Month: May 2009

I’ve got an eventful five-day recap, so prepare your scrolling finger!

Err….

Thursday
Last Thursday was the 21st, so I did another 24-hour fast. Much easier than the first, because I had a really good idea exactly what to expect. I’d considered going for a 36-hour this time, but decided not to because I had work to do, and going all evening without eating would have just put me in a bitter, useless mood. I guess overcoming that is really the point of the ordeal. I’ll have to work on it in the future.

I did get some work done, though. Moved all my computer stuff out of the old office and into the new one, and started working out the new layout. We also got a good start on arranging the stuff in the old office to get it ready for painting.

Friday
Friday was my RDO, and I put it to good use. I woke up early and started gathering the painting supplies. In the old office we’d painted the ceiling and doors a light grey, all the woodwork a dark, dark grey, and the walls dark green. The goal was to take the woodwork (and doors) back to the same flat white in the rest of the house, the walls to the same light green we had in AB’s nursery, and then the ceiling to the tan color on the walls in the rest of the house. For the most part, that meant taking very dark shades and painting over them with very pale shades. Luckily we’d been through that process once before, when we last got the Tulsa house ready to sell, and learned that primer really does work.

So we started Friday morning with the woodwork, got it all primed, let that dry, and then put the white on. While that was still drying, I started putting up primer on the walls, but I only got two of them done before I ran out of paint. I waited half an hour for the first wall to dry, and then got a coat of the light green up, and used up all of that that we had leftover, too.

That was most of what I hoped to accomplish on Friday anyway, and I ran out of paint at the same time I ran out of day off, which is to say about three in the afternoon. I got cleaned up and then made a trip to Byron’s Liquor Warehouse to stock up for our party that night.

Friday was our second Poker Night, and we spent it playing Heroscape instead. We had five there this time, including the same group from last time plus Toby, and I think we all had a pretty good time. B– wrote mid-week, in response to my final email saying that the party would be on Friday, to say he could come any night but Friday. We all took it for a joke, but it turned out he really meant it. Hopefully he’ll make the June meeting, though.

Anyway, we officially broke at midnight, but then a few of us stuck around talking for a bit, and after everyone cleared out I cleaned up the mess and finished off my last Tatoo and Redbull, and it was around 1:30 when I finally went to bed and realized I had just slammed half of a Tatoo and Redbull. Ugh.

Saturday
Still, Saturday came around in spite of me. I got up around 7:30 (at the insistence of my delightful little daughter) and then T– took her away for her own safety to do some garage saleing, while I got started on the room.

I was about halfway through putting primer on one of the two remaining walls when B– showed up to lend a hand. Mindful of my sore back (and my weekend’s work did nothing to help with that) he graciously offered to do the hardest work (specifically, the ceiling), so I handed over a roller to him and got to work on some edging.

I also rigged a laptop and some speakers to play King Baby, Jim Gaffigan’s latest stuff, while we worked. That was pretty awesome.

Essentially, before B– offered to come over, my goal for Saturday was to get the primer up before lunch, then do the walls in the early afternoon and hope that I still had the time and energy to do the ceiling before bed. With his help, we got it all primed and then both walls and half of the ceiling done before lunchtime. It was incredible.

I ate and then T– came in to do the trim work while I finished off the ceiling, and by mid-afternoon the painting was done. AB woke up from her nap and the two of them went out to play in the yard while I swapped out stuff from the closet. We also moved a ton of AB’s furniture from our room into AB’s new room, which was nice to get done.

Sometime in the midst of that we went out to dinner with my sister’s family at Taco Cabana, and afterward we brought her two girls back to the house to play with AB while they (my sister and her husband) went to Lowe’s. So obviously it was a busy and exhausting day.

Sunday
Sunday after church we went to K– and N–‘s for a delicious quiche lorraine sans oignons (or something like that). AB behaved really well, and it was a perfectly pleasant visit. It’s weird to think how little time we’ve spent over there since the baby was born, but that probably has as much to do with it being the football offseason as it does with parenthood. I’ll guess we’ll find out in September.

Anyway, we went home and AB went down for a nap and so did I. I actually crashed on the couch, then ended up on the floor somehow, and only really woke up when I heard T– closing the garage door on her way to Wal-Mart for groceries. I was just talking myself into getting up and going to my bed when the phone rang. It was Dad, calling about some comments I’d sent him regarding his novel. We talked for right at an hour, discussing his book in specific and writing in general.

Then he got off the phone at the same time T– got home and AB woke up from her nap. They went outside to play again, but not before T– gave me more work to do. She told me to take care of dinner.

So, an hour later, I ran up to P F Chang’s to pick up our order.

D– came over to join us for supper, and brought back a bunch of my computer games that he’d borrowed and finished a while back, so after we ate I spent the evening installing games and got caught up in a Civ game that took up a lot of my time over the next three days. It pretty much ate my whole evening, anyway, but I did take time to fix a loose hinge on one of our cabinet doors in the kitchen. So I did accomplish something on Sunday. I was up until 2:00 playing, though.

Monday
Monday morning I woke up around 9:30 and mowed the lawn, then got cleaned up in time to head over to my sister’s place with T– and AB for a Memorial Day party. A real crowd showed up in, and instead of flooding this page with even more dashes I’ll let you look at T–‘s or my sister’s blog for more details and prettier pictures.

I played a Magic game with Toby and my brother-in-law before social pressure forced us to put it away. Then I spent some time outside in the accursed sunlight until T– requested a snowcone and Toby and my brother-in-law and I all fled the party to see if we could find an open stand. We picked up seven snowcones and brought them back to much rejoicing.

I don’t really remember much else from Monday, but that’s probably because I spent the rest of the day fighting off Vikings and Frenchmen with a horde of Mechanized Infantry. I won.

Tuesday
Tuesday morning I woke up too sore to get out of bed, and eventually talked myself into skipping work. I finally got out of bed sometime between nine and ten, and watched AB while T– ran some errands. Then we had some lunch, and I went to my office to work on some of my old poetry stuff while AB took a nap. Around three she woke up and I agreed to watch her again while T– went grocery shopping.

We had some fantastic pot roast for supper, and we were just getting ready to play AB’s memory game when UPS rang the doorbell to drop off some new computer stuff. I got a couple UPSs to protect my equipment from our frequent power outages, a new hard drive for my fileserver (which seems to be dead on arrival), and a new monitor to use as a TV in my office. It’s beautiful.

I got it all unboxed, then sat down at the kitchen table with T– and AB to play memory. She has a bunch of cards with Disney characters on them, and we narrowed the seventy-two cards down to a more reasonable twelve, and played the traditional memory game with AB. She’s far more interested in placing the cards in the plastic storage tray than in actually matching, probably because the motor skills present her with a real challenge. She has no trouble at all remembering where the cards are.

We went through through the six-card game several times, with slightly different sets, and then came up with a more complicated version using the storage tray and twelve cards, and she excelled at that, too. We were so impressed that T– pulled out the camcorder to get a record of AB’s ability, but by then she was tired of the game and decided to argue instead of showing off. Alas.

We put the game away, then, and I went to the office to work on my computer. I spent about an hour trying to get an old hard drive to work (only to discover it was a bad drive), and finally gave up on that and just installed my new drive (only to discover it, too, was a bad drive). When that was done, I put it back in the top of AB’s closet, and then tucked her in and wished her goodnight.

Then I spent another half hour rearranging the entertainment center in the living room to install a UPS there, and finally sat down on the couch to watch the second half of Charade with T–. That’s one weird-ass movie.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

Yesterday after work I rushed home to get started on more work.

Instead of exercising for the day, I toiled. T– had cleared off a bookcase for me during the day, so I dragged the empty bookcase from the old office into the new one, found a space for it on the wall, and then made a bunch of trips (with T–‘s help) carrying books from one of the full bookcases in there, clearing it off in the process.

That worked pretty well, and I think we moved the second bookcase in there before dinner. We got them both set up in the back corner and fully loaded. Then we darted up to McDonalds to grab something for AB before meeting my sister and her family, D–, and K– and N– at Quiznos.

I’ve never been a big fan, but I always try to get the Quiznos version of my favorite sandwiches from other places. That, or something weird. Last night we split the classic club, and that was better than anything I’ve had there. Delicious.

Afterward D– drove me back to the house, and I put him to work. We dismantled AB’s bed (in her room) and the futon (in the old office), and swapped rooms. Then, once the futon was reassembled in the new office, D– asked about my plans for the eventual layout and immediately suggested we could probably do something better with the bookcases. Turned out he was right, but to prove it we had to go ahead and move the desk, which wasn’t really ready for that.

We did it anyway, and once the desk was in place there was clearly enough room beside it to put the bookcases there (on the inside corner instead of the outside one), which freed up the back corner for just the elliptical. There’d been enough room as it was, but it was cramped. This works a lot better.

It meant clearing off the bookcases again, moving them along the wall, and then reloading them. It was also a pretty significant chore to get the elliptical taken apart and moved, and we had to find places for the rest of AB’s stuff in our bedroom, to keep the old office clean enough that we can paint it over the weekend.

Anyway, that was my whole evening. I’ve got all the furniture moved into the new office, though, and I think I’m going to take a stab at wiring it tonight. I had lots of time to think about that while I lay in bed last night, because I couldn’t sleep at all. I went to bed at 10:30 and it was after midnight before I fell asleep, and only fitful rest after that. Ugh.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

Is it the twentieth already? Ugh.

Yesterday after work I did forty minutes on the elliptical and finished off the first season of Dollhouse, which ended fantastically. I’m really looking forward to seeing where they go with the story (and, in the same vein, really stoked to learn that they are renewing it).

Then after that we had steaks for dinner, and then started the process of moving AB out of her room. We brought all her toys and most of her furniture out of her room and set them up in the back corner of our living room as a temporary play area.

Our goal is to swap the nursery and the library, and put both kids in the larger room. It’s a temporary fix, but it should buy us a few years.

Unfortunately, it’s no small task. In addition to all the furniture that needs to get moved, the office is done up in my personal color scheme (which is to say, dark), and T– thinks it would be bad for the children’s psyches to grow up that environment, so we get to repaint them to happy meadow green and white. I did a pretty thorough job when I painted it in the first place, so that’s a lot of work to take it back.

And, as I implied above, I figure I’ve only got a few years left of having an office at all, so I’m not going to bother repainting the smaller room. I’ll just leave it happy meadow green and hope it doesn’t get on my nerves too much when the only light in the room comes from a computer monitor.

We’ll have to move the network equipment and fileserver out of the old office closet, to protect it from curious little hands, and we’ll need to drop cable and network connections in the new office because there was no need to have them in that room when it was a nursery. That’s an unpleasant afternoon’s work, but not much more.

Anyway, last night all we did was move AB’s toys out to the living room, and then I started the process of condensing my library down from three bookcases to two, because that’s all I’ll have room for. It wasn’t quite as painful as I’d expected it to be, but it’s still a bummer.

Of course, by the time I went to bed I was still working out details and planning exactly what needed to be done, and it was hours before I actually fell asleep. That was irritating.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.