March 18, 2004
"Stomp!", the home version
I thnk I've found the downside to working at home. That pasta dish I made for lunch, consisting of shrimp, mushrooms, asparagus, garlic and basil-herb fettucini stir-fried in olive oil, while incomparably better than cafeteria food, would have been better still with the addition of a bottle of white. Somehow, though, I misdoubt me that would have been conducive to the "work" part of working at home. Sigh.
It turned out to be a good thing that I was planning on staying here today, though. Rudder took a day off yesterday to research a possible alternative to rowing on our wake-ridden lake. After that, he'd scheduled someone to come out and see why one of the heat-pumps that both heat and air-condition us didn't seem to be working properly. It turned out that the unit had rusted-out coils and was otherwise defunct. (Good thing we found out now, while the nights are still cool and it only reaches 90-plus degrees for a small part of the day.) So today, we are getting a whole new unit. We are *not* looking forward to paying for this, since we'd just gotten a new roof put on a few months ago and our pool-
deck resurfacing is now in progress thanks to the leak we found when we came home from Antarctica. We'd really hoped to put both the pool and the heat pump off 'til next year, but neither would cooperate.
I had also forgotten, when I planned to stay home today, that this is the day for our cleaning service's day
biweekly visit. My telecon this afternoon may be accompanied by the rhythms of vacuum cleaner and burly men stomping on the roof.
Since I am at home today, I've decided to give y'all the 50-cent tour. So c'mon
in.
You've walked in the front door and you're still standing in the foyer. Here's your view of my newly semi-furnished intended-as-the-formal-living-room library:
Here are close-ups of three of the photo collections in the room, respectively pictures we took in Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica:
More bookshelves and a comfy chair and footstool are on order and should all be here within the next month. You can see a bit of the formal dining room from the library, so lets walk further into it:
.
We actually do use it as intended, but just at the moment the table is holding some of the small pictures we took down to make room for the big collections above, as well as some picture-hanging tools. With only two of us, there's plenty of room at the other end of the table anyway. From the dining room you step into the kitchen:
where you look through into the family room. Step further into the family room where you can see more bookshelves and the happy yellow wall that connects to the yellow hall and laundry room (Rudder decided we needed to paint the laundry room and
there was no good place to stop):
You can clearly see why I will never have a stark Modernist decor: too clutter-prone, and fond of my comfort.
Outside through the French doors is the backyard. What you're looking at is newly-refinished deck and a new wall and grill/seating area, and a big hole in the ground that was the pool. It will be again after they
resurface it next week. They'll also be painting the wall, painting and topping off the grill area and the firepit bench you can't see, and putting in a grill. They're not doing anything to the basketball court, but I should put up a new net
one of these days.
The yellow hall leads from the family room to the garage, but before it gets there, there's the office on one side (where I worked today):
and the bathroom Rudder redid from the studs on out on the other side. In this photo you can see some of the tile-work he did, the
pedestal sink he put in, the wall I painted, and the stained-glass mirror his mother made:
Besides all that, there are four bedrooms upstairs: the one we sleep in, the old library/erg room, the spare bedroom (with an actual comfy bed
where some of my relatives ought to come stay some time, hint, hint) and the work/storage room. I have no idea why the previous owners decided to tile one room while the rest of the upstairs is carpeted, but it's handy for the
toolbench.
There are two cats, too, but they're both black and hard to photograph well. Tune in tomorrow for: The Outside of the House: watching the cactus grow.
(No, not really. It takes a saguro seventy-five years just to put out its first arm.) And I'll be back in the office then
anyway.