There was over a 1' of snow blown into the back yard against the porch. You can't even see the terraced shape of steps at all, just a slope of crusty creme' brule snow. Since my flight was cancelled I spent today scraping the ice of our window sashes, shovelling, and knocking what ice I could out of the downspouts and gutters. The latter is nearly impossible due to our roof height. Hopefully they melt before they break off under the weight of all the ice and snow. Sunshine today bodes well for that.


We needed to paint before, but after a week of pounding wind and snow getting blown into all the little cracks and chips in the paint, and the forthcoming big melt, I think we're definately going to be up for a scraping, drying in the sun, and painting sometime this summer.

Hopefully my second flight out tomorrow morning will be ok, and soon I'll be somewhere where the weather is even worse, yay!

winter wonder ness

Several days of snow have made for the most severe winter I've seen since I've lived in Seattle. The winds have made it clear which bushes need pruning ASAP so they don't continue to scrape against the house. A project for after the snow melts, for sure.

A spade and an entrenching tool are not adequate snow shoveling tools. I suppose I could have been stuck with only a trowel and a backscratcher, so I should count myself lucky, right?

The weekend I meant to either get a ladder tall enough to reach the gutters, or hire it out for now, was when all the snow first fell so that hasn't gotten done, but at least it isn't raining into them right now. Yet.

I've started to move things around in the living room, just the teeniest bit- its' largely still a storage area at this point; but even getting our crappy couch set up feels very nice. I sat in there and talked to Aimee on the phone last night and was very happy to sit in the living room for the first time.

The new Lexan windows in the basement seem to be doing fine in the temperature changes. I'd read they were more susceptible to expansion and contraction, but the silicon I used seems to allow adequate fluctuation. Benjamin and I set up the game table in the north basement room and geeked out a little today, which was wonderful. It'll need some more careful planning, maybe some different lighting would be nice, and the obligitory weapons and flags decor. I'm quite excited to expand the table by 2', and perhaps come up with some better storage/display structures more suited to the particular needs of gaming ephemera.

Now lets just hope we don't lose electrical service in the great ongoing bluster of Snowpacalypse '08.

Minutae

The big stuff is mostly done, but there are plenty of things that need to be done to make the place feel more like a home, and also to not drive me nuts. Even if I'm out of it after work I try to do something for the house every day.

Yesterday: Switch & outlet plates installed, closet organizer assembled.

Today: Blinds installed, threshold saddle for the extra layer of rabbit carpet, peephole, security chain.

I had thought of going to MacLendon's to get some Lexan for the basement door, but I'm not sure I'll make it down there yet today.

----edit-->:

No, I don't think I'll be pulling the glass out of any windows tonight after all:

Judging by the cover. . .

We finally have decided on at least temporarily-permanent-for-now places for the book shelves. This is a good thing as it allows us to fill them with books, and then place the boxes that were once filled with books into the stack of boxes to recycle or return to their loaners.

This means less boxes in the living room. Yay.

Our lovely friends Luci and Swante came for dinner tonight which marks the first real dining guests we've had - aside from Daniel eating pizza on the floor with us during our painting phase.


While filling my shelves I continue on my rigorous dispensing with dust jackets. I hate them. They slide off the books, they allow the books to slide out of your hand if not held just so, and they are wasteful. Well, my dispensing with them doesn't make them any less wasteful, but it does solve the aesthetic and kinesthetic problems of them being ugly and unwieldy.

Glazing Putty.

Who ever invented it is my nemesis today. Oh sure, it does the job, but what about un-doing the job? I am standing in my basement, leaning on the window ledge, holding a heat gun to the casements and moving along a centimeter at a time, so that I can eventually replace the cracked glass . . . if I get the old one out before dark, that is. Very slooooow. Very boring.

Of course, if I could get the sashes out of the casements and do the work on a table, that'd be nice too, but no luck there.

Fooey.

Small Victories

We've gotten some more blinds in place- despite Ikea lieing to us about their stock levels, and sending Aimee on an hour long wasted wild goose chase.

I've got some clothing storage solutions in place, and some in progress, hopefully I'll be able to have more than suitcase worth of cloths available to me on a daily basis without having to dig through random boxes. This project is the result of having copious built in shelving in the old place that afforded me never using a convetntional dresser or anything.

We have new fixtures in the rabbit room. Aside from some furniture for the buns to play on, that room is pretty well in hand; yes!

Our phone service is up. Same number as the old place. Mom and Dad sent their old double hand-set system to us so now we can use them as an intercom to chat from opposite sides of the house. Very important feature.

It doesn't even feel like we've been there a week, even though we have . . The 4 day weekend that was mostly either visiting friends, or cleaning the old apartment has a lot to do woth that feeling. It will be nice to spend a weekend at home. Our new home. And do some home-on-the-weekend things. . . I wonder if it will be this weekend.

Just around the corner is christmas with all its running around and travelling. Then there is the emotional hangover month of recovery for Jan. We're not going to be able to have a house warming till Feb. at this rate.

not much to report

I went for a run through our neighborhood this morning, and I didn't even get jumped. HA! no really, it was completely uneventful. Our neighbor two doors down has pretty Christmas lights up all over her rhododendrons. We have seen our next door neighbor in the McMansion a couple of times. He is a young-ish stocky bald white man who drives a VW Beetle and has a bulldog. He has a silver fake Christmas tree right next to the piano and the weird ugly horse head statue. He also has man friends who came over bearing pizza and beer this weekend. No, we are not *spying* so much as we are keeping an eye out on the neighborhood. It's called a "neighborhood watch" and all the cool suburbanites do it. We need to know what is going on with the Joneses in order to keep up with them!! I think we might build our own concrete wall, taller and more awesome than Bald McMansion Man's wall, so he knows who the alpha neighbors are.

Today we got nice wooden blinds for the art room - Ikea was all out of the neat aluminum ones but we really just wanted to get it DONE. Also got Nathan a cool cube storage thing for his clothes. It's meant to be a bookshelf/TV shelf but it will work great for clothes.