A three-day working holiday

I am taking three whole days off of college work this week.   Three days!  (Well, not quite three full days, because meetings and such keep coming up, but I'm trying my best to ignore my expanding email In-Box). 

And I'm filling my days with what feels a bit like spring cleaning.   So Much Work.  Yet So Much Fun!

I spent most of Monday painting like a maniac.   Tuesday, I was going to do electrical work, but I decided instead to put vegetable seeds in the ground. which meant pretty much a huge amount of weeding and mulching and filling compost piles.   OhMyGosh, but our yard is big!  This is the last summer we'll be in this yard, and although I'm super glad that I get to garden this year, I'm also looking forward to the day I don't have to deal with so much space for weeds to flourish every time I turn my back.

Today I got a full-body workout replacing some light fixtures.   The wiring in our house is really wonky and old, so figuring out which circuit breaker goes to which fixture turns out to require lots and lots of running up-and-down stairs, for example.  In an ordinary home, you might just plug in a blaring radio, and you know you've killed the power when the noise stops.  But in our home, the ceiling fixtures aren't necessarily on the same circuits as the outlets, so . . . I got a really huge stair workout.  

Then there's the arm and shoulder work out, lifting fixtures over my head. I got a working ceiling fan down from a room with a low ceiling (so the fan always kind of scared people, especially tall people), and I put up a small fixture.  Very satisfying!

This fixture went up nice and easy!

The light and fan in N-son's room stopped working suddenly about a month ago.  It's an even heavier fixture than the first one I took down, but I managed to get it down and install the other (working) ceiling fan in its place . . . only to discover now the new one wasn't working.   At this point, I have to suspect it's a house wiring problem, which is beyond my area of competence, so I'm turning the project over to the pros. 

Original fan on the floor;
replacement fan on the ceiling;
in a dark room because the wiring seems to be bad.

 So, then I started doing some serious paint organizing.   I labeled all the paint buckets that are staying in our house, by which room they're for (and whether it's wall or trim paint), and I also created a master sheet with the codes that the paint store uses, so it's easy to get more matching paint in the future. I curated and labeled the paints that we'll be taking to the new home.  I created a huge box of extra paint supplies that I'll be taking back to the painting store.   So that's all good.

Paint cans with labels for where they're used.

 But wait!  There's more!  I also used an awesome cordless drill that my daughters got me for Christmas to disassemble one of my wobblier homemade Adirondack chairs.  I love my cordless drill!  So much so, that I bought some accessories for it -- a bunch of screw bits -- and so taking things apart is super easy.

The seat of the chair is still together; the back slats are in a heap.
In the background, you can see my Adirondack Love Seat, which I adore.

 I rescued the wheels off the bottom of that disassembled chair and attached them to the bottom of a chest that we've used for storing wooden train tracks, so it'll be easier to wheel around.  Then I did the hugely laborious task of taping all the metal trim on the chest.  Taping trim is such a chore for me, partly because I fret about the trash involved.  I think taping took me two hours, because the trim is curvy in places and so I had to tape and use an exacto knife to trim it.  And then painting took me 5 minutes.

First coat.  I'll put on the second coat tomorrow.
Underneath that blue tape is gold-colored metal.  

This has been such an awesome, challenging, exhausting, satisfying three days.  Tomorrow I really have to go back to work and take care of a paper revision and referee reports and book design templates and such.  I love my job, really I do.  But I think I'll love it even more now that I've had such a physically fulfilling mini-sabbatical.