Cimorene

As long-time readers are aware, Wax and I have been cat divorced for what feels like forever* (in this case, since we brought Sipuli home last September), in a house ( divided. )

Tristana's journey: Tristana would initially not come near the gate at all; then she would gradually creep closer but run away and hide at any sign of movement. ( It was agonizingly gradual, and it's been over six months, but as of about a week and a half ago, she is not afraid at all. )

Sipuli's journey: So Tristana has made a lot of progress, and will stay sitting right next to the gate now even when Sipuli gets excited and rattles it or bounces off it a bit. But now the problem is Sipuli. After her first reaction of getting over-excited - usually like, one bounce - she typically has a quick spurt of intense regret and self-doubt, and frequently retreats, sometimes all the way into the other room. It seems that she has learned that her over-excitedness has something bad associated with it, but she doesn't understand what about it is wrong, so she will leave the gate while Tristana is still sitting right there peering through at her like "Where are you going?"

They have sat quite close on opposite sides of the gate looking at each other, neither one freaking out, I'd say about three times in the last week and a half, though. They still haven't sniffed and greeted each other, but I think it is probably not far away now. And then when they do they can be introduced on leashes in the same space!!!!!!!



This was last weekend, the second time they did it. And these are sketches I did after waxjism said "They're so Kiki and Boba!"

* But before that since I think 2022 because of Anubis, with a couple of weeks of breaks here and there.

Here's the finished dresser!



Wax and I glued and clamped one of the interior rails, glued the front feet back on, and made a serious attempt to glue in the one board that keeps falling out of the bottom of the middle drawer. I mixed a darker shade of green milk paint, which was more pigment than advisable and a huge pain to paint with. But it was all worth it! After that I lightly sanded along the edges with 150 grit sandpaper, vacuumed up the dust, and covered it with a coat of hemp oil, which darkened the color to this, and which will gradually harden into a protective coat over the next month.

After waxjism's suggestion that we use this single roll of wallpaper (Pihlgren & Ritola Atomi in discontinued green) in this alcove, I got enthusiastic about decorating the upstairs landing. I keep makeup and skincare routine stuff on top of this dresser usually, because it's often easiest to see here at the big mirror I posted about Saturday. Making the dresser coordinate makes more of a focal point of this alcove.

I didn't realize, when we were telling the electricians what to do in the bathrooms, that if you skip the standard medicine cabinet with its ugly built in light and replace it with a cute retro mirror you won't have enough light to apply eyeliner in the bathroom mirror anymore. It turns out that the wisdom is that good bright light from beside the mirror is needed; the centered globe light above the downstairs powder room mirror creates disorienting shadows, not that anyone would be trying to apply makeup there usually.

The upshot of all this is that I need another mirror there over the dresser with one wall sconce on either side of it, but I'm having trouble getting the right lamps. They have to be the kind of wall lamps that plug in, and they have to fit the spot, which turned out rather 1960s although my concept for the whole upstairs in general is 1970s. There's always a drawback in vintage lights that they typically have old-style ungrounded plugs, but I haven't found anything even similar to my vision in newer production. Oh, there are various things that look like they could've been made in the 60s and 70s, but it's always the wrong bit of the decade. Mod won't work (like our kitchen light), space age won't work (like our living room and dining room lights, although the rooms are basically anchored in 1950s aesthetics because the house was built in 1950): a hint of midcentury traditional is needed. I guess I'll keep haunting tori.fi (Finnish Craigslist sort of) for the next month or so.

 




L-R:

§ Medicine cabinet in situ in the downstairs bathroom (or powder room or half-bath or toilet or WC, depending on your dialect and culture), in Uula's furniture paint, manually mixed with powdered pigments (the wall mural in Uni Posca paint marker topcoated with spray lacquer);

§ the kitchen stepstool (Ikea Bekväm) with gray graphite milk paint and furniture wax on the legs and Uula's stinky trim oil paint in painter's trim white on the seat and step;

§ the antique stool that I compulsively sanded and discovered three different old coats of green on, hence the milk paint on it has been slightly sanded to reveal a bit of that before sealing with Coloria Öljyvaha (turned out nice but the product turns out to not be good for milk paint, as it tends to dissolve it and move the pigment around as you apply it - luckily I wanted this stool antiqued); before pic in this post

§ the kitchen bench, made by Wax's granddad for her mom's kitchen when she was a little kid, glued and repaired by Wax and painted by me in Uula's furniture paint in the color Ohra (barley). I haven't made the proper cushion yet, so it's adorned with a couple throw pillows. The color matches the kitchen china cabinet (actually vintage, actually aged linseed oil paint) pretty well, which is what we aimed for. before pic in this post

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I never found slip-on Vans that I liked enough to buy, and definitely none nearly as cool as these tiger-print ones that I happened to grab the last pair of in Wax's size.

Eventually I got a cheap pair of solid-colored slip-ons to wear until I find some cool enough Vans, but the plainness was getting me down; hence this Uni Posca paint marker design (beloved of graffiti artists and customizers, great pens). (I drew the designs in April and I painted the shoes over a month ago, but I just got around to the waterproofing spray.)



Also here's a kitty inside the play tunnel in an armchair.

My wife was moved to make a post about the unexpected deluge of would-be tenants to replace our tenant who gave a month's notice. Apparently there is areal shortage of rental housing in town. Personally, I was hoping the fact there's only one bedroom (and that the whole flat is only 51 m² - 549 ft²) would have put off some people, like the ones with children, but Wax already talked to 3 who were still excited anyway, and tragically they all seem pleasant, so we're definitely not looking forward to telling anybody no. Also we can't show anybody the flat for at least a week; it's currently full of boxes as well as the tenant's junk, and her normal state of living is even more cluttered and messy than ours. We're gonna have to call and talk to them all again once she's moved some stuff.

In a burst of energy sparked by inability to do anything about this situation yet, I made a heroic effort and managed to squeeze even more recycling into piles of bags and boxes awaiting the return of the van (it's nightmarish. There's Leaning Towers of Recycling dotted around the front of the house). I was kind of surprised they fit. But I was able to clear the counter enough to completely take everything off it and scrub it down with a magic eraser. I'm thinking we will actually oil the butcherblock now, something you're supposed to do every six months but which we haven't done since October 2020. Butcherblock is beautiful, but I do REALLY wish we'd got the whole counter out of stainless steel. There's nothing like avoiding the necessity of logging into a government employment website to stoke enthusiasm for oiling butcherblock!

And in all the subsequent excitement, I nearly forgot that Snookums had his first meeting with rain today!

We don't take the cats out when it's raining, but I didn't realize it had started raining when I put the leashes on them today. We found out when I opened the outer door, and I tried to just turn around, but Snookums wasn't sure what he was looking at and he hesitated, and then demanded to have the door opened again. So I opened it again and tried to point out that it was wet out there. He took a couple of steps onto the stoop and then... ran away from the door instead of towards it. He stopped at the bottom of the steps, but then when he found out it was still raining on him he ran away another few yards and stopped again. The third time he finally figured out how to run back towards the house and darted between my legs, entangling them in the leash so that I teetered on one foot and ended up losing my clog and putting the foot down bare and getting gravel stuck to it. So once I did manage to catch the cat and carry him inside, I had to walk quite carefully.

Meanwhile he was deeply offended that he was STILL being rained on even while in my arms and when I put him down inside he was still extremely dismayed. He stomped around yelling about it for a while, then went upstairs to tell Wax about it loudly, in her face, and I had to drop my recycling and come rescue her. He needed to be firmly hugged for quite a while before he got over it.

Also here is a chunk of the lettering I was inspired to do based on popular memes from Tumblr.

This dishwasher nonsense went like this:

1. The dishwasher didn't drain after the cycle a week ago last Friday and displayed the 'not draining' error. We bailed it out by hand and cleaned the filters and pump housing as instructed, then plugged it back in and turned it on.



2. We ran a load of dishes and got the not draining error again. However, the dishwasher had in fact drained when we looked in it and the stuff was clean. We unscrewed the outtake pipe from the under-sink trap and plumbing-snaked it. We didn't get much water or any evidence of blockage, so we hooked it back up.



3. But it started working again anyway.



4. It worked from Monday-Saturday, then yesterday (Saturday) gave the same error again. We found no problems in the filters, so we unhooked the drain pipe, but there was no water stuck in it, so we didn't use the plumbing snake. We just hooked it back up and turned it on.



5. But it started working again anyway.



6. ?!

I gueeeesss there might be some sort of sensor issue?????????

I am not cool with this becoming a pattern.

Wax says the cost of the repairman's labor is usually more than the cost of a new dishwasher, but given that it would be a cheaper dishwasher and this one came with the house and is a Miele and isn't even that old but IS out of warranty, maybe fixing it would still save money because it could presumably work longer AND better than its hypothetical replacement? I'm not cool with having to make this decision, either.

These aren't actually my thoughts, per se. They're just bits of the conversation between waxjism and me that tickled my fancy and that I then made into lettering.




Wax's been rewatching Roswell for like a week because she pauses every minute or two to type notes about it, like liveblogging, but on her phone, which obviously takes a lot longer. Earlier today she watched sixteen minutes of 3x01 in about two and a half hours. I suggested she post some of it already because she would surely have like 45 pages by the time she finished season 3, but she was shocked and horrified: "I'm not making these to POST. These are for ME." (Some of this with the sound on, some of it wearing headphones, so I have observed a certain amount.)

Wax's favorite way to engage fannishly with film is to read other people's recaps, reactions, and reviews. She used to spend all her time at TWP when she watched a show. So I didn't think it was that weird for her to be entering recap (reaction? liveblog?) fandom, but since she currently hates to be perceived, it actually makes perfect sense that she's writing the world's most detailed recaps for herself, just to pore over.

One of the first things several people said to me was that acute lower back pain means I should not lift things without a back brace on. Now, to be clear, I was holding something when the stabby pain happened, but I was bending only slightly, at the hips and not the waist, and the thing I was holding wasn't heavy enough to even register with me, and I am not strong. It was a little plastic tray with about six small flowerpots in it, like the size of soup bowls I guess? So like, sure, there was SOME bending and there was SOME lifting, but at the same time, I'm pretty sure it was neither the weight nor the angle of that particular tray of flowers at fault. There was probably an injured or cramped muscle or something that was at the end of its rope before it decided to spasm.

I was looking at my Call Ikea icon (I love the style of Ikea instruction guy illos, but also, it's just so hilarious how happy this guy is to be on the phone to Ikea) the other day and felt inspired to illustrate, in Ikea instructions style, this directive:''



Also then the other day Pinterest showed me this hilarious historical print of a Mr. Ellar who performed the role of Harlequin in a harlequinade play... apparently the play itself called Mother Shipton, although Mother Shipton was herself a harlequinade character as well as subgenre of harlequinades. Going by this drawing, though, the outfit looks rather like a ballet costume. It probably isn't a ballet though? At least it's quite some time before George Barbier's iconic drawings of Nijinsky as Harlequin.



...and somehow the two collided in my brain and I drew this as well. This drawing is just also relevant to the pictures, not to the point of this post.



So anyway, I DID buy a back brace to try... but it lasted less than 2 hours. I even put a merino singlet on under it because I had read that they were probably sweaty, but like... my hips are so much wider than my ribcage that it just slides up all the time? And also it was so hot I was starting to feel queasy, but all that and it wouldn't even firmly support the part of my back that was sore... well. Nope.

I googled them again, and it seems like there are different sort of lower braces that go around the hips and they are intended for sacroiliac joints I guess? And the others seem like... some of them just are so wide that I guess they're thinking it can't ride up at all, but overall, most of them have the same basic concept. And I guess if it's wrapped firmly around the narrow part of the waist it will get the lumbar spine. But like... the belt thingy was significantly less snug over the part of my back that was sore and there didn't seem to be any way to tighten it so it would be, because it was just too wide but it's more or less just a long tapered stripe? I guess there are some more high tech solutions that do follow the curves of the waist and they start to more and more closely resemble, well, corsets. And cost a lot more. IDK.

Our household's quotes of the month saved on our calendar, as continued from 2019 after the ignominious failure last year due to calendars getting lost in the move.

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And for the first year ever, I spent today lettering all of these. Why? ?¿?

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It's time to make a second backup copy of my important documents and my music and photo collections! I have had multiple backups before, but I sort of fell out of the habit recently in all the confusion. I forgot how long that took - it's been copying 3 hours now from the hdd to the new Avengers Tower external. In fact, for the last few years I've mostly been leaving my photos in Google Photos because I keep not getting around to culling the bad shots and downloading them, but I'm trying to fix that too. I want to have local copies.

I finalized a lettering design that says "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing", intending to order it on a shirt to wear to the jazz cafe, but when it came down to it I couldn't decide what color and type of shirt and didn't order one. Finally I realized that I don't really want more tshirts per se - I have a large tshirt collection; if anything I feel like I have trouble getting around to wearing my favorites - I just want to advertise all the stuff I love, so I ordered a bunch of stickers and buttons instead. I couldn't think of very many things to plaster with stickers, so most of them are on the covers of my notebooks, including my own design here!



One of Tristana's funniest characteristics is that she loves watching while the litterbox is cleaned. She always comes running in response to the sound, like in this video. She was pretty sleepy yesterday, though, so she mostly just watched. Sometimes she climbs right in the box and gets thoroughly in the way.