Futility Now

So as I said, there was some home improvement and it was insane. The drain basket that was in our sink was old enough that any effort to hold it in place while unscrewing the basket’s nut (heh heh) resulted in the ancient metal shearing off. This is (most of) the basket and the nut after it had finally been wrenched from the sink.

Here is the old and the new passing one another.

In the middle of the process, we took a break for pupusas.

On the way home, the world was clearly ending.

The next day we recovered at the aesthetically-consistent Little Big Burger.

So I’m in New York now, but I wanted to mention that last weekend was a sweeping display of failures that were slightly less dismal than those to which we have become accustomed, and some of them were quite dramatic. Pictures of the drain basket that I yanked out of the sink with a channel lock are on their way!

I was really tired of my office being bright blue, so over the break we did something about it. First we painted the middles of all the walls a sort of nondescript tan. After that there was a beautiful vision in which we would strip and stain all the wood, but basically the stripper was so toxic we gave it up. Even the curtailed version of the plan in which we only stripped the floor molding was pretty exhausting, probably more unctuous than all of the subsequent painting combined.

Then we masked things off, which actually looked pretty cool on its own.

Then there was the painting of the dark portions. I think it turned out pretty well.

And that’s good, because it ended up being pretty crazy. We actually finished on the 31st, just in time to put on more appropriate Champagne-drinking outfits, which is good because boy howdy.

So lo, the whole appraisal thing happened and ended up putting us in a pretty good position, on the condition that we do some scraping and repainting. We’re going to do this on Friday which, according to weather forecasts, is going to be one BAJILLION degrees. Taking suggestions for hats.

Ages ago, when I still lived in New York City, I purchased a Dremel during a process that culminated in the creation of this:

What I had hoped to do was use the Dremel to slice strips off of a roll of aluminum siding and then fix them to a piece of wood to create a desk. So some siding was rolled out, and I started cutting, but the metal didn’t want to stay flat, and it managed to flex in a way that pinched the Dremel’s blade, and the thing totally shattered. After this I went back to the hardware store, where I bought the metal cutters you can see behind the bottle of German mineral water in that picture.

After this failure to use the Dremel, there was another one, during the course of which I left the tool at a friend’s, and then I skipped town. After a substantial stretch of time, it has been returned to me. Now, I didn’t really miss it whilst it was away, but having it again makes me feel like I should find something cool to do with it. We’ll see.