New Toys, Blah Chores and Whistler

For my birthday, my folks bought me a Sony Reader (well, technically they said pick between the Reader and the Amazon Kindle - I went for the Reader). First, I have to say I'm incredibly unimpressed with Sony's customer service, but I'm very pleased with the reader itself. It came with 100 free downloads from their classic category, which isn't really that great of a special since those titles are all in the public domain and can be downloaded elsewhere on line for free as well. But it was a great way to get me started... and I picked an old favorite (Pride and Prejudice) and pretty much read it straight though. Yes, of course I have a "real" copy of that, but this was an experiment and I didn't want a poor literary choice to discourage me. But once I'd figured out how to run their little iTunes-esque program and move files around, etc. I dove into the world of free ebook downloads. Oh, what fun! There are all these great old titles out there that would be all but impossible to find anywhere, but are absolute treasures. So far my favorites have been about gardening...

We've continued to make progress in the spare bedroom. The ceiling and walls of the main part of the room now have a coat of paint each and all the drywall work is finished, even in the closet. I actually don't mind painting, and I'm a total sucker for the $5.00 mis-tint cans of paint at the home stores. So when it came time to pick a color, we went out to the garage and dug through all the, "Oh we can use this color for something." cans that we had stored up (we're actually out now, I think... we've finally used them all) and decided the off-white would work. But once we got up to the room and out of the not-so-great lighting of the garage, I of course changed my mind and said I wanted something a little bit more brown and less yellow. Jim said, "Let's just add some color to it." and pulled out of his magic hat (also know as one of the cupboards in the garage) some paint tint. We added it, mixed it up a bit more and Behold! it's the exact color I was envisioning. Go figure. So anyway, the painting wasn't so bad, except of course it made the house stink for a couple of days. I guess that's the price I pay for the $5. cheap paint.

But the next weekend that involved project work was UGH! Admittedly, we didn't get a ton done, this go-round, but we both had such unpleasant tasks it's OK. Jim sanded the last coat of mud in the closet and looked like a ghost when he was done; he was so covered in dust. Meanwhile I had to crawl around in the attic replacing the insulation that we removed when we started this little spare bedroom project of ours. ICK! I don't like the attic. Well, I like it in theory since it's a great place for storage, but I don't like to be up there. WAY too many spiderwebs and shadows, and I'm always convinced I just saw something move. Add itchy insulation that has to be pushed way back into the corners while lying on my stomach carefully avoiding falling through the ceiling I just carefully painted... Funny thing about insulation, though... it WORKS! The room is warmer now. Imagine that.

Nicely enough, we had a little vacation between these two weekends up in Whistler. We actually didn't ski, which is pretty unlike us. The first two days were in dire need of fresh snow so we really didn't feel like it was worth the effort, much less the moola for lift tickets. And then the second two days there was fresh snow on the top of the mountain, but it was closed! ??!?!?! So rather than do things that burned calories, we did our best to consume them. There was this one restaurant that we have had our eye on for a while called Quattro, and on their menu they have what they call the Roman Feast. It's a 5 course meal, chef's choice. YUM!! Everything was heavenly. We also tried out one of the Sushi restaurants in town, Sushi Village, and were very pleased there as well. And of course Jim got to play guitar quite a bit, which always makes him happy. One night we were sittin' around and we could hear a guitar outside. We opened the door to the deck and the folks below us were singing and playing, so Jim joined in on lead. It was a couple in the room right below us, so we invited them up to play for a bit. Good times!