The glass got cut wrong because I mis-measured, and P didn’t check his text messages before he bought it, and getting those little fleur-de-lis off without peeling away the frosted glass paint proved to be a bigger challenge than I’d thought, but not bad for a first try, and I can always take it off with nail polish remover and redo it if I want. I like the glass better than the empty frames with those little curtain-things velcroed (is that a verb?) on, and they’re my goddamned windows, so I’ll do what I want! It’s a lot of work, though; there are 32 of those little panes. Anyway, it looks cool.

I got the first coat on last night, and just finished the second this morning. I have laundry and ironing, of course,  but may be able to get the seat for this one done today, too. Won’t be able to put it on until the paint has had a week or so to cure (mebbe…hehe), but it’ll be done. I found a reasonably-priced epoxy to do the table top, so I think I’ll at least give it a shot. Worst case, I’m out the cost of the paint because if I don’t like it, I just won’t do the epoxy and I’ll make a new tabletop from pine and stain it maple like the rest of the furniture in that room.

I forgot before,  but Much-Maligned Gold Coach is very nearly done; I just need to do the bit under the cushions. Eventually, I’ll refinish the wood, but it’s okay for now.

I also thought about using the dyed fabric to make Miffy a bed for that couch; it’ll coordinate with the room, and keep his hair off the cushion covers. Dunno.

It’s almost sanded, and attempt #2 to get the colour of fabric I wanted for the seats was a success, even if they did only send me two yards when I’d ordered four. (I opened a case.)

I did most of the sanding outside; I’ll finish up the hand-sanding in here, and hopefully get the first coat of paint on tonight. Second maybe tomorrow,  maybe one day after work this week. I pre-washed the fabric I did get, and might cover a seat tonight or tomorrow.  The fabric I dyed is too dark for the chairs, but I need new pillows for No Longer Maligned Draw’s Coach anyway, so I can use it for that and it won’t be wasted.

I finally took T’s jungle back to the office, so my own plants have more room. I got another cute little sans tonight for the south living room, and a little Dieffenbachia that I think is ‘Splash’, since the ‘Camille’ seems happy in my bathroom. I got a big spath with speckled leaves, and coughed up $10 for an Anthurium worth about half that, but they’re beautiful and I’ve always wanted one. My ‘Moonlight’ philo died, but the ‘Silver’ is doing well, so I moved it to the living room with the rest. It looks nice, but still a work in progress!

EDIT: I did end up doing the seat of the chair I’d already had painted, and it looks…pretty good, I think.

Before:

After:

Current incarnation of plants in south living room, probably subject to change (lots of it):

Fuck you, Slate! It was your stupid JavaScript; FF’s default behaviour is to freeze a page with JS it believes could be potentially malicious, and your crap code triggered it. Disabling JS made page after page load smoothly. So, fuck your shitty code, and your advertising (because I block it), and I’ll read what I want, where I want. Muahaha!

“…a lot like her friend, Loxoceles reclusa,” (points to image on wall) “the Brown Recluse…”

Which this spider most emphatically is not.

(Law and Order: SVU)

Oh my GOD! I watched a little farther into the show, and the person Olivia and Stabler are looking for is an arachnologist who “milks” spiders for research at a university. She goes looking for wild spiders, and they have an old lady at a church say that Janis started coming around after the “infestation.” Then, she says, “Six-eyed sand spiders!” Hahaha! Well, considering that Sicarius hahni A) lives in deserts in Africa, and B) has no proven fatalities to its “credit” and only two even suspected, a rectory in a New York City church is unlikely to ever have a single specimen, let alone an infestation sufficient to attract a researcher who milks venomous spiders. Even if one did hitch a ride, the environment would not be conducive to establishing a colony. Sand spiders are the ones that bury themselves like in the hilarious YT video where the guy does the voiceover of the spider. Bwahaha.

Well, let’s see if I can watch this until the end without rolling my eyes so far back in my head that they stick.

Purchased 13 years ago at some random yard sale–I remember it was at the back of the garage and cost four or five dollars–and it made the living room at 544 look larger ever since. The frame was dark woodgrain plastic, but it was a pretty good fake and worked well in the room. Here, though, we have so little wall space that I was having trouble finding a spot for it, so it leaned against the wall for three months. I finally found a spot, but the dark frame wouldn’t work, so I went paint shopping and settled on Rustoleum textured in “Caribbean Sand”. I got white primer and matte clearcoat.

I forgot to take a picture before I started because I was on the phone with Dad when I was cleaning and taping it, but here it is primed.

I covered the mirror with some ugly Christmas paper left over from two or three years ago.

Now, two coats of paint. Not exactly the right colour, but it’ll blend in well enough, I think.

The paint is textured, and has tiny dark specks. Kind of like a white sand beach; hence, Caribbean Sand.

I’ll let it dry overnight and clearcoat tomorrow. We’ll see!

I also dyed the fabric I’d got for the dining room chairs; the green wasn’t as dark as it had looked on eBay, and I had dark green dye (lol). Still wet, but hopefully the colour will be right.

Got a 4′ palm and a sanseveria in a 10″ pot at Walschwitz, too! Ten bucks for the palm (Easter promo), and thirteen for the sans. Probably kill the palm, but I’ll do my best. Three little plants; a baby sans, a peperomia and a Hypoestes. No pots for them yet…new project?

EDIT: There. Clearcoated with Krylon flat finish, which looks a little wet because I just applied it, but dries fast and does dry matte. The daylight gives a better idea of the colour; I was painting last night (and most grateful for the 4′ fluorescent lights P had installed when we moved in).

All I wanted was a plain, unfinished sofa table with round, straight legs. I want to make a table that matches my “stone” topped one, so I didn’t want to pay a whole bunch for it. Googling showed one that looked right on target.com, but the thumbnail was small, and I already know how abysmally bad Target is in a web browser. I don’t know who designed that site, but he or she should have his or her genitals unceremoniously removed with a dull knife. Anyway, since I already had the Target app, I just used that. When I opened it, it wanted to update. I did not want to update, but could not ignore the irritating little message across the bottom of the screen. I sighed and updated. Part way through the update the goddamn thing froze, and although I waited, it did nothing. Black screen, unresponsive, no choice but to hard reboot. The phone came back on, but I got a message that said the SD card was damaged and the only option was to reformat, or ignore it and not mount the card. I chose the latter. Still, I have stuff on that card that I want. I already hate Target on a good day, and this was not a good day.

I figured the partition table was probably damaged but that’s usually not the end of the digital world as long as the data still exists. I got TestDisk from the repos, and ran it on the SD card. It did find errors in the heads and sector numbers and although I was able to successfully fix them with TestDisk, I still couldn’t get the card to mount. Fuck. Okay, let’s see if my data is still there. Everything looked OK, so I copied it to my hard drive, then ran chown recursively to change ownership of everything from root. Reformatted the card, tried to mount it, nope. Fuck. Tried again. Nope. Fuck. Deleted the partition, then formatted it again. Success! Copied my files over to the card, popped it back in the phone, and fired it up. Everything appears to be fine. No fucking thanks to Target. Fuck you, Target. I hate you. First, you make me jump through hoops, and nearly have to send you a sample of my DNA, just to get a credit card with a lousy $1000 limit, and then when I move to a new house you don’t want to change my address. Your site does not work in any browser that runs on my operating system, and now your spectacularly crappy app tried to destroy my SD card. Nothing that you have and no generous 5 percent discount can make me shop at your shit-tacular store ever again. Target, you can suck my non-existent dick!

Moar half price E.L.F. stuff! Studio line this time, which is most of what I use anyway.They shipped my last order short some items, though, and I’d better get them or I’ll cancel this one. Not that I need any of it, but for the price, a great way to keep from getting bored while I wait for spring!

Well, as soon as I have the time amongst the rest of my projects! I promised I would keep the ruffled curtains, but my fingers were crossed and I meant I would keep them only until I was sure the old lady wasn’t going to come over and visit. I’m fairly certain that isn’t going to happen, being that she died. So, I was thinking of other curtain options, and with the windows being so big, and there being so goddamned many of them, nothing I came up with was even reasonably priced. Then, I had the idea that I might just make over the existing curtains. At first, I thought I would turn them into valances, but then I would have to figure out a way that we wouldn’t be living in a fishbowl, and not have to worry about closing a bunch of blinds every damned night. Then, I thought I could just take the ruffles off and hem the edges. That would be a fair amount of work, but all straight pressing and stitching. I looked at the ruffles and I discovered it would be even easier than I had thought because the curtains are already edge finished and the ruffles were just added on afterwards–yay! Since they’re chain stitched, removing them will be as simple as opening a bag of bird seed. They will be a little short, but I can use the extra fabric from the ruffles to make a hem facing. I bought some 3 inch wide grosgrain ribbon in dark green because my chair seats are going to be dark green fabric and my table top may or may not be dark green stone. I have already done one chair with the French white paint and the green fabric should be here by the weekend. With the curtains more tailored and less girly, I think it will look good, and the dark green will pull it together with the rest of the big front room, but enough different that it’s not just one huge blob of a room. It makes sense in my head! We’ll see…

You know you’re a pathetic bug nerd when you’re watching a show about the first use of forensic entomology, and you stop paying attention to the narrator because you’re too distracted by the fact that while the narrator is saying, “….human skulls covered with maggots…” the re-enactment is showing skulls covered with fake blood and the larvae of  Tenebrio molitor, which, being the larvae of a darkling beetle and being commonly referred to as “mealworms” are neither maggots nor a species typically found on decomposing flesh. It is, however, a species that is very readily available in bulk, since it is raised commercially for pet food and fishing bait, which is why it’s often used for television and movies when large numbers of squirmy, icky bugs are required.