robglazebrook.com

You know, for the record, I didn’t specify how much later. :) Patience is a virtue, children.

So! Yes. My blog is up and running again. I’m a little annoyed with my webhost over the ordeal. I got an email from them last week saying they’d randomly decided to move me to a newer, faster server. I was happy about this, until I noticed that my blog’s database did NOT come along for the ride. I emailed back and forth (and back and forth…) with their tech support about this for five. Stinking. Days. Before I solved the problem. Yeah. ~I~ solved it. Five days emailing their tech support and I ended up fixing it myself. Admittedly, I did need their help getting to the solution, but still. It kinda sucks that I had to fix it myself. Normally their tech support is great on the rare occasion I have to use it, so I’ll assume things’ll get better for now.

Alrighty. Big announcement time! Some of you already know, but here t’is just the same: Amanda Marie Wurzinger and I are a couple. :) We have been, in fact, since December 9th, meaning we celebrated our first monthiversary just last week. I waited to post about it because there were a few people I wanted to tell in person first. And then, once I’d spoken to them all, my blog broke. :p So goes life. You know now, and that’ll have to be good enough.

What have we being doing with ourselves? Good question. We keep busy. We went to the Nutcracker Ballet in Ames one weekend, although that might have been before we were an official couple. We’ve went to two Iowa Stars games since the big day (the Stars lost both games, but the last one was really close), which is fun and I hope to continue going. We watch a lot of movies, though we’ve not yet seen one in the theater together (we’re hoping to change that this weekend).

Last weekend, we painted my upstairs living room. T’was a chore! I’d been saying I was going to paint it for months, but hadn’t gotten around to it. On Saturday afternoon we made the spontaneous decision to paint the next day, so we ran to The Woodsmith Store for supplies. I heart my employee discount there. :) I got two gallons of paint in two different shades of pale blue-gray, four rolls of painter’s tape, roller covers, tray inserts, drop cloths, and so on. We, my friends, were going to try vertical stripes.

And try we did! And I think we did a pretty kick-butt job all around. It was close, though. I almost didn’t buy enough supplies. We were very literally scraping the bottom of the can for the base coat. We finished with maybe an ounce or two of useable paint left. And then, after the paint had dried, came the stripe-taping. It was wearing work, and we ~very~ nearly ran out of tape. I’d bought four rolls of the stuff, which is 240 yards (720 feet) of tape. When I taped off the last stripe, I pulled out the remaining tape to see how close we cut it. I had less than eight inches left.

Now my living room walls look awesome, but they are making my furniture look crappy by comparison. I’ve decided I need furniture covers in a rich, solid color of some sort. That’ll come some other weekend. I still haven’t gotten my living room put back together again yet. When I do, I’ll take pictures and post them to flickr.

That’s a good enough update for today. I get the feeling I’ll be posting again soon. If anything, we have a new guy starting in my department at work next week, so my work load should lessen somewhat.

So the move went well, dear readers, but I still don’t have an Internet tube hooked up to my house, so I may be slow in blogging/responding to emails in the immediate future. In case you haven’t already noticed. ;)

Last weekend marked my first home improvement weekend in, literally, forever. On my own home, at least. I focused all of my mental and most of my physical energies (and quite a few of Danar’s energies, too) on the basement living room (henceforth referred to as the living room… I’m thinking about calling the upstairs one the library or parlor or something). The result being, it’s now a different color. Yay. :)

Two-thirds of my basement is now a really rich reddish-orange color called Tucson Red. The other third is an off-white called Timid White. Not the best names ever, really, but the colors are pretty. For your viewing pleasure, they’re available yonder. RGB approximations thereof, anyway. I happen to think it looks really good, but it did take a ton of work.

I woke up around 9:30am Saturday, got dressed, and headed out to the Woodsmith Store. One of the benefits of working at August Home is an employee discount at said store, so I figured they were a pretty good place to start. Especially considering they’re a Benjamin Moore carrier (which sounds very disease-like but is much happier in reality). $160 and 90 minutes later, I was on my way back home with two gallons of paint, a gallon of primer, accessories (such as plastic dropcloths) out the wazoo, and a new random orbital sander. That’s right… baby’s first power tool purchase! :)

Once I got home, I moved all of the furniture out of the living room and got to sanding. Dana got there around 1:30pm, and she starting wiping down the walls behind me as I sanded. Once all the sanding was done (which took a few hours and two pads of sandpaper), we started taping off the walls and laying drop cloths. Once ~that~ was done, it was time to prime. We each took turns, one with the roller while the other “cut in” (I’m told it’s called) the edges of things. Once the walls were prime, we headed to Menards (I bought a dozen compact fluorescent light bulbs for $12!) and Home Depot (two floor lamps and half a dozen wall outlets to replace the hodgepodge assortment in the basement). When we got back, it was time to start painting.

Two and a half hours later, the first coat of paint was on the walls, and we realized we were going to have to wait a few hours for the paint to dry before we could put on the second coat (four hours, according to the paint can, the resident expert on said matters). So, we went out to dinner at El Aguila Real (or as Amanda calls it, the Regal Eagle), stopped off for some beer and ice cream on the way home, and then watched a movie on Dana’s laptop. Four hours, three beers, and half a pint of ice cream later, it was time to start the second coat. Once that coat was completed, we staggered back upstairs and headed to bed. Lights were out around 4:30am Sunday.

So I learned this weekend that, with just one person helping, we can prep, sand, prime, and paint an entire room in just one day, as long as you’re comfortable with very large values of “day.” It was a great experience, all told, and I had a good time. I’ll post some pictures when I get them. Dana snagged a bunch of before and after shots. Next up: the library!

I was supposed to play paintball on Sunday. I was inexplicably not in the mood. ;)