Reading: The Sisters of Henry VIII

Moving: housework all day, also turned the compost

Watching: Sunday night line-up, currently 60 Minutes Simpsons Malcon (hiccup) Sopranos.

Cooking: Hell no. It was a Chipotle night.

House: put a second and third coat of semi-gloss white on all the trim. Cleaned and hung one (one!) repainted bedroom storm. Turned the compost, which I am finally getting right: it steamed when I dumped it, and as I turned it, it was hot against my hands. Hot. Also icky, so I bought a pitchfork.

2 December 2001: The living room

Yesterday RDC came up behind me and slid his hand into my right front pocket. "Are you giving me the philosopher's stone?" I asked, but he didn't know what I meant. Today I donned the same cotton trousers to continue painting in and shoved my hands into the pockets to straighten them. He had given me something, a bottle cap. He's so romantic.

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This weekend a radio station played the Beatles A to Z, with at least some of their solo work. RDC discovered this in the car this noon, so he heard "Hey Jude." Whatever album that's on, we don't own. I don't know any of Harrison's solo work except that one first song, whatever it's called. Right around "I'm a Loser" (was Beck strongly influenced by the Beatles?), the deejay announced Harrison solo whose title I've already forgotten. Also, soon after "I'm a Loser" came "Imagine," after which we changed the station because there were too many ads. Muting the radio the way we mute the television doesn't work as well. Anyway, after our labors we made a Home Depot run--bits to hang the ceiling fixture in the living room, since our wiring is ancient plus the fixture came out of the box with wrong parts, my pitchfork, new outlets and switches and switchplates and doorknobs for the living room--listening to this station again, and we heard "Revolution" and "Rocky Raccoon" on the way there and "Taxman" before Chipotle and "The Long and Winding Road" between Chipotle and home. This made me shriek in horror. What fuckwit alphabetizes by an initial The?

Yes, I just wrote an entire paragraph to set that up.

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What with System X and a bad USB card and whatever else, I am down the webcam, the trackball, any means to upload digital cameras, printer, and scanner. I regularly have to quit Dreamweaver and reboot "Classic" (system 9) and relaunch Dreamweaver to view its windows. Unfortunately, I am using a mouse, for the first time in years. (I use one at work too, to the dismay of any other Dot Orger who wants to use my machine for anything. I mention this only because it cracks me up, not because it has any bearing on whatever my point turns out to be.) Last night RDC uploaded my camera to his laptop and transferred them to my machine and finally I had access to my last month's pictures. That's when I got all happy about what my Macintosh consultant has done to my computer. It smokes graphics.

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The trim's needed so many coats despite two coats of white primer because the white paint is covering gunmetal gray. Also because we were suckered like greenhorns into buying the standard Home Depot brand, Behr. Don't. When we went late this afternoon, after we were done, a Home Despot clerk recommended an additive that keeps the paint from drying so quickly, which would have been handy with semi-gloss here in parched Denver. We'll know for when we do the kitchen, which I'm not looking forward to.

A kitchen remodel will feature a built-in Supersoaker aimed toward the birdfeeder to attack the squirrels. We can't get to them through the storm window and they'll figure that out pretty soon.

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The room's not finished yet, but I want to post the Before pictures anyway. They're really unfair, in the best Before picture tradition, because it was dark out, but it was then or never (and I'll take the After ones in daylight probably with a Christmas tree, which is really unfair advantage). I think I took these right after I scrubbed the walls, while I was spackling.

To the left as you walk in the front door. The upstairs landing has had two floor speakers in it since we moved in, waiting for the living room to be finished. I use them as a table for stuff that has to go downstairs. After the living room is finished, ideally we'll much smaller speakers. They'll have to go against that north wall, and the right speaker will have the side of a couch in front of it, unless it's a new, much smaller, wall-mounted speaker.

The dining room wall of the living room will have a couch along its length. You can't see it in this light, but that wall had not only eggshell, flat, and semi-gloss paint on it, but also a few different grayish whites. If we had felt ambitious, we, or should I say my resident carpenter, could have replaced that grate from an previous heating system with continuous floor molding. Instead we're disguising it with a couch. A similar grate from yet another also previous heating system can be seen to the right of Blake's cage in the dining room.

We had wondered whether the inside of the archway should be sage, like the walls, or white (flat, not semi-gloss). When we painted the dining room (over a year ago, not that we're slackers), RDC primed the archway into mostly-white, so now the archway will remain white. But with paint, not just primer.

RDC wants to rebuild glass doors for the built-ins. Once upon a time, before the trim was painted, there were doors. I'm ambivalent, because we have a no-door policy in the house--I removed the saloon doors between the kitchen and sunroom and the bedroom and RDC's study have no room doors, plus we haven't yet got around to painting (and rehanging) RDC's study's closet door. We do want to tile the cemented-over fireplace. And replace the brass doors with anything more attractive. There's the ceiling fixture in its box waiting to resist installation.

The previous owner said he planted twelve trees on the property; he was displeased to learn only seven survive. He stripped the moulding in the living room to wood and was more than displeased to hear there were three coats of paint on it sealing the windows shut. To have opening windows, RDC had to rebuild the moulding, so even if we had the cajones to recreate that labor of love, none of the wood would have matched. So anyway. The six vertical pieces separated the two pairs of windows are therefore new and painstakingly routed, and behind them are new nylon ropes that we will not paint over.

As of 2:30 this afternoon, the ceiling was done, except for dirty fingerprints around what will be the ceiling fixture, and most of the trim was done. The mantel, floorboards, doorways, and windowframes are done; the sashes themselves will be my next several days' work.