Arm Photon Torpedos!

For a variety of reasons, our moving date has floated back a week... or even more. If we don't move Labor Day weekend, we'll have to wait until after Shrewsbury (Sept 8-10) to move two weeks later (Sept 15-16). This gives me two weeks to recover from moving and finish up the final draft of a story for the Writers of the Future contest (Sept 30).

I think the quote of the day for August 18 was, "Wow, it's a good thing John didn't have photon torpedoes or those people would be so dead." (Sometimes shouting 'Arm photon torpedos!' at the idiot driving in front of you helps to relieve stress.)

So I'm a man with a mission; finish up the house now so I can free up my will to focus on other projects (like writing, for one thing). It's become obvious to me that we'll be hinkle-pinkling around with various odd house jobs forever unless we hire a baby-sitter to watch Arthur while the both of us take on the tasks of new-home-ownership. So we've got one for next week.

This weekend we had lots of help... Scraping. The. Damn. Kitchen. Cabinets. Even if they are old, clear fir, I'm about ready to take them out and burn them. Even with (or possibly in spite of) using strippers on the cabinets, there's areas of decorative globs that gum up the sandpaper. I've discovered a new tool called a "sandstone" that is sort of like a cross between pumice and a sponge; with a little bit of pressure you can use it to get right down to the wood. At least in the parts where you can use the sandstone. It's a little ironic that the kitchen is what's holding us up because if we could afford it, the kitchen would be the second thing we'd gut and re-do. (The first would be the bathroom.)

Probably the funniest thing to happen this weekend (which I didn't see) was my Dad managed to cut through an extension cord with electrical hedge shears. I'm told it was very dramatic with lots of sparks. Good thing part of the house settlement was installing trip-fuse electrical sockets; my Dad's already had his heart medically rebooted twice.

This whole ordeal has been a learning experience, though; I've learned that Mark and I physically perceive colors differently. If you give us a source green, for example, and a variety of green paint chips, we'll choose different chips. I don't know if we're using different ways to evaluate color tone or color shade or some other color modality -- but it's different. The good news is that Mark and I have chosen three colors to paint the house, we wrote the color names down on a piece of paper and we both signed it. I think this will be the first page in what we'll call "The Book of Big Decisions." I'm very glad that we've irrevocably, finally, absolutely really and for true, nailed down the colors. Now, of course, we have to buy the paint. We've also agreed on drawer pulls for the house -- they're classy and round, and it's nice that we had a gift certificate from Jerry's because elegance and style aren't cheap. We would have gotten some cobalt glass pulls, but they were even more expensive.

In further good news, I've decided that I like the smell of Murphy's Wood Soap. Which is a darn good thing because there's paint dust and chips all over our hard wood floors.