Still Alive

Anonymous asked if I'm still around.  Indeed, I am, yes.  In fact, there's a vacation in the not-too-distant future, so there will be much blogging then.  (I'm already trying to figure out which tech to take with me, so I can do this properly.)

In the meantime, I fear I'm having too much fun with twitter.  Apparently, it's much easier to just toss off 140 characters and get back to business than actually blogging.

Today was Columbus Day.  (Still is, for a bit.)  I usually spend Columbus Day at the outlet mall, doing as much of my holiday shopping as possible, and then taking a solemn oath to not set foot in a mall again until the new year.  Today was a bit different, though.  Today, the painters came.

I've been in my house for almost four years now, but I hadn't gotten around to painting the interior (largely because I didn't know what colors I wanted -- there have been samples on my walls for months).  Well, I bought myself an Angie's List coupon for 40 hours of painter service (that's two guys for two ten-hour days) and there was actually an expiration date on it.  So, today, the painters came.

And the air conditioner guy.  And the plumber.  And the tree trimmers.  Hell, if I get a day off to do home repairs, I'm going all out.  So far, everything went according to plan.  (Well ... this was a new air conditioner guy -- hired because I'd lost faith in the last air conditioner guy, and thought that the prior operation was padding their bills.  So this new guy comes down off my roof and tells me that, yes, the part the first guy said needed replacing does not, in fact, need replacing.  Then, he told me to turn the a/c on so he could run some tests, and the a/c did not, in fact, go on.  There was a blown transformer.  I was, obviously, skeptical of this -- I mean, the part blows while the guy is on my roof dicking around with the a/c.  What are the odds?  On the other hand, though, it was a pretty cheap part -- the whole bill (inclusive of new transformer) was less than the first a/c guy wanted to charge me to fix the part that didn't need fixing.  So I'll just prefer to believe that the fact that my transformer blew while the repair guy was here was, in fact, a happy accident.)

ANYWAY, trees are trimmed, shower works again, and about a third of my house is painted.  Also:  my furniture has reassembled itself in the middle of my rooms, there's a (mostly) empty paint bucket in the middle of my kitchen, and the cat (for obvious reasons) is locked in the other (paint-free!) side of the house.  She's miffed that I haven't let her out, but between the open paint buckets, the painter's plastic delicately draped over furniture, and the massive dust bunnies discovered behind the furniture, this place is a feline minefield.

There will be photos when it's all done.