Busy bees

After I've been working on a particularly grubby and grueling DIY project, there's no feeling in the world like stepping into the shower and getting really clean. I deploy the sweetly-scented personal-care equivalent of 80 grit sandpaper. It's so wonderful to scrub off all the teeny paint chips and cobwebs and dirt, and to emerge smelling like mangoes or papayas or coconut.

All of that is a lead-in to the fact that I started painting the living room ceiling today. Yes, I know you're supposed to work from top to bottom when you remodel a room. But we had to live somewhere, didn't we? We couldn't stay at the Suburban Lodge motel forever--not at $180 a week. So we finished the walls and moved on in.

So now I am moving furniture wherever practical, and throwing dropcloths over the rest. I'm scraping peeling paint where I find it, painting what I've scraped, and basically spending hours on a ladder with one arm over my head. Then there's a long, drawn-out cleanup where I vacuum everything and use the brush attachment to get flyaway dust out of the papasan cushion.

The room is starting to look a lot better--lighter and brighter! and with a ceiling that matches rather than clashing with the walls!--but I suspect it's going to take me a while to finish.

Outdoors the weather is gradually improving after the lapse earlier this week. The arugula, radishes, and turnips are starting to look like real plants. The sorrel is sending up new shoots. The s.o. has been outdoors whenever he can, using the table saw to rip baseboards for the upstairs (and to make a couple of replacement boards for the exterior, with the goal of keeping a noisy squirrel out of our attic).

Suddenly it's afternoon, and I haven't even had my lunch!