When You Do House Siding, It Always Rains

Progress has been made on everything except my book. I think my agent is going to send a hit squad to come get me soon. I'm finding myself doing avoidance behavior I've never even thought of before -- I'm even going out to the barn and removing disgusting old ceiling tiles (that rain mouse turds and hundred-year-old sawdust on me) rather than sit down and write.

What the hell's wrong with me? Writing used to be a pleasure, even under deadline. What is it about this book contract that has me avoiding it so assiduously that I've put myself in an unarguably impossible situation with both my editor and agent? Egads: I've turned into The Author From Hell.

Someone just shoot me now.

Okay, back to the progress....

We've successfully destroyed the inside of the old "kitchen" (calling it a kitchen is a diplomatic statement: it was a hellhole disguised ingeniously as a "summer kitchen") and the room behind it. Tore out most of the bathroom except the Mary-Kay-pink commode, leaving the reasonably good pine wall boards where we could. The commode goes as soon as the Dumpster gets emptied again. We have rescued a pile of rather nice old farm boards from the ceiling, where they were covered up by a nasty set of tiles from the sixties; the boards are rustic, some as wide as sixteen inches, and can be planed down and used for flooring down in the book room we're building on the garage level (for office archives of books).



This area will be our new office, in the ground floor of the barn.



We're also in the process of tearing the aluminum siding off the barn, and eventually the house, too. We'll be resealing the old clapboards and painting the whole kit and kaboodle white with either dark green or indigo blue trim. (I'm all for the blue, a la French Canadian houses, but Elric likes the dark green. We shall see who wins.)



When I say "we," the hard work is primarily being done by a good friend, Bruce, who is overseeing the contracting and doing most of the work himself. He is a true mensch, even if he is a good old home baptist kinda New Englander.

If you want to see a Quicktime .mov file of Bruce playing with the crane we had today, click here. It's about 2.5 megs in size, so be patient. It only runs for 8 seconds, so don't blink. The extra pair of legs in the crane basket is me -- I'm so short, I disappear behind Bruce.

Not That Anyone I Know (Including Myself) Ever Asks Stupid Questions...



Thanks to WendyKnits blog for this image. A picture is indeed worth a thousand words.

Department of Who Thought This Would Be a Good Idea?

Homeland Security has announced an appointment for their privacy czar, who will oversee proposals and procedures for use of and dissemination of private information on citizens, gathered in their brand-spankin'-new database monolith.

Who would they appoint? None other than the woman who headed up Doubleclick's "privacy" department. Remember Doubleclick, boys and girls? The marketing behemoth investigated by the FCC, among others, for misuse of private information they gathered -- most of the time without the awareness or permission of said users from Internet/Web users. Doubleclick, who is still on the hotlist at the Electronic Freedom Frontier of Companies Not To Trust As Far As We Could Throw Them. I can go with that -- I've been using various software to block their ads (and therefore most of their information-gathering bots) for years. Tricky little devils even place invisible .gifs on pages that gather information that can't be blocked by most software.

And we're supposed to trust the former "privacy" officer of this company with overseeing the "privacy" section of Homeland Security, including CAPS II?

What are they drinking in D.C. these days? Absinthe?

I Wunder Where Da Birdies Iz?

Spring is officially here in New England:



And small miracles of color are found hidden in the most unlikely of places:



And in my knitting corner, I've done a quick workup of Ann Norling's "fruit cap" for my PT, who is expecting a baby this summer. I did a strawberry cap:



Click on the photos above for a larger image. Thanks to Dawn the cat for use of her teddy bear in posing the strawberry cap photo.

Andrew Lipson has created a series of incredibly sophisticated and complicated Lego creations, including Escher's "Relativity".

A nerd with way too much time on his hands. I should talk. Go look. Worship the Lego.

Knitting update:
I've finished two projects in the last two weeks, because, of course, I should be writing my book instead --

Lang Ja Wolle socks, knitted using Wendy's Knits toe-up pattern (my new favorite sock pattern!):


A neck-down sweater pattern in worsted wool I snagged from Elann.com (alas, no more of that yarn left there, but plenty of other more yummy yarns -- click on "what's new" to see what's around) -- Elric models for us in this photo:


Click on the photos to see larger versions of them.

Using the twisted avenue of Technorati.com, I'm going to try paging Patrick Nielsen Hayden by simply linking to his blog and seeing when he sees the link via technorati's blog-link search engine.

Patrick, call me at home. I have been tagged by NPR's "The Exchange" to talk about warblogging tomorrow morning. I want to pick your extensive brain.