This morning, at the office:
Tree and grass enveloped in ice
Tree and Grass: Ice
Category Archives: Beware of Leopard
Shoveling S…
Yesterday we were due for 1-3 inches of snow during the day. Late in the afternoon, I took care of the first four inches of that snowfall. Early this morning I shoveled off the last inch and a half, which was lovingly topped with a freezing rain crust. Weirdly, by 1 PM, I was walking the dog while wearing just a light jacket – temps had ramped up to nearly 40° F.
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In the afternoon, I painted:
Cutting in: basement foyer
What I’m calling the basement foyer is a tiny little space, with a doorway (visible) through to Marcia’s sewing areas, a set of louvered doors to the furnace/AC, and the doorway to my woodshop. There’s structure, and cut-ins, and storage, and bulkheads. It took a stunning amount of time to do all of the cutting in. Rolling out the rest of the paint is going to take about 15 minutes, I think.
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No new casualties were announced by DoD in the previous week.
Cold Holiday
It was colder than 6° F when I got up shortly after dawn this morning, with about two inches of snow that was drifted and icy. No real fun driving out for the groceries today, as a result. The temperature had warmed all the way up to 15 by mid-afternoon. According to the NOAA, we’re not supposed to see the fun side of the freezing line until next Sunday or later, and we have some snow coming again in the mid-week. So, an utterly normal President’s Day weekend, then.
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Being cute:
Lexi being cute
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I managed two coats of glossy white enamel on my fabricated shoe mould trim yesterday. Today I applied some of that trim to the basement foyer area, and got another coat of mud on the areas of drywall needing repair. Tomorrow, a bit of sanding and some primer, I think…
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Wow! We’ve made two months without an announced casualty (since 12/14/14) from DoD. Cool.
Super?
There’s a football game on the tube. We watched the first half, decided that 14-all meant it was a new game… and we weren’t starting over again. So. Good luck, Tom and the gang! I will vote on most depressing commercial of the first half, though … that Nissan commercial with the absentee, almost died several times, race car driver dad. Really? Really?!?
Not much progress on the basement this weekend. We’re adjusting sleep patterns as pain management changes – that plus several hours of on-site and remote work this weekend left me with enough energy for food shopping, laundry, and television. Back to the basement next week!
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No new casualties reported by DoD in the last week. News I’m happy there’s nothing to report about. Ciao!
Productivity
This weekend marks another transition for Marcia – she’s stopped taking the rat poison (Coumadin, aka Warfarin). That also means that she doesn’t have to wear the compression stockings anymore, which makes her very happy. She should sleep much better tonight. She’s solo’ing up and down the stairs, but not leg-over-leg yet. Progress is.
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I spent the weekend on two different primary tasks. The first was a bit of patching of Linux production systems late last night and early this morning, during the appropriate maintenance windows for the systems in question. Much of the balance of the weekend was spent working on the basement floor.
I started working it in past the entry way to Marcia’s sewing area. I’d start by scraping and cleaning the concrete, sweep up and vacuum, then lay a chunk of flooring and move a cabinet over to the freshly laid area, rinse and repeat. At the end of Saturday, it looked like this:
Basement floor – Saturday
Today, after the Linux patching and the weekly shopping, I got back to work. I moved all the stuff that was in the basement kitchen down into the area I’d gotten flooring into yesterday, then I cleaned up, shaved the edge of the linoleum to ease the transition, and started moving appliances and laying flooring. By the end of the day I’d gotten to about the 80% point on the entire floor – and the kitchen area looks like this:
Sunday – basement floor progress
I only wasted two full planks doing cuts wrong, and shaved the skin off of one knuckle doing the work. So, a net win. Another day to get the rest of the flooring down, then I can start working on walls and paint and moldings.
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No new casualties were reported by DoD in the last week.
Final Sunday
So endeth the last four day weekend of the year. Well, I am on call, so it was four days of not going to the office, but keeping a reasonably close eye on email…
We had a nice Christmas Day – food and relaxation and calling family off and on through the day. Friday was all about the leftovers. I’m going to have to pick up that exercise ball and run with it double-time for a while to make up for that.
Saturday, I finished up a couple of small woodworking projects, and today, I finished preparing the first section of the basement floor:
Basement floor: clean, patched, and ready.
The “fun” part was removing the adhesive residue from the old stick-on tiles. Heat gun + putty knife for the bulk of the removal, followed by scrubbing the floor with low odor mineral spirits. Then I patched the concrete where divots remained from removing carpet and edge banding nails. On New Year’s day, I’ll try to lay some flooring.
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DoD announced no new casualties this last week.
Catching Up
The calendar is catching up to the weather, in fact. On Tuesday into Wednesday, we’re due for “wintery mix,” which sounds much nicer than it really is. But 30’s and 40’s for December are just fine. It’s the teens and 20’s that make us cranky, here in Chez Bilbrez.
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I’ve got the week “off” – burning some unused hours before I lose them to policy, come the end of the calendar year. Primary focus: finish building Marcia’s rolling cabinet, which is do-able, methinks. Here’s the carcass, much progress:
Marcia’s Rolling Cabinet Carcass
In the last two days, I’ve got finish on all of the drawers and the body of the carcass. This afternoon, I made the face frame components and attached them. Tomorrow, I’ll sand the face frame and apply finish coats of urethane to the whole thing. Then I can get the hardware attached, and start working on the top and the drawer fronts.
Also on tap for the week: the house needs a deep cleaning, and the basement floor continues to need my attention. We’d like that to be done by the time Marcia’s recovered from her right knee replacement (surgery scheduled for January).
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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:
- Sgt. Maj. Wardell B. Turner, 48, of Nanticoke, Maryland, died on Nov. 24, in Kabul, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when the enemy attacked his vehicle with a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device.
- Spc. Joseph W. Riley, 27, of Grove City, Ohio, died on Nov. 24, in Kabul, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when the enemy attacked his vehicle with a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device.
Winter is … What? Over 70 degrees tomorrow?
Yeah. This week we spent a significant amount of time at or below freezing, including a couple of mornings around 20°F. But according to the various forecasts, tomorrow it’s supposed to get up to 73°F. But two days later we’re back down to the deep freeze, with potential snow/sleet on Wednesday. Very weird.
I spent most of this weekend working in the woodshop on drawers and carcass for a rolling storage cabinet for Marcia, to use in her quilting space:
New cabinet for Marcia
Most of today was spent laying out and pre-drilling holes for the drawer mounting hardware. Then I’ll finish the drawer bodies and the carcass in an off white. The drawer fronts and trim on the cabinet body (as well as the cabinet top) are going to be made from the pine shelving that I got from Jolene’s yarn shop a few years back.
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DoD has reported no new casualties in the last week.
Space, Patch, Read
A number of folks who lack a sense of wonder, a sense of adventure, a … spine, perhaps, are whinging in articles here and there online about how awful it is that Michael Tyner Alsbury died testing a near-space tourist plane. How very risk-averse we’ve become, as a culture. I’d do his job tomorrow, in a heartbeat, if they’d let me. The wonder and joy of experimentation, research at the edges of what’s possible make life worth living, either personally or vicariously (for those of us too old to but dream). Again, risk vs. reward.
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Today I finished patching the rest of my Solaris systems. That’s a good thing, and it came off without a hitch, nothing but the 3 hours of time invested, and I was able to accomplish other tasks while monitoring the patch, live update activation, and reboot processes in other windows. Not the life of Riley, but it’s the one I have.
I should have gotten to mowing the lawns and roasting some coffee, but that didn’t happen, so I’m going to have to squeeze those in during the week ahead.
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Recent Reading
I finished reading Cheri Priest’s Dreadful Skin this week. Jack is a changed man. Well, a man changed into … something. Avoiding spoilers when discussing stories like this is hard.
Some of the joy of reading Cherie Priest’s wondrously intense writing is the little surprises in the beginnings that set the mood and reveal bits of joy (and horror). As in a well-done horror film, you can tell from cinematography and music that something scary and terrible is about to happen, but you can’t tell what until it jumps out at you from the shadows. Ms. Priest manages that time and again with her writing. I’ve not read the whole of the Priest canon extant, but so much that I have read contains that power to surprise and delight, even in the darkest of places.
I enjoyed this triptych tale, and when you read it (as you should), I hope that you do too. Note – this is probably not for most of the YA and younger crowd. That said, I’d have probably read it by age 10 or 11 without harm. Highly recommended.
I also finally finished up reading Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 97. My favorite of the fiction therein was Taxidermist in the Underworld, a grim tale with a twisty happy ending. I can recommend Clarkesworld Magazine without hesitation or reservation – I’ve been a subscriber (at a very reasonable price, mind you) for the last couple of years.
In progress: I’m still reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Doubt Factory. I’m finding it harder to get into than I’d hoped. But early impressions are rarely reliable, so I’ll forebear any judgement until I’m done. That’ll be a while, because unless I’m mistaken, I’ll not be through before I leave the book behind for a week while I’m at LISA’14 in Seattle.
On deck: Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 98.
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Our condolences to the family and friends of Cpl. Jordan L. Spears, 21, of Memphis, Indiana, who was lost at sea on Oct. 1* while conducting flight operations in the North Arabian Gulf.
[* DoD says “previously reported”, but I haven’t seen Corporal Spears mentioned in the DoD timeline]
End::Garden
2014 Garden is done
Yesterday, along with a bunch of lawn work front and back, I put the garden to bed for the year. I’ll probably break out the tiller in a week or two and turn the soil, for good measure. I did get one last batch of assorted (and unexpected) peppers from the maze of weeds, though:
Last of 2104 peppers
All told, about 7 hours of yard work yesterday, in utterly lovely weather. Today, I worked inside. More basement floor prep, a bit of cleaning here and there, and I made a pot of spicy turkey chili. Yum.
Recent Reading
I just finished reading Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi. It was a read that I’d been putting off for a number of years. I knew (in a non-spoilerish sense) that Zoe’s Tale was a revisit of the events from Scalzi’s The Last Colony, told from the PoV of Zoë Boutin-Perry. My problem is that I’m still tired of most retells, more than two decades after I read most of Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series. On the other hand, I really enjoy just about everything that Scalzi has written. So when a copy found its way into my hands while I was in the Dealers Room at Capclave last weekend … the time had arrived.
Like most good YA speculative fiction these days, Zoe’s Tale involves young adults in substantial trials and tribulations, and not all ends well for all participants. So, realism: check. That said, Scalzi works hard at a consistent voice as well as honest growth and reactions from his young protagonist. While it’s a bit much to put the politics and martial fate of a big chunk of the galaxy in one set of hands, the plot makes utter sense in the context of the byplay of the preceding three novels in the Old Man’s War series. That an extraordinary young woman rises to, and above the occasion … well, it could happen. Youth are unrestrained by the cynicism and can’t-do attitudes that affect so many of their elders.
If, perchance, you’ve read Old Man’s War, and the others of the series, but skipped Zoe’s Tale for any reason, it’s time to give in and read the book. I cared about the characters, and their fates. That matters to me in a good book. Recommended.
Reading in progress (still): Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks. On deck: Genevieve Valentine’s Dream Houses.
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No new casualties were announced by DoD in the last week.