The kids continue much as reported in the previous update. Penny's birthday is two weeks from today and she's been doing a countdown for over a week. I don't have any really big exciting presents for her, so I hope she's not too disappointed. Both of them have been taking advantage of summer to stay up late -- I don't make Alex go to bed until after 8:30, and Penny's been staying up until 10. I expect there to be much wailing and gnashing of teeth when I make them dial it back for school, even if it's only going to be by half an hour.
Most of my energy has been going to the house lately, quite honestly. The front porch has been repaired, and the fix on the dining room floor was supposed to start today, so I scrambled to get the painting done over the weekend... and two hours after we finished, my contractor emailed to tell me another job had been postponed due to weather and so he wouldn't be able to start my floor until next week. The forecast for this week is fairly reasonable, though, so hopefully that won't push out too much further.
I'm pretty happy with my paint, though! John and Sam came over to help me, for which I am eternally grateful. (It was supposed to be John and Dad, but earlier in the week Dad was helping John repair a broken gutter and his cheap-ass ladder crumpled under him and he fell. He got away with only a broken finger, but it sounded pretty harrowing -- Dad's brains got scrambled enough by the fall that he still doesn't remember anything between standing on the ladder and being in the emergency room a couple of hours later.) Anyway, here's some crappy cell phone pictures of the new paint:
Just those two walls are blue in the dining room; everything else is creamy white, about half a shade lighter than what was in there before. And a lot of the blue will be covered up when I can put the hutch back in the room and hang my pictures back up, so it won't look quite so overwhelming then. I'm VERY pleased with the yellow accent wall in the kitchen, though. I've got a picture to hang on it that's going to make it just sing.
I'm pondering alternate placement of my furniture and other less-intense home improvement projects (e.g., new fixtures, wall stickers) for when this is all done.
It's been just over a year since Matt moved out, so I called my lawyer last week and he's prepping the documents so we can get the ball rolling on the divorce. Not much to say there, really; it feels like a non-event, a bureaucratic ribbon on a package already purchased.
I'm editing a lot and writing a little; check the sidebar for my latest story release. Human Aspect is a little more wide-audience than most of my other stuff, being a coming-of-age fantasy story. And KT/Lynn and I are buffing up the shorts we've been writing all year so we can get them assembled into a collection and submit it. I'm really excited about that one -- it's all over the map, and was oodles of fun to do.
And I'm still crocheting, though I haven't accomplished much in the last month, partly because I've lost time to rearranging stuff and furniture to clear the dining room and kitchen for the repair/renovation, and partly because my initial idea for Yog-Sothoth turned out to be way harder to do than I anticipated, so I had to scrap it and start over:
And that's about it at the moment. I keep telling myself that I should go back to writing here every day, just so I don't lose track of the minutiae, the passing thoughts and the anecdotes. But it may be a while before I feel settled enough to make myself get back into that habit.
EDIT (March 2020): Seven years later, I am STILL getting fairly frequent requests for the patterns for these guys. So I've uploaded my patterns to Google Docs (the Cthulhu pattern was something I found online and since seems to have been taken down, alas) and you can get it RIGHT HERE.
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