Angela Law

animal lover, gardener, knitter, and gourmet cook
 
do-it-yourself

bookin’ it

The stack of books in our “library” finally hit Brian’s tipping point last month, so he sat down and finalized some bookcase designs for the room. And, then he started constructing them. While he has a long way to go, the first six cases were completed last week (that’s probably 1/3 to 1/4 of the final count). After I spent almost a week finishing them, they are now ready to be installed. Brian’s working on that right now. I can hardly wait to fill them with books. Unfortunately, filling them up won’t take long, but at least it’s a start.

This project is expected to drag on for a while, though his goal is to complete it by the end of the year. No offense to Brian, but I will be surprised if it gets completed this year only because we have a number of projects in the works. And, building the bookcases is more than just making the cases. Once all of the cases are done, they will be outfitted with face frames (which is basically solid wood framing to cover up the plywood of which the bookcases are made). Next will come the doors, which will be fitted with glass. And, at some point in the construction, a solid wood top will be made to tie all of the cases together. And if that weren’t enough, we’re also going to do some custom lighting. Phew! So, you can see why this might not be done this year.

And, the second best part of the project is this…If there’s one thing I like to do, it’s make lists. As we put our books away, we are going to catalog them on this nifty little site my mom sent me, bibliophil.org. Why? For one thing, it will allow us to mark which ones we haven’t read. Because, frankly, I have no idea at this point–that mental list got away from me years ago. And, secondly, I GET TO MAKE A LIST!

jake

beer butt chicken

I made this dish last summer and Jake must’ve eaten half of the chicken. He’s been asking about it ever since, so since the weather finally got a little warmer this week, I put it on the menu. He enjoyed it just as much this time as the first. Jake’s not what I’d call a picky eater, but he doesn’t usually eat with as much gusto as when he’s eating beer butt chicken. I have a theory about this–it all goes back to the name of the recipe. I don’t think dinner would’ve been half as interesting to him had it been called something like “Grilled Beer Basted Chicken”. That just doesn’t sound exciting. So, I think I need to pull a Calvin’s mom on him and start naming the recipes something that would appeal to a six year old. Perhaps I will pull a recipe from the Calvin & Hobbes file and make stewed monkey heads soon.

friends

friday night

Last night, a couple Brian used to work with came over for a visit. I had met both of them before on an occasion or two, but this is the first time we all got to sit down and talk. And, talk we did. Jake happened to be at my parents last night, so it was nice to have an evening with adult-only conversations going on. His stay at my parent’s was not planned specifically for the evening, but it worked out nonetheless. I guess this fulfills our socialization quota for the week, though we did not leave the house.

movies

the godfather: part iii

We finished the Godfather series last night. The third movie in the series wasn’t as good as the first two, but it was still worth watching. There were a number of scenes (particularly the opera one) that dragged on longer than seemed necessary. Part of the problem was that we watched it over two evenings, so we kind of lost some momentum in the passing 24 hours. Luckily, the Sopranos start back up in a few weeks, so we’ll get a good mafia fix in April.

work

some days you eat the worm, some days the worm eats you

In my new job, I’m learning all sorts of stuff. I started off with SQL and now I’m working in ASP.NET. Throw in a little ADO.NET with the two other things and that adds up to a lot of Google time. I was checking out an article on the GridView control today and proceeded to read the comments on it so that I might glean some more information. One person used the salutation “Worm Regards” to sign off on their comment. He/She wasn’t trying to be funny, but it sure gave me a chuckle.