For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

I’ve stolen that title from Douglas Adams. It feels relevant, and perhaps I will go hunting for other quotes for future titles.

It’s been about a week since the new BCA website launched, and it was a busy time. I had a review with someone who pointed out a number of things that needed fixing on the site, as well as some additions she is going to help me with. In addition the BCA was one of the hosts of an All Candidates Meeting related to the upcoming federal election here in Canada, and a day later we had our Annual General Meeting. Both of those events required more work on my part than you might expect, with various page updates, data collection and insertion, etc. Finally there were quite a few fixes to the website that no one will ever notice. Many were actually invisible. We’re using a WordPress plugin called Elementor to build pages, and I never had any formal training in it. Instead I just started using it and am learning everything the hard way.

It turns out that in the middle of the week I had an ah-ha! moment about something related to sections and inner sections (don’t ask). I’d been doing something stupid, which made it harder to keep things looking good when a page was viewed on a mobile device. Once discovered, I had to fix all the pages where I had made that mistake, so that I (or someone else) will have an easier time editing and keeping things looking good in the future. It turns out I needed to fix 30 (yes, thirty) pages with that error. In doing that I wound up cleaning up some other rough edges as well. I think I spent about six hours on that task, and no one but me (and the readers of this post) will even know it happened.

Add it all up and I spent most of the week in front of the computer, moving little but my hands.

But life does go on in other places. I spent some time…

No, Wait.

I have a confession to make. Remember this photo from the last post?

I said there weren’t a lot of blooms on this hydrangea because it doesn’t get much sun. Well, that’s not exactly correct. Apparently hydrangeas only bloom on old wood, and Anne pruned this one heavily last year. As a result there isn’t much old wood to bloom this year. Next year it might be better. There certainly is a lot of new growth on it.

So, I was wrong about the hydrangea. As it happens I am wrong about a lot of things. I’m used to it.

Now that I have that off my chest, here is what I have been working on this week:

Those are two of the four bifold closet doors from Anne’s office closet. They were the same awful — nearly black — grey that most doors in this house were painted. In the photos they have been primed in preparation for being painted the same colour as we’ve been painting the other interior doors.

The problem is that painting these doors is a pain in the you-know-what.

You can’t use a roller, since the slats in the louvre (Canadian spelling alert, not the museum) are deep enough that paint won’t cover them without using a roller with a very thick nap. But even if you did that, paint still wouldn’t get into the areas where the slats overlap.

Professionals spray these things, and that was clearly done to at least some of the doors we have. You can see they didn’t paint the backs, and even missed spots on some doors. But I don’t have a sprayer, nor a space where I could use one.

Thus I am using a brush, and it’s slow and painful work. It will probably destroy brushes too, since getting into all the corners along the inside edges where the slats meet the stiles is a challenge. (Did you know that the vertical parts along the edges of doors like this are the “stiles” and the horizontal parts along the top and bottom are called the “rails”? I was honestly not sure which was which, but I looked it up just for you, gentle reader. Also, if you care, a middle horizontal rail can be called the “lock rail” but is also just another rail.)

Anyway, I am hand painting these doors, two at a time, and I am painting the backs as well because what was there is so ugly that it offends me.

This is going to take a long, long time.

Also, some of these closets are going to get converted from a pair of bifold doors to French doors. That is, the doors will be attached to the door frame with hinges (on either side of the opening) rather than being connected to each other with hinges. I’ll probably remove the top tracks in those cases as well. I hate bifolds. More work for me, but I will be happier in the end.

I also started working on the magic to seal up the back of the vanity in the tiny little guest bathroom. That is a complicated task, though, and will take a lot of time. Photos once the pieces are starting to come together, I hope.

Today it is pouring rain. Real Vancouver weather. The prediction is 56 mm (about 2.2 inches) of rain today, and another 16+mm (over half an inch) tonight. But these predictions never take our local geography into account. The mountains just north of us wring all the water they can out of the clouds right over our home. We were nearing an inch of rain in the gauge as of 10 am. I expect a lot more than the forecast amount of rain in the end.

But despite that we are going out for dinner tonight. We have our vaccine passports figured out and are going to help friends celebrate a birthday at a fancy vegetarian place. If we get crazy Anne and I might stop at a hardware store on the way home to get bifold door hinges (which the previous owners painted). That will make the event an actual date night in our books.

I think that sums up the week. All computer and paint.

May you find comfort and peace wherever you are. Keep safe!