The Chronodon Remains Unfed

Hello there everyone!

You’re back, probably wondering if the Chronodon left me a blithering idiot again, completely unsure what I did yesterday. Is that right? If so I’m afraid I must dissappoint. This week I tracked my major activities as I went along, so I have a clue where the time went. As a result I am certain the Chronodon did not feast on my past. I can account for it all, more or less.

Most of the week was spent working on the living room. Drywall fixes were completed and primed, half the baseboard radiator was cleaned (an awful job!) and painted, and the remainder of the walls and ceiling were painted as well.

Here’s a picture of the room as it looks on Friday morning:

Lovely isn’t it? All those walls and ceilings being the same — not dirty! — colour.

There was an entire day in which I did not work on the room, though. I spent half of it working at Langara College, helping a sculpture instructor herd her students through the first work session on the wood project. Once they arrived it was a zoo, but it was fun.

During the other half I dealt with something else. Turns out that on Sunday afternoon Anne had driven to rehearsal in Vancouver with plans to stop at one of the local Chinese grocery stores on the way back. However, her car acquired a flat tire and that complicated things quite a bit. She changed the tire, skipped the store, and returned home. It then became my job to get it fixed.

Aside: for those wondering why I didn’t help with the tire change, I was in the middle of painting some of the living room when she called. And she didn’t ask me to come help. Instead she needed advice on how to get the tire loose after removing the lug nuts. (Answer: kick it really hard.) I never even got the chance to go help her out. I would have if she had asked, but that’s not the way she does things.

On Monday I took the tire to a local tire shop to get the flat fixed, and on Tuesday when I got back from the college I went back to the tire shop, picked up the patched tire, brought it home, installed it, and torqued all the wheels down on both vehicles, just out of paranoia. I also fully inflated the donut spares in both cars, which were down to 30 PSI when they should have been at 60.

Life lesson: if you are the kind of person that changes your own tire rather than calling a tow truck, it pays to check the pressure in your spare every few months, just to be sure it will be usable when you need it.

Anyway, add in some laundry and a bit of other life overhead (still working on tax preparation, for example) and that was my week.

What’s left to do in the living and dining rooms? Well…

• Finish cleaning the baseboard radiators. Earlier I mentioned this was an awful job and it really is. In theory the covers can be removed to make cleaning easier, but that isn’t the case here. They are so old and beat up that someone has actually used at least one screw to anchor them down. Beyond that, I’m afraid that if I remove the covers I will never get them back on in the right places. As a result, cleaning involves using a shop vac and a hand held blower at the same time, trying to blow all the dust and debris into the vacuum. But as you can imagine, that only sort of works. While cleaning the section I did, in addition to clouds of dust and dog hair, I found many needles from past Christmas trees, and a ticket to a ballet dance spectacular dated “81–82”. As you can tell, it’s been a while since anyone cleaned in there. I have no idea what I will find in the rest of the radiators (other than dust) but should anything unique show up I will let you know.
• Paint the rest of the baseboard radiators, and a bunch of normal baseboard as well.
• Dress the step in the dining room that covers the hot water heating pipe. This one is complicated and still requires thought and research. I’ll provide pictures when I finally get around to it.
• Re-hang all the art.

Once that is done I can finish painting the hallway, then paint the kitchen (which also needs some minor fixes), and then I can start to seriously ponder how to patch and paint the two story entryway. And after that there is more work to do upstairs. Whee!

You know, you probably signed up for this list when I was an art student. At the time I had (theoretically) mildly interesting things to say about creating strange bits of art in an environment that was stimulating and challenging. Now I waffle on about patching drywall and painting walls. I am sorry about that.

I will say that a couple of times lately I have tried to write some fiction — beyond asking ChatGPT to do it for me — and I hated the results. My internal editor jumped all over everything I wrote, sometimes before my fingers even moved on the keyboard. I really need to get past that, but so far I am not having any luck.

And of course I want to get back to creating real art as well. I need to do that before the AIs take over the entire art creation world and there is nothing left for anyone to do. (That’s a joke. I hope.)

For the moment, though, my life revolves around making our living space prettier and more livable. It’s painful and slow, but it makes a difference and I will get it done eventually. So for the time being these are the posts you get. Again, my apologies!