So what would I do, with not quite a week of bachelor life and no work to go to? ... Not a very lot of things, really. Watching a bunch of game shows on Buzzr, or listening to show tunes on the SiriusXM Broadway channel. You know at 11 every night they play a whole cast album?
But I also settled into doing small home repair stuff. Replacing the very broken window blinds in the bathroom, for example, with a set that we had gotten from some neighborhood freecycle thing like three years ago. It turned out to be almost no time once I started actually doing something, although it would have been faster still if I could have found the Philips-head bit for the power screwdriver. With that experience, though, replacing the broken and faded curtains in the living room seems more attainable.
Another task? The dining room wall. It had some spots where the paint was peeling. A couple months ago ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger got the gumption to scrape the weak spots off, and keep on scraping until she found where the paint was well-attached. This took more time and area than she expected and then we stalled out. The walls needed to have putty compound put on them, and smoothed out. So, I finally got around and started doing that.
The challenge here is that the goop needs a day or more to dry, and then to really smooth out, needs to be wet-sanded, run over with a damp mop to smooth it flat. You can dry-sand it, using sandpaper, but it makes an impossibly fine powder that you don't want to inhale (says every home repair site I looked at). Ah, if only I had a good supply of N95's. ... Waaaait a minute.
Anyway, every page I saw about this said I'd need three layers, and with a day or so to dry in-between, that meant I had just enough time to get these swaths of the dining room wall flattened out before bunnyhugger got back home.
But. Mm. The thing about our dining room is the walls are textured. The three layers of putty smoothed that out, more or less. Once painted --- the step I couldn't get to --- they would be forever obvious as a smooth stretch in a textured wall. This is why bunnyhugger had wanted to feather the edges, putting enough compound on the seams to cover them, but not to cover the expanses of rough wall surface. When she got home she was distressed about this but resolved that, one way or another, we were about to get the wall finished, finally.
I couldn't leave it at that. Finally when she had an afternoon when she had to nap --- and I wasn't at work --- I took the sponge and mopped off as much of the putty as possible. Though it had been on over a week, the water reactivated it and it almost all came off, besides little bits at the edge of the well-attached paint. I want still to do a go-around and make sure there's no corners missed, but we might finally be ready to paint for real.
I did at least succeed in going to the paint store and getting a match to a big chip taken off the wall. I'm feeling good about the color match: they dabbed a bit of it on the big chip and even though I know just where it was I can't spot it easily. bunnyhugger couldn't find it at all, and that is a careful eye.
There was other stuff to take care of but that's the kind of guy I was on my own: getting around to much-delayed home repair stuff with about 67 percent success. (I was also able to successfully replace the clock movement in a wall clock that had burned out. Joann's had a replacement that was almost the same size --- close enough that you can't know the difference --- although instead of the German-made mechanism that originally lasted 25 or so years, this is a ten-buck kit. But I know how to replace it when the time comes.)
And now ... December, at last. Going to share some pictures of going out to cut our Christmas trees and you'll get to see the rare event of a couple bunnyhugger-taken photographs of someone or other who brought a hacksaw to the Christmas tree farm. See if you can spot the subtle clews that it wasn't me behind the camera this time.
bunnyhugger going up to the farm building to discover that Small bunnyhugger is already there! Wow! Also you can see that while it's chilly out, it's not near freezing or anything. Just muddy.
bunnyhugger brought her film camera this time, the better to capture action like holding tree clippings!
Now, is this a cute-looking tree or what? We've been getting shorter but better-shaped trees lately.
But here bunnyhugger sizes up the tree we ended up getting for upstairs, a short but lovely one among the nearly two left.
And now to some of bunnyhugger's pictures; we had brought a tarp just in case it rained lightly and the ground was all unpleasantly damp and what do you know but ...
So embarrassing to be caught underneath the tree you just felled! It's unsurvivable, that's all it is.
Trivia: The word ``bridegroom'' first appeared in Old English, as brydguma, literally ``bride-man'' (or ``man about to take a wife''). The Middle English ``bridegome'' mutated because of the influence of the word ``groom'', an unrelated word which by about 1330 had come to mean ``a male person''. Source: Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, Sol Steinmetz. It's not clear where the independent ``groom'' comes from; Steinmetz offers the hypothesis it might be related to ``to grow''.
Currently Reading: His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine, S C Gwynne.
