Sunday, February 18, 2007

Today's construction tip

Doors are not interchangeable.

You'd think they would be, with standard spots for the hinges already stamped into the wood, doorways being of uniform size, and so forth, but they are not.

We were chagrined to discover this after we took 7 doors off their hinges to paint them, without labeling which came from which doorway. We were lucky and it turned out I only needed to swap two after re-hanging them; it was a close fit, but not quite right. The rest were subtly different, but not so subtle that you couldn't narrow things down a lot after looking closely.
It's been a long couple of weeks painting the basement. Come home, eat dinner, put the kids to bed, paint until 11 or 12 or even 2:30. Get up, go to work, repeat. We're basically done now except for some touch-up, and I've taken a solemn vow to never paint more than one room at a time.

Meanwhile, my grandmother was in a car accident, and for a while it looked like she might not make it. Enough so that my mom flew out to help her recover and, well, in case this was her last chance to see her.

I also have two presentations coming up at PyCon this week that I've had to squeeze in time to prepare for, as well as prepping and shipping a new Carnage Blender server.

So, like I said, it's been a long couple of weeks. I'll try to get back to noticing cute kid stories next week.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

The Gunny Bag Cometh

Matthew didn't clean his room Monday. Rachel told him he had to clean it, and he could come out when he was done, and he spent the afternoon playing and throwing tantrums. Tuesday was more of the same. So Tuesday after I got home Rachel upped the ante: one hour to clean, and then The Gunny Bag was going to come eat everything left on the floor. (Clothes eaten by the gunny bag would be exchanged for toys of the gunny bag's choosing. The gunny bag likes toys better.)

59 minutes later Matthew was done. The gunny bag went hungry this time.

It's been a few months since the last time we did this. Last time the gunny bag got a full belly of toys. Apparently Matthew still remembers.

In other news, we've decided that when Matthew loses his temper and starts breaking things, he's going to get spanked. Leaving him to the consequences of not having what he broke just isn't caustic enough to sear real regret into him.