Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
An unblogged adventure, part 1
For the last 2 months, I've been unable to share with my reading public the most important features of my day-to-day life.
We have been redecorating (thoroughly!) a bit more than half of our house, but since I wanted the finished product to be a surprise to our globe-trotting son and daughter-in-law , I couldn't blog (or tweet) about it! I was about to go nuts!
Finally, they arrived Sunday and were suitably amazed and impressed with our efforts. Here they are, along with Austinite daughter, playing an insanely complicated BSG board game in our newly elegant and luxurious dining room—to what better use could it be put?!
To give you an idea of where our starting point was, here is a picture of our "grand" entry hall before the project started. The cool LOTR poster was covering up a hole in the wall. Note peeling paint around the archway. Paint was peeling all over the downstairs. But this wall was especially bad because of damage caused by overflows from the bathroom just above it.
And here's the downstairs powder room, complete with non-functioning sink (the drain pipe had rotted away—note the "do not use" sign). Getting this vital space fully functional again was a major objective of the work.
Amazing things happened during this project. For example, on the left you can see Henry 
actually mopping the living room floor after he and his brother moved out the furniture. "Henry" and "mopping" were two words I never thought to have seen directly connected in my lifetime, at least outside of the fantasy/science fiction genre. In this photo the baseboards have already been removed to allow 
new wiring to be put in place.
He really got into things, especially in the living room, where his dreams of a home theatre system have yet to be completely realized. But the wiring is in the wall!
In the background of the photo on the right you can see that the damaged wall below the LOTR poster has been removed. Here are some better looks at it.
my study full of stuff from guest room while guest room was being worked on
dining room full of supplies (the giant buffet eventually had to be moved to refinish floor but here is only covered for protection)
that's how you paint a ceiling! note cheerfully-colored scaffold. That's my piano, well-covered in front of the fireplace; it eventually also had to be moved out when we decided to do the floors
half of the garage made unusable for cars (although boats & bicycle stayed at home) while used for storing non-essential furniture
As you might be able to tell from the photo at the top of the post, things are not yet completely back to [the new] normal. Nothing's been hung on the beautiful new walls, since I don't want to be as cavalier about such things as I used to be with the crummy walls. I need to give these decisions more thought. And some of the furniture has yet to be moved back from the garage.
But we can actually inhabit all of the rooms of the house, and sit down in the living room, which are simple pleasures I had no idea were so precious.
In my next post you'll see some of the secrets of 1930's domestic architecture that were exposed in the course of the project, and then I'll show you what the rooms look like now.
We have been redecorating (thoroughly!) a bit more than half of our house, but since I wanted the finished product to be a surprise to our globe-trotting son and daughter-in-law , I couldn't blog (or tweet) about it! I was about to go nuts!
Finally, they arrived Sunday and were suitably amazed and impressed with our efforts. Here they are, along with Austinite daughter, playing an insanely complicated BSG board game in our newly elegant and luxurious dining room—to what better use could it be put?!
So now I can share the saga with the world!
To give you an idea of where our starting point was, here is a picture of our "grand" entry hall before the project started. The cool LOTR poster was covering up a hole in the wall. Note peeling paint around the archway. Paint was peeling all over the downstairs. But this wall was especially bad because of damage caused by overflows from the bathroom just above it.
And here's the downstairs powder room, complete with non-functioning sink (the drain pipe had rotted away—note the "do not use" sign). Getting this vital space fully functional again was a major objective of the work.
Amazing things happened during this project. For example, on the left you can see Henry 
actually mopping the living room floor after he and his brother moved out the furniture. "Henry" and "mopping" were two words I never thought to have seen directly connected in my lifetime, at least outside of the fantasy/science fiction genre. In this photo the baseboards have already been removed to allow 
new wiring to be put in place.He really got into things, especially in the living room, where his dreams of a home theatre system have yet to be completely realized. But the wiring is in the wall!
In the background of the photo on the right you can see that the damaged wall below the LOTR poster has been removed. Here are some better looks at it.
with poster still in place over the hole...so long, Aragorn!...
...and with hole made bigger for repairs. Sound insulation (to keep embarrassing tinkling sounds in the powder room from disturbing diners) has been added to the wall
...and with hole made bigger for repairs. Sound insulation (to keep embarrassing tinkling sounds in the powder room from disturbing diners) has been added to the wallHere's the work a bit further along, with the walls in the entry all patched and ready to be textured. You can imagine how yucky they must have looked before when I tell you how beautiful they appeared to us at this stage!
To give you an idea of how thoroughly our lives were disrupted, here are a series of photos showing how various rooms looked at various points in the process. The guys that did the work were very accommodating and—given what all they were doing—friendly and easy to have around. But I can't believe now when I look at these pictures, how we survived with (mostly) sanity and marriage intact.
guest room full of stuff from my study while study was being worked on (bed is still in garage)
To give you an idea of how thoroughly our lives were disrupted, here are a series of photos showing how various rooms looked at various points in the process. The guys that did the work were very accommodating and—given what all they were doing—friendly and easy to have around. But I can't believe now when I look at these pictures, how we survived with (mostly) sanity and marriage intact.
living room full of building materials, painting supplies and other implements of destruction construction
guest room full of stuff from my study while study was being worked on (bed is still in garage)
my study full of stuff from guest room while guest room was being worked on
dining room full of supplies (the giant buffet eventually had to be moved to refinish floor but here is only covered for protection)
that's how you paint a ceiling! note cheerfully-colored scaffold. That's my piano, well-covered in front of the fireplace; it eventually also had to be moved out when we decided to do the floors 
half of the garage made unusable for cars (although boats & bicycle stayed at home) while used for storing non-essential furnitureAs you might be able to tell from the photo at the top of the post, things are not yet completely back to [the new] normal. Nothing's been hung on the beautiful new walls, since I don't want to be as cavalier about such things as I used to be with the crummy walls. I need to give these decisions more thought. And some of the furniture has yet to be moved back from the garage.
But we can actually inhabit all of the rooms of the house, and sit down in the living room, which are simple pleasures I had no idea were so precious.
In my next post you'll see some of the secrets of 1930's domestic architecture that were exposed in the course of the project, and then I'll show you what the rooms look like now.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Spousal shout-out
Back in November, the very weekend I was taking it easy in the Big Easy, my husband and some friends took off in the opposite direction from San Antonio. They headed west for a 3-day paddle on the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park. If my New Orleans plans hadn't already been made, I'd have gone with them—hopefully they'll want to go again sometime and I can join them.The next best thing to going, however, is looking at Henry's wonderful pictures and reading his detailed and often humorous account of their
adventure.He doesn't believe in labelling his blog posts, but if you go to his main blog page now, you can see the last of seven posts about the trip. And the previous six are in reverse order going down from there. If you'd rather see the first one first, it's here.
I'm sprinkling just a few of his fabulous pictures here to give you a taste of what he's been working on the past month or so. (The versions in his posts are bigger; I didn't want to upstage him.) Visit his blog or his Flickr pages (linked at the end of each post) and enjoy the desert scenery.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Monday, January 11, 2010
Blogging ennui.....?
I have been a very bad blogger lately. And I relate this to being a very bad Hometown Tourist as well. But, realizing you have a problem is the first step toward recovery, right? And I've been doing some thinking about why this has come about.[in the meantime, I've dotted this post with some select photos from my 2009 travels, to entertain my readers and—hopefully—to get me back on track]
Classes start today at St. Mary's, bringing to an end a long holiday break that saw me- staying home a lot and
- working very hard on my London photo project
interest in, Hometown-Touristing. Staying at home means catching few interesting sights around the city to inspire blog posts. And, perhaps more importantly, my head—and heart—have been in London, rather than here at home.I've realized—duh!—pretty clearly that you have to be open to current experience to be a good tourist or a good traveler, whether your current experience is happening around the house or on the other side of the world. And my intense concentration on London
has closed off my eyes and ears to what's going on here.Two examples:
- I intended, at the beginning of the holiday season, to make a trip downtown so that I could take a photo like this one of our lovely Riverwalk at Christmastime and show you how San Antonio dresses up for the season. But I just never managed to get downtown. (Thanks to nanpalmero's Flickr photostream for this great picture.)
- When I did have an errand last week that took me to a part of town I don't usually frequent, I could have gotten some neat photos and shown you some of my hometown's diversity. But I forgot to take my camera with me! If I had been in proper Hometown
Tourist mode, that never would have happened.
AND, my London photos are almost all done! Web pages need proofing, and some technical difficulties with Flickr are slowing down the process, but the end is in sight! So hopefully this project, fun as it is, will be bogging me down less and less as 2010 progresses.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Friday, January 1, 2010
Twenty-ten* !
One of those years is actually here! I mean, one of those years that used to make you think of something else, when you said the words. In this case, it's one of my favorite sci-fi movies, 2010. (Turner Classic movies lets you watch the trailer here, which really made me want to see it again, badly!)
The last time this happened was in 1984, in one of many coincidences—see below—the year 2010 came out. This date had always had a very sinister connotation. Before January 1, 1984 dawned, I wondered what it would feel like actually to live in that iconic year. (The environment of which, thankfully, wasn't much like that in the book.)
As it turned out, what happened wasn't anything mystical or life-changing (at least, not anything to do with the date). It became just another year and the syllables that make up the words
nineteen eighty-four sort of lost their original power. I suspect that will happen pretty soon with the syllables that make up twenty-ten, too.
However, something very special did happen in 1984, and it's actually related to the movie 2010, which is, of course, related to today. Bear with me a minute.
My daughter was born that year, and all the previous years that I'd spent dreading the coming of 1984 (ever since I read the book, which was probably in high school) melted away in the joy of adding her to our family. Now 1984 just became the year I entered as her birth year on all the school forms to come.
The connection with 2010 comes from her name. Everybody knows the computer in the original 2001, HAL. You might not remember that there's another computer appearing briefly in 2010, whose name is SAL. (The review I wrote for the movie, since this was back in my movie-reviewing days, was even written from her viewpoint.)
My SAL and HAL visiting me in London last year
I wish that the hopeful message of 2010 will infuse our new year in reality, in spite of the fact that we're a ways behind the movie, space travel- and home decorating-wise. And I hope it's a happy one for all my kind readers.
*I don't think there's much of a contest between saying two-thousand-ten and twenty-ten, as was discussed in a recent NPR segment. I just don't have enough excess energy to spend some of it putting an extra syllable into the date every time I say it. Now, if I can just remember to write 2010 on those first few checks of the year....
The last time this happened was in 1984, in one of many coincidences—see below—the year 2010 came out. This date had always had a very sinister connotation. Before January 1, 1984 dawned, I wondered what it would feel like actually to live in that iconic year. (The environment of which, thankfully, wasn't much like that in the book.)
As it turned out, what happened wasn't anything mystical or life-changing (at least, not anything to do with the date). It became just another year and the syllables that make up the words
nineteen eighty-four sort of lost their original power. I suspect that will happen pretty soon with the syllables that make up twenty-ten, too.However, something very special did happen in 1984, and it's actually related to the movie 2010, which is, of course, related to today. Bear with me a minute.
My daughter was born that year, and all the previous years that I'd spent dreading the coming of 1984 (ever since I read the book, which was probably in high school) melted away in the joy of adding her to our family. Now 1984 just became the year I entered as her birth year on all the school forms to come.
The connection with 2010 comes from her name. Everybody knows the computer in the original 2001, HAL. You might not remember that there's another computer appearing briefly in 2010, whose name is SAL. (The review I wrote for the movie, since this was back in my movie-reviewing days, was even written from her viewpoint.)
Now, HAL's name in 2001 was, according to some scifi geeks, a little joke on IBM (just move back one letter). But our son's nickname was chosen for its Shakespearean connotations, not to call to mind psychotic computers, as a way of distinguishing him from his father and grandfather, for whom he was named. Our Sally was named that because we liked the name and there are other Sallies in the family. How funny to find out later that year that we'd named our kids after two of Arthur C. Clarke's computers!
My SAL and HAL visiting me in London last year
I wish that the hopeful message of 2010 will infuse our new year in reality, in spite of the fact that we're a ways behind the movie, space travel- and home decorating-wise. And I hope it's a happy one for all my kind readers.
*I don't think there's much of a contest between saying two-thousand-ten and twenty-ten, as was discussed in a recent NPR segment. I just don't have enough excess energy to spend some of it putting an extra syllable into the date every time I say it. Now, if I can just remember to write 2010 on those first few checks of the year....
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