kareina

 I started the morning yesterday by adding stars to all the quadrants of the living room ceiling that had their outlines done. Then I switched to working on all the circles and arcs that hadn't yet been outlined. Given the deadline of having everything done before the soffa arrives on Friday I opted to do a focused push to do all of the remaining ones as quickly as possible. So yesterday was step 1, put the strips of 1.25 cm wide medical tape along the middle of each of the gold lines, ok, curves, and using a black permanent marker to cover all of the gold that sticks out from the tape. Before yesterday I was working in small sections, do step one for everything I could reach without moving the ladder, then do step 2, put the 2.5 cm wide medical tape over the center of the newly outlined gold curves, and then paint more midnight blue paint over the uneven edges of black that stick out from the tape, and also touch up any areas in the vicinity that could use a third layer of blue. Doing both steps together like this means more breaks from looking up, so it is easier on the back of my neck, but still hurts after a while. But doing a big push to just do step 1 for everything that still needed it (about 2/3's of the ceiling) meant that I could get more of it done in a single day, and now that part is complete for the entire ceiling. However, I got that done just at sunset, and I know from experience that it works MUCH better to do the paining step while there is plenty of daylight coming through the windows, so I stopped there for the day and switched to other projects.

In the meantime Keldor replaced the light switch in the laundry room. The old one was original to the house--one of the old fashioned ones that rotate. When we moved in it rotated to the next set point with a loud "click" and stopped in the new position, and the light turned either on or off (as appropriate). Many of the other basement light switches are still this sort, and work fine. However, the one in the laundry room partially broke some time back, and whatever physical thing in there that stopped the rotating in the correct position no longer worked. This has meant many months of rotating the switch carefully back and forth till the flicker of light when it was in the correct position stabilized into actual light. This has been very annoying, especially if one is carrying something as one goes through the door. Can I tell you how happy I am that we now have a switch that simply turns on when one pushes the button? It is fantastic!

When he finished that he took the top board from his desk downstairs and sanded it smooth (or, as smooth as one can get from a composite board that one uses as a work surface for tooling leather and any other projects he can do in the living room) and oiled it. It looks MUCH better! The desk was already in bad shape when we bought the house--it is one that came with the house, but his projects aren't exactly good for the work surface area. He also glued a sheet of leather over the middle, most worn section, so, in the short term, the desk actually looks quite nice. He promises to try to not destroy it before the party next weekend to celebrate the delivery of the couch and the newly painted (and hopefully, by then completed) ceiling.

I was still in the mood for painting when I finished what I could do on the ceiling, so I took his painted banner to the kitchen and used the gold paint over the yellow border, and it looks much better. Then I started dealing with the craft room, which has been a bit of chaos ever since we re-finished the chest of drawers/secretary plus piled things from the living room there so we could do the base blue coat of paint on the ceiling. I took a few electronic things like the old printer/scanner and gps that came with the house off the shelves, which made room for some of the baskets that have been on the floor. Some of the electronic things wound up in the cupboard in the little room by the kitchen, and others will go to electronic scrap area at the dump. Then I moved the small stacks of drawers from the big dresser back to the top of the recently refinished secretary, freeing up room on the dresser for more larger boxes and baskets that have been waiting on the floor. Once the floor was emptied of all non-furniture items and vacuumed, I pulled everything out from under the bed in our room and vacuumed there. The suitcases and bags of fabric scraps, projects in progress, mending, and clothes I like the the fabric of, but will need to re-make into something else before I would wear them, I took out and emptied into drawers. The new drawer space we have because I bought that one new white chest of drawers (that triggered emptying the secretary into it, so we could refinish it) turns out to be exactly enough space to empty those suitcases and bags, which makes me happy, and the suitcases can go back to the attic out of the way. Now the only things left under our bed are the big wicker basket/box we use at camping events, my massage table (which had been leaning on the closet doors in the crafts room since it got taken out of the little room by the kitchen when we did the complete clean and re-organise there a couple of weeks back), and the cat-carrying crates.

While I did all of that Keldor first made progress on a knife handle in progress, and then was suddenly inspired to empty, clean, and reorganise everything on the green cabinet just outside the door to the workshop. That is a cabinet that came with the house that we had filled, nicely organised, the first couple of months we lived here, back when the workshop space was still an unusable mess of car parts and filth. In the years since it had become a bit of a catch-all for things we didn't know where we should put them, and lately it had become rather impossible to find anything there, so I am really glad that he tackled this. I hope he remembers what he did with everything though, as I didn't see any of it in progress, being busy upstairs, so I didn't make notes in my log of "away".

Despite several late nights in a row, I woke up early this morning because I didn't want to miss my meeting with the owner of The Closet (as I've named my new home). This gave me time to get to the post office, where I posted the forms to the shipping company in England who is dealing with my stuff as it clears customs from Australia before heading to me here, and paid the fee for the Italian class in which I've enrolled. Then a quick stop at a store to buy some fresh sponges and a new broom (the student housing I've been staying at had a broom, so I haven't needed one yet) and, more importantly to break a 50 euro note--I wanted to have exact change for the cash portion of my transaction to obtain The Closet.

( The meeting took ages ) Eventually, he managed to convince the owner that the numbers were correct. After that we signed the forms, I got my keys, and we were free to go.

( That is when the real work started. )

Whilst scrubbing The Closet I did have one adventure brought about by being a bit too tired to think clearly. One of the tasks I decided upon for the day was moving the washing machine to a new location. I'd observed that the water hoses attached to the machine were plenty long enough to reach the new, improved, location. However, this goal was complicated by a minor problem. The kitchen sink/counter is both up off the floor standing on legs and attached to the wall behind. The washer hoses come out from the wall behind the sink, then pass along the floor under the cabinet and out between the legs of the cabinet to the back of the washer. In order to move the washer to the other wall it was necessary to get those hoses out from between the legs. Since the back of the cabinet is firmly affixed to the wall it wasn't possible to lift the legs and slide the hose under.

Therefore I decided to unhook the hoses. I did pause long enough to look under the cabinet and determine that the hoses disappear up somewhere behind the cabinet itself, with no sign of any kind of valve or attachment point visible. I started unscrewing the water inlet hose from the washer itself. It started dripping a bit of water as I unscrewed. I glanced again under the cabinet--nope, couldn't see any valves--they'd be up somewhere behind the cabinet. I thought "ok, better make this quick", pulled the bucket in reach and under where I was working and unscrewed the hose the rest of the way. Result: water gushing out of the hose at a very high rate of speed. oops. Quick! Put end of hose into the bucket. Bucket is very rapidly filling. Eeep! Stand up, move end of hose into sink. It *just* reaches. Now what? I can't let go, the hose would fall on the floor and gush water every were. Finally, at long last, and not a moment too soon, my brain wakes up. Open under-sink cabinet. Look in. Oh, look! Someone punched a hole in the back of the cabinet before attaching it to the wall so that one can reach the shut-off valve. Shut valve. Water stops. Pick up sponges (one in each hand) and commence moving the water from the floor into the bucket. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

It is a very good thing that this afternoon was on the warm side. I'd dressed in jeans and a t-shirt this morning, since it was coolish at 06:30 when I got up (and I knew I didn't want to wear my new skirt for house-cleaning), but by afternoon it was too hot to work wearing that much, so I'd taken everything off and was working nude, so when the kitchen floor and I got our shower it was just me getting wet, not my clothing. Oddly enough, once I'd managed to get the floor dry(ish), I decided to call it a day, since my brain was clearly not functioning.

That is why I didn't get any uni work done today. I suppose I *could* have tried doing some after cleaning, but given my demonstration of the brain not thinking things through, it is probably best that I didn't. Perhaps tomorrow I'll get the house ready to move into. I hope so. It takes only two minutes to walk down the four flights of stairs from The Closet, cross the street, walk up one flight of stairs and down the hall to my office. I'm looking forward to that commute. I'd also like to get the moving done ASAP so that I can return to the uni work. I want those experiments started, I want those papers ready to submit. Preferably before I hear back from my thesis examiners with a list of corrections to be made.