2013 Books #2-6

I'm making progress on my reading challenge for 2013.  I'm ahead of where I need to be to reach 25 new books by the end of the year, but I know from previous years that it is good to have some wiggle room towards the end.

#2 was The Confession, by Olen Steinhauer.  We borrowed this one from my mother-in-law.  It took me a bit to get into the story, but once I had a nice chance to sit and read for an extended period of time, I liked it very much.  I think I like his Milo Weaver series more, but this was a worthwhile read.

#3 was One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  I loved it.  This was another from my list of books that every reasonably well read adult should read.  Marquez's language is beautiful.  I take back my previous comments regarding books without defined plots.  Good writing, beautiful language, and interesting people go a long way towards making me not miss a plot.

#4 was Young House Love, by Sherry and John Petersik.  I think this would have been a really fun book in the pre-Pinterest days.  It's a nice collection of fun ideas for your home, but doesn't really go into enough detail on any of them to really call them tutorials or how-tos.  I also think that the 243 ideas advertised on the front of the book is stretching the truth a bit.  I'd call it more like 175 ideas and some corollaries.

#5 was Before I Go to Sleep, by S.J. Watson.   I read this for a book club I joined, and was not very excited about it based on the book flap description.  The endorsement from Dennis Lehane intrigued me though (I refuse to read any more of his Patrick Kenzie series, but still think he is an excellent writer).  I was very pleasantly surprised.  I checked the book out of the library on Sunday, and had it finished by Tuesday night.  It is a great thriller, and kept me eager to read the next chapter all the way through to the end.

#6 was The Nearest Exit, by Olen Steinhauer. This is the second book in his Milo Weaver series.  I enjoyed it very much.  I thought it was odd that the wife's ex-boyfriend wasn't even mentioned in this time, when he seemed to play an important role in the previous book, but that is my only quibble with the story.  I've ordered the third book, and am eagerly awaiting its arrival.

Shoe Storage Bench

We're a shoes off in the house family, but never had a good place to put the shoes.  Our house has two closets in the entry, which should provide plenty of room, but they don't work well for us.  They're dark, small, and frankly there's just too much stuff in them.  Shoes would get buried under other shoes, and we'd spend far more time than I'd like each morning trying to find matched pairs.  I told my husband I thought a bench with drawers for the entryway would be great, but I wasn't finding much that I liked for a price I was willing to pay.  There were a lot of benches with sort of cubby holes, but I worried that the baskets in the cubbies would just end up all over the floor, and we'd be in the same place we started.  I kept my eye out on Craigslist, and finally found one I liked!  One small problem:  it was missing its top.  I told my husband I had a plan.  He was skeptical.  I told him it could be my Christmas present.  He rolled his eyes, and said ok.

I bargained the seller down $10, and finally had a place to store shoes!  For about a month, it sat, topless, in my entryway.  The kids used it for its intended purpose anyway, and suddenly, our shoes had a place to call home.  When the holidays were over, I finally got around to making a top for it.  I went to the fabric store, and spent far more time than was really necessary choosing fabric.  It was all so pretty though!  The Jo-Ann's was having a sale on upholstery fabric, and I had a 20% off coupon, so the prices that originally had me questioning decision to make my own top turned out to be not so bad after all.  I walked out of the store with three and a half yards of this.

 I also bought three yards of foam.  That the foam was more expensive than the fabric just about blew my mind.  Then I was off to Home Depot to buy a board to fit the top.  There was a nice guy working in the lumbar section, and he cut a the board down to the exact right size for me.  I had my daughter with me, and she was not pleased about the sound as the saw met the wood.

Then it was off to select the paint for the bench itself.  I thought I nice grey would work, but when I got home with it, my husband suggested trying to match the lighter brown in the fabric. Fortunately I'd just purchased a test pot of the grey, so I was only out $3.  I brought a swatch of the fabric with me, and found a pretty close match to the lighter color.  I brought it home, and my husband said "oh, so you decided to stick with the grey?"  Bah.  It matched the lighter color almost perfectly.  Not grey.

To make the top, I put the board on top of the foam, and cut the foam to match. I cut the fabric a bit larger than the board, so I'd have enough to stretch around the foam.

 After I flipped the board over, I used packaging tape to hold the fabric in place while I secured it to the board.  I used upholstery nails to attach the fabric to the board.  I thought about getting a stapler gun, but didn't want to spend the money for a one time project.

Then it was time to paint!  Can I just say I hate the trend of making furniture look older than it is, and dirtier than it is?  I scrubbed the bench down, and quickly realized that the grimy looking spots were that way purposefully.  I don't get it.  The new paint looked good though, and covered it up nicely!

 Two coats worked for most areas, with just touch ups needed for some stubborn parts.  I could not figure out how to get the drawers all the way out though, so ended up just painting the front and edges of the face of the drawers.

To attach the top, I used four small hinges.  We don't lift the top to the bench very often, but I like having the ability to get behind the drawers if necessary.  It also makes the top easy to remove if I ever want to change the fabric.I just screwed straight though the fabric.

 Mission shoe storage is complete.

Too Cold to Hold 5 Mile Race Report

I ran the Too Cold to Hold 5 mile race this morning.  When I ran the Too Hot to Handle 15k in July, I was curious to see what my time would be on the same course, but 40 or so degrees colder.  It didn't work out that way as they changed the Too Cold to Hold to a 5k, 5 mile, and 10 mile course from the 5k and 15k offered in the summer.  I haven't been running much at all lately, so the 5 mile was all I was willing to attempt;  my husband signed up for the 10 mile.

Parking was easier than over the summer, and we got a spot right by the start of the race.  We got to the park about 50 minutes before the race started.  We got some hot chocolate, made sure we knew where bag check was, and then went back to stay warm in the car a bit longer.  My phone said it was 37 degrees at the start, so not terrible, but colder than I wanted while wearing thin running clothes.  We headed back over with about 10 minutes to go, and waited in the starting area. 

I had made a new playlist the night before, and put it on my iPhone.  Or so I thought.  I went to make sure it was ready to go, and couldn't find it.  But there were new songs on the playlist that weren't on my phone earlier, but were today.  So somehow I managed to upload all of the songs I wanted, without the playlist itself transferring.  I was disappointed, as I had organized the list the way I wanted, to be almost exactly as long as I thought the race would take me.  I improvised there, but ended up with more songs than I planned, and I couldn't edit the list to go in a particular order.  I put it on shuffle, and that worked well for the first two miles or so.  But then it played one song three times in a row, and I had to fiddle with it to move to the next song.  My kids convinced my husband to download "I'm sexy and I know it", and I added that to my list, hoping it would be a great running song.  It did not disappoint.  I don't know if it was an iPhone issue or a Runkeeper issue, but Runkeeper was behaving oddly again as well.  For the most part, it gave me the audio cues I asked for, but maybe 3 times during the race it gave me random updates.  

They started all three races at the same time, along the same course.  The 5k split off pretty early, so I wish there had been an announcement that the 5k runners should line up on the left, 5 and 10 mile on the right, because there were a lot of 5k runners having to cut across the road.  The race was really too small for corral starts, but people lined up oddly too, with seemingly no consideration to how fast they were going to start out.  The woman in front of me started the race walking.  I really think if you are planning on walking the course, you should line up at the back of the crowd though, as everyone had to run around her.  There were a bunch of little kids running, which was fun.  Maybe next year I'll see if my older son wants to do the 5k with me.

The course had changed slightly from over the summer, with a loop on the out portion of the race going up a hill, then back down.  The hill wasn't very steep, but it sure was long!  That part of the course did not repeat on the way back, thank goodness!  The organizers had put orange cones along the course, which is an out-and-back, and spray painted arrows to show which direction people should run, but no one really followed that at the beginning.  The course is along a popular running/biking trail, and it isn't closed, so having us marked to run on the opposite side of the path as is customary just wasn't working well.  This turned out to be a problem around the 5 mile turn around point.  Maybe a quarter of a mile past the turn around point, the returning runners had to cross the path of the runners who hadn't gone to the turn around yet.  

Then end was sort of funny too.  I am a pretty slow runner, and finished just shy of an hour.  The leaders of the 10 mile came in right after me.  From the looks on some of their faces, they did not appreciate having to dodge and run around slower runners at the end of their race!  I'm sure they are much more used to having a clear path to the finish!

All it all, it was a good run.  The course is beautiful, and the weather was much more running-friendly than in July! 

How the International Space Station ruined my Wednesday morning.

Remember a few weeks ago when the White House issued the "This isn't the petition response you're looking for" response to the request that the US build the Death Star?  I was reading it, and laughing, when my older son asked what was so funny.  He is a Star Wars fan, so I read part of it to him.  He was pretty interested in the International Space Station, so we followed the links in the response to NASA's page, where we learned how to see the Space Station in your own back yard.  It turns out NASA will e-mail or text you when the Space Station should be visible in your zip code.

My son was thrilled.  He received a much-wanted telescope for Christmas, and was just certain he could use it to get an even better look at the space station.  We are learning how to use the telescope, but I doubt our ability to capture a moving object, so I suggested the first time we received notice the Space Station would be flying overhead, we just try to find it with our naked eyes.  We live near an airport, and he insists that every plane he sees flying above us must be the Space Station.

Tuesday night we received our first e-mail that the Space Station would be near us.  The e-mail detailed that the Space Station would be visible for four minutes, appearing in the northwest, and heading towards the southeast.  All starting at 6:25 a.m. Wednesday morning.  Unfortunately, it was raining Tuesday night, and the cloud cover was forecast to last through Wednesday.  I told my son I'd wake him up, and we would just have to see what we could see.

I had dreams of going to watch the Space Station all night.  I dreamed I was back in the house I grew up in, gathering my neighbors to watch.  I dreamed we watched from our back deck in Boston.  It was sort of nuts.  I woke up at 6:15 and checked the cloud cover.  There were a lot of clouds, but you could see some of the sky, and some stars, so I thought it was worth a shot.  I went to my son's room, and told him he had to wake up to try and see the Space Station.  He shot straight up.  This never happens.  He is a terror to wake up in the morning.  His pleasant reaction did not last long though.  He tried to get out of bed, and immediately started crying because his foot was asleep, and he couldn't walk.  He started crying that he was going to miss his only chance to see the Space Station.  I told him I'd carry him down the stairs.

We turned off the house alarm, and headed outside.  He saw that it was cloudy, and started crying again.  He was never going to see the Space Station.  It wasn't worth it!  (Still not sure what he means by that.)  He went back inside, where he said he wasn't going to eat breakfast or do anything else.  I tried to convince him to go back outside with me, explaining that by staying inside, he had a zero percent chance of seeing the Space Station, but if he went outside, his chances could only improve!  He was having nothing to do with logic.  I said fine, we'd try again next time, but he was convinced it would be cloudy again then.  He will never see the Space Station.  I told him if that was going to be his attitude, I'd turn off the notifications, and we wouldn't worry about it.  He proceeded to pout through breakfast.  As he was getting ready to go out the door for school, I asked why he looked so sad, and he almost broke into tears again, and said that I said I was going to take away his telescope.  Goodness gracious child, I said nothing of the sort.  Nothing would convince him that I wasn't going to take away his telescope.

And then I got into a fight with my husband over the shirt my son was wearing because we were all short tempered from dealing with the Space Station spotting debacle, I was pissed off my whole commute in, and ended up packing absolute crap for my breakfast and lunch because I was just throwing food into the bag.

So NASA, my son has a request.  The next time you make the Space Station fly over our house, can you make sure it isn't cloudy, please?

2012 Book 26; 2013 Book 1

I did not meet my goal of reading 30 new books in 2012; I made it only to 26.  I didn't want to read just to get to the goal though, and I finished the year on a book from a series that I really enjoy.  Book 26 was Cold Days, by Jim Butcher.  My father-in-law introduced me to this series several years ago, and I love it.  I also appreciate that the author releases new books in the series on a regular basis, but doesn't seem to rush so much that the quality of the story telling declines.  I did find the pop culture references and Harry's ha-ha, aren't I funny side comments to be a bit too much in this book though.  I think the editor should have reigned that in a bit.  

So, on to 2013.  The goal for this year is 25 new books.  Book 1 is A Memory of Light, by Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan.  My husband introduced me to the Wheel of Time series right before our wedding ten years ago.  I think I reread the first 15 pages or so three or four times before finally sitting down to just read it.  I remember confronting him the next morning that he hadn't warned me about the trollocs, when he knew that I was going to just read a chapter or two before going to sleep.  Who can sleep in the middle of a trolloc attack?  I stayed up way too late reading that night.  I read through book 9, Winter's Heart, by that summer.  I then suffered through Crossroads of Twilight, and despaired of the series ever ending if this little plot advancement was going to happen.  But then Knife of Dreams was wonderful.  And then Robert Jordan died.  I always read for the story, and was excited when Brandon Sanderson was named to finish the series, as I though his Elantris was a wonderful work of story telling.  I suppose telling someone else's story takes a slightly different skill.  The characters weren't quite the same, the story wasn't quite the same.   But I'm glad it was finished anyway.  Even though when I finished, I put the book down, looked up at my husband (who hadn't finished reading it yet) and said "Lame."  I know Jordan wrote the epilogue, and Sanderson can't be blamed for it, but I can't help but wonder if the way Jordan would have written the final chapters before the epilogue would have made a difference.    

The Chess Table, aka When DIY Goes Wrong

Once upon a time, I bought a chess table cheap off Craigslist, and attempted to refinish it all on my own.  Sometimes things just don't work out according to plan.

 It all started with this little guy.  Cute, structurally sound chess table in need of a home and some love.

I totally misread the Craigslist ad though, and overlooked that it was only 15 inches tall.  That's barely taller than our kitten, Thor.  Thor is unimpressed.

At first I was in denial.  Certainly I could just find some short stools or chairs, and this would still be a great table!  Alas, my thrift store hunting left me empty handed.  I found one chair that would work, but chess is better played with two.  So then I had the brilliant idea to just get new legs.  A search of Home Depot, and I came home with four of these poplar 26 inch sticks.  The pre-made table legs all seemed to grand (read expensive).

I also walked out with two small jars of stain.  One in a color called Kona, the other Golden Pecan.  I started sanding, in preparation for application of what I thought would be beautiful new stain.  I sanded and sanded, and developed a new callous on my thumb.  Someday I will invest in a hand sander.

So the color on the can of Kona looked like a dark brown with darker areas of the grain almost black.  When I opened the can, I thought "wow, this looks really dark, I wonder if I should trade it for a different color.  But I want to stain this now! I'm sure it will be fine."  Someday I will learn that it is better to get it right than get it quickly.  That stain was black.  The instructions said to wipe off in 10-15 minutes, I started wiping in off after 5.  You could barely see the wood grain.

I carried on though, thinking that once the lighter squares were the Golden Pecan color, it would look better. It didn't.

Google told me that stain stripper likely wouldn't work on new stain.  I tried anyway.  It sort of worked.  It lightened the stain at least.  My options were to leave the thing in the garage for a year and try stripping it again, re-sanding the whole thing, or just carrying on.  I chose the later.

I went back to Home Depot and chose Black Cherry.  It looked like a warm dark brown.  I opened the jar at home, and the stain looked purple.  Having totally failed to learn my lesson with the Kona, I applied it anyway.  Yep, purple.  Argh.  At that point, I decided to just stick with the Kona.  The Kona over the Black Cherry ended up looking ok though.  I pretty much started wiping the stain off as soon as it was applied, but the purple under the black ended up looking fine.

I attached the new legs, gave the whole thing a coating of polyurethane, and called it done.  I'm calling it the daddy long legs chess table.  I suppose not every project can work out.  After the holidays, I may start cruising Craigslist for a game table again.  This time, we'll just put our existing board on top of it.

How we used our parents' night out

The kids' daycare hosted a parents' night out last night.  For $45, they fed the kids dinner, played games, and had a party, until 10:30 pm.  Not a bad deal for all three kids!  We were going to go to a movie, but there wasn't anything at our local theater that we really wanted to see, and we were too lazy to go farther away.

Instead, when we got home from work we changed our clothes and went running.  We weren't sure if the park where my husband usually runs was lighted or not, so we just ran a loop around the neighborhood.  I loved seeing all of the Christmas lights.  We went running together on Veterans' Day as well (day off for us, but not for the kids!), and that was the first time I'd been running since the Too Hot to Handle race in July.  I am getting lazy.

I signed my husband up for the Too Cold to Hold 10 mile race, but wimped out and signed myself up for the 5 mile course.  I just want to run a race all the way through, without stopping to walk, and I know I'd be setting myself up to fail if I singed up for 10 miles.  I'm looking forward to the race though, and hopefully having the race to prepare for will encourage me to get off my ass and run more than two times in five months!

We did 4 miles, and my slow pace, but it was a nice run.  I could have made it another mile, but had set 4 as my goal, and was looking forward to going out to eat without the kids!