An I Hate Technology day, to be specific, because I’ve been at OtherJob trying to get my school stuff out of the way for Winter Break, and in an hour of trying this sentence is the first thing I’ve accomplished, because every piece of technology I own is falling apart on me all at once.  The phone can’t grab a signal to save its life, the laptop won’t load anything, and the iPad is being a bitch about pairing with my keyboard.  I have a lot of school stuff to do today– my plan is to have nothing work-related hanging over my head for the rest of my break so I can focus on the bathroom and, well, lazing around, and that’s not going to work if my entire kit betrays me at once.  In particular the laptop, which I think I’ve got behaving again– it hasn’t deleted this yet, for instance– has me alarmed, as it’s about four years old by now and starting to show its age.  In the strictest sense of the word, I can afford to go buy a new laptop this afternoon, but I made it a line item in the grant and I’m really hoping that I can keep it going until spring and then find out somebody else is gonna buy one for me.  We’ll see.

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Ignore the condition of my bathtub– that’s a consequence of the filter I chose; while I’m not going to pretend my tub is pristine it certainly doesn’t actually look that bad– and take a look at that wall.  That’s maybe 40 minutes of work yesterday evening, which means that if I put a couple of hours into it tonight stripping the wallpaper from the two walls that need it done right away is going to be a much, much easier project than I had anticipated.  I basically just ran a scoring tool over the wall a bunch of times and then applied hot water– from the teapot on my stove into a Febreze bottle and then poured over a rag.  I had initially had the idea that I’d use the Febreze bottle and just spray the hot water directly into the wall; it turns out that aerosolizing even very hot water that way cools it off instantly.  I can literally spray water from a plastic bottle that is too hot to hold directly onto my arm and it feels cold, so using a rag was the only way to do it.  The wall still feels a little rough to the touch but it looks great; I figure a little cleaning and it’ll feel fine too.

This is good; I needed the first project to go well, even if it was a simple one.  The next step is to knock out the bulkhead and install the new shower fan, which is not going to be simple.  Hoping to get started with that on Sunday and Monday; I’ll keep you updated on the disaster.  Whee!