librarygrrrl.net

So my folks visited this weekend, and we generally had a fabulous time. Friday, we, along with Amy, went to dinner at Marigold Restaurant, a little place a couple of blocks from my house. Saturday we hit a bunch of galleries in Old City like Synderman Works and the Wexler. That night all four of us went to dinner at Astral Plane - a very cool place near Rittenhouse. Sunday we went took a driving tour of the murals in Philadelphia, and then went over to Amy’s place where Mom helped her think about how to remodel her kitchen. Dad headed home that night, and Mom and I got ready to paint.

Monday morning, Mom and I dug in to the painting frenzy. We almost finished everything by 4 p.m. on Tuesday - there are only a few more places where the trim needs a second coat. After 2 years of living in this unpainted place, I’ve got to admit I was ready for something different, clean, and nice. What we ended up doing was this (all in Behr paint again):

• Swiss Coffee on the back and front walls, low and high fireplace wall, and trim
• Honey Butter on the long walls in the kitchen, dining, and living rooms, and on the outside stairwell walls
• Sweet Maple on the tall fireplace wall
• Carbonite in the stairwells
• Scarlet Cap in the master bedroom
• Some color a bit darker than Carbonite in the study/guest bedroom (I forget the name)

A variety of sheens were used, of course. The lowest part of the low and the high fireplace wall and the trim are in satin, and the rest is in eggshell enamel. Mom thought the different sheen would be nice on the fireplace walls. I agree with her.

So anyway, I’m exhausted from the painting. I’m getting a little bit of a chest cold. And I’m ready to head back home and go to sleep. But this time it’ll be in a completely painted house, and that feels wonderful.

There are two fabulous kitties who live at Sophie’s Yarns in Center City, Philadelphia. One is a boy baby, and the other is his momma. I spent a few hours knitting there a couple of weekends ago, and the boy kitty took to me, probably because I was the only one with allergies in the room.

Here he is:

Isn’t he a cutie?

If you think that I’m a pretty dyed-in-the-wool liberal (and a wool-dying liberal, too, although I’ve only dyed wool once, when I was really young) you’d be right. I was most unhappy with the past 2 presidential elections. I’m also not very happy with the maps of Jesusland and the United States of Canada or the Fuckthesouth.com web site. I’m vaguely amused by them, but not happy with them.

That being said, I was sent a link today from an academic list that I subscribe to, and was just blown away by the fabulous use of GIS to demonstrate what’s really going on in red vs. blue United States. Check out Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of the University of Michigan.

It’s not quite so disheartening now, is it?

Hello all. I’ve just moved my blog over to Wordpress, so that means my rss feed is changing. For those of you who read me through an RSS aggregator, please change your RSS feeds to point to:

http://www.librarygrrrl.net/wordpress/wp-rss2.php

Thanks. And please keep reading - I hope to be updating a LOT more now that I’ve got a web-enabled blogging tool. While Thingamablog was good for me to use when I started blogging, it’s just not as portable as I need it to be. Thanks, Thingamablog, and may you continue to serve your other users well.

Welcome to my shiny, new blog! I installed Wordpress a while ago, and have been blogging with it until I felt confident I wanted to use it for my only blogging tool. As you can probably guess, the time has come where I’m happy to call this my Wordpress-driven blog.

More changes coming, I’m sure - especially since this template is one I downloaded and haven’t modified much. I like making things look like “me” and this doesn’t yet.

At any rate, expect to hear more from me now that I’m up and running!