Tag: projects

On that project

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

That slight pinkish hue is how we know that the drywall compound hasn’t finished drying yet; this needs another sanding before it’s ready to paint, but considering how it looked a couple of weeks ago this represents significant improvement. We meant to get this done last weekend but neither of us were feeling well so it got put off to yesterday and today; I capped off that loose wire and stuck it into a box (It meets code now! It’s even straight and flush to the wall!) and we both pitched in on the sanding. Bek did the mudding. Hopefully next weekend we’ll get to throw some furniture around, and then there’s a dumpster coming for the first few days of Spring Break, during which I will have to be restrained from throwing away everything we own. Do we need a dining table? The oven? Come on, let’s just put ’em in the dumpster.

Seriously, we have like half a dozen projects planned for Spring Break (most of them involve destroying stuff, which is exciting!) plus a handful of contractors and other specialists coming out to either take care of other things we’re not smart enough for or give us estimates for them. If we get more than half of the shit we’re thinking about taken care of it’s going to be a very successful Spring Break.

My other project today was … filling a hole in front of the house, which may be a post all on its own. I never realized that it was possible to be bad at filling in a hole, or to fill in a hole incorrectly, but I appear to have done both of those things. One way or another the current phase of the Fill The God Damn Hole project is complete; the only question is whether we need to move to Fill The God Damn Hole, Phase 3: In Which I Learn to Pour Concrete, Because Fuck This.

The most exciting thing that happened today: Saturday edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

One:

Two:

Three:

Patching, repainting and putting the trim back in place is gonna wait to next weekend, and rearranging the room until the weekend after that, but that job was a lot easier than either of us thought it was going to be.

Adulting!

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

Took the old garage lights to the dump— did I mention we installed new garage lights?– got our taxes done, and knocked a couple of test holes in a wall today for a “weekend project” we have in mind that no doubt will take six months to finish. I feel like that’s a Saturday, right?

I have four letters of recommendation to write tomorrow, all for the same scholarship, and the building can only nominate one of the kids who apply to the next round. I am supposed to send the letters directly to the school counselor and I am genuinely tempted to write a real letter for the clear best choice and have the rest of the letters say “I choose that other kid.” I’m not going to do that, of course; I’ll make the best case I can for each of the kids, but I think the choice is pretty clear at least among these four. I think the world will forgive me if I use a common framework for the four letters, though. Hopefully. After that I have a week of lesson plans to write– for some reason I really want this week settled before I get to school Monday morning– and after that a combination of threats and prayers toward nature, because apparently despite it being nearly 70 degrees earlier this week we have a winter storm headed our way again? And, no. There are not going to be any more winter storms. Indiana had tornadoes yesterday, and it is an ironclad rule of the universe that tornadoes and snow cannot coexist in the same week. Just … no. I threatened to kill God on Bluesky the other day and it received a startlingly positive response; nobody wants to make me follow through here, right?

Today is the 61st anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination, and while I freely admit that I did think when I purchased the above book about Malcolm X that I would read it during Black History Month, specifically starting it today was a happy accident. I could tell you without looking it up that Malcolm was killed in late February of 1965, so I knew it was soon if we hadn’t just missed it, but if I’d gotten the 21st right it would have been a lucky guess. I’m startled at how fast February has flown by; I have about 30 books I need to read in the next seven days, and my wife and I ought to figure out what we’re doing for our eighteenth anniversary at the end of the week.

Yeah. Eighteen years. I am so old that I have been married for eighteen years. Madness.

Sawdusty fun

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

Spent the evening at a local makerspace, one we’ve been to a few times now, learning how to use a bunch of woodworking tools. This was supposedly the safety class, and my wife, who works with OSHA regulations and compliance for a living, spent most of the evening twitching and visibly musing to herself about insurance rates. I just drilled holes in things and played with saws; I still have all my fingers so we’re good.

That said, it managed to be a long day despite being another snow day (cold as fuck outside; we’re going to have another one on Friday, watch) and so I’m going to cut this short and go curl up in a chair with a cat.

Possibly after changing my shirt.

Sunday/Not Sunday

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

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!

I gotta get my shit together

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

As you might expect, I follow a lot of teachers on my social media accounts, especially on TikTok. And one thing I see a lot of this time of year is teachers who are being really defensive and insisting that we Don’t Really Get Summers Off, because of … I dunno, planning and continuing education and a bunch of other stuff.

I have been teaching for over twenty years, and large portions of my job are muscle memory by now. I very much have my summers off and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. If you think that’s unfair you are absolutely welcome to become a teacher, and if you’re not running to do that, well, you must not be that upset about my summers.

I’m a week into summer break now, and y’all, I am seriously in need of a routine or a project or some shit like that. I cannot just stare at my phone and take naps all summer long, and I am dying over here.

This has got to be Find a Project week. I’m going to a Counting Crows concert next Saturday, so that can be my reward for having a productive week, right?

Sure.

In which it’s cold & I made stuff

On By Luther M. SilerIn art2 Comments

We’re going to present these in reverse order, because one of them is a better picture than the other:

I finished the Lego Himeji Castle set this evening, which turned out to be a really fun build even if it continues the fine Lego tradition of putting a bunch of cool details in that are immediately completely covered up by other bricks, never to be seen again. I suppose I would rather have the cool details than not have them, but I wanna see them, dammit.

Also, I need a bigger house, because I have four unbuilt Lego sets sitting in boxes a few feet away from me right now and I have no idea where the hell I’m going to put any of them once they’re done. Anyone want to give me their house?

My wife got me (well, both of us, but I was the one who wanted them) registered for three pottery classes at a local makerspace for Christmas, and we had our second class today, charmingly titled “Build a Mug.” The first class was kintsugi pottery and I did not post my product from that one because, frankly, I screwed up on the very first step and didn’t notice it until it was much too late, and since the modern version of kintsugi involves repairing broken pottery with epoxy, the initial mistake meant that every subsequent piece I tried to put back together only ended up slightly more askew, and the final product just looks crap.

This mug? It’s not glazed yet, but I think I might actually use this mug once I have it finished in a couple of weeks. It needs to dry for about ten days and then we can go in and glaze it for final firing, so it’ll be a bit before I can post a picture of the final product, but my understanding is that glazing will smooth over a lot of the little imperfections. This obviously won’t look professional but I don’t think it looks completely crap, and the class was a lot of fun.

We’re actually doing a throwing class on Valentine’s Day, and I am fully ready to make pottery my entire Goddamned personality for a while if that’s as much fun as I think it might be.

Additional hotness of the new variety

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Reading4 Comments

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.