Riffday: tmi again

You know, I still can't figure out what I was trying to say yesterday, although it did occur to me as I was driving around that I was mixing up "sources of inspiration" and "defining my beliefs."  So I will keep thinking about that over the weekend and see if I can clarify it another time.

So time for a break, because I'm just confusing myself with those posts. 

House update:  The amazing, miracle-working carpenter who has been working for us since October may be done today.  We are going to have him back out in a couple of months to do some built-in bookshelves, etc. but our budget has to recover first.  He's been here long enough that he's like a member of the family.  I don't even blink anymore when he sees me in all my pre-shower, pre-contacts glory.  Probably he would say that his main accomplishment here has been patching and repairing the drywall in the entire house, including completely re-doing several places down to the studs, and then texturing and painting the whole thing.

But my favorite thing he did was done over a month ago-- pulling out all the old thick, chocolate-brown trim and flimsy doors, and replacing them with beautiful lightened-up, solid wood stuff.  We went with either alder or hemlock, I can't remember which, so not high-end, but still it is such a vast improvement.  The use of the word "chocolate" might have made the old stuff sound appealing, but it was not--and it was not only the baseboards and door frames, but there was a chair rail of it.  I wish I'd thought to take pictures, but that never occurs to me.  Here is a corner of the main hallway with the new stuff.  That little half-size door on the left is the only closet in the house besides the bedroom closets.

Our shower still isn't done.  But the plumber is coming to re-install the new base on Monday, and the tile guy is coming on Tuesday, so maybe (*fingers and toes crossed*) by the end of next week we will have a functional bathroom.

Drivers Ed update:  MadMax is taking surprisingly well to driving.  I haven't driven with him since that first time, but he has gone from being terrified to finding it interesting and a little bit enjoyable (although he is thankfully still cautious).  The driving age in Montana is 15, so the kids can take drivers ed at 14 1/2.  He will not be getting his license as soon as he turns 15, but we just wanted to get drivers ed over with.  You can't miss a day, so we didn't want to do it in the summer, and it is really nice to let someone else teach your kid how to drive on snow-packed roads, anyway.  Once he has the certificate that says he completed the class, we can figure out exactly when he gets his license later.

But we will both be glad when the class is over.  We used to swap driving the kids to school with some neighbors, but now that we've moved, I'm driving him to school every day.  The drivers ed class is at the high school, so I have to pick him up at three and take him to the high school every day, and then go back and pick him up from the high school at 5:30.  If it was every once in awhile, it would be no big deal, but a month of it is getting really old fast.

One of my new "friends" on Fitocracy mentioned MyFitnessPal, which is a different place for recording exercise.  Actually, it's mainly a place to keep a food diary.  I've tried food diaries in the past with no success-- I do great for a couple of days, then I start forgetting about it, and by the time a week is up, I'm done.  But this is better.  I suppose it says something about how easily I am entertained that I find it much more fun to click on my food entries than to write it down in a notebook.  Plus, when I signed up I said I only wanted to lose a half-pound a week, so they gave me 1650-ish calories a day.  Then, when you exercise and record it, it adds calories.  So I get around 1900 calories a day, and I'm finding to my surprise that that is totally do-able.  1900 calories is a lot of food-- but still less than I was eating a month ago, so maybe this is a good solution.  I decided yesterday I'm going to stick with Fitocracy until I get to Level 10 (I should level up to 9 today) because I have my pride, after all.  But then I'm dumping it.  I'm not enough of an exercise snob for the macho crowd at Fitocracy.

So what else can I bore you with?  Anne Stuart recommended Judith Ivory on her blog a couple of months ago, so I tried Untie My Heart last week and loved it.  It's a grifters story-- conning a bad guy to get back the money he stole-- which I sometimes don't enjoy.  It's one thing to exact appropriate revenge, another thing to consider yourself above the law.  But the characters in this one are so appealing that I was able to overlook that.  Recommended.

Also am re-reading Wuthering Heights for the first time since undergrad.  As Karen said the other day in the comments, the characters are awful.  Not a likable person in the bunch.  But I'm still finding it interesting.  All I remembered from before was a vague idea about the frame story, and then CATHERINE AND HEATHCLIFF.  But this time I'm actually finding Mr. Lockwood and Nelly Dean to be more interesting than the history relayed-- not necessarily as characters, but just in the way they serve as foils for the more passionate story, and the complex way Brontë uses them to skew the point of view.

And that, my friends, is everything I can bore you with for today.  This is the kind of post that Nell teases about-- (Hi, Nell!) -- why would I want to know that you stood in line at the post office today?  Sorry about that, but it's all I've got today.  We got about half an inch of snow last night, so everything is pristine white again, and the sun is out.  For the moment.  It's a beautiful day.  Hope you have a good one.