Today is one of those boring, at-home days that I actually love. Being here with the family is just good. It’s not stressful. There aren’t any deadlines. We’re improving our home and our lives, and just being together. The details are incredibly unlikely to be of interest to anyone else, though.
I began the day with a very lovely breakfast cooked by curiousmay9. The only thing better than living in a house with one good cook is living with two.
shadowkatt just left with mayremi‘s family to attend a Pow-Wow, then the Renn Faire (again). You know she just hates that 😉
mayremi‘s little sister, R, is always very shy. We found the cure today: cats. She was absolutely fascinated with having four cats moving around, and kept wanting to chase them. Sparks and Shelley are baby-safe cats, but Wizard is still learning “thou shalt not bite” and KG isn’t the best-socialized cat in the world. Sparks was very, very interested in R, too—she’d just nursed, so she smelled milky.
It’s very quiet now without the girls. Even the cats are napping.
For some reason, curiousmay9 and I both have nasty sinus headaches today. I don’t think there have been any significant changes in barometric pressure, and we haven’t been doing anything involving chemicals. Weird. However, the headache has led our housemate to nap in the living room covered by cats.
We did manage to get most of the paint out of the kitchen sink. Of course, we’ve still got painting to do, so it was a silly thing to spend so much time on, but it was making me crazy. There was also an accidental application of Kilz to our bathroom sink a while back, and I want that cleaned up. I can’t use steel wool there, though, as it would damage the Corian. I do need to set a 5-minute timer, though, as my hands are cramping terribly from the earlier efforts. In fact, that task should wait a few days.
sambear is putting together lunch for us. He’s such a sweetie 🙂 He moved bookcases around for me today, as well as helping curiousmay9 get one upstairs.
Lots of laundry has happened, too. I have an inordinate sense of satisfaction when I look into the laundry room and don’t see enough dirty laundry to make up a full load of anything.
I repotted one of the plants we inherited with the house today. It stayed droopy no matter how it was treated, and when I finally got around to examining it closely I found that it wasn’t really in the dirt in the pot. I ended up moving it to another pot and using fresh dirt. The dirt in its old pot was all caked together and solid, so it was difficult for me to even dig it out. I’m hoping the plant survived the transplant operation. I figure it can’t really be any worse than it was before with the stalks flopping all over the floor.
I want hooks for hanging baskets in the living room, but I haven’t found the hooks yet. After I do find them, I’ll have to sweet-talk someone into installing them for me, as I’m not permitted on ladders.
Tomorrow curiousmay9 will be swapping some of the furniture here with some stored at joyeuse13‘s house, then taking the result upstairs. That means less furniture in the crowded living room. YAY!
The plan for today includes hanging blinds and fixing the drip and sluggish drain in our shower. I think some network wiring was expected to happen, as well.
Thanks to the kindness of someone on the Freecycle list, we now own a PowerPC 8100/70. We need to find an ethernet card for it. Learning to make the Mac play nicely with Windows/Linux network will be a good experience for me and sambear. It came with an incredibly huge monitor. It doesn’t have the right ports to use on a PC, so I suppose it’ll stay with the Mac.
The film for the upper windows in the entryway arrived, but applying them requires getting the big ladder out, cleaning the windows, and then putting the film in place. I’m not sure that’ll happen this weekend.
I’d like to get curiousmay9‘s surround sound system hooked up, if only because I’ve never had one before. I don’t know that I will. For one thing, I have absolutely no clue as to where the speakers should be placed.
There are two wireless speakers around here somewhere, as well. I’m thinking about running them off the stereo in our bedroom, rather than the one in the living room, simply because I’d like to be able to hear my musical selections wherever I am. We need to change the power arrangements for that stereo first, though. It’s currently plugged into an outlet that is controlled by a light switch. Not good.
The girls did get one of the keyboards up and running, and shadowkatt even sat down and played for a bit. She did take piano lessons for a couple of years, and I’m hoping she’ll take it up again. She plans to hook the other keyboard up to her PC and see what kind of fun she can have with that.
I continue to lust after a true electric piano. The keyboards just don’t feel right to me, and I can’t stand to play them beyond what’s required to work out a vocal part.
Hmmm—I wonder if sambear‘s guitar will be safe from feline depredation on its stand? Shelley never bothered it, but she’s not as destructive as the other three cats are.
We’re making progress. Slowly but surely, we are making progress. One of the things I look forward to is hosting a filk, or just general “come make music” nights.
