General productivity

[ailbhe]

We're building bookshelves for our library. Yesterday we went shopping in Wickes and bought 5 planks of pine, some brackets and some wall fixings. Then Rob went out to buy me some more birthday gifts and I settled down to paint wood.

Non-drip gloss paint is like painting with warm jelly (jello for merkins). And it got everywhere, especially when I tried to paint the shiny metal brackets. It was still sticky-damp almost 30 hours later.

Today we fixed the wallfixings to the wall, added a screw to the CD rack that was leaning away from the wall, and sloshed second coats of paint atound. We managed not to drill into the power socket on the other side of the library/hall partition wall, which was good, as it was the socket the drill was using.

Tomorrow things will be dry enough to actually put the brackets on the wallfixings and the shelves on the brackets. And maybe even the books on the shelves.

Insomnia

So there were planks stickly drying on the dining table yesterday afternoon and we couldn't face cooking and eating in a house with no paint-free surfaces. So we called Darrell and Becky and said "We have some lamb bits and some chicken bits, and no dining table. If we bring the food, will you cook us dinner?" and they said yes.

Fajitas. Mm-mm. And with that we had...

A taste each of Darrell's homemade blackcurrant wine, which was very tasty and very sweet. A little pineapple brandy, to see what it was like, and a Scarlet O'Hara cocktail. Some of Ingvar's own aniseed vodka, and some Blavod brand ditto, to compare. A smidgen of whiskey and a taster of apple brandy and a sip of cherry vodka. Vanilla ice-cream with coffee-and-chocolate-and-stuff mixed in (yes, neat coffee grounds. Gorgeous).

So we finally went home at about 11 ish and went to bed and at about one we realised that we weren't sleepy and got up again. So we took all the books off a bookcase downstairs and all the children's books off the shelves in the spare room and moved the bookcase in the spare room to the foot of the bed and moved the big bookcase from the library downstairs to the spare bedroom upstairs and put all the children's books in alphabetical order and unpacked the two boxes of kids' books that hadn't been unpacked before and added them and we put curtains up in the spare room too. Then we drank decaf tea and I read Callahan's Key and we went to sleep at about 4. But it was only 3 really because the clocks went back.