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!
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?
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.
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.
So I’ve got this new project going where I’m not allowed to buy any books in 2024 other than sequels to books I already own until I’ve cleared my Unread Shelf. The only exceptions are books I preordered in 2023; I’m also not allowed to preorder anything new until this is done. You may note that there are more books on this shelf than there were just seven days ago when I posted my December Unread Shelf; those are Christmas’ fault, as I got some cash and some gift cards and the Barnes & Noble box took forever to arrive.
Also, these aren’t my only unread books. I got into the terrible habit last year of ordering entire series at once if I was convinced in advance I’d enjoy them! There are other unread books that you don’t know about!
Let’s review the carnage here, shall we?
King: One book, no sequel. This is the next thing I’m going to read on account of Martin Luther King day being next week. Red Rising: Book One of, currently, six; the series is set for seven but that one’s not coming until 2025. Forged in Blood: Book One of two but the second is TBD. The Will of the Many: One of three, I think but the others aren’t out yet. The Bladed Faith: One of three, the third book comes out Tuesday so the series may as well be finished. A Touch of Light: One of two, both out. The Night and Its Moon: One of three, all out. Light from Uncommon Stars: Stand-alone, I think, and if I’m wrong don’t tell me. Exorcism: Two of three; third isn’t out yet. Silver Under Nightfall: Stand-alone. Nevernight: One of three, all out. Against the Loveless World: Stand-alone. Bookshelves & Bonedust: Prequel to Lattes & Legends; as far as I know, no more planned. Sword of Kaigen: Stand-alone. Mrs. Lincoln: Stand-alone. The Storm Beneath a Midnight Sun: Two of two, I think. The Adrian Tchaikovsky books: Volumes Five, Six and Seven of the completed ten-book Shadows of the Apt series. I don’t own the last three yet, but Volume 4 kicked the legs out from under the plot entirely so it was a good place to stop for a little bit. Sky’s End: Part of a series, I think, but the only one out. Ravensong: Part two of four, all of which are out. The Jasad Heir: Part of a series, but just one out. Kaikeyi: Stand-alone. The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn: One of three, all out.
But that’s not all! The following entire series are on the bookshelves in my living room:
The Books of Babel, by Josiah Bancroft. Finished Book 3 of 4 yesterday, will probably finish book 4 by Wednesday. Of Blood and Bone, by John Gwynne. Trilogy. The FarseerTrilogy, by Robin Hobb. Trilogy, but the first trilogy in a cycle of something like sixteen books that I hope to temporarily ignore the existence of.
And if I’m really feeling nuts, I can go back to:
The Stormlight Archive, by Brandon Sanderson, which I have the first four books of but never bothered reading the fourth; The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson; I bought the first three books in a fit of optimism and got halfway through the first one before bailing; and The Fucking Wheel of Fucking Time which I am never ever finishing fuck these books.
That is, ignoring the last section, fifty-one books that I need to read before I can buy more. It is always possible that I’ll decide to bail on some of them (a lot of these are book ones from authors I don’t know anything about) but that’s still a shitton of books.
Okay, I admit it: once I got past the incredibly tedious “making books” section of this project, it ended up being quite a lot of fun, and the whole project probably took 12-14 hours over three or four days, including the early part where I glued some furniture together and then didn’t touch it again for a month. And now that it’s finished it looks great on the bookshelf, although I’m probably going to turn the lights off once the motion sensor in the front starts becoming annoying.
I still have a Lego set to put together in the next couple of days, so I probably ought to figure out where I’m going to put it when it’s done.
If anybody has any questions about the build, let me know. Those are rubber bands in that one picture; one of the walls was just the tiniest bit warped and I needed everything to squeeze together a bit while the glue set.
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.
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