Busy busy busy

So this past weekend I:

• Took the family to the bank and to go shopping

• Collapsed a bunch of boxes and moved a few others out into the garage

• Cleared off all the tables on the first floor (all seven of them)

• Hung candle sconces in the dining room

• Hung a coat rack in the foyer

• Replaced the family room light

• Framed several pictures for our daughter’s room and one for the living room

• Removed about eight bags of gravel from the front porch

• Put away some laundry

• Hung another picture

• Organized my tools and hardware

• Brought in several more boxes of paperbacks and put said paperbacks up on the ledges in the family room

• Transferred files off our digital camera

• Set up our new printer (a spiffy Canon Pixma)

• Occupied the children while my lovely wife worked on a big project of her own

I have a whole list of things to do before our families visit this coming weekend. I got perhaps a third of it done this past weekend, which was pretty good.

Installing the family room light, something I’ve been putting off for a year because I was leery of the electrical work, proved to be easier than I’d expected. The previous owners still did strange things with the wiring, and some of the old wiring had to be completely taped up because the casings were utterly disintegrated, but I got it all put together. It works and there were no sparks and no heat on the floor above (something that my lovely wife had noticed with the previous fixture) so I think I did a solid job.

The winner of the “What a colossal mess they left us” award this weekend was actually the coat rack. Which is sad, really. And not entirely the previous owners’ fault, since I’m sure every house on our block has the same construction. But the exterior side walls are old concrete or cinder block and don’t take nails well—they tend to either resist completely or just crumble away. The same goes for drilling—in one spot I couldn’t even get the drill through and in another it left a large hole. I wound up having to cheat it a bit with a nail but the coat rack’s up and looks good and seems sturdy enough. We’ll see what happens once we start hanging things on it.

Oh, and for Father’s Day my lovely wife and adorable children (and cute cat) got me:
• The Cat from Outer Space on DVD
• The extended Sin City on DVD
• A deep-fat fryer: I’ve actually been wanting one of these so I can do my own fried chicken, among other things
• A frying cookbook
• A cookbook of quick-fix recipes

Tonight I’m hoping to repair our DVD player. It stopped working over the weekend and a quick Google search showed that it’s a recurrent problem with this particular model—because it has a standby mode and never fully powers down, a capacitor tends to blow out after 6-14 months. We’ve had ours for eight, so on the shorter side of that window. Fortunately someone put up detailed instructions of how to replace the capacitor. I picked up a soldering tool and a new capacitor today and we’ll see how that goes tonight.

I didn’t get any writing work done this weekend, but that’s okay. It was a nice break. I’m going to be revising my second Warhammer novel next, then finishing up a short RPG piece and starting a new writing project. More on that one at a later date. And of course I’ve got the rest of this to-do list to get through. My dad’s coming up tomorrow, and my sisters will be here Friday.

Should be an interesting week.