We didn’t do nearly as much as we’d have liked to accomplish on our various projects, but that just means we had a good time. This assertion is supported by some of the debris we left behind in the room, our empties, mostly champagne and vodka bottles…

Since getting back I’ve had my birthday. We went out for three straight nights, once for my birthday, once to someone’s Halloween party, and once to someone else’s birthday gathering. At least for me, the most fun was on Friday at Tres Agaves, which just opened last week. (Highly recommended, even though they are struggling under the load of instant success.) We started with drinks in the (packed) bar, and then moved to dinner. Where it turned out there was yet another birthday going on at the table next to us, except the ladies dressed up in theme. It was destiny that we would meet:

No wonder we still haven’t unpacked completely! Anyway, if you’ve been waiting for a phone call or email, we should be back to normal after this weekend. Talk to you soon.

I don’t usually talk about our vacations on this weblog while we’re away, because I’m too paranoid: I don’t like telling people when it would be easy to break into our house. But this trip, we’ve taken the most valuable (to thieves) stuff (our computers) with us. (Plus we have house sitters for most of the two weeks. House sitters keep the cats from revolting while we’re away…)

Rochelle and I both have projects we’re working on during our two week “retreat,” and most of them involve or require the use of a computer. Sounds crazy, but it really is relaxing to be able to go away, and concentrate on things you’ve been meaning to do, but can’t find the time, or have too many daily distractions. And the things we’ve been meaning to do — writing, organizing photos, leaning new skills for work — are all intimately tied to technology. Welcome to the 21st century, I suppose.

At any rate, we’ll be back to San Francisco in a week or so.

“I don’t know, but you must have been very bad in a previous life, because you have him, Basta, and me.”

The day after Ken left, I spent hours and hours pole sanding the putty in the floor seams, and then painted the floor. We can’t actually decide what kind of flooring we want (plus we’re out of money), so we’re just painting the subfloor for now. You can sort of see the dark brown we’ve chosen in the photos below. The paint is polyurethane-reinforced, but the subfloor is soft plywood. We’ll see how well it all works out.

Because of the damn floor paint, which takes 24 hours before you can walk on it in socks, or apply another coat, and takes a week to cure fully, we haven’t been able to really move back into the kitchen. But, with the sink finally hooked up, we’ve been able to do dishes, and that has made us a bit happier — huge piles of dirty dishes have been oppressing both of us for some time.

It’s also nice to be able to flip a switch and get light in the room again. Actually, our old kitchen lighting was a single fixture, with two 60-watt bulbs. Our new lighting is a central fixture, three wall sconces, and a task lamp over the sink (which is the only light you can see fully in the photos above). All told, it’s 13 bulbs, and most of them are 60-watt. It’s as bright as the sun in the room (the yellow paint helps with that effect), and we’re pretty happy with that. Though the central fixture is kinda ugly; a poor decision on eBay, alas.

There’s still plenty to do to finish the room, and then lots and lots to do to move back into the kitchen properly. But we’re really, really close to being able to call it a kitchen again, instead of a project.

Which is good, because we have a party scheduled for the weekend after next. Yikes! Good thing Rochelle has three days off this weekend to work on the house…

Almost like a chaperone. We’ve taken to calling him the abstinence kitty.

Like I said, alternately endearing, amusing…and irritating. ;-)

For me, the thing that dominated the year was my new “job” as a consultant. I’d done some consulting before, but in 2004 I managed to string together almost an entire year of work. Mostly half-time, so it wasn’t quite the income I would have liked, but I was able to pay the bills, and that’s pretty amazing. Really, all the credit goes to my primary client, Nicely Done Solutions, where the majority of my work comes from. They’ve kept me busy, and I hope to keep doing work through them for some time.

That dominated my day-to-day, but my biggest accomplishment in 2004 was my five year wedding anniversary with Rochelle. We have many more of those in our future, if we can both resist the temptation of butter.

After a frenzy of traveling in 2003, we mostly stayed at home in 2004. A short trip to Boston, where Rochelle was attending a conference and I was eating cannoli, was the furthest we went. We also made our traditional Thanksgiving visit to Rochelle’s family in Texas. And our longest trip was a road trip down to Palm Springs, where we stayed for two weeks in a condo, while Rochelle wrote the culminating papers for her Masters degree. (Which was Rochelle’s biggest accomplishment of 2004, successfully completing her Master’s program. All over but the paperwork. Yippee!) I mostly loafed around and read a couple of books; in fact I think that was the only fiction I read all year long.

I did get a chance to enjoy more fiction than those couple books, though, by finally giving Audible.com a try. Rochelle started her subscription to the service last year, and has really enjoyed listening to the audio books on her player. When I gave her an iPod mini for her birthday, I inherited the Audible.com Otis player she had been using, and started using it while I was driving. While the Otis sucked, the audio books are fantastic, and there is no better way to enjoy them than on a digital player; CDs and tapes are more expensive, and you have to constantly change them to keep going. Not with the iPod, or even the Otis, which can store almost nine hours — or hundreds of hours for the iPod.

We continued to improve our home with a number of projects, including replacing the solid wood back door with a wonderful wood door with glass panels that lets in far more light. In spite of the glass, with the redone (and now straight) door frame and new weather stripping, the kitchen is much warmer now than it was with the solid door we replaced.

Also in the kitchen we added a display shelf along one wall, to better show off the ridiculously large collection of champagne bottles we’ve amassed. I’m sure we’ll have to purge the collection at some point, but for now it’s fun to have them all in a row, and know that we’ve found and enjoyed some really fine wine in the last couple of years. The bottles on the shelf are only from the last two years, but it represents far more champagne than I drank in my entire life before Rochelle.

We painted our bedroom from top to bottom. Rochelle picked out three new colors that matched our antique bed frame, and over the course of a week, we stripped and repaired walls, and painted painted painted. The results are not perfect by a long shot, but it’s still a tremendous improvement for us.

Also in the bedroom we ended up replacing all but the headboard of that bed frame, which lowered the mattress and gave us a much more stable bed. The antique bed frame itself was quite solid, but the queen conversion kit that came with our McRoskey mattress replaced the solid side beams, and made the bed horribly shaky.

The biggest improvement we made was replacing the old, grim gray carpet that Rochelle picked out 10 years ago with new carpet that is warmer-toned, and coincidentally hides cat stains far better. That went into our parlor, office, and bedroom, as well as the hall closet, which we somehow omitted from the hardwood floors project a couple years ago.

In the office, we replaced almost all of our furniture, getting rid of our desks and a chrome shelving unit, and replacing with much bigger desks and some standard shelving from IKEA. They’re not perfect, but they look a lot nicer than what we had before, and work a whole hell of a lot better with the computers, etc., than the old stuff did.

We didn’t eat out as much this year, and so we discovered fewer new restaurants than we usually do. We still found a few, including Saha, where Rochelle’s favorite chef from last year went after he sold and left our favorite find of 2003 (which is no longer particularly special). The cuisine can best be described as Arabic fusion, and combines Middle Eastern spicing (the chef is from Yemen) with French technique. It’s extraordinary, and everyone we’ve taken there has agreed that the prix fixé dinner would be a bargain at twice the $27 it currently costs.

On the topic of food, I took HomeChef’s “essentials” cooking course (4 hours one night a week for 12 weeks), and had a blast. I made a lot of the food at home during the course, but haven’t cooked as much as I’d hoped to after the class ended. Still, I probably cooked more in 2004 than in 2003, which is a trend I’d like to continue in 2005.

We only threw one party in all of 2004, and it was on the last day of 2004 (more on that in another post). Shame on us. Look for that to change in 2005.

On the technology side, I got a new computer, my first laptop, and have really enjoyed the new mobility. Before the current generation of PowerBooks, I always felt that getting a laptop was too big a compromise. There’s still a big performance gap between the PowerBook I got and Apple’s professional desktop systems; and my hard drive size is limited compared to what’s available in full-size systems; and the PowerBook’s screen is quite a bit smaller than what I had before; etc. But with the current laptops, the hardware has advanced so far that what you get is more than good enough, and the trade-off of headroom I don’t need for mobility I want is now possible.

We also switched to a new DSL provider, Speakeasy, which is both saving us money and providing better service. We stuck with our reduced cable plan, which is $14 a month, and we (mostly) don’t miss the channels. At the end of the year, we signed up for Netflix, so we could get the movies back. Minimum cable plus Netflix is less than half what we were spending for our premium cable services, and gets us pretty much everything we want. Except for ESPN…

I made roughly 60 posts to this weblog. And I sold zero BeBoxes. Both of these numbers need to go up in 2005.

I gained back much of the weight I lost at the beginning of last year. That number needs to go down in 2005.

The cats all stayed healthy and happy, and we didn’t add any new ones. The number of cats in our house needs to stay the same in 2005.

And that was my 2004.

That doesn’t mean she’s lost her curiosity, or thirst for adventure. She loves to visit other rooms in the house, especially the office, where we’ve set up a semi-permanent (but movable) bed on top of the printer, close to Rochelle. And she loves to go out to the back deck, and chew on whatever plants Rochelle is currently torturing.

But, how to get to other rooms, or the great outdoors, when the highways and byways of the house are controlled by the Evil Basta? There’s really only one way that’s safe from ambush: a cab rid on our shoulders. Billie loves to jump up — from the bed when she can, from the ground when she must — and cling to our shoulders, neck, or back, and be transported at a safe altitude to other, more exiting places. We’ve come to recognize the look on her face that says she’s coming aboard, and usually manage to crouch down lower, so her leap doesn’t involve quite as much claw when she lands.

The thing is, we’re often not in the bedroom. Mostly not in the bedroom. So, when we’re too far away, she’s taken to hailing us.

It’s a distinctive, insistent lowing that borders on a whine. She’s used it for some time to tell us she wants something, but it’s usually been food or attention. We know what it means in a general way, but lately it’s been more specific: come get me, and take me somewhere. Her chariot arrives, she leaps aboard, and the game’s afoot. Fun!

Tonight, she even started giving directions. When I came to pick up my fare, she kept on yelling, especially when I headed in the wrong direction. When I finally realized she wanted the back deck, she quieted, and lept off immediately when she arrived at her intended destination.

No tip.

The second most frequent problem people had was “My mouse isn’t working anymore.” The solution for this was to go visit the user with my micro tweezers, take out the mouse ball, and tweeze out the hair, dust, fuzz, and other gunk that inevitably got into mechanical mice. This was something I probably did twice a week all year long at work, and for myself at home, 3-4 times a year. The difference in mouse smoothness afterwards was always amazing, and it was this issue that finally made me go out and buy a new optical mouse a few years back.

When I went optical I thought my problems with cat hair and other gunk getting into my mouse would be over. Today, while checking out why clicking and scrolling had started acting weird, I learned different.

While there is no mechanical aspect to mouse movement tracking, the scroll wheel (which I love love love) and regular buttons are still mechanical. When I opened up my mouse and peeked around, I found enough hair for a whole ‘nother cat, wrapped around the scroll wheel’s spindle. Cleaning it all out was oddly nostalgic — a job once again for the micro tweezers.

As I was doing it, I again found myself marveling at the wonderful design of my Logitech Cordless Optical Mouse. Removing two screws allowed me to lift off the top part of the mouse. Inside, it was easy to remove the mouse wheel to get at all the little places where hair had lodged. I wouldn’t call the design “user serviceable,” but it certainly wasn’t difficult. If you can handle a screwdriver and pay attention to where the three wheel parts go, it’s quite easy to take the mouse entirely apart and put it back together afterwards.

We didn’t do that. Instead, we decided that we couldn’t take the various stains on the light blue-gray carpet that covered half the house. (Two years ago we got rid of the other half, by putting in hardwood floors, which we are still in love with.) Time for new carpet.

Rochelle and David had already spent months finding just the right pattern and color, so when Rochelle’s twice-yearly ESPP kicked out a chunk of change, we decided to go for it. This involved moving everything out of three rooms (including, once again, the bedroom) for a day. And because of the noise and the strangers in the house during the installation, the cats liked this less than the painting. Let’s just say that Billie didn’t stop at puking this time.

But the carpet was fast, in no small measure because we weren’t the ones installing it. We were moving furniture back into all three rooms by the end of the day. We got a lot of the big stuff, but three months later, we still haven’t moved everything back to where it should go.

This is because we’ve decided not to move anything until we’ve decided where it really belongs. Which means we’re throwing out crap, giving away crap, selling off crap, taking crap down to the basement, etc.

To go with the lovely new carpet, we also bought all new furniture for the office. It’s all from IKEA, so it was reasonably cheap. Two bookcases, a three-level horizontal filing cabinet, and two huuuuge new desks for probably less than a grand, and the office is far more usable. And if we ever actually paint the office, it’s going to look really fabulous, too. Which will be good for me, since it looks like I will continue to be self-employed (gainfully, really) for a while. It’s almost to the point to where I could have clients visit!

In the last few weekends, we’ve moved a bunch of stuff to the basement, taken a bunch of stuff from the basement and either thrown it out or taken it to Goodwill, and generally spent a good 30+ hours working on house organization. It’s starting to feel good!

We also had a friend, who is a professional contractor, come and paint, stain, and varnish our brand new back door, which is really beautiful, with small glass panels framed in wood, and lets far more light into the house. The new door framing and brand new weather stripping mean it seals far better than the old door; in spite of being glass, the kitchen is actually 10 degrees warmer than it was before. This is going to be great this coming Winter.

Anyway, all of this is to catch up, and explain a little bit about why no posting. We’ve been really, really busy!

This past weekend was phase 1 of what will surely be a 5+ phase project. Colors were chosen, paint and tools acquired. Rochelle took Friday off, and we emptied our bedroom, and started prepping the walls. Which led to the second unfortunate discovery, that the wallpaper under the paint was sagging and bulging in places, and basically came off like peeling a bad sunburn. Three hours later, we had stripped off two of the four layers from half the bedroom, and sensibly called a halt to further destruction.

(Side note: the first unfortunate discovery came weeks earlier, when Rochelle went to start stripping off the wallpaper, and discovered she was peeling the paper off the front of the sheetrock that had replaced one wall. After she’d peeled half the wall. We became convinced there was no wallpaper in the room. We were wrong. The only place without wallpaper was where Rochelle started peeling. Unfortunate discoveries are a part of home improvements if your home is a Victorian…)

Saturday David arrived, took charge, and made us start painting what we could. Nothing is more motivating than seeing fresh paint on your ceiling and walls, and we got a lot done (while also going through three bottles and one magnum of sparkling wine).

Sunday, supposed to be the last day, it was back to the damaged walls. Lots of Fix-It-All and sanding. And dust. Lots of dust. This was a lot of work, and while we put a second coat on the ceiling and picture rail, and a first coat on one wall (which looked terrible, because we stupidly decided not to take off the last layer of wallpaper), we didn’t paint much.

Monday Rochelle went back to work, and I finished stripping walls, and then painted like crazy. Finally the room was starting to look good again. Tuesday saw the “final” coats of paint, followed by some hole patching, that will require, you guessed it, another coat of paint. I am very, very tired of painting.

Tomorrow I’ll paint one last time, one wall and some touching up, and tomorrow night, barring more unfortunate discoveries, we’ll move our bed back into the room, which should make the cats, if not happy, on the road to happy. (Ironically, the cats have not been taking the project well. Billie was so stressed out the first night that she, you guessed it, puked on the floor.)

Then it’s on to the parlor and office, both of which are bigger than the bedroom.

I think 2004 is going to be the Year of Paint.

Our youngest cat, Luigi, has really stinky poo. Really stinky. And it seems to be his natural condition, because we’ve taken him to the vet about it.

He used to wake us up with his poos, but we got wise, and he doesn’t crap in the litterbox that’s just off our bedroom anymore. Instead he uses the box in the water closet, across from the bathroom. The problem is, he likes to do it when we’re taking a bath, especially if we’ve shut him out of the bedroom to give Billie a few minutes of peace. As you might guess, this makes the bath a lot less enjoyable.

We’ve hit upon the right technique to deal with it: shut him out of the bedroom, open the water closet window wide, and close the water closet doors most of the way. That’s the theory, but remembering to do this every time before you take a bath is hard, even with the excellent negative reinforcement Luigi gives us. In reality the steps are more like, get into bath, enjoy bath, smell toxic poo, get out of bath, cover poo in litter, open water closet window really wide, close water closet doors most of the way, get back into bath. Less than ideal.

One of these days I will learn…

Ever since Cecil died, Basta has been getting more and more bold, and taken more and more of the house away from Billie, to the point where Billie can only count on being safe under our bed, or on our shoulders.

So we got a new cat, the week before Xmas. Luigi is a 3-year old male, black and white shorthair, with a really sweet, cuddly, docile temperment. We adopted him to be pals with Billie, which will hopefully tilt the balance of power in the house somewhere back towards even. So far they’re not quite buddies, but at least Billie has stopped hissing whenever he looks in her direction.

Luigi has a serious problem, though, something not disclosed to us when we adopted him. A lesser household might have shipped him back to animal control, a virtual death sentence. There’s no way to say this nice: Luigi has toxic poo.

The first time he crapped, Rochelle and I were sitting in bed, watching TV. At first, we were “What’s that?”, followed closely by “Eeeewww, open the window!” The smell continued to grow, and opening the window and holding the bedsheets over our noses still wasn’t enough, so Rochelle braved the stench, and ran the litterbox to the kitchen, and came back and lit a scented candle. That solved the immediate problem, but later we discovered that the kitchen reeked, and Rochelle retched.

The next time Luigi did his business in the box off the bedroom, we sprang into action immediately. I grabbed the box and took it into the hall, and scooped the offending material into a plastic bag, while Rochelle opened the window and lit the candle again. It worked reasonably well, and that has been our routine about every 20 hours.

This morning it happened around 6am. I was barely awake, and Rochelle was asleep. I decided I was too tired to get up, and simply put my head under the bedcovers, with the intent that if it woke Rochelle up, we’d handle it then.

Well, not only did it wake Rochelle up about 10 minutes later, but the odor was so powerful that before waking she dreamed that Luigi had pooped, woke up grateful that it had only been a dream, and then shreaked when she took a good whiff and realized it was real.

Our vet tells us that there’s nothing obviously wrong with Luigi, or his poop, which was tested earlier today. But it’s definitely one of the more fragrant samples they’ve encountered, and they don’t believe it can be normal, so Luigi will be getting general antibiotics later today.

Please, god, let that take care of the problem!

We actually, for the first time ever, were completely packed well before our departure time. This was critical, because we’d made dinner plans with friends, to go visit RNM across the street (great food, spotty service). We’d intended to send them off with an hour of time left before leaving, but we were having a such a good time that we suddenly freaked out when we realized we had only 20 minutes to get ready and leave.

Among the many things we accidently left behind were Rochelle’s new flip-flops, really nice ones with loofa-style surface for massaging your feet as you walk. And we left some critical travel supplies (booze and sleeping pills), which meant our plane time was torture. Like democracy, air travel sucks, but it’s better than all the alternatives — especially if you can consistently knock yourself out.

I also didn’t get to pet all of my kitties before leaving, at least not the way I like to before taking off for a week. The taxi out to the airport is where I always think, maybe I should just stay home.

There aren’t very many direct flights to Costa Rica, so we were flying by way of Houston, where we had hoped to hook up with Rochelle’s brother for breakfast. But Code Orange got in the way of him being able to meet us, and we weren’t able to make contact by mobile phone to make alternate plans, so we just headed to our gate. Fortunately there was a bar literally right next to our gate, and the biscuits and gravy from the Popeye’s 100 yards away was astonishingly good. I think that says oceans about the food they serve on planes.

Two things did work out well for us. Our friend David was able to connect with us in Houston, and continue with us to Costa Rica (he was with us the entire trip, except the SF<—>Houston legs). And our flight timing, starting at 1am on Friday and getting us into Costa Rica at noon, was brilliant, because we were able to grab our rental car, race out to the hotel, throw our stuff in our room, and proceed directly to the pool and chill out. Once the waiter brought us drinks, we were almost completely recovered from our travel traumas.

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DHI 82: A fair amount of cleaning and reorganizing stuff that we’re either moving around or getting rid of.

DHI 83: Swept up the debris under our deck, and hosed down the area. It’s cleaner than it’s been in months or years.

DHI 84: Planned and executed a new arrangement of litter boxes for the cats. Yuck!

Note that with the earlier posting for this week, I actually managed a full week of DHIs, in spite of the basketball tournament!