Mirabilia Monday

mirabilia ~ marvels; miracles

Everybody have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year? Happy to see the end of 2016 and welcome 2017 with open arms? Just so you know, we’re not out of the woods yet. 2016 was the Year of the Monkey in the Chinese calendar, and monkeys love to play tricks, which accounts for the difficulties of the year. The Year of the Monkey doesn’t end until January 27 - let’s hope the Year of the Rooster is kinder.

I’m just happy all the holiday stuff is behind us now. More and more I’m finding the holidays are too people-y, and I can only handle people in small doses. And sadly, it’s not quite over for me yet. We missed one of the family get togethers due to weather issues, and we’ve yet to come up with an alternate plan.

I’ve had ten days off from babysitting, and I’m happy to report that other than the one day I lost to a stomach flu, I’ve been putting my time to good use. There was the holiday madness of baking and cooking and sewing and crafting, and since then there’s been the finishing of An Elemental Earth and the cleaning of the office.

Which is one of the reasons this post is so late. I was up until 11p.m. last night working in the office, and then I really needed a break so I watched Star Trek: Into Darkness. Which means it was something like 3 a.m. before I got to bed. This morning I woke up at my usual time, got up to feed the cats, then took an Advil for my headache and went back to bed for a while. ;-)

Anyway, there are no pictures of the office yet. Everything in there is clean - excerpt for the cushion in the reading nook - but I still need to put stuff back where it belongs. I’d move stuff to a clean surface as I cleaned and I just didn’t have the energy to put everything back again. I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion: I have a lot of books. And knick knacks.

While I was doing that, the hubby was slaving away in the bathroom. After doing a couple of test strips and lining things up to have a look, I decided against sponge painting the walls. One, I really didn’t like the look of the test board, and two, I decided that having a patterned floor, patterned tiles, and patterned paint was too much pattern.

Maybe if I was more familiar with the sponging technique, or maybe if I was using several different colours of paint I’d feel differently, but I kind of like the clean look of the dark paint. Hubby’s not too sure, but he’s also pretty sure he won’t want to re-paint the walls again because they look tacky.

It was too hard to try and get a picture of both the floor and the walls together (because there’s all that space to be tiled in between, so I’m just going to show a picture of the floor, because it’s really spectacular. You can see a bit of the paint at the top of the picture:

The guy who was supposed to help hubby with the tiling hasn’t been available, so in the interest of time (and because he’s never tiled before) hubby has hired someone to come in to do it for us. Which means, my friends, the end is near for the bathroom reno!

This is the point where I usually talk about my goals for the upcoming year, and recap how I did on last year’s goals. However, because I’ve been such a blogging slacker the last few weeks, this post has ran rather long. And since a lot of my goals are kind of writing related anyway, I decided to post them on My Writing Journal. So just click on the link if you’re curious. :-D

Welcome to 2017!

Milleflori Monday

milleflori ~ glassware made of coloured rods embedded in clear glass

I’m late! I’m late! At least I’m late with this post. Still, at least I’m here now, unlike my update post on my Other Blog. I missed that post altogether because there just wasn’t enough to report. But that’s my writing blog and this is my regular blog, so I’ll save that rant for another time. ;-)

As expected, the bathroom renovation has slowed somewhat. It’s a little hard for the hubby to work in the bathroom when he has to work all week. And bowling season’s started as well. Still, there wasn’t much he could do in there until the plumbing for the tub was put in, and the plumber wasn’t able to come until Friday morning.

Friday mornings, for those of you who are new to the whinings of my life, are my busiest mornings because that’s when I grocery shop. And along with the plumber we had a guy coming to do a house inspection for our mortgage renewal. And I had to go in to babysit early. So you can imagine the amount of fun I had that day.

However, the plumber and his handy assistant did their thing, and now the rest is up to hubby. Unless he decides to replace the window with glass blocks, in which case we’ll get a contractor in to do that. But he made good progress putting the dry wall back up, and it’s even starting to look a little bit like a real bathroom again.

You can see from the picture just how tiny that bathroom is, made even tinier with the bigger tub. Now imagine being closed in there to work, without so much as a fan to give you some relief. That’s a south facing window and it’s painted shut, so that small space heats up pretty quickly. Kudos to the hubby for working with the door shut (both to reduce the mess spilling into the rest of the house and to keep the cats from getting into stuff they shouldn’t. I suspect the sun coming in that window would make it hot even in the winter.

I seem to talk an inordinate amount about the weather, but I can’t seem to help myself. Last week the weather was fabulous. Clear and cool and sunny and did I mention cool? We didn’t need the air conditioner at all, and only used the fans some of the time. And I spent one whole night without the fan at all. Sheer bliss!

And then ... the weekend. The humidity rose faster than the temperature, so even when it wasn’t exactly hot, it was really, really damp. I hate the damp worse than I hate the heat. And I hate feeling damp even more than that.

Today is starting off a little cooler than predicted, but it’s supposed to warm up again this week, then back to something a little more seasonable for the weekend. Ha! Just in time for the changing of the seasons, so it’ll be official.

Speaking of seasons ... I’m sure by now everyone has noticed this is the time of year when we have pretty much pumpkin spice everything available. While I enjoy a pumpkin latte every once in awhile, along with a piece of pumpkin bread or pumpkin pie, even I have to admit things have gotten a little out of hand this year.

We have Frosted Pumpkin Pie Poptarts, Pumpkin Spice Oreos, Pumpkin Spice Peeps, Jif Whipped Peanut Butter and Pumpkin Pie Spread (that even sounds gross!), Philadelphia Pumpkin Spice Cream Cheese (actually a good idea), and Thomas’ Pumpkin Spice Bagels or English Muffins. And let’s not forget the Lindt Lindor Pumpkin Spice Milk Chocolate Truffles, Pumpkin Spice Cheerios, Pumpkin Spice Malted Milk Balls, Dreyer’s Slow Churned Pumpkin Patch ice cream, Planters Pumpkin Spice Almonds, Nestle Toll House Pumpkin Spice Refrigerated Cookie Dough, Barbara’s Pumpkin Puffs, and Kellogg’s Pumpkin Spice Frosted Mini Wheats,

But for those of you who just aren’t into pumpkin, don’t worry. Peppermint season is just around the corner. ;-)

Mediagenic Monday

mediagenic ~ able to present a good image in the media

Well, last week was certainly a week. I tell you what.

The hubby took the week off for the bathroom renovation, even going so far as scheduling the plumber to come in to do his thing. So the first day he started to take out dry wall in preparation for removing the old tub and discovered this:

Fortunately it was not the extremely toxic black mould that forces people to abandon their homes, but it did set the work back a bit. And while the strapping did need to be reinforced, it didn’t have to be replaced. Mostly what was accomplished last week was removing stuff: tub, toilet, sink, medicine cabinet (which was trickier than you’d think because the light fixture was attached to it) - and ripping out dry wall.

So last week was all about removing stuff from the bathroom and re-enforcing the floor and walls. Right now it’s pretty much just a nice empty room. A little on the small side perhaps, but there’s not much we can do about that without tearing out some walls completely.

We have the tiles for the walls stacked up in the music room, the faucet for the sink and the toilet stashed in the work room, the new (to us) tub is in a trailer in the driveway, and the sink and the faucet for the tub will hopefully (knock on wood) be here this week. I have a fistful of paint samples to pick a new colour for the walls - paint and flooring are still on the “to buy” list.

I guess that’s just the nature of renovations, they take three times as much time as expected, and cost twice as much money.

Last night I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark during an Indiana Jones marathon (the Star Trek marathon having ended). It was maybe not quite as thrilling as the first time I ever saw it, but it was still pretty awesome.

And this was before the days of CGI (computer generated images) so the special effects really were special. That was a real person holding onto the whip being dragged under a truck. All those snakes slithering around in the Well of Souls were real. And I remember reading something about the lengths they had to go to, figuring out the timing to get that truck Marion was supposed to be in to tip over.

If that movie was made today I think some of the magic would be lost because computers would have been used for so much of it. A shame really. Just because we have the technology doesn’t mean we should use it. Which brings me to the other big happening last week, I finally broke down and bought myself a tablet:

It’s a Samsung Galaxy Tab E - whatever that means. So far I have figured out how to put a password on the screen, and take it off again because when the screen goes dark after 10 seconds of inactivity it got real old real fast, having to turn it back on and put the stupid password in. Then I figured out how to make the screen stay on longer. I can check my email, even send one if I’m feeling adventurous. And I can play solitaire on it.

I freely admit to being somewhat intimidated by this little piece of technology. I seriously have to sit down and have a look at the manual - I’m sure there are all kinds of handy dandy things I could be doing with it, if I only knew how.

I remember a time when computers were my thing. I knew all kinds of useful stuff about the technology. But then I let it get ahead of me and now I’m practically a luddite. However, unlike in those early years, today’s technology is so simple even children can use it - maybe I just need to find a child to help me. ;-)

And once I’ve mastered the tablet, can a cell phone be far behind?