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August 5, 2004

What Do Normal People Do?

In theory, I am on my summer vacation. This time is supposed to help me recharge, revitalize myself for a very demanding school year of nonstop work.

So how have I been spending my time? When I'm not doing construction work on the house, I'm do web coding for myself and other people.

I decided to redesign the Casa Decrepit web page a month or so ago, because I wanted less crap on the main page. All fine and good, except that I didn't spend enough time on the planning, started out without a good idea of where I wanted to go, then got wrapped up in other stuff for a month or so. So it's been waiting for me to get to it for a while.

As I tottered around on the ladder this evening, dripping mud into my hair as I put the second coat on, I wondered what people who don't have a giant house full of major renovation projects do in the evening. Imagine being able to sit down and read a book all evening, if you wanted! Or having a conversation with your husband that did not include rough sketches of construction plans! How would you function?

Apparently, thinking such things tempts the gods or something, because I ran out of drywall mud again this eveing only ten minutes later. I swear those walls suck the stuff up; I've just polished off the third gallon, and I could easily use as much again on the rest of the room.

I figured I'd sit down and work on the site a bit, since I don't have anything worth taking pictures of. I did some planning and plotting, got the home page functional, and destroyed the archives as the first step to making them more pure, or something like that. I still have to fix two templates, but we're almost there, really.

Running out of mud also gave me time to practise the mandolin, which is coming along nicely. I'm developing callouses quickly, which helps a lot; I can practise for ten minutes instead of three or four. I'm having trouble getting the hang of strumming just the two strings I need to, but practise also seems to help, there. Still can't tune that sucker, though. I had this brilliant idea that I would de-tune it and tune it to practise, and the result is amusing, at least, if not very pleasant to listen to. I can get the higher strings to sound OK, but the G sounds godawful no matter what I do to it. I suppose I could track down Noel's electronic tuner, but that seems like cheating.

Now I'm tired and sleepy, and I'm going to have a nice hot shower and go read a book in bed. Quite a change from staying up until 1am flinging mud around.

Posted by ayse on 08/05/04 at 11:59 AM