The saga of repainting the cracked patch of our dining room wall is ... plausibly close to ending, about a year after the cracks became an urgent issue. They became urgent with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger's buying a carousel rabbit to display where a bookshelf had hidden the flaws in the wall's paint.
The basic steps were never very big or complicated. Scraping the old paint off took longer than we expected as more paint was poorly attached to the wall than we thought. And there things lingered for ages, with the carousel rabbit being put upstairs to be out of the way. I made the next attack on this while bunnyhugger visited her brother, putting joint compound over way too much of the wall and then washing much but not all of it off. Finally this past month I attacked the wall with the primer, and then the joint compound (as should have been). And, finally, painting with the quart of paint matched to a big sample scraped off the wall. And it looks ...
Well, not quite right. Part of it is the joint compound, which turns invisible when it's damp and can be wiped away, but turns white when it's dried, so you keep washing the walls with a damp sponge and they come out bad again. Less bad, but not enough less bad. And then some spots where the repainted wall looks darker than the rest of the wall, at least in some light, including the full dining room light that we eat by. And, worse, there's a couple new or at least previously unaddressed cracks, lower down on the wall. I suspect it's damage from all my attempts to wash off excess joint compound.
After hotly debating what to do, though, we settled on this: we're happy to have the wall presentable if not shipshape for now, and have moved the carousel rabbit back to its proper place. Also put a couple pictures and an art piece back on the wall where they belong. At the end of the month, we'll move things back out of the way, and scrape and re-paint the parts that need touching up, and hope that that will clear things up in about a week of daily work.
Anyway the work passed its most important inspection. bunnyhugger's father was over and looked at it and pronounced that we'd done a good job. He asked no questions more probing than whether I used a brush or roller (brush for the first coat, roller for the second, and I'm not sure the roller was really needed). He did not ask for his tools back, which spared us the trouble of saying why we didn't want to return them just yet.
As I say, not done, but very close to done.
You know what's not done, but is very close to done? Saturday at Anthrohio! Seriously. Here's a half-dozen pictures.
It's the cake-decorating contest! Which started early! While the doors to the place were still barred shut! Leaving us with no cake to decorate or place to even squirm in on someone else's cake!
You can see some of how busy the people were with cake-decorating. Meanwhile the food lines --- cheese dogs and Fig Newtons --- was serving as normal.
Some of the finished cakes, reflecting whatever the theme of the convention was, if someone remembered.
Maybe it was cryptids. Not sure. I'm unsettled by whatever thing was done to the cake in the upper center of this picture.
I believe that this is the hallway outside the plush-gathering, an event so packed that we couldn't have gotten in the room even if the crowd hadn't scared us away from it.
The video game room on the main level. Somewhere within here was hidden one of the geocache boxes that added a fun element to the convention. It wasn't that tightly hidden
Trivia: In 1753 the British House of Commons approved a census of the kingdom, despite supporter Matthew Ridley's report that while he was not superstitious himself, if the bill passed and then ``be accidentally followed by any epidemical distemper, or by a public misfortune of any other kind, it may raise such a popular flame as will endanger the peace, if not the existence of our present government''. The bill died in the House of Lords, more likely owing to the prospect of a new tax assessment following the first census. Source: The Sum Of The People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, From the Ancient World to the Modern Age, Andrew Whitby.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 49: Look Out, Lummox!! or Who Slew Hillary Hee??, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. So the story is about Lummox, an amiable unfrozen caveman, who's accidentally killed someone. A prize bull, in this case. And, you know, Thimble Theater did accidentally-killed-animals stories over and over without them ever being any good. I know it's too late to tell Sims and Zaboly this but if you, dear reader, should ever find yourself writing the Popeye comic strip? Don't do a story built around Our Heroes killing animals. It doesn't work.
