The Ink-Pot and the Palette

I'll be taking kis and Mr Kis to their rental car first thing tomorrow morning so that they can be off on the second half of their American adventure, and that will end a week in which long anticipation, high expectations, and reality converged better than anything I've ever experienced.

Put another way, I've been imagining their visit for ages, it was fabulous in my imagination, and the reality has been even better than than I'd hoped.

Here's a little picture from our day at the coast:

( Mr Kis and Haystack Rock )

It's been true all my life and I don't see it changing at this late stage: I'll accomplish things for a deadline or for someone else that I'll let go for years when I'm my only audience.

kis has several times expressed a concern that I'm overdoing the home improvement for their visit (in three days! Eeeeee!!!), but it's a fantastic motivator, and I'm not doing anything that didn't desperately need doing.

It's the back end of a perfectly splendid September Saturday, and I'm happily tired (and prophylactically dosed on ibuprofen), having sawed, spackled, chiseled, pounded, painted and pruned things that have been left undone for as much as ten years. Several of them seemed too difficult or too complex for me to tackle, but with the Magic of External Motivation® I suddenly found simple, obvious solutions.

It's like getting a new house! I hardly know the place.

Today my new door is due to arrive, and this evening I get my new mattress.

Door and mattress. I remember a day when I wouldn't have considered either of these things as exciting as I do today, but here's the thing. There's been a sheet of plywood screwed to the back door frame for weeks, and if I want to use my refurbished back yard--which I do--I have to go out the front door and around the house (through amazingly recurrent spiderwebs) carrying my computer, my iced beverage and my phone. Decency demands, incidentally, that I be dressed before I do this.

So by Saturday I hope to be able to rise from the supportive and yet yielding splendor of my memory-foam-enhanced bower, drop the coffee beans on the floor if I want to and be able to reach down and pick them up, and then, coffee drink in hand and possibly still wearing my bathrobe, exit privately to the umbrella'ed table next to the gently plashing rehabbed home-made water feature in my charming outdoor living space, and there be the Queen of All I Survey.

And not a moment too soon, either, because even more importantly, my lovely guests kis and Mr Kis will be able to enjoy the same during their visit, which is less than four weeks away! Eeeee!

OMG it's almost done. The mudroom is scraped, stripped, scrubbed, de-epoxied, thoroughly cleaned (several times) and primed. Today, after a full week of "painting," I'm finally going to paint.

Here are some things I've learned, re-learned or proved to my complete satisfaction:

• Liquid fabric softener, which is nearly as toxic in its own way as some of the other substances I've been working with all week, really does make latex paint slide right out of paintbrushes and rollers
• Light-reading audiobooks and fun podfic make the job go faster, but surprisingly, serious non-fiction audiobooks work well too
• Rockite is my new favorite thing
• It always takes longer than you thought it would
• Four ibuprofen just before bed are like a really good sleeping pill
• Posting "before" photos really motivates one to get to the "after" photos
• Once you are soaked with sweat, you can stop worrying about being sweaty

Okay. Paint! Pea green, deep navy blue, and cream. We'll see how it looks.

It's all very well to pour on the steam, to scrub and scrape and sweep all day long getting ready to paint, but I forgot how much it hurts later on. My hands hurt, my hips hurt, my knees hurt. Waah!

Then I had to go to work today. I'm supposed to be on vacation--Friday the 2nd through Sunday the 11th, right? Ten solid, uninterrupted days. But no. They had a crisis, and none of us on the team have any backup, so in I went. The entire system is predicated on basically either everything going smoothly, or no one taking vacation.

happytohaveajob...happytohaveajob...happytohaveajob....

And I really am, but between the pain and the work crisis, I made no progress on Project Mudroom today, and it's supposed to get super hot tomorrow. Boo. Hiss.

On the plus side, the paint should dry fast.

I've drunk two pots of coffee. I've been to the hardware store and to my sister's tool room and my basement. I have now assembled one great piece of podfic :D, several quarts of leftover interior and exterior house paint, most of a gallon of Kilz primer, a box of TSP, rubber gloves, a bucket, a scrub brush, a mop, a respirator, fresh filters for the respirator, concrete paint (tinted black), a cheap light fixture, brushes, rollers, rags and crappy paint-stained clothes.

I can't procrastinate any longer. Well, I can--it's what I'm doing right this minute--but I'm not gonna.

Wish me luck. I'm goin' in.

Woo hoo! After a long and rainy season with a mudroom whose leaking roof actually gave a view of the sky, Ed the Contractor (also my bro-in-law) has begun the re-roofing project.

( This has gone WAY beyond a few shingles and some flashing. )

I spent my 15 Minutes For Kis today as planned, clearing off the side table in the kitchen where a lot of staple foodstuffs had taken up residence.

I'm not finished yet, because of course putting (or throwing) all that stuff away meant cleaning some other stuff. It's the Way of Decluttering. The hipbone's connected to the thigh bone, etc. Right now my kitchen's in an uproar. But that's what podfic is for--cleaning the kitchen.

So I'm downloading Queensguard right now. Yay podfic!

Next up: finish the table and then (aaauuuggghhh!!!) tackle the Old Trunk Full of Keepsakes that lives underneath it.

One of the greatest things that can happen in online fandom life is to discover even more common ground than fandom with someone, and make a real-life friend, one you enjoy meeting in person.

I had that experience with kis. We connected online in the Firefly fandom way back in 2003 (god! could it have been that long ago?). I met her in person for the first time at a 2005 con in London (where we had the most squeeingly great time), and got a personalized tour of Edinburgh a year later when I was back in the UK for non-fannish purposes. Met Mr Kis and "the Son and Heir", both delightful gentlemen, and brought home wonderful memories.

So now, kis and Mr Kis are coming to see me! They've planned a trip to the US centering around Jellystone Park, and because hey, coming-all-this-way, etc., they are going to fly first to Stumptown solely on the strength of my living here. Well, that, and Mt St Helens.

We have tons of plans involving volcano-climbing, bookstore-wandering, augite-hunting, beach-going, possibly bike-riding, friends-meeting, food-eating and generally good-time-having, before they rent a car and drive eastward into the Rockies to go see Old Faithful and fly home out of Denver.

The very-clever arrangement we've come up with is for them to take over my humble house while they're here. (I, meanwhile, will stay across the street at my sister's house. My house is way too small for three people.)

This is all going to happen in early September. Between now and then, I must put my house in order. I'm used to my house, but that's no reason to inflict it as it is on wonderful friends from lands far away, right?

Accordingly, I'm implementing 15M4K, Fifteen Minutes For Kis. I will spend (a minimum of) fifteen minutes every day making, doing, or fixing something about the house and grounds that will make their stay more enjoyable. Remodeling, it ain't. It's more of an extension of Project Empty.

First up: Prune the crazy kiwi vine that's threatening to tear down my porch. *goes outside with garden shears*

Okay, that's done. Next? The Secret Closet of Clutter.