I’m pleased to announce that the sense of impending dread that most teachers associate with Sundays is not currently afflicting me. I’ve been sickish all day again, as has been typical of Sundays for a while now, but beyond that, we’re prepped for class tomorrow and we’re all good. I actually got a major (sort of) task done today; our mailbox has only been tenuously attached to its base since we installed it after buying the house in 2011 and I finally bought a piece of wood of an appropriate side to attach the thing properly today. Fourteen and a half years, y’all, but the mailbox no longer wiggles when you open it. I am amazed that in all this time we’ve never had a complaint from a mail carrier; I am sure that he will notice the difference when the mail gets delivered tomorrow. Maybe there will be a thank-you note in there! It would be nice.
I also sent out the first of my roughly-biweekly parent newsletters and got a barrage of responses in rapid succession, which I suppose I should see as a good thing but which might actually have the effect of decreasing how often I send such things out. Or maybe in the future I’ll just make sure I’m somewhere where I can instantly reply to a ton of emails if necessary.
That means that it’s 7:12 PM and, since this blog post is written and my Duolingo obligations are fulfilled, I’m free to spend the rest of the night reading or playing video games. Huzzah!
If you’ve been around here for any length of time– five days would do it– you have certainly seen at least a variant of this picture, my four Nice Bookshelves that are in my living room and are currently dedicated at least mostly to series fiction. The bottom shelves are an exception, partially, but whatever.
A few weeks ago I discovered what I thought was a spectacular sale at the furniture store I worked at– not quite, but almost, half off of these exact same bookshelves. So this has happened:
Hello, Gideon. Hello, The Boy’s toes.
So we’re back to having seven bookshelves in this room again, which I … think is probably the end of it, because of the extra room the sectional takes up compared to the sofa we had before? But who knows. At any rate, these are not precisely identical to the bookshelves we had before, because they weren’t on sale– these come unassembled, and that’s why they were cheaper. That rather tedious process has been my job for the last few days. That said, once put together, they look identical, and they’re quite solidly put together as well– these are absolutely not Wal-Mart $40 specials like the other bookshelves in the house and I have no reason to not believe they’ll last just as long as the ones we spent more money on.
We used my wife’s nice big new car to deliver a shitton of styrofoam and cardboard to our local recycling/hazardous waste facility today and I’ve got all the shelves where I want them. I have two days of vacation left and by the time school starts back up I want my books organized properly again. Right now the theme is “only fiction in the living room” and “only nonfiction in the library … other than the leatherbounds,” but we’ll see.
I’ll post more pictures once everything is properly organized.
The new bed is fully in place, and the new mattress is going to arrive tomorrow, so depending on how long it takes for it to decompress from the tiny box they’ve stuffed it into he ought to be sleeping back in here by mid-week next week at the latest. I have a couple of observations about putting this bed together, if you don’t mind indulging me:
First, the build quality of the bed itself is really impressive. The whole thing is steel and decent-quality particle board; there was a small dent in one of the pieces of wood because the box took a hit at some point during the delivery process, and we’re going to see if we can get them to send us a new one, but I was able to hide it and it’s not going to make any kind of difference structurally. Everything went together really easily, all the predrilled holes in the metal pieces were in the right places, the welded joints feel strong, and once I went through and tightened all the bolts (suggestion: install everything with your hands to finger-tight and then go back with a drill once you’re certain everything fits right) it just feels rock-solid. It’s not making any noises or squeaking or anything and it just feels like it should have cost more than the slightly-over-$300 we paid for it. There may have been a bag of screws missing from the hardware box– I say “may have been” because it’s entirely possible we lost it during the unpacking process, but I really don’t think that’s what happened, because I was being careful. At any rate, a trip to Lowe’s solved the problem for an extra $5 worth of screws. Whatever.(*)
Let’s talk about the instructions, though. And if you think I’m about to complain about something translated from Chinese, think again. There are almost no actual words in the instructions, I assume specifically because they wanted to avoid translation issues. That said? The instructions suck. They get piece numbers wrong a few times– one page had a couple of part numbers handwritten in it, and even then they were wrong– and there are a couple of deeper issues as well.
One, this bed is reversible, which one would think would be a selling point– by which I mean that the stairs can go either on the right or the left of the bed itself, and once you figure out what you’re looking at it’s easy to figure out that, okay, if this goes here instead of here, that’s why this seems to have extra holes in it. But the instructions never mention this! In fact, the diagrams show the stairs on both sides and in both orientations at various points with no indication that anything has changed, which as one could imagine, can lead to some confusion to those not paying careful attention. I am proud to say that I made only one build error– that bottom three-part rail on the right side was initially put in upside-down, which was not the instructions’ fault and was easily fixed. But I’m generally pretty good at this kind of thing. If you’re not used to it, the moving stairs are gonna be a problem.
And, well, there’s this, too. Take a second and look at this diagram carefully before you keep reading:
Look at the bottom part of the diagram. Am I going blind, or is there some sort of haywire M.C. Escher shit going on with the directionality of the bottom third of this diagram? Like, these lines don’t line up correctly, right? This is apparently looking up from underneath the stairs, and I can’t put my finger on what’s wrong but I also just can’t parse it.
The good news is that all you really need to be realizing from this diagram is 1) put feet in the feet-holes, 2) screw all of the pieces of wood onto the frame, and 3) put those little brackets on the side of the hangar cubby, which– right– I did screw two things up, because I used the wrong bolts there and, uh, had to have my wife get two more from Lowe’s. But this fucking diagram is terrifying if you’re already not confident about how to put this type of thing together, and I’m genuinely not convinced that the actual diagram itself matches physical reality properly.
One way or another, though, the boy has a new bed, and once the mattress goes in and I get his whiteboard put up on the side there and, Christ, some more lighting– note that I had to pull some of my spotlights from my year of teaching at home to help me out in the top picture– I think the room will be good until he decides the trees and Pokémon are too little-kiddy and we need to repaint again. One way or another, I hope he likes the loft, because it’s never leaving that room.
(*) My wife, who actually got the job of having to buy the right screws, might disagree with my “whatever” here, just for the record.
We have been on a hell of a tear around here lately; the boy’s new loft bed isn’t finished yet and the mattress won’t be here until Monday anyway, but we tore apart his old bed (storage, with a storage headboard as well, so it was quite a job) first and moved that into the garage. Today also involved reinstalling the trim I removed yesterday so that the new refrigerator could be moved in, then putting the door back, then hanging up some smoke detectors that have been in the Wrong Place for literal years, so we got all kinds of stuff done at the Siler homestead today. Tomorrow I’ll put the desk together and add the stairs on the side and then the bed will be done, and sometime in the next couple of days there’s going to be some painting in the living room. Also, now that I’m an electrician, there’s a really good chance that our front and back porch lights are not long for this world, because I’ve never liked them.
I know I promised a pillow review. Probably not tomorrow, since I’m sure I’ll be posting “after” pictures, so let’s say Monday. I promise soon, though.
Project Buy All The Things continues apace; this one was practically an accident, as we weren’t in the market for a new refrigerator until Lowe’s decided to put them on an absolutely ludicrous sale– this particular fridge was $800 off. This is the second new fridge we bought this week as the first one was too Goddamned big to be brought into the kitchen; they have a “will this fit?” tool on their website to avoid specifically that problem that I didn’t notice until after a very nice and patient delivery man, clearly expecting to get his ass chewed out, apologetically informed me that there was no way that they were going to get the damned thing into my kitchen. Various fuckery ensued and long story short an only slightly inferior refrigerator is now in our kitchen, although there were some scary moments getting this one in as well– I actually had to pull some trim from a doorway last night to ensure we had enough room, and even then it was about literally as tight as it could possibly be; you can see where the missing trim is in the doorway behind the fridge. I’ll put it back tomorrow. We’ll have to repaint a bit but we needed to do that anyway.
Those of you who are either particularly eagle-eyed or have a good memory will note that there is a nook that appears to be for a refrigerator on the left side of the picture there, and yet the New Hotness is rather oddly perched against a wall in the middle of the damn kitchen. The problem is that any fridge that fits into that space has to be smaller than we want it to be and we’re going to reno the kitchen eventually anyway, as soon as we get done paying off the bathroom we did last year. We just decided to jump on the fridge early. Yeah, it’s awkward, fuck it.
Tomorrow, I review a pillow. For at least the second time.
Much was accomplished today. Like, no bullshit. We got a lot done today.
The before pictures, keeping in mind that we’d already put a new light in the library. These lights are so goddamn old, guys:
The one on the table was the light in the entryway, and I want you to pay particular attention to that one, because it has fucking snowflakes on it for some reason, a thing I only ever noticed when I had to change bulbs and managed to annoy me anew every single time I had to do that job.
After, and yes, that’s a different light in the library, as we took the one we put in the library earlier this week and moved it to the entryway. The others are in the kitchen, bedroom hallway, and hall bathroom, respectively. The hall bathroom is the Bathroom of Terrible Decisions, a renovation project that has been ongoing for something like eight years and may actually be finished for real this weekend.
The after pictures:
The lights in the kitchen and the library match, the hallway lighting is hugely improved, and there are no longer fucking snowflakes on the light in my entryway. I am particularly pleased with the lights in the bathroom, which look stellar. The rest of the house feels astonishingly bright now, and there may be another project coming to add some dimmer switches, as the only place in the house with one is in the library.
I have had my arms above my head all day, and my shoulders are killing me.
I thought about putting an exclamation point at the end of my age up there– 47! — but that implies a level of excitement about this birthday that I don’t really feel. Honestly, I could do without it, and I’m feeling a little bit of stress about this one that I really don’t remember being there the last few times July 5 rolled around. Maybe it’s got something to do with yesterday being the hottest day in the history of the human race, or maybe it’s just that I’m undeniably in my late forties now, with 50 staring me in the fucking face, and I feel like my sudden realization earlier today that my hobbies haven’t changed noticeably since I was nine years old is kinda hitting harder than it deserves to as well.
But fuck it. I’m 47. That’s what 47 looks like on me. There’s a video going around on TikTok right now of a woman who claims to be 28 who looks at least a decade older than me so things could definitely be worse. And it’s not like I don’t know plenty of people who didn’t make it to 47 to complain about it, too.
(EDIT: This post is auto-linking to my birthday post from last year, which I also started with a selfie. I am wearing the exact same shirt today that I was wearing a year ago. Apparently the idea of wearing red the day after the 4th entertained me both years.)
Anyway, I’m an electrician now. This has been hanging in my former dining room/ current library since we moved in in March of 2011:
It had a bunch of dangly glass things with it that we removed almost immediately, and I’ve mostly been hitting my head on it since we moved the dining table into the other room. I finally took it down and replaced it today, with this significantly simpler model:
That’s an LED ceiling light, and you can adjust the temperature of the light. Right now my wife thinks it’s perfect and I think it’s too fucking white, so we can look forward to fighting over that for forever, but I don’t need to buy those stupid fire-shaped lightbulbs ever again. I also swapped out the existing dimmer switch with a newer one that was supposed to be specifically for LEDs. This is, as it turns out, a pretty simple job all around, mostly requiring convincing yourself that you’re not going to electrocute yourself while you’re doing it. It was made slightly more complicated by the fact that my house has aluminum wiring, having been built during the five-year or so period where copper was hugely expensive for some reason. There are special little boxes you’re supposed to use to connect copper and aluminum wires, but again, they aren’t complicated either; they just make the job a little scarier.
I also discovered while swapping out the dimmer that it was installed wrong, and was in fact installed without the little boxes, which is basically exactly what you’re constantly told not to do when you’re working with that type of wiring– you don’t want to pigtail them together like you would with two copper wires, because something something science science and they can spark and cause a fire. I hope to hell that that dimmer switch was installed a lot later than the rest of the house (it would make sense that it was a late addition, since, after all, it used copper wire) and I’m really hoping that I’m not about to find out that every power switch in the house is installed incorrectly. Since this went off more or less without a hitch we’re going to swap out a few other fixtures that we’ve decided we don’t like, and while we’re doing it I’ll look at the switches and make sure they’re installed right.
The punch line to all of this is that now that it’s in I’m not sure I like the new light. It’s higher in the room than the chandelier was, as you might expect, and so it throws shadows on the books and statues and various and sundry other things in the room in a way that was very different from the chandelier; you can get some hints of what I mean from that picture above, although I wasn’t smart enough for a “before” image. We’ll see; I’m sure I’ll get used to it. I also haven’t seen it at night yet, so we’ll see how I feel about it in a couple of hours.
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