10:00 am: It’s a late start today, due to a late night devoted to finally watching Empire of the Sun. However, I have hatched various schemes and plans for my beloved tiny room bungalow/ranch:
Immediate Plans
Finish hemming deconstructed old silk dupioni curtains and hang in living room with bamboo barkcloth
Prime inner hallway and begin painting
Turn off water valve to sheds outside because temperatures are supposed to plummet from 68 degrees today to some absurd and unheard of subarctic temperature
Long-term Plans
Hire electrician to fix outdoor socket (so sump pump will work again) and upgrade old interior sockets (so I can finally plug in modern appliances, like televisions and interior lights)
Prime kitchen, but no paint yet
Reconstruct sunroom, meaning pull up carpeting, prime and paint, hang shades that aren’t pink blinds, decide on flooring, move exterior door from laundry room to replace luann exterior door
Temporarily move bedroom from where it is now to sunroom
Install french doors in place of extremely dangerous sliding glass doors
10:45 am: In celebration of my game plans, I make a new pot of coffee and investigate the stats on the simply gorgeous little bungalow for sale down the block.
11:05 am: Well, no wonder they haven’t sold that little beauty! Despite being a lovely and well-kept little thing from 1930, they have more gruesome faux wood paneling inside than my lovely little place! Paint is our friend, and someone needs to tell them!
11:09 am: I spend several minutes patting myself on the back for purchasing a place for thousands of dollars less than the place down the street, and my home has a metal roof, tornado shelter, new windows, new floors, new plumbing, and a host of other improvements that that place doesn’t have.
11:14 am: I begin priming the inner hallway.
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11:33 am: I realize it’s 70 degrees outside, which means the cold front (and accessory severe storms) should be moving in before I know it. I have to shut off that valve *immediately!* I throw on tennis shoes and race outside.
11:40 am: Gawd, what were the former owners, combination hobbits/ground-dwellers?? There is simply no way to get to the water turn-off valve without shimmying 20 feet in a 1 foot high space. And their claims that there are *tons* of access points to the crawl space? Sheer bunk!
11:41 am: I hatch an alternative scheme: around 6 pm, I will run outside and turn off the water to the entire place. That means I’ll have to do some water storage but, having spent months hauling water at my old place before I bought this place, who cares?
11:43 am: I decide that, as a rite of passage, all red-blooded Americans should have to haul their own water for months while simultaneously holding a job that they not only commute to, but that they have to look professional for.
11:44 am: I return to priming.
We have water haulers here who deliver our water. Juan is my water guy and my little Cora has a mad crush on him. So do I but he is very young. VERY!
How was Cora’s birthday party? Did she get to wear a teeny sombrero?
The party is on January 4th. There is plenty of time for you to attend. She insisted that Juan get an invitation. She is so silly.
12:10 pm: In a flash of inspiration, I realize the former owners utilized child labor to turn off the outside water valve.
12: 11 pm: I decide to cook up some evil corn for lunch.
Remember a few weeks ago when we got the new bed with nifty rolling drawer storage underneath?
The puppy girls have gnawed one side of one drawer into splinters. Literally. I just crawled under the bed with the vacuum cleaner hose and managed to extract approximately one-half cubic yard untreated yellow pine splinters, the largest of which was the size of a matchstick.
Then, of course, I crawled back out from under, turned off the vacuum cleaner; and, released from bondage, all the splinters instantly fell out of the hose onto the carpet.
New furniture + any pup under the age of 2 = chewy fun!!!
The houndie grrrl’s specialty is rugs, not furniture. She chewed a hole through a wonderful, huge old kilim rug. I’ve tried cheap rugs instead – she chews them right up. So my toesies suffer their absence.
Although the houndie grrrl did eat my old sofa. There just came a point at which I said WHATEVER!!! She pooped cushion foam for days.
2:43 pm: I check TalkLeft to see if the opportunity presents itself to gloat about Sam Bradford in front of the football hooligans.
3:10 pm: I go outside to enjoy the 75 degree temperatures, then notice how threatening it looks to the north. This observation leads me to race into the house to check Weather Underground, only to discover now they’re predicting a stupid ice storm starting tonight! I suffer a major *wtf?* moment.
4:02 pm: Shit! It’s 45 degrees colder than it is here a mere 100 – 150 miles north of here! I decide to run to store to stock up on rations.
4:03 pm: I remember I’m stuffed to the gills with every ration imaginable except chocolate.
4:04 pm: I decide i must have some chocolate. Then i remember that everyone else is town will be at the store stocking up in anticipation of cold weather. I decide I had better figure out if we’re really going to have an ice storm like Weather underground claims.
4:06 pm: If there’s an ice storm, then there won’t be any water if the pumps get zapped. I decide my best plan of action is to take a bath, then make corn cakes topped with stewed apples.
Corn cakes? Stewed apples? Dish!
In the meantime, I have decided several things.
1) I really dislike the current purple Politicook theme.
2) I need a monitor capable of 1440×900 resolution.
3) At my age, that resolution means I need about a 42″ monitor.
4) In order to get this, I am considering whether to buy a new laptop and a large external monitor, or a desktop.
5) Now I have to decide whether to do this now or wait until after January 1.
Kate, you have fabulous taste. I think NPOV is absolutely gorgeous, and I’ve actually been envying a few other foodie blogs that have similar set-ups — eg, check out Scotia’s latest link to White on Rice.
I think you should just run with it and see what happens. And, if you don’t like it … change it!
Actually, I’ve been playing with a new setup for NPOV today, one that borrows a little from the layout that Hen & Harvest is using — latest post two columns wide at the top, older posts by category underneath. That way I can put all the architecture stuff together, all the mannequin posts together, and so on.
I’ve spent a long time today looking at other blog sites and dinking with layouts for PolitiCook. I don’t think I’ll mess with the structure too much — this blog, I think, needs to stay linear with the latest post at the top — but my design fingers are itching. I threw this one together in about a day last spring, and it shows.
All of which is to say that one day soon you will sign on and go “WOAH – What happened?!”
(I hope it’s a good “woah!”)
Check out White is Rice Couple. It’s like NPOV.
And I don’t mind at all if you change it – I agree it needs to stay linear.
But *confession* – I’m not that wild about Hen and Harvest’s layout. Too confusing for me. Maybe try a back page thing and see if it works there?
I think H&H is confusing because they are trying to use the front page to show everything — multiple authors, featured content at the top, multiple categories — and none of it really hangs together. NPOV, I hope, won’t be confusing.
And PolitiCook should just look better when I’m done with it.
Here’s Scotia’s link — it has some similar things going on to what you have on NPOV – I think it’s wonderful!
See, here’s why I need a higher resolution monitor. I’m working with a 1028×764 and White on Rice is built at 1220×800 or thereabouts:
I quit designing for 800×600 years ago, but resolutions larger than 1028×764 are now about 55%-60% of users. I’m having to design for larger pages and then use a browser service to take a picture of it and show me what it looks like. Very inefficient.
That is so strange. I’m on an ancient Mac, and it works. But I have to go through another browser to really see stuff – and sometimes, my whole computer crashes if someone’s really done it up.
The corn cakes will be similar to the last recipe in A Brief Evolutionary [something] {forgot the word} of the Corn Cake – Claiborne’s recipe.
I haven’t figured out the stewed apples yet. I dunno. I’m moving in that direction, but it will probably have to be dark before I fully commit myself because the sky north of here is SO CREEPY looking, thanks to that nasty cold weather it’s carrying along with it.
I think Arctic air needs to stay in the Arctic and leave us alone!!!!
I will go look for the corn cake recipe. Thanks!
4:11 pm: I dig out my favorite bad weather DVD, The Day After Tomorrow, then run a boiling hot bath.
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