snarkalupagus

so close

The bathroom is so close to done it's making me very very very antsy...worse than usual, which is pretty damn bad.  Another weekend of work, augmented by awesome help from the Belle and mommasnarx, has produced amazing progress...

Eventually, the beadboard will wrap all the way around the kitchen, on the sides of the cupboards, etc., but right this minute I can't face any more of it.  Please pardon the disarray on the countertop...that's the staging area for tools.

 
 And yet another shot of beadboard.  I like beadboard.

I also like baseboard.

Now, before we all get too excited about the floor being in place, I'm ripping it up tonight.  The contractors cased the door all the way to the subfloor, and instead of doing it right and getting a dovetail saw and removing enough casing to slide the flooring under, I jigsawed the flooring.  Mistake.  Poppasnarx stopped by yesterday afternoon and said, "Wow," which made all of the effort worthwhile, until he looked at the door frame and said, "Um, so...what happened here?"  I cannot stand not doing it right, so I will be fixing that this evening before I put down any more quarter-round.

Up until that point, however, here's how it looks now:

 
 and here...

 
Mommasnarx and I are going to be painting a lot this week...after I reinstall the floor.

briefing

Item 2 on the agenda for the weekend, following submittal of the fling-flarn grad school application, was buckling down and addressing the trim in the bathroom and kitchen.  I am pleased to report that progress was reasonably decent:

I got the door pretty much trimmed out on Saturday; this side worked out nicely.  On the other side, I had to do an emergency run to the home improvement emporium for a 1x3...when we were installing the switches, we, um, put the light switch inside the bathroom, um, a little too close to the door frame. 

Same wall from the other direction, after I had tried out some wood filler to see about the gap between the beadboard panel and the chair rail, but before I discovered that white paint makes it invisible anyway.  So I have a little sanding to do now...

By 8:30 or so last night, I'd finished the beadboard and chair rail all the way around to the door...I wanted to get the baseboard down and the floor in too, but there are only so many hours in the day and I only have so much sanity to lose making miter cuts, even with my fabulous compound miter saw (the saw is fine.  The brain that has to remember which way to cut chair rail with a different top-to-bottom profile on inside and outside angles?  Not so much).

What amuses me is the difference in how the paint looks with a flash and without.  In real life, it's way less disco than this:

See (when you look at that photo you can also see the 1x3 trimming the door, if you care...)?

 
Ew.  That must have been before I dusted the walls, too--the brown dust from cutting the panels is now everywhere, making a lovely two-tone effect with the bright white dust from the drywall sanding. 

So.  Boring.  Sorry.  But I'm excited.

overachieving already

About five minutes ago, I filled in my credit card information and clicked the "Submit My Application" button for my grad school application to Syracuse University.  I spent two weeks sweating blood over two essays and a business plan, and finished the last of it this morning (with help and moral support from all of my beloved friends, who I am sure are as sick of all of this angst as I am, and perhaps more so).

What steamed me, however, was that when I went online to upload them, there was only a specific page for one of them.  After about fifteen minutes of freaking out and four separate trips through all of the pages of the application form, I still hadn't found them.  I copied the damned topics off of the form weeks ago, so at one point, they were there; the only thing I can think is that the form is customized by program, and they've changed it, or one of my answers pulled me into a different form.

Anyway, I was not about to waste all of that effort, so I attached the extra ones anyway.  So there.

yes, still here...

...and by Monday there should be photos of a finished bathroom (except fixtures...I require SBJ help with that part) and bragging on a completed grad school application.  Until that point, though, it's safe to expect continued radio silence, as there are simply not enough hours in the day to write anything substantive enough to inflict upon you.

twubble

Time is growing ever scarcer around the gnome home...current projects include:

• Finishing MikeyB's thank-you-for-sweating-your-nuts-off-on-my-roof scarf, which is slightly more than 2/3 done;
• Writing three essays for my graduate school application, which is due by November 1;
• Putting the texture coat on the bathroom walls to cover up my not-as-flawless-as-I-thought drywall mud job, which is required before the installation of the beadboard paneling, chair rail, and baseboard I bought last weekend, not to mention the door trim;
• Painting the entry walls, which is required for said wainscot and trim;
• Locating recipes and preparing two desserts in time for family Octoberfest on Saturday afternoon;
• Putting the ridiculous amount of yarn purchased last weekend into the stash trunk so that it's hidden;
• Cleaning the house of the film of drywall dust it's acquired of late...it's made it into my bedroom closets.

Fortunately, I do better under pressure, so what am I doing tonight?  Going shopping and to dinner with the Belle.  I have my priorities perfectly straight.

photojournalism

Still here.  Busy.  Spent a lovely couple of days with S. getting our biannual fill of yarn...turns out that the NYS Sheep and Wool Festival was a lot more fun two years ago before knitting became Cool Again, bringing out way too many people to the Dutchess County Fairgrounds.  I'm still searching for the perfect pattern for a lace scarf to make out of the precious skein of cashmere I splurged on, but that will have to wait until I finish MikeyB's scarf (2/3 done) and MikeyA's mittens (just a gleam in my eye at the moment) and my grad school application. 

The bathroom is painted, though (apologies for the blurry photo--my cell phone doesn't do so well at night, though SBJ said he could see it on his phone):

Alpacas are cute:

 and so are sheep (until they open their mouths).

random breadcrumbs

I really am still here.

I'm waiting to hear about grad school (specifically, whether or not my company will be providing assistance for me to go to grad school, which will then determine whether or not I continue the application process).

I'm trying to get the bathroom finished, but get distracted by roadtrips:

That's from the back patio of the Fenimore House Museum in Cooperstown; I only took two photos at the Hall of Fame.

I'm also distracted by this craziness:

 

I sent that as a picture message to SBJ last night with the text, "dear god, it's not even fucking halloween yet.  [favorite grocery store name] is trying to drive me crazy."

At least they weren't playing carols, or I'd have had to get medieval on their ass.

reservation

This space is reserved for some kind of writing that will occur sometime soon...I keep having thoughts that I try to file in the "That would make a great post!" file, but somehow I never remember to put the file in my mental briefcase because then I usually remember that I forgot my lunch and it's garbage day, so I'd better get the bathroom trash upstairs, and while I'm at it I need to remember to take up the bills and put them on my desk (and pay my cellphone bill because that's the only one that's off by two weeks from the rest), but I forgot to grab the laundry on the way back down, dammit, and then I stub my toe on the toolbox that I keep meaning to move but then I won't be able to find the utility knife when I go to trim the drywall paper around that one outlet, and holy SHIT I only have a month to get my grad school application in, and I hope I hear back about the tuition assistance pretty damn soon.

Stuff like that. 

boundless love

Happy first birthday to Finn, whose smile is imprinted on my eyelids even though I don't see it in person often enough.  You've made us all so happy, little girl...may your second year be twice as joyful as the first, except it's hard to double infinity.

(Apologies to your mama for stealing the photo, but I just love it...)

surprises

Even though it's been nearly three years since I took off one-third of my total weight, I still am surprised sometimes...navigating through crowded spaces, I often have to remind myself that I can actually get through a narrow gap.  It still gives me a little thrill to look down when I'm sitting in a chair and see seat on either side of my hips.  I love to fold my pants when I take them off the clothesline...they look so small.  (I figured, during Roofstravaganza weekend, that I should put on a pair of jeans if I were going to be climbing around on the roofs--I ended up not getting on either one, but I still wore jeans...my favorite size-18 jeans from when I was heavy.  I didn't have to unbutton them to get them on, and even with a belt cinched as tight as it would go, I walked around hiking up my drawers all day that Saturday.  Come to think of it, I went to Home Depot like that.  Twice.  No wonder I got funny looks.)

Today I got shocked again, though.  I went shopping with the Belle (after we made two batches of strawberry jam and split a jar between us for dessert after lunch...be advised that there is very little in life that can top eating still-warm jam straight from the jar with spoons on a sunny patio with a good friend).  We both wanted to get a bra fitting, so in the course of spending most of yesterday's paycheck, we did.

I'm not surprised that my band size is bigger than what I thought it was--we do so much back work in circuit class, and I'm so broad around the ribs anyway, that the ones I've been wearing really don't fit properly. 

What shocked me beyond all reason, though, is that I'm actually a cup size bigger than I have ever worn in my entire adult life.  Now, lifting weights does not make the girls bigger, nor do the gobs of pushups in circuit class.  Wishing they were bigger doesn't work either, though I have certainly tried that.  I measured myself after losing the weight and bought bras based on those measurements (had to do that twice during the process, actually) and thought everything was fine.  I assumed that losing weight all over also meant losing weight in the girls, and was happy that I hadn't actually dropped a cup size.  I figured everything was groovy and went about my business for three years.  The cups occasionally runneth over, but I chalked that up to the bras stretching out over time.  Apparently, though, stretching wasn't the issue. 

After the fitting, after I picked my jaw up off the floor and made her re-measure, after the clerk patted me on the shoulder and said, "Yes, honey, that really is what you are," I returned the armload of bras I'd picked out to their original homes and grabbed a few in the new size. 

Alone in the dressing room, head spinning, I tried one on. 

Dadgum if it didn't fit.  And the girls actually looked bigger.  Evidently I've been compressing the poor ladies all these years.  Put them up where they belong with enough room to fill, and fill they do. 

Coulda knocked me over with a feather.