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Friday, July 18, 2003
A coupla links:
The Sorting Hat
I'm in Gryffindor.
France bans 'e-mail' from vocabulary
I think they should call it "freedom mail".
The Sorting Hat
I'm in Gryffindor.
France bans 'e-mail' from vocabulary
I think they should call it "freedom mail".
Sunday, July 13, 2003
The Painting of the Den is complete! As you might know from reading my status page, I am in the process of remodeling my home office. For the last six months, "the process of remodeling" has consisted of a) emptying the den and b) nothing else. With a little prodding, I managed to pick out my colors and get the painting under way.
The project began with a trip to Home Depot on Friday afternoon. In a previous post I mentioned that Home Depot is like strange, mysterious world to me, and it was with great trepidation that I marched in there again, clutching the list of supplies I'd culled from the Internet.
The sense of otherworldly displacement was brought into sharp relief as I entered the paint section. Before I even had a chance to start looking at supplies, I found myself walking down the aisle towards a woman who was squeezing her own boob. I swear I am not making this up. She was wearing a tank top and had her hand looped under the left strap, absently squeezing away as she browsed the aisles with her husband. I turned and looked behind me to catch a glimpse of the dimensional portal I'd surely stepped through, but there was nothing there. Apparently this odd place in which women felt themselves up while strolling through giant hardware stores was, in fact, my own universe. (I must also point out that the people you see engaging in this type of activity are never the ones you want to see. Let's just leave it at that.)
After I'd recovered from that little slice of Lynchian nightmare, I encountered yet another one: buying the supplies. My list, which looked so brash and confident coming out of the printer, now seemed feeble and pale under the harsh flourescent lights of Home Depot. It's one thing to write down "2-inch angled sash brush", but it's another thing to select one from the roughly 17,000 million different kinds that are avaliable for purchase. My strategy was to buy everything I could find. I am a newcomer to the world of interior painting, so I decided to prime the surface of my walls with a thick layer of money. I felt like I was on a paint supply bender. I imagine that I looked something like the Tasmanian Devil as I threw stuff in my cart and whirled my way to the checkout line. Thirty minutes after I entered I emerged from the store, slightly dizzy and carrying $135 worth of supplies.
I then returned home to get ready for the painting on Saturday morning. This included wiping down the walls with a sponge to rid them of dust, spackling over the crater-sized holes left in the dry wall by the 760,000 wall anchors that the previous owners had inserted, and laying down 28 square miles of drop cloth with pinpoint accuracy in order to prevent any paint from accidentally spilling on my carpet or, possibly, Northern California. All this took me until 1:30 in the morning to complete. My friends Abby, Scott, and Vicki were coming over the next day at 9:30 to help paint. I was as prepared as I could be, and I hoped that I had everything I needed.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that we're about to get to the part of the story where I find out that I got the wrong color, or where I dump paint all over myself, or where I wake up to find that I'm a giant bug. These Scott-as-modern-day-clown stories normally end with some sort of hilarious finale, right? Oddly enough, this one doesn't. Everything went really, really well. We got the first coat on in about two and a half hours. I'd arranged for feng and Cara to come over in the afternoon to help finish up, but we were done before they even arrived. Abby and Scott came over this morning to do the second coat, which we finished in about 90 minutes. I did discover some paint on the floor today, but most of it came up OK. (Apparently the expensive canvas drop cloths I bought don't actually absorb anything - they merely serve as a brief detour on the paint's journey from the brush to the carpet.)
I attribute this problem-free project to the presence of other people. Abby, Scott, and Vicki are all more experienced at painting than I am, so I can only assume that it was their guidance that helped things go so smoothly. Thanks guys!
To make up for the lack of a smash ending to this story, I made a movie for you. It's a time-lapse look at our first day of painting that will give you an idea of what it would have been like if you'd been there, assuming you had a time machine. I'm the one wearing the baseball cap. Regular readers of this column will also notice the odd squares of paint in the den; those are a few of the color tests I referred to in this post from April 15. Back then I predicted it would take two weeks to get the den painted; in reality, it took three months. Not bad, all things considered.
Enjoy!
Time To Paint
Small (7.5 MB)
Large (11 MB)
Requires QuickTime 6.
The project began with a trip to Home Depot on Friday afternoon. In a previous post I mentioned that Home Depot is like strange, mysterious world to me, and it was with great trepidation that I marched in there again, clutching the list of supplies I'd culled from the Internet.
The sense of otherworldly displacement was brought into sharp relief as I entered the paint section. Before I even had a chance to start looking at supplies, I found myself walking down the aisle towards a woman who was squeezing her own boob. I swear I am not making this up. She was wearing a tank top and had her hand looped under the left strap, absently squeezing away as she browsed the aisles with her husband. I turned and looked behind me to catch a glimpse of the dimensional portal I'd surely stepped through, but there was nothing there. Apparently this odd place in which women felt themselves up while strolling through giant hardware stores was, in fact, my own universe. (I must also point out that the people you see engaging in this type of activity are never the ones you want to see. Let's just leave it at that.)
After I'd recovered from that little slice of Lynchian nightmare, I encountered yet another one: buying the supplies. My list, which looked so brash and confident coming out of the printer, now seemed feeble and pale under the harsh flourescent lights of Home Depot. It's one thing to write down "2-inch angled sash brush", but it's another thing to select one from the roughly 17,000 million different kinds that are avaliable for purchase. My strategy was to buy everything I could find. I am a newcomer to the world of interior painting, so I decided to prime the surface of my walls with a thick layer of money. I felt like I was on a paint supply bender. I imagine that I looked something like the Tasmanian Devil as I threw stuff in my cart and whirled my way to the checkout line. Thirty minutes after I entered I emerged from the store, slightly dizzy and carrying $135 worth of supplies.
I then returned home to get ready for the painting on Saturday morning. This included wiping down the walls with a sponge to rid them of dust, spackling over the crater-sized holes left in the dry wall by the 760,000 wall anchors that the previous owners had inserted, and laying down 28 square miles of drop cloth with pinpoint accuracy in order to prevent any paint from accidentally spilling on my carpet or, possibly, Northern California. All this took me until 1:30 in the morning to complete. My friends Abby, Scott, and Vicki were coming over the next day at 9:30 to help paint. I was as prepared as I could be, and I hoped that I had everything I needed.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that we're about to get to the part of the story where I find out that I got the wrong color, or where I dump paint all over myself, or where I wake up to find that I'm a giant bug. These Scott-as-modern-day-clown stories normally end with some sort of hilarious finale, right? Oddly enough, this one doesn't. Everything went really, really well. We got the first coat on in about two and a half hours. I'd arranged for feng and Cara to come over in the afternoon to help finish up, but we were done before they even arrived. Abby and Scott came over this morning to do the second coat, which we finished in about 90 minutes. I did discover some paint on the floor today, but most of it came up OK. (Apparently the expensive canvas drop cloths I bought don't actually absorb anything - they merely serve as a brief detour on the paint's journey from the brush to the carpet.)
I attribute this problem-free project to the presence of other people. Abby, Scott, and Vicki are all more experienced at painting than I am, so I can only assume that it was their guidance that helped things go so smoothly. Thanks guys!
To make up for the lack of a smash ending to this story, I made a movie for you. It's a time-lapse look at our first day of painting that will give you an idea of what it would have been like if you'd been there, assuming you had a time machine. I'm the one wearing the baseball cap. Regular readers of this column will also notice the odd squares of paint in the den; those are a few of the color tests I referred to in this post from April 15. Back then I predicted it would take two weeks to get the den painted; in reality, it took three months. Not bad, all things considered.
Enjoy!
Time To Paint
Small (7.5 MB)
Large (11 MB)
Requires QuickTime 6.