Home lessons - part 1

Over the course of our marriage, Jason and I have lived in two apartments, three houses, and a couple of temporary hotels and/or furnished apartments during moves. Each of these has taught me something about being a homeowner, something I didn't know 11 years ago when I first went out on my own. Here are some of the lessons my homes have taught me:

1. When you strip off ugly wallpaper, at least 50% of the time you are going to find a wall that's so nasty you'll wish you'd left the ugly stuff up.
2. That's where sponge painting comes in handy.
3. Even if the house was built in the 1950s, that doesn't mean all the wiring is up to date ... there's always the chance that somebody's uncle Guido came in and "helped" add some new lights, using technology that was state of the art at the beginning of (last) century.
4. When you are trying to buy a house, almost every house in your price range can be described as having one or two unfortunate traits in common. For example, when we bought our first house, we were in the "shag carpet and/or waterbed" price range, because almost every house we looked at contained one or the other (sometimes both).
5. That thing living under your deck may not be a bunny ... it may, in fact, be two adult raccoons and six kits, all of which have to be dragged out screaming and crying before being euthanized.
6. Just because your yard looks level when you buy the house doesn't mean that it is. We hauled 19 bags of leaves out of our first backyard, and found out one corner was almost a foot lower than level, and we hadn't noticed before because that's where all the leaves had collected.
7. Need to sell a house? Call on St. Joseph for help. It worked for the lady who sold us our first house.
8. And if that doesn't work, call my mother and get her to give you a transplant of one of her friend Grace's ostrich ferns. Twice we've planted them, and neither time have we stayed in the house long enough to see them the following spring.
9. When you use the wet/dry vacuum on the "wet" setting, it's important to a) empty out the dry stuff first, and b) remember to empty out the water afterward. Otherwise, a few months later you'll realize, So THAT'S where the smell is coming from ...
10. Paint the trim first, then paint the walls. If you make a mistake it's easier to wipe latex paint off of the trim than it is to wipe oil based paint off of the walls.
11. Textured ceilings are evil. Practical for the builder, I'm sure, but evil for the homeowner, who gets stuck trying to shave off the bumpy bits so they can install crown molding, and has to be extra careful when painting near the ceiling because there is NO way to get paint off of the textured stuff.
12. Install a chandelier by myself? Rewire a chandelier? Patch huge holes in the wall? Relight the pilot light in a gas water heater? Singlehandedly rip out 400 square feet of carpeting and install most of a laminate floor in the same day? Yes, I can do that.
13. My dad can reglaze old windows while standing on a ladder in the steaming sunshine. Not that he wants to do it again, but it's good to know that he CAN.
14. Yes, it is possible to shoehorn a powder room into a space that is less than 3 feet wide, but it's a bitch to paint it.
15. Ivy is evil, and Virginia creeper doubly so. The best way to rid the world of evil is to douse it with Roundup, wait a few weeks until you have tricked it into thinking you've forgotten about it, then go in and rip its weakened little tentacles out, one by one. Curse the day that ivy was invented. Then take a spade and turn over all the earth where the evil used to live, ripping out any roots you uncover while doing so. Then hoe all the turned over earth, ripping out any roots that rear their ugly heads. Curse whoever planted the ivy in your yard. Plant your replacement plants, ripping out any existing roots you find (trust me, they're there, so keep ripping). Put down mulch, then use at least double the recommended amount of Preen. Be vigilant for the next, oh, forever, about ripping out the returnees. Curse the day you decided to rip out the ivy in the first place.
16. Or, forget all of the steps in #15 and just move. Works for me and cleaning the oven, which I have never, ever, done, not once in 11 years of adulthood. There are benefits to moving every couple of years, you know.
17. If the disclosure sheet on the house you're planning to buy mentions that the basement gets "a little damp in heavy rain," what that actually means is that when you get the first heavy rain of the spring, you're going to spend all of the storm in the basement with the wet/dry vac, trying to suck up the water that's flowing from one corner of your basement toward the pile of cardboard boxes you haven't unpacked yet. I've about come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a dry basement. The International Space Station probably has an area the astronauts consider their basement, and I bet it's got water issues, too.
18. Floors will squeak loudest in all of the locations where you need to walk to put a sleeping baby to bed.
19. If you paint two walls of your bathroom and look at the drying paint and say, "huh, I really don't like that much," for god's sake quit painting and go find a better color. You are not going to like your minty fresh bathroom any better two years later, and it will be even harder to convince yourself to repaint it at that point.
20. If your house is 95% hardwood floors and 5% hard-to-clean wool area rugs, guess where the cats will puke 90% of the time? We're on our second can of carpet cleaner, and that's all been used one 2-foot square at a time.
21. Nobody ever paints the tops of the trim around doors.
22. The expensive streak-free paper towels combined with the expensive streak-free window cleaner really does mean you don't end up with streaky windows.
23. Just because you can get the mattress through the door and up the stairs doesn't mean you can get the box spring up the same way.
24. Sometimes one person or one family is the catalyst needed to pull a whole neighborhood together, and when they move away the neighborhood drifts back apart. I am not that person, but I know her, and I was privileged to live across the street from her for more than a year. We miss you, Joy.
25. All it takes is one person painting their living room red, and the rest of the neighborhood follows suit. There are five or six of us on our street now ... I'm such a trend setter!

Oh, there are so many more, but I think this is getting too long for one post. If I remember, I'll post on this again later. In the meantime, what have you learned from your homes? Talk amongst yourselves ...

Hallelujah!

Before:

You can't really tell from the picture, but the lower walls are cinderblock that was cast to look like tumbled bricks, which were painted sloppily in vibrant colors. And the upper walls were a lot more yellow in real life.

And now, after two weeks of working on it every naptime despite a two raging headcolds in the family, about 14 trips to Hell Depot, a fun five minutes spent attacking a cinderblock wall with a hammer to knock off pieces that stuck out too far (ooh, that was fun - can we do it again?), a drillbit-shaped burn on my forearm, a large bruise under my thumbnail, three coats of blue paint, half a gallon of white trim paint, and about 3/4 of a tube of spackle, here's our new guest room.

After:

Inspiration for the colors in the room came from these pillows, which I found after weeks of looking in vain for a color scheme for the room. I bought the pillows and everything else fell into place like dominos - sheets, quilt design, wall color, funky little birdhouses that remind me of Jamaica despite the fact that I've never been there.

I am so psyched about how this room turned out that I actually had a hard time getting to sleep last night, I was so excited to get it cleaned up enough to show it to the world. I decided at the beginning of the project not to talk about it until it was done, and it was killing me - keeping secrets has never been my strong suit.

I am inordinately proud of the fact that absolutely I didn't need any spackle to cover mistakes between the trim and the ledge, or the baseboard and the paneling, or the uprights at each end of the paneling ... it all went into closing the gap between the wavy wall and my not-so-wavy ledge, and closing the gap between the wall and the trim under the ledge, which had to be cut short so I could maneuver it in place. True, we managed to buy panel nails that were 1/32" too long and therefore can't be countersunk (so you can see every nail in the paneling if you look closely), and if you hold a string up to the paneling under the window you'll see that it bows in about 3/4" ... but if you're not looking for it, I swear you can't see it. And I managed to get the baseboard and the trim to bow in exactly the same place, so I didn't have to spackle any gaps - which is a total freakin' miracle, if you've seen any of my past trim installations.

Now all I have to do is finish the second quilt and make a valance for the window ... and stain the cabinet ... and buy headboards for the bed ... and find art I like for the big blank wall over the bed and on the inside wall ... and make a matching valance for the guest bathroom, paint the bathroom, and replace the sink and vanity in the bathroom ... gonna be a long summer at this rate.

Geeling on the Ceiling

So, painting the ceiling did, indeed, suck. But it's done, and it was at least marginally tolerable, thanks in large part to Visible Solutions, the color-change ceiling paint from Sherwin-Williams*. Paint goes on a purply pink, but it dries in 20 minutes or so to plain old white. Not too bad about splatter, either, thanks to a formula that's thicker than pancake batter. Not fun to get into the nooks and crannies of a textured ceiling, but at least it wasn't running down my arm at the same time.

Liza was tremendously disappointed that it didn't stay that color permanently. Jason was disappointed that he has a lasting reminder of his fun with the giant roller today ...

"Not only did I get a blister from rolling so much, it just burst all over the extension pole. Blech."

And we're both excited that we managed to prime and get two coats of paint on the whole kitchen without screwing up any of the new cabinets. That could be because we're awesome, or it could be because none of the cabinets are actually touching the walls with any surfaces that will be visible once the trim and cover panels are attached next week ... you be the judge.

And yes, we did go ahead and slap a coat of paint on everything, including the areas that are going to be tiled for the backsplash, mainly because I was sick of it looking all spotty and half-finished.

I told Jason yesterday that the thing that's going to kill me about this project is that virtually nothing will be complete until the last day or two ... you can't finish the upper cabinets until you hang the trim and paint the walls and put in the hole for the exhaust fan, you can't finish the lower cabinets until you install the flooring, you can't install the sink until the countertop is installed, you can't touch up the paint until the tiling is done and the baseboards are in place, yada yada yada. I like projects where I can check things off on my list as I go along, and then not have to deal with them again during the project. This isn't one of them. Good thing I'm not the one who has to do all this stuff!

*Yep, it comes from the company that employs my husband, but that doesn't mean I'm lying about how it works.

Work Day 20/Calendar Day 26 - trimmed

Last night Jason and I put a coat of white on all the trim for the dining room and living room, in hopes that the contractor could attach it today so we can load the furniture back in this weekend. And the result:
More linear feet of trim to caulk, spackle, and repaint. It feels like that's all I've done for the past three years is paint freakin' trim. At least at this house we're using waterbased paint.

Oh, and Liza's been painting, too:
Yes, she did just write "LI" with no prompting or help from me. Why? Because she's brilliant, of course. We just won't discuss the fact that she stepped in the paint tray afterward, hmm-kay?

A life lived one nap at a time

One of the things I've had to adjust to since Liza was born is that I have to fit my life around her schedule. I've always been very independent, one might say almost to the point of being selfish about my time and my ability to do what I wanted when I wanted. I sort of figured that I'd get a laid-back baby who would go with the flow and happily work around my schedule. Ha!

Instead I've got a challenging baby, one who wants to do exactly what she wants when she wants. I wonder where she got that trait? Having Liza around means that the only time I can take care of consuming tasks and hobbies is when she's asleep. Finishing my thesis, refinishing furniture, quilting, writing to friends ... all of these are things that I have to chop up into nap-sized chunks of time. That's a lot easier now that her naps are more consistent; at first there was no way to tell whether she was going to sleep for 45 minutes or 4 hours, which made planning a little challenging.

Taking Liza's naps into account is so prevalent in my internal scheduling that I've started to estimate the size of projects based on how many naps they'll take to complete. Sewing project for a friend? That's about two and a half naps. Refinishing a dresser for Liza's room? That was about six naps and at least two days of Jason taking care of the kid while I was up to my armpits in carcinogenic chemicals (smiling like a giddy schoolgirl the whole time, and not just because of the fumes). My friends sometimes marvel at how much I'm able to get done, and I tell them that it's not that hard if you're really driven in a sick sort of way and refuse to turn the television on before your husband gets home from work.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about how my personal life is now lived one nap at a time; I've had lots of time to do that thinking while I painted our hallway. I've been working on this for weeks, pulling out the paint can whenever I have a spare moment. Everything will look great when it's done, but I've been kicking myself for starting the project ... I hate painting trim, and the upstairs hallway alone has five doorways, plus baseboards and crown molding and bannister spindles.

But the tedium of painting has been balanced by the fact that I'm working toward a 20-month-old goal: eradicating the last traces of the boring grey the previous owners of the house painted on every wall in the house. When Sam the Electrician put the finishing touches on rewiring the downstairs hall, it was finally time to pull out the wall paint and get going. His van hadn't even cleared our driveway before that paint can was in my hand! Seven naps, three evenings of intense pre- and post-bedtime painting later, we're just about done. I still have to finish the finicky bits that involve teetering on a ladder at the top of the wall next to the stairs (and paint all of the trim downstairs), but I'm pretty happy with how the color has turned out:

It's one of those odd colors that seems to change depending on the light source and the time of day. So far I've been able to describe it as "peach," "pink," "tan," "mushroom," "grey," and "beige." On the color strip it's actually a warm shade of tan, and it's less pink than the color I was originally going to choose. I think it's a good thing I changed my mind, because the colors we ended up choosing are right at the limit for how pink we could go without having a PINK hallway (which would have upset Jason).

***

Speaking of Sam the Electrician, the end of our longer-than-a-year, whole-house rewiring project is finally within sight. It's not gonna happen next week or anything, but I can count on one hand the number of rooms we have left to do. Of course, Sam the Electrician keeps finding lots of lovely surprises the previous owners and contractors have left for us, and every time I hear him sigh heavily I know we've just added at least an extra day of work to the project. My personal favorite so far is that when he pulled the lightswitch out of the wall at the bottom of the stairs, there was another lightswitch floating loose in the wall behind it ... and it was still hooked up and "hot." By process of elimination he figured out which circuit controlled it, and he also figured out that about half of the first floor of the house is also run by that circuit, which is hooked to a fuse box in the middle of the basement. Fun, fun, fun! It's a miracle the house hasn't burned down yet thanks to some of the electrical eccentricities perpetrated by Larry, Darryl and Darryl (as we've nicknamed the "good local boy" contractors the previous owners hired to do most of the work in the house ... badly).

Sam the Electrician has been working on our living room and dining room this week, and we've got the gaping holes and dangling wires to prove it. This morning he was trying to drill a hole from the basement up into the inside of one of the walls so he'd have room to run the wiring up there, and the hard wood of the floor joist was smoking a bit as Sam drilled. The smoke was puffing up the wall and coming out of the hole where the switchplate will go, which is what Zach was watching from a prime vantage point:

That poor cat isn't going to know what to do with himself once all the wiring is done and there isn't so much interesting stuff to keep track of every morning. Oh, well - by then Liza should be walking, and he'll have a whole new set of problems to worry about!

Again with the tiredness

Thursday night I made 10 shirts for Liza and the spelling bee contestants from Kindergarten.  Do you have any idea how hard your hand cramps after using that much puffy fabric paint?

Friday I watched Liza at the spelling bee, where she won "Bravest Speller."  The judge said it looked like she was thinking, "Okay, Mr. Microphone, I know you want to eat my face off, but they told me I needed to use you to win, so I'll just stand way over here and be prepared to run away if you make any sudden movements."  What do you think?

Oh, and I hereby declare that the silent "h" in words like "wheel" is stupid and should be abolished.

Saturday I was getting ready to start painting the bathroom when the power went out.  You know, on the day when it was raining.  And the battery backup on our sump pump was out of juice.  So I got to bail - over the course of 3 hours - 60 gallons of water out of my sump hole, or, as I like to call it, The Black Hole of Olmsted Falls.

In the 10-minute increments between bailings I managed to get the basement even more tidy than it was before.  Um, yay?

When the power came back on, Jason asked if I still planned to paint the bathroom that day.  Two-word answer that starts with "f" and ends with "no."

Sunday I finally got the walls painted.
Monday I got the trim painted.
This morning I got the caulking done and moved all the towel rods and cabinets and curtains back in.  After another hour of cleaning all the dust off of everything, it looks pretty sweet, if I do say so myself.

Even if I still don't have a fucking faucet, which, if you recall, was THE ENTIRE REASON I STARTED THIS PROJECT ALMOST A MONTH AGO.

This afternoon I went outside to look at something other than my bathroom or basement for the first time in like a week and a half.  It was worth the trip.

One more thing ....

... before I go do something useful today. My best friend here in the neighborhood is moving later this month, and she asked me to help her decorate her new house by making some cornices for the windows in some of the rooms. Here are the first two, done and ready to go once they close on the house next week:

They're actually close to 8 feet long, so this photo just shows the left half of each. The bottom one will go in her master bedroom - it actually gets a tassel at the bottom of the point that I hadn't attached when I took the photo. The top one goes in the girls' room, and since you can't see the nifty part in the big photo, I took a closeup to show you the trim detail:

Any time I get to use a glue gun and trim with little tassely things, I'm a happy camper. I can take no credit for the fabric choices - my neighbor picked them out on her own. I think she made some great choices - they totally fit with the feeling she's trying to go for in each room.

I can tell she likes this new house more than her current one, because it took her over a year to make a decision about what color to paint the dining room here, but she's just about got the new house decorated and she doesn't even own it yet! Anyway, I've got one more set of cornices to make in the next week, and those should be even more fun than these, because I get to design them myself. I'll post photos when I get them done - they'll either be REALLY cool, or practically hideous - could go either way.

Patio pics, part the first

Remember the patio room?  You know, the one that we started prepping for a year ago, poured the pad for last year, and started building a month ago?

It's (almost) done.  The contractors are finished, we've been able to use the semi-finished room for a couple of weeks, and the building permit is gone from the front window of my house.

But in order to save money, I'm doing some of the finishing work myself.  Why pay the contractors to install a floor and paneling when I can do it myself (and take 10 times longer, curse more, and have it look almost as good as if it was done by professionals)?

(primed, not painted, so don't worry, it will look better soon)

The humans haven't been using the room to its full potential yet - we haven't even ordered the carpet, and walking around on the DRIcore subfloor barefoot isn't the best idea - but that hasn't stopped other family members from taking full advantage of the three walls of glass surrounded by birds and squirrels (and even an occasional chipmunk).

 

I've got to get one final coat of trim paint on the paneling, wait for the carpet to be installed, and I'll be done.  And then it will be party time!

It's been one of those weeks

Monday: I am tremendously productive in the morning, paying bills, taking care of procrastinated tasks and managing to almost locate the top of my desk. At 12:45 Liza has her first swimming lesson over at the university pool, so at 12:30 I pull into the parking lot. The pool looks pretty easy to find, so I leave the map in my car (mistake 1). I'm not sure what the locker room situation will be like, and the pool isn't too far away, so I leave my stroller in the car (mistake 2). It takes 20 minutes of wandering around to even find the building, which doesn't have a name on the outside. Maybe I was just hormonal from having my first real period since August 2, 2004 (hooray!), but I was pretty much in tears at this point, and Liza's 20+ pounds of bulk weren't helping things. Then it took another 10 minutes of trying the various doors to the building, each of which seems to open into a variety of incorrect dead ends - fitness center, men's locker room, etc. I finally managed to find the right door at 1:00, and I still had to get Liza into her swim diaper and swim suit, which was fun because I didn't have time to go looking for a changing table. We made it into the water at 1:05, and the class ended at 1:15. I have not been that stressed out in a long time, thank god.

Tuesday: I get almost nothing done this morning, since we have guests staying over and I need to cook breakfast, etc. We have a standing playdate at 10:30 at a local park, and Liza cries for most of it and refuses to play with anything until five minutes before we have to leave. I drive to Kroger to pick up some prescriptions, only to realize that I left my wallet at home in the other stroller. There isn't enough time to go home and get it and still eat lunch before swimming, so we go to Sonic and make our lunch decisions based on the change I scrounge out of the car seats and my gym bag. We make it to swim class on time, but I'm still all freaked out from the five minutes when I thought my wallet had been stolen from my bag. Liza's mobility is increasing by leaps and bounds, so that anytime I leave her alone for a few seconds, I'm liable to come back to a scene like this:

Wednesday: I am feeling back to normal, especially since I actually slept well the night before. Liza gets up early, so later I put her down for a brief morning nap and try to get the new bicycle seat installed on my bike. I finish pretty quickly, so all I have to do before we leave for storytime at the library is adjust Liza's new helmet. Fifteen minutes later, I'm still futzing around with straps and buckles and gromets and whatever. I refuse to be stressed out by this, however, and get it adjusted well enough that we can bike over to the library. Liza spends the whole ride over trying to pry the helmet off of her head - she never succeeds, so I guess I got it adjusted properly. Meanwhile, I discover that, contrary to the laws of physics and common sense, the road between our house and the library manages to be uphill in both directions. We come home, eat a reasonable lunch, and I fairly skip out the door on the way to swimming. Only after we get there do I find out that I forgot to pack a towel, so Liza and I have to drip dry after the class. And I had planned to run some errands around campus, so we ended up walking - dripping wet and cold, despite the 80F temperature - all over creation, trying to get her registered for a pre-school program that won't begin until 2008.

Thursday: Compared to earlier this week, today was a breeze. We went to Liza's OT appointment early in the morning, where Liza once again showed off her determination to NOT stay in a prone position unless forced to or coerced into cooperation by swinging on the platform swing:

Liza was in a foul mood for much of the OT session, but she perked right up when we got in the car to run errands afterward. A trip to the bank, and the grocery store, and McDonalds for lunch, and we still had plenty of time to buy some paint and make it to swim class on time. Liza even managed to blow bubbles in the water, twice - a lot more socially acceptable than her usual trick of trying to swallow the entire pool in 30 minutes. Liza was in such a good mood that I bit the bullet and finally took her over to get her lead test done at the hospital. When we went in for Liza's 12 month appointment, I asked the doctor to request a lead test for her, since we live in an older home and have been doing a lot of work on the walls and trim and stuff. I figured it was just going to be a heel stick, but no, they have to actually draw an ampule of blood for it. So I've been putting off the testing since the first week of May, dreading the thought of the technicians trying to find a vein in that squirmy, squishy little arm. But it was on my to-do list, and today we got it done. The technicians were great - found a vein on the first try - and Liza was a trooper right up until they stuck the needle in her. Then it took two of us to hold her down while the third person drew the blood ... but she recovered quickly afterward, and even got a free stuffed animal and a sucker from the lab techs. Here's our brave little patient, after her nap:

Notice the fetching hot pink stretchy wrap stuff they gave Liza in place of the oh-so-tasty bandaids they have a the pediatricians' office.

It's a good thing this swimming thing only lasts for one more week, and Liza seems to really enjoy it, because it's throwing my schedule all off kilter. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go find the mint julep with my name on it somewhere in my kitchen ...

Weekend of extreme sinus drainage (and productivity)

Wednesday: Came down with the "something's been dripping down the back of my throat all day" sore throat, which usually signals the start of a week-long cold infestation.

Thursday: Sore throat continues, plus sinus headache and pain so bad I feel like throwing up. The pain laughs at the two kinds of cold medicine and pain relievers I throw at it. So, of course, I take Liza swimming at a friend's neighborhood pool. Thanks to me, the entire kid population of Camelot Farms will miss a good portion of next week's school. In my defense, at this point the symptoms were still indistinguishable from allergies.

Friday: Throat is better, but now I'm blowing my nose so often that the muscles in my neck and back hurt from the effort to get the approximately 14 gallons of stuff out of my body. Liza chooses today to turn into a whiny limpet. The only way I manage to bypass toddlercide is to make her watch Cinderella with me twice, and let her run around outside with the hose running full blast for an hour. Jason gets home from work, I retreat to bed and hide there until it's Liza's bedtime. After she goes to bed, I work on the stuffed dog that I've been knitting since we were in the hotel room. Because, you know, nothing takes your mind off of snot like working on a project you have grown to despise but are finishing because you've invested too much time in it to throw it out.

Saturday: My throat would be better, if I weren't hacking stuff up every five minutes. I talk to my mother on the phone, and she actually sounds worried. I tell her not to fret, at least now I can sing my daughter "Amazing Grace" in an additional lower octave, thanks to Sexy Cold Voice. Jason takes pity on me and goes out with Liza until lunchtime (thank you, saintly husband!), giving me time to finish the quilting on the first of two quilts for our guest bedroom. I'll have photos once I get the binding on. And I manage to make the valance for our kitchen window:

Afternoon is a blur of naps and looking through decorating books for ideas for our bedroom curtains. Jason went over to a friend's house Saturday night, and I knitted and crocheted until my fingers bled. Literally ... although I don't have a picture, unfortunately. I do, however, have pictures of The Dog From Hell, which seemed like such a good way to get rid of a lot of ugly brown yarn, and turned into the project that wouldn't die.

"What's so bad about that?" I hear you thinking. Well, that dog was made in about 30 different pieces, and despite the fact that I cut 60 rows of knitting out of the pattern when it was obvious things were getting out of hand, my boy is four feet long and weighs about five pounds. Here's Liza's first exposure to The Dog of Doom, just so you can get an idea of the scale:

Her actual comment while I was taking the picture? "Mama, help! Take it off! Take it off!" I think she was just ticked off because I put it in the way of her continuing to use the couch as a trampoline, but still.

Ahem. Anyway, Saturday night I also finished up two crochet projects from the bottom of my knitting bag, both made of yarn I had leftover from the zebra:

I've decided to call the penguin "Blotto," and the bear is "Claw." I can't tell you how perfect the beak is on the penguin - it turned out exactly the way I wanted it to.

Sunday I was on the mend, only expectorating twice an hour, although when I talked to my dad on the phone he thought I sounded awful. I had enough energy to work on a summer dress for Liza, which I completed in one naptime. A long naptime, and I still need to take in the waist some to make it fit right, but still. Damn, I'm good.

I'm not kidding when I say I have to take the waist in. Here it is, safety-pinned together in the back so I could judge how much I needed to take it in.

I have to cut off FIVE INCHES of the elastic that holds the waistband up in back, despite the fact that Liza's waist is only one inch smaller than the measurements on the package for this size. Stupid pattern designers.

And then Sunday night I started a new sweater for Liza, which should be big enough for her this winter. Given that the pattern is ridiculously complex and I've already messed it up twice in sixteen rows of the pattern, I'm going to need all the time between now and first frost just to get the thing done. I had to "watch" the episode of Heroes we had on DVR with my head buried in the pattern book, muttering under my breath "ONE perl perl TWO perl perl THREE perl ... damn, it was only supposed to be two. Okay, back on the left needle, guys. Hey, you! Don't you dare drop down one more row! I've got a crochet hook, and I'm not afraid to drag your sorry ass back up where you belong!" I firmly believe that the more I curse at a craft project, the faster it goes. If that's true, I predict I'll have this sonofabitch done next week.

And today I'm mostly healed, except for the hourly removal of great quantities of stuff from my nose. And I've managed to pull all the ugly trim off the basement wall before I even got out of my pajamas, and I got the first coat of paint on the walls during Liza's naptime. So if you'll excuse me, I have a second coat to apply. "Lupine," here I come!