Feb 2 - no scraping required

Sandy picked up the paint yesterday and we got started in the afternoon. By wine-time, we'd completed all the edging. Bathrooms are awkward places to work, especially if they have cathedral ceilings requiring an extension ladder. That's the case in the master bath.

The good thing about indoor painting is that there generally is no scraping required -- much less prep than outside painting. George has his hands full doing the outside job on his place in Phoenix. Another good thing about indoor painting is that you're not weather-restricted. Of course the bad thing about indoor painting is the smell, but this paint is extremely quick drying -- you can re-coat in an hour -- so the smell went away quickly.

I said that indoor painting is not weather restricted ? Well, that's not quite the case. Had the weather been good, I wouldn't have been working in the bathroom.

With drying time that fast, work with the roller -- especially with ceilings that high -- could be problematic. I have a pole long enough to reach a 14-16 foot ceiling, but there isn't enough room in the bathroom to bring the roller down to the bottom ... hmmm. That will be this morning's challenge.

Painting notwithstanding, I need to get out for a bike ride today. Hopefully I'll have time to do one coat with the roller before rolling out on the bike. If the weather holds I'll ride tomorrow as well, take Friday off, then I have the 300k on Saturday.

Sandy's been doing really well with the club/gym or whatever you want to call it. She's gone every weekday since she started, taking the weekend off. There is only one guy there to provide advice though, so she's thinking of engaging a "personal trainer" for a few sessions so that she gets the most out of her time. She's wise ... wiser than me. I know that I would do better in my biking if I did some sort of interval and cross training. Ken Mercurio had engaged a personal trainer when he prepped for the ride across the country. He never met the fellow face-to-face, it was all by remote control. If Sandy engages this person, it will be in person -- she's at the club MWF.

I cleaned up the results of my mangrove trimming, cutting up into smaller pieces and piling at the road. While I was at that, I also did some palm-frond trimming at the road and picked up the results of some earlier palm trimming by the mangroves. By the end of the day the sun came out, perhaps giving us a taste of today's weather. Right now it's cool -- 52F -- but supposed to hit 63F -- not overly warm but I'll take it. Weather for Saturday will be similar, by the looks of things ... whew, no rain ... knock on wood.

We had tuna for dinner with rice and peas. A much simpler meal than the day before, we're still clearing out that cholesterol. I didn't touch the pizza in the fridge, opting instead for a salmon sandwich. I don't know if Sandy had any of her leftover Carbonara ... somehow I doubt it.

If we were up north I'd probably put that pizza out on top of the boathouse for the squirrels. Can they get elevated cholesterol levels ? Would I end up with a local squirrel population with diabetes and prone to heart attacks ? Somehow I think not. Heck, look at the bears -- they are so packed with fat by the Fall but then work it all off by Spring. Have they never heard the bad things about extreme diet & binge cycles ? Oh -- I know -- it's because in the wild they eat "good cholesterol" -- fish, with Omega 3; nuts and berries -- natural fructose not high fructose corn syrup -- I wonder if eating pizza and/or garbage from the dump gives you bears with a shorter life span ... ??

Speaking of high fructose corn syrup -- yogurt is good for you, right ? Check the ingredients for these "fruit on the bottom" -- it's not all fruit. Yup, high fructose corn syrup. Yogurt is supposed to be tart, that milk lactose having been converted to lactic acid -- I guess that the fruit is sweet, but not sweet enough. I did manage to get some of my yogurt made, although it took longer than usual to "cook". It seems that this time I did find a variety (Danone) with live bacteria, but not as many as one might expect. I bought two small plain and two small with blueberries (and, upon later inspection, the aforementioned corn syrup).

I made a few more re-connections yesterday, these via email/facebook, catching up with Doug Pole, Arlene Ouimette and Alnasir Samji. It doesn't take long to amass many friends with facebook and being able to find people and send them messages that don't get caught in a spam filter is a useful thing. I still have a number of requests out there to people who haven't noticed them yet -- likely facebook users at one point who have not kept up with it. Doris Guymon is one of those, but she's otherwise occupied at this point.

Well, I've completed another blog. As usual, it's filled with painful detail, too wordy, no substantive content, no pictures ... Oh -- one more thing that I did yesterday was collect all the 2009 photos out of "recent" and move them into 2009. Recent is now quite short.

Onward, still ...