"I R Handyman"
Tue 2005-08-23 21:33:23 (in context)
- 46,205 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 74.00 hrs. revised
Some time ago, I made a one-item-long wish list. Since then, although the letter of my wish (that the Tea Spot were open 24 hours) has not been granted, the Powers That Be have apparently heard the spirit of my lament. They moved heaven and earth, or at least that part of heaven and earth concerned with national diner chains, and transformed the Boulder IHOP into a free wifi hotspot.
I may never go home again.
Actually, I'm headed home pretty soon. Tomorrow's a long day, so I'd better get some sleep. I'm also thinking that this wasn't the smartest point in my novel to tackle in public. There are several reasons why sex scenes are best written in private, and one of them is the window right behind my head and the way it feeds my natural reading-over-my-shoulder paranoia. (I'd list other reasons, but most of them are TMI.) In any case, tonight's hour was slow going.
Just an hour. Just one frickin' hour. Look, today was loooooong. Today was very long and it involved plumbing. No, not that kind of plumbing. Dude, just because the novel's reached a plot-obligatory sex scene doesn't mean you have to take everything I say as a double entendre. I'm talking about replacing both the kitchen faucet and the bathroom faucet, which involved biking out to the hardware shop for new water supply hoses since the new valves installed this morning were 3/8" quarter-turner ball-joints in place of the old 1/2" screw-types. (Huh-huh. She said "screw". For cryin' out loud...). And then I had to deal with two obstinately leaking P-traps, which involved a lot of swearing and moaning and griping and sore thumbs. (From tightening the nuts, of course. Gutter-brain.) They're still leaking now.
I had expected this adventure in consumer installation to take a few hours. Maybe half a day. Definitely to be over by lunch. But oh no. I had just barely gotten around to feeding the cats and slipping into a well deserved hot bath when John got home from work. It was 5:15.
Got a bit more spinning done before I headed out to the IHOP. The blue-and-white is safely plied, skeined, washed, and dried, so today and yesterday (yesterday was a day off, by the way) belonged to a different project. That one time I went to the Estes Park Wool Market a couple of years ago, I picked up a fair bit of silk and a ziplock bag full of sparkly mylar. These are both rather tricky fibers to spin. Well, try mixing them up and spinning them. That's really tricky. But the result is fun. Ply together one strand pure silk and one strand silk/mylar, and you get this fingering-weight glitzy stuff suitable for creating whatever fashion accessory you'd like to turn heads with. I'm thinking, maybe a purse. I don't really own a purse, so it might be nice to make one. Maybe make one with beads on, just for added glitter.
(I'll upload some pictures as soon as I get ahold of a digital camera. John's got lost at GenCon, and the only other digital picture-taking implement in the house is his T-Mobile Sidekick II, which, being his cell phone, doesn't get loaned out often. Keeping in tune with the family tradition of low-end photo hardware, I've special-ordered the $99 Kodak C300 from Circuit City; I'd have it in my hands right now, only, I'm not the first to think that a hundred bucks for 3.2 megapixels is a good deal, and they're out of stock.)
Anyway, time to head home. Hard to pull myself away, but I've been nursing this pot of coffee way too long, and tomorrow's looking uncomfortably near. G'night, all.