A Homely Day

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.