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dragonlady7I seem to have let the whole weekend pass by without an entry. I was online now and then. Don't know that I left any comments or anything either. I wasn't incommunicado, I just wasn't thinking in an LJ kind of way.
I called in on Friday, intending to do something about the itchy eyes—I wasn't going to scrape through another day like Thursday—but then, I couldn't get a doctor's appointment on short notice, and you know, nothing at home irritated my eyes at all, so I had no symptoms to show, and what would they do for me? I'd show up next month sometime and blink at them and they'd tell me there was nothing wrong with me and also I was fat, so I'm really not interested.
So instead I set to work on cleaning out the last of the junk in my room so I could begin stripping the wallpaper. I also finished taping the windows so I could paint them, in the living room, and put what I hoped was the last coat of paint on the last bit of trim that hadn't been painted (around the front door).
I also reread the entire most recent draft of Barbarians_Novel in hopes of seeing where to edit to make a more final cut of it. And I did all the laundry in the house, which was a lot. And I made a batch of chili from entirely homegrown vegetables except for a can of beans.
On one of my trips to hang up clothing to dry and pick tomatoes, I noticed that the mail had arrived. Also there was a package. I picked up the package. What was it? A book. Oh yes, I had ordered a hardback copy of The Wizard Hunters (and a paperback copy of The Gate of Gods) so I'd have a full set of hardbacks, and could turn my paperback copies into loaners. Hurrah! So I opened up the package, thinking it would be my hardback of Wizard Hunters, and lo! It was not! It was my copy of Death of the Necromancer, which I had not yet read and had to buy used because it's out of print. (Bastards.)
Well, there went the rest of the day.
You know what?
Oh. My. God.
I thought I loved the trilogy, but this book? This book on its own is perhaps possibly better than all the others. I hadn't thought I would like Nicholas Valiarde as a protagonist—in the trilogy, at one point, he's described as "a little black stormcloud", and another point he was "lurking the halls in a probably unconsciously sinister manner" (I'm paraphrasing, I know it was less awkwardly-said than that). He just seemed too, I dunno, ambiguously wicked for me. He didn't seem terribly attractive, either. I just didn't know that I'd like him. But I was so curious, I figured it was certainly worth a read.
Oh my God.
I don't have a review in me, not today, but read this fucking book. Do what you have to in order to get a copy, and read this fucking book.
Nicholas still isn't hotter than Ilias, but you know, where Ilias is a bit of a car crash, Nicholas is a train wreck with two trains and a tractor trailer and a hot air balloon full of dynamite.
I have to say, I'm just glad that I don't have the same taste in men in real life as I do in fiction. I'd be dead by now.
Poor Madeline.
Anyway.
I eventually recovered myself, and we finished the living room, except that the trim on the windows could probably use another coat or two or a goddamn zillion because that damn paint is so dark it shows every flaw. Bleh.
So on Saturday I got my room totally hoed out, with not a scrap of stuff left in it. We got the mattress and box spring hauled up to the attic, and even swept out the floor.
Sunday we got a bucket of hot water and a mop and just went to town on the west wall. The bed headboard is going against that wall. We have to finish up that wall before we can get the new mattress delivered. So we focused on that wall first.
Hot water and putty knives. Since we have plaster walls, we can saturate the wallpaper and not worry about anything except getting puddles on the floor. I went over it five or six times with the mop, let it soak in, went over it again, and then we attacked it.
It won't come off in big sheets, but it peels pretty well. No real bad sticky spots so far. And I also discovered, somewhat accidentally, that if all else fails, you can just get one of those plastic scrubbers and scrub the shit out of it. I scrubbed a full layer of wallpaper right off.
Here's where the age of the house becomes convenient: there's only one layer of wallpaper, and no paint under or over it. The bare, virgin plaster was underneath, tinted pink but we think that was just part of how it went on. It doesn't behave like paint, anyway.
So we stripped one wall, scrubbed the wall down with a tiny bit of bleach where there were traces of mildew, scrubbed the rest with plain hot water, scrubbed the trim clean all around the room, and then primered the wall, and precisely an hour later put on the first coat of paint, and then D-glossed and primered the trim along that wall, edged the wall with paint, and then at 10 pm, precisely four hours after the first coat, put on a second coat of paint.
It's almost the final color now. I have photos. It's impressive. It's a deep purple, slightly maroonish, so dark it's almost brown in some lights. It's very dark and I wonder if it will shrink the room. But I think the fact that there'll be a huge fucking bed in it will shrink the room just fine on its own, and Z is actually quite excited at the prospect of having a dark cozy room to hole up in for sleeping.
I think it'll look pretty good, though I can't wait to get a coat of the red onto the trim to see how that will look—I have faith that it will look fabulous, but I am just not entirely sure yet and want to see for myself.
But at this rate, we can take delivery on the bed next week. We'll see how that goes.
We need a lot more living room furniture, though. Gotta get on that. Ugh. I'm pushing to borrow Z's mom's car (which is a boat and also the rear seats fold down so you can put long cargo in the trunk and have it poke into the cabin) and hike back up to Ikea, to return the wrongly-labeled black navy blue cushion and hopefully to buy a coffee table. We'll see.
Ug, I've gone on a long time. I should point out that I'm hung over something awful today. I'm sure I've mentioned here how Z and my dad figured out that when working with solvents you should drink alcohol? Apparently acetone plus alcohol yields vinegar, and as it's an incomplete reaction, the presence of any two will result in the third being produced until the three are in equilibrium. (Thus, kiddies, don't have vinaigrette on your salad while drinking wine or you'll be pissing acetone.)
Anyway, it was in these union painters' contracts, while Dad worked for the state, that they were allowed to have a beer while painting, as it helped reduce the concentration of acetone in their systems.
So I have a general rule of thumb that if I'm painting or working with solvents (hello, D-Gloss! You got me so fucking high last night, it really wasn't very nice of you, I thought the wall was a hundred feet long and was convinced my leg was fifty feet long) I try to have a beer open and going. I'll keep it in the fridge and not drink it very fast, but still.
Well. I had a beer, then I had a mixed drink, then I had a snifter of Grand Marnier, then I had a nightcap of blueberry port…
I wasn't drunk when I went to bed, and I was making a deliberate effort throughout the day to drink water too (as it's best to flush all this stuff out, really), but I woke up this morning with a wicked headache and a sour stomach.
Bleh. Welcome back to work, girlie! You're a moron. Aspirin, coffee, and a generous handful of animal crackers, and I've now been at work nearly an hour and am just starting to figure out what exactly it is that I do here.
But, my bedroom will be amazing.
And I managed to scrape far too much time this weekend to write thoroughly self-indulgent Nicholas/Madeline fanfic. Just what the world needed!! Unfortunately, it's not really any good. But. I keep telling myself, this is all getting me back into writing, I've been away so long and need the warm-up.
Christ, I can't explain what's so hot about Nicholas. But all y'all angst-ficcers, if you like really tightly-wound self-controlled fundamentally-damaged characters, he is a fucking treasure trove.
Sorry, I am very foul-mouthed when hung over. I don't imagine most people will make it all the way through this, so I am not bothering to edit myself. Fucky fucky fucky fuck! There goes the spam-filter! Snap.
And oh—Z stole some Powersolo mp3s from their website. I will be doing a music post. This must be shared. One of their albums is called "A Bag Of Drugs Up My Ass". It is entirely not like you'd expect it to sound.
I think this entry may set records for number of cuts and yet remaining length on the page. I do apologize, I am not at my best this morning. This should be entertaining to come back and read sometime after lunch.
I called in on Friday, intending to do something about the itchy eyes—I wasn't going to scrape through another day like Thursday—but then, I couldn't get a doctor's appointment on short notice, and you know, nothing at home irritated my eyes at all, so I had no symptoms to show, and what would they do for me? I'd show up next month sometime and blink at them and they'd tell me there was nothing wrong with me and also I was fat, so I'm really not interested.
So instead I set to work on cleaning out the last of the junk in my room so I could begin stripping the wallpaper. I also finished taping the windows so I could paint them, in the living room, and put what I hoped was the last coat of paint on the last bit of trim that hadn't been painted (around the front door).
I also reread the entire most recent draft of Barbarians_Novel in hopes of seeing where to edit to make a more final cut of it. And I did all the laundry in the house, which was a lot. And I made a batch of chili from entirely homegrown vegetables except for a can of beans.
On one of my trips to hang up clothing to dry and pick tomatoes, I noticed that the mail had arrived. Also there was a package. I picked up the package. What was it? A book. Oh yes, I had ordered a hardback copy of The Wizard Hunters (and a paperback copy of The Gate of Gods) so I'd have a full set of hardbacks, and could turn my paperback copies into loaners. Hurrah! So I opened up the package, thinking it would be my hardback of Wizard Hunters, and lo! It was not! It was my copy of Death of the Necromancer, which I had not yet read and had to buy used because it's out of print. (Bastards.)
Well, there went the rest of the day.
You know what?
Oh. My. God.
I thought I loved the trilogy, but this book? This book on its own is perhaps possibly better than all the others. I hadn't thought I would like Nicholas Valiarde as a protagonist—in the trilogy, at one point, he's described as "a little black stormcloud", and another point he was "lurking the halls in a probably unconsciously sinister manner" (I'm paraphrasing, I know it was less awkwardly-said than that). He just seemed too, I dunno, ambiguously wicked for me. He didn't seem terribly attractive, either. I just didn't know that I'd like him. But I was so curious, I figured it was certainly worth a read.
Oh my God.
I don't have a review in me, not today, but read this fucking book. Do what you have to in order to get a copy, and read this fucking book.
Nicholas still isn't hotter than Ilias, but you know, where Ilias is a bit of a car crash, Nicholas is a train wreck with two trains and a tractor trailer and a hot air balloon full of dynamite.
I have to say, I'm just glad that I don't have the same taste in men in real life as I do in fiction. I'd be dead by now.
Poor Madeline.
Anyway.
I eventually recovered myself, and we finished the living room, except that the trim on the windows could probably use another coat or two or a goddamn zillion because that damn paint is so dark it shows every flaw. Bleh.
So on Saturday I got my room totally hoed out, with not a scrap of stuff left in it. We got the mattress and box spring hauled up to the attic, and even swept out the floor.
Sunday we got a bucket of hot water and a mop and just went to town on the west wall. The bed headboard is going against that wall. We have to finish up that wall before we can get the new mattress delivered. So we focused on that wall first.
Hot water and putty knives. Since we have plaster walls, we can saturate the wallpaper and not worry about anything except getting puddles on the floor. I went over it five or six times with the mop, let it soak in, went over it again, and then we attacked it.
It won't come off in big sheets, but it peels pretty well. No real bad sticky spots so far. And I also discovered, somewhat accidentally, that if all else fails, you can just get one of those plastic scrubbers and scrub the shit out of it. I scrubbed a full layer of wallpaper right off.
Here's where the age of the house becomes convenient: there's only one layer of wallpaper, and no paint under or over it. The bare, virgin plaster was underneath, tinted pink but we think that was just part of how it went on. It doesn't behave like paint, anyway.
So we stripped one wall, scrubbed the wall down with a tiny bit of bleach where there were traces of mildew, scrubbed the rest with plain hot water, scrubbed the trim clean all around the room, and then primered the wall, and precisely an hour later put on the first coat of paint, and then D-glossed and primered the trim along that wall, edged the wall with paint, and then at 10 pm, precisely four hours after the first coat, put on a second coat of paint.
It's almost the final color now. I have photos. It's impressive. It's a deep purple, slightly maroonish, so dark it's almost brown in some lights. It's very dark and I wonder if it will shrink the room. But I think the fact that there'll be a huge fucking bed in it will shrink the room just fine on its own, and Z is actually quite excited at the prospect of having a dark cozy room to hole up in for sleeping.
I think it'll look pretty good, though I can't wait to get a coat of the red onto the trim to see how that will look—I have faith that it will look fabulous, but I am just not entirely sure yet and want to see for myself.
But at this rate, we can take delivery on the bed next week. We'll see how that goes.
We need a lot more living room furniture, though. Gotta get on that. Ugh. I'm pushing to borrow Z's mom's car (which is a boat and also the rear seats fold down so you can put long cargo in the trunk and have it poke into the cabin) and hike back up to Ikea, to return the wrongly-labeled black navy blue cushion and hopefully to buy a coffee table. We'll see.
Ug, I've gone on a long time. I should point out that I'm hung over something awful today. I'm sure I've mentioned here how Z and my dad figured out that when working with solvents you should drink alcohol? Apparently acetone plus alcohol yields vinegar, and as it's an incomplete reaction, the presence of any two will result in the third being produced until the three are in equilibrium. (Thus, kiddies, don't have vinaigrette on your salad while drinking wine or you'll be pissing acetone.)
Anyway, it was in these union painters' contracts, while Dad worked for the state, that they were allowed to have a beer while painting, as it helped reduce the concentration of acetone in their systems.
So I have a general rule of thumb that if I'm painting or working with solvents (hello, D-Gloss! You got me so fucking high last night, it really wasn't very nice of you, I thought the wall was a hundred feet long and was convinced my leg was fifty feet long) I try to have a beer open and going. I'll keep it in the fridge and not drink it very fast, but still.
Well. I had a beer, then I had a mixed drink, then I had a snifter of Grand Marnier, then I had a nightcap of blueberry port…
I wasn't drunk when I went to bed, and I was making a deliberate effort throughout the day to drink water too (as it's best to flush all this stuff out, really), but I woke up this morning with a wicked headache and a sour stomach.
Bleh. Welcome back to work, girlie! You're a moron. Aspirin, coffee, and a generous handful of animal crackers, and I've now been at work nearly an hour and am just starting to figure out what exactly it is that I do here.
But, my bedroom will be amazing.
And I managed to scrape far too much time this weekend to write thoroughly self-indulgent Nicholas/Madeline fanfic. Just what the world needed!! Unfortunately, it's not really any good. But. I keep telling myself, this is all getting me back into writing, I've been away so long and need the warm-up.
Christ, I can't explain what's so hot about Nicholas. But all y'all angst-ficcers, if you like really tightly-wound self-controlled fundamentally-damaged characters, he is a fucking treasure trove.
Sorry, I am very foul-mouthed when hung over. I don't imagine most people will make it all the way through this, so I am not bothering to edit myself. Fucky fucky fucky fuck! There goes the spam-filter! Snap.
And oh—Z stole some Powersolo mp3s from their website. I will be doing a music post. This must be shared. One of their albums is called "A Bag Of Drugs Up My Ass". It is entirely not like you'd expect it to sound.
I think this entry may set records for number of cuts and yet remaining length on the page. I do apologize, I am not at my best this morning. This should be entertaining to come back and read sometime after lunch.
