Whichever it was, it was tiring. T has been agitating to move into the southwest bedroom (AKA the sewing room, AKA M’s room-to-be) for some time now, and this weekend she pushed enough that L started the job of moving her in there, moving M back to T’s former room, and clearing up the living room where M’s been living since she was born because the roof problems made her room-to-be unusable for living. The roof problems are still there, but T’s better equipped to work around them than M is.
So this morning L told me that I needed to stop everything and put up the ceiling fan and light in T’s room, so T had light at all. Installing fans isn’t that hard—I’ve done half a dozen—but this one’s design left me very little room to work with the wiring, and the ground wires in particular were utterly perverse about escaping from the wire nut I kept trying to fasten them with. After a lot of wrestling and grunting, I got the fan in place and wired, and a quick test flip of the wall switch showed power.
Getting the light kit in place was rather more of a wrestling match, because it required shoving an awful lot of wiring into a very confined space, and then setting three little-bitty screws in tight places while holding the lights in alignment. In the end, I had to get L to hold the lights in place while I got the screws set—or two of them at least; the third has escaped someplace and can’t be found. L picked out two fanciful lucite pulls for it, a teddy bear and a unicorn.
The fan in place
Detail of pulls
After that L really got the bit between her teeth and declared it was time to reorganize the storage shed in the back yard. Lord knows it needed it; it’s had stuff just pitched in it ever since we moved in so you can barely find anything, and it’s a haven for roaches and silverfish and pillbugs.
Débris got scattered all over the yard while we worked. Observe the large, overflowing trashcan, mower gas can sitting on top of the smoker’s firebox, various boxen to be thrown out, M’s easel (which was drying in the sun before we brought it in), and the lawn mower handle in the left foreground.
Two shots of the shed being repacked
Once we were done reorganizing everything and throwing out lots of crap and ruined stuff, I got out the mini-industrial vacuum and sucked up huge quantities of filth and disintegrating floor tiles (it’s old enough that it might be the kind with asbestos fibers in it, but there’s no way to tell), and L reloaded everything. Afterward, we could actually GET TO everything in the shed and have about a quarter of the floor space accessible, where we barely had any at all before.
The Shed Reloaded
And in passing, I noticed that the rosebush I transplanted from the north side of the house last year, where it was in full shade and horribly unhappy and sprawly as a result, has put on lots of blossoms and is obviously much happier where it gets full sun for part of the day. I don’t have any more black spot problems with it, either. Now I just gotta coax all the little antique roses I transplanted there to start blooming as well, and I’ll be set. Until, that is, I finally tackle the problem of digging up and re-setting the trellis yet again as I try to get it aligned and square to the bed, the house, and the world generally.
The rose bush
Tomorrow I have to finish reloading the shelves where I keep my indoors tools, which had to be moved from T’s old room to her new one, and give a Mensa admission test in the afternoon. After which Tanya invited me out to dinner to celebrate my impending transition to an Agent of the Empire.
Tristan Tzara died several years after he was born. Fnord.
