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February 2002| |
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Current entry Archive February 2002 |
Sometimes, one thing leads to another; the next thing you know, you're driving a Mercedes down the Rhine valley.
We flew to Wiesbaden on Wednesday afternoon, uneventfully enough; no trouble with motion sickness, which made me happy. Mike picked up some anti-motion-sickness tablets at Boots that turned out to have three things going for them: (1) they are chewable; (2) they take effect in 20 minutes; (3) they only last 3-4 hours. This makes them much easier to manage than the kind you have to take an hour in advance (only to have your flight delayed for hours just after you take them) or that last all day (so you are woozy and fluff-headed for ages). I think we'll stick with these ones.
The planned activities for work on Thursday and Friday went well; I got to know their NetWare server, and am now ready to replace it with the new one, migrating all their data, user rights, and printers. Paul did his stuff to the wan, although he had some trouble getting the backup ISDN line installed. Between the two of us, we got the BDC working--a minor miracle considering it was shipped in August and has been powered off and out of the domain since then.
While I was at work, Mike got to wander around Wiesbaden being a tourist. The office is right on the edge of the pedestrianised Old City, so there was a lot to look at and take photos of. We got together for lunch both days, so he's now met several of the Wiesbaden office staff, and we had dinner with Paul both nights. Thursday night we were quite adventurous and tried a Persian restaurant. It was rather like Indian food but with unexpected spices. Quite nice; I'd try it again. Mike got to dust off his school German in a big way, as we tried to decipher the menus. Some places had English versions of their menus, which was helpful, but often he could work out most of what a dish was about and we could guess at the rest.
On Thursday, Walter (the office manager) asked what our weekend plans were. We'd been intending to stick around Wiesbaden, using public transportation or taxis; I was not at all comfortable with the idea of trying to drive around Germany when I don't speak German and wouldn't be able to understand the road signs. No, no, no, he said; get a car, it's easy, go across the river to Mainz, it's beautiful, go up the river to Rüdesheim, there are vinyards and castles, here are some maps. Well, he talked us into it. They even did the work of arranging a hire car for us; what more could we ask?
The car, to our surprise, was an A-class Mercedes; apparently Mercedes are utility vehicles in Germany. Even the taxis are mostly Mercedes. I quite liked it; it's a tall but otherwise small car, kind of like a Smart with a back seat. With some trepidation, I started the thing, and immediately tried to shift gears with the door handle. But after this first false start, I settled into the driving-on-the-right groove again easily enough. We had a natural division of labour: I got to drive, because it was on the right, and Mike got to navigate, because he had some hope in hell of reading the signs. Amusingly, just about all the road signage is exactly the same as in England, with some notable exceptions that we never did figure out what they meant (including, weirdly enough, one sign that showed one set of numbers for trucks and a different set of numbers for tanks; no idea what that was all about).
Saturday morning looked promising; there was hardly a cloud in the sky, and the forecast hinted at unseasonal warmth, maybe even reaching the 60s, with Sunday looking equally sunny but possibly less warm. With surprisingly little difficulty, we navigated out of Wiesbaden and onto the motorway leading to Rüdesheim. The motorway soon dwindled into a regular road that followed the banks of the Rhine, dotted with picturesque villages along the way. We spent the morning mostly in Rüdesheim itself, taking a panoramic walk through a vineyard and looking at chunky old buildings. When we left Rüdesheim and continued along the valley, we got something of a shock. I thought this country had castles! The Rhine must be one of the most hotly-contested bits of real estate on the planet. Every time we went around a bend in the river, there was another castle or two. Sometimes we could see three at the same time. Most are very old (ca. 1000-1200), some are ruinous, some have been maintained, and some are even still lived in. They're just everywhere. Eventually we stopped spluttering and just became numb. And every square inch that isn't under a castle is covered with patches of vineyard all running in different directions. I can only imagine what the Rhine valley would look like in the spring. It would be unbearable.
You can imagine the photographic mayhem that ensued. I won't be posting any photos in this entry, though, as we haven't even emptied the cameras yet. Later, later.
Outside the city, we found that people were more likely to speak little or no English. Although I was exposed to quite a lot of German vocabulary during our stay, most of it immediately fell right out of my head again. Some did stick, though, and it'll be a surprise to nobody just which words did. Let's just say that I can manage to order tea and a chocolate cake--or apple cake, or apple strudel, or apple streusel for that matter--with cream, and maybe ice cream. ("Ein tasse Tee und ein Schokoladekuchen mit Sahne und Eis, bitte!") I'll probably butcher the grammar, but I will nevertheless end up with tea and a nice little snack. Wait, did I say little? They have an agreeably civilised idea of the correct size for a piece of pie; it's more like the size of a piece of pizza.
It would have been a lot harder without Mike there, of course, because there would have been no way to acquire that vocabulary in the first place. And he got to field anything more complicated that came our way.
One fun thing we noticed wherever we went: There were Smarts everywhere! I still think they're terribly cute. They look like little roller skates with roofs. I kicked myself for not hiring one of them, but then I realised that logically they're not the most likely hire car--luggage space could be a problem.
Sunday evening came just in time; we were running out of camera memory (I forgot to bring the connector cable, stupid stupid stupid) and my feet and legs were getting very tired and sore. We got up from our last bit of cake and äpfelstrudel and headed for the airport. This was the hardest navigation we had to deal with. You already know what a tough place airports can be, even when you speak the language. Well, imagine you don't. It was easy enough to find the signs for our terminal, but there were lots of signs for "Tor" this and that and we don't know what a "Tor" is, and we didn't know the word for "rental car return". In the spirit of purest optimism, we followed signs for "Rent A Car", even though we didn't actually want to rent a car; our theory was that even if we only found the pick-up place, they could probably tell us how to get to the drop-off point. But as it turned out, it did take us to the drop-off point, so I pulled our little A-class into a parking space and that was that. But then, looking around us, guess what I saw? Smarts! Smarts everywhere! Little rental roller skates! They do rent them, practical or not! Well! If we ever do the tourist thing in Germany again, you can guess what I'm going to ask for! Well, if Mike doesn't object too loudly, that is.
At the airport, more language trouble while checking in, but we got past that and found ourselves with a bit of time to kill. We pushed our luggage cart idly around, looking at the various shops until we found the inevitable bookstore. Since we couldn't leave the cart, and couldn't bring it into the shop, we took turns watching over the luggage while the other one went into the shop. Even though most of the books were in German, we found a few anyway; we got The Xenophobe's Guide to the Americans, and another for the English, and also another Bill Bryson book (A Walk in the Woods). After a while we settled in at a typical airport restaurant for a light dinner. We giggled over our Xenophobe's Guides while we snacked, but eventually decided we were done, and went to pay and leave...
...I'll just get my wallet out of my handbag...
...Where's my handbag?
Ack!
Frantic scrambling among the carry-on bags, under the table, nearby on the seat...
No good. It's gone.
Could I have left it at the bookstore? Mike ran down to check while I, in the stupid way people do when they've lost something they just can't lose, checked among the carry-on bags one more time, as if it would suddenly have materialised there. Sinking feeling. I couldn't possibly have left it at the bookstore, there wasn't anywhere to set it down. Wait, what about the ladies' room? The hook was in a strange place, on the side wall behind the loo...Waiting for Mike to get back from the bookstore so I could go check there, knowing full well it had been about an hour by then, there was just no way it would still be hanging there, how could it be? No way, no way, no way, the hell with the cash and credit cards, what have I really lost, oh how about my Massachusetts driver's license, the palm pilot, and our one and only working key fob for our car alarm? Very short-lived stab of worse panic--passport? No, my passport and ticket for that matter weren't in it. My passport is the single most important thing I currently possess and it would be hell to get it replaced.
Mike coming back, told him the current theory, traded places while I ran off to the ladies' room. When I got there the stall in question was, not surprisingly, in use, so I couldn't check it right away (as if it would be there anyway!), but I'd hardly even had time to register that it was in use when the attendant came over. I started to say "Have you seen..." when she (incredibly!) nodded her head, said "You..." and gestured toward her shoulder, as if indicating a strap. "Yes!" I cried in amazement. "Is OK," she said, and led me to an information booth just a few feet away. They asked my name, checked it against what they'd written down, and even showed me an inventory of the cash that had been in it when it was turned in by the attendant. And suddenly, against all expectations, it was back in my hands again, without so much as a single Euro missing.
Wow. I then proceeded to shake with relief for a while.
Strange that I didn't notice it was gone for so long. Usually when I don't have it, I feel a gaping missingness that drives me half crazy. I can't imagine how I could have gone so long without even noticing.
Thus ended the handbag saga. We then had a quite ordinary and unremarkable flight back to Manchester, where the car was still there and we were even able to find it, and we arrived home without incident, at about midnight. Quite an anticlimax, eh?
That is, until I unlocked the inside front door, pushed on it, and...nothing happened. It wouldn't move. What's this? Well, we did install that draft excluder, which presses hard against the rug, so the door now requires a good solid push, but not that much, I didn't think. I pushed really hard and it gave suddenly, but only opened a little bit. Astonishingly, it had taken the carpet with it! Weird, what's that all about? I contorted my way over the pile of mail, squeezed through the narrow opening, dropped the bags and turned on the hall light so I could find out what had made it pull the carpet up like that. There were little V-shaped twists of carpet yarn everywhere, thrown as much as four feet away from the door. Goodness, could the pushing-up of the carpet have done that? Doesn't seem likely, but oh well. Then I looked up and saw...a small pile of droppings at the foot of the stairs. I called to Mike (who was still out at the car) "There's been a cat in here!" How could a cat have gotten in while we were away? Omigosh what if it's been here since we left? What if it got in while we were loading the car on Wednesday? It's been days--where is it? Why didn't it come running the second I opened the door? Could it have slipped out while I was turning on the hall light? If it is still here, why didn't it come? Wide-eyed horror: Have we locked some poor cat in the house, probably that friendly black one that always sneaks in, and killed it? Omigod omigod omigod, frantically hunting. The back door shows signs of having been opened; the linoleum is curled up in front of the door, pulled away from the floor; has that door been opened or something? No cat in the living room, but--uh oh--front curtains open! We didn't leave them open! Has someone broken in? Did a cat get in through a hole left by a break-in? Mike calls, "Are the computers still there?" Hmm, they are. So is the stereo, but wait, there's dirt and general disturbance on the stereo. There are some bits of broken glass on the stereo. Lift the curtains and--no broken windows. What is this? Well, never mind, we'll figure it all out later, where's the poor cat? Both dashing around now, senselessly looking in the same places we've already looked, wanting to find the cat, hoping not to find it. In the dining room the curtains and curtain-rod are half down and dangling from one end. Whoops, we've left the front door open all this time. Closing the front door, negotiating my way over the hump of carpet, looking down at the pile of mail and see on top of the pile a folded sheet in large block capital letters:
OUR CAT (JACK) IS IN YOUR HOUSE
It was from the neighbours two doors down, asking us to ring their doorbell when we got in.
Hmm. OK, let's slow down for a minute.
Mike went outside to get a better look at the front window, to see if one of the panes was broken. Nope, they were all intact. Wait, one has been broken--and replaced.
Ah. Now it's becoming clear. The cat was trapped in here when we left, and they broke the window to let it out, then replaced it.
Immense relief. We didn't kill the poor thing. The whole drama is over and done with.
While I was writing a note back to the neighbours, Mike found two more notes, one more frantic one reiterating that the cat was trapped in the house and asking us to contact them, and a final one explaining that, as we'd surmised, they'd had to break the window to get the cat out, whereupon the neighbour from the other side, who is a joiner (carpenter) had then replaced it, and they were terribly sorry.
Bits and pieces of the story began to assemble themselves as we thought it over. I'd had to park the car further down the road than usual on Tuesday night, so when we loaded the car on Wednesday, we were out of sight of the front door as we came and went. We'd left the door open; obviously the cat had wandered in at that point. It's not the first time he's done it; in the summer he surprised us several times by peeking around a corner when we didn't realise he had come in. We just aren't normally leaving for Germany when he does it. The little V-twists of carpet by the front door were where he'd scratched at the door and carpet, trying to get out. This had caused the carpet to pull up from the floor, so it was in the way of the door opening. He'd also clawed at the back door, pulling up the linoleum, and had brought down the curtains in the dining room. At some point he sat in the front window, and his owners had seen him while they were going by. After waiting overnight without us coming back, they couldn't think what else to do, so they broke the window. This all happened over Wednesday night and Thursday, by the dates on the various notes.
Well. We dropped our notes into the mail slots of both houses (the cat-owner and the joiner) expressing our relief that the cat was OK and apologising for trapping the poor thing in here in the first place, and promising to drop by tomorrow. We'd first thought we would do that in the morning, but then it occurred to us that it might be better to show up with bribes, so during the day today Mike planned to pick up a couple boxes of Thornton's, plus a can of sardines or something for the star of the whole affair.
It only occurred to me sometime this afternoon that our only reaction had been relief that we didn't kill the cat. We could, I suppose, have been annoyed at the disorder the cat caused, or have been indignant that the neighbours broke our window. But what else could they have done? We were glad they did.
Immediately after we got home, we went round to the cat-owning neighbours, where in fact the lady had been worried that we'd be angry about the cat, and the window. She said she'd been relieved to get our note this morning, which made it plain that we were nothing of the sort. She'd been feeling better anyway as time went on and we still didn't arrive home, because clearly they couldn't have waited for us to get home. Her worst fear was that we'd show up while they were breaking the window. "Erm, we're just breaking into your house..." The Thornton's went over well, as did the can of salmon for Jack. She wouldn't let us pay for the window, although we would have been happy to. All in all, strange circumstances under which to meet your neighbours. Still, better than if the cat hadn't survived.
From there, we went to see the other neighbours and repeated the process (but without salmon this time). Amusingly, it came out that they are blueyonder subscribers also, and they've had just as terrible a time over the last two or three months as we have, so it really isn't just us.
And for the whole rest of this evening I've been writing this diary entry. Whew. Done.
(Later) Damn, blueyonder is up but XCalibre is down! I'll have to try to post this in the morning.
Created at 23:11
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A constant source of frustration for me has been dealing with the consequences of my prolific use of that darn digital camera. We go away somewhere, I take about a billion photos, but they all need a bit of work before they're usable. Unfortunately I'm not especially good at this. Mike looks at a photo, does two or three tweaks, and suddenly it's much better than it was. I look at a photo and have no idea what to do to it. Even if I know what I don't like about it, I don't know it in the correct technical jargon. I've had access to Photoshop and similarly high-end photo editing tools for years now, but have always been quickly frustrated by their endless profusion of tools. It doesn't do you any good having hundreds of things you can do to a photo if you don't know how to use them. Would you like to see a histogram of the blue channel in this photo? You can, but then what? Mike tries to explain what he's doing, but I get impatient too quickly for this to be a practical way for me to learn about it.
Way back in August when we went to Scotland, we wandered into a bookshop (shocking, I know) and came out with just one book: Photoshop 4 Artistry. It was deeply discounted because Photoshop 4 is very old now, but the principles are unchanged, and I thought it might help me learn what those tools are, what all the technical jargon means, and maybe even what to do with these blasted photos. Annoyance at trying to fix some of the recent Wiesbaden photos led me to take the drastic step of opening the book and seeing what it had to say. Well, I remember now why we bought it. It's very good about explaining what the most powerful tools can do, and even how to use some of those tools to help understand what is wrong with a photo. It also shows the process of correcting different kinds of photos, which is helpful; you can see what they're doing and why, and how they think.
All of which might lead you to think that I'm going to report that I am now a virtuoso of photo editing. Well, actually, no. It's a huge topic. It hasn't conveyed a magical ability to look at a photo and say something like, "Clearly there's too much cyan in the grass." But it does feel very good to have begun trying to understand it.
I did do some tentative, hesitant experimentation on some of the Wiesbaden photos. I suspect the professionals, or Mike for that matter, could still draw a lot more out of them than I've managed. I assume that it will be a long, drawn-out process of tinkering, learning a bit, tinkering, and so on. This will, of course, result in a syndrome similar to Amateur Programmer's Curse--the agony of looking at code you wrote last year without fixing everything you did wrong way back then. But that's already true to an extent; most of the earliest photos I posted on this site could really benefit from re-examination. But I'm not going to do it. Not today, anyway. Plenty to do without looking for things to re-do.
Anyway, how about a photo or two from Wiesbaden? Well, from the Rhine Valley, strictly speaking. I was working during the daylight hours on the Thursday and Friday, and we spent the weekend on the Rhine, so I didn't take any photos in Wiesbaden at all.
Once we got home, we had to put a name to all these castles we took pictures of. A web search quickly turned up maps, descriptions, etc. Among the material I found was the claim that the stretch of the Rhine we visited has more castles than anywhere else in the world. Wow. We were at the castle capital of the planet and I didn't even know it at the time. Still, it does go some way toward explaining how, by the end of the second day, we could have our reactions blunted to the point where seeing yet another castle didn't get much more reaction than "Oh. Another castle. Huh."
On this map, we travelled up both sides of the Rhine, starting at the lower right corner off the map, going up to Koblenz (near the middle). Counting, there are about 22 castles we saw (we turned back before Koblenz; there are a few we missed in that direction).
Anyway.
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Rüdesheim in the morning (78 KB). |
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Burg Ehrenfels (139 KB). Just up the river from Rüdesheim, we rounded a promontory and were struck dumb by the ruins of Burg Ehrenfels. As ruins go, it's wonderfully picturesque. |
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Mausturm (Mouse Tower) (116 KB). Ehrenfels' picturesque setting is not hurt by having this toy-like castle on an island in the middle of the Rhine directly across from it. Just up the river on the opposite bank is yet a third castle. |
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St Goar (214 KB). We're now into Sunday morning. We went up the other bank of the Rhine, to see some of the castles we'd viewed from the other side on Saturday. One of our first stops was in Sankt Goar, which sports a ruined castle (Burg Rheinfels) looming over it, now with a hotel built into and alongside it. The town centre of St Goar is build on the bank of the Rhine on the flat, but the valley sides are steep, so most of the houses are perched precariously above. |
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Marksburg (132 KB). So we carry on north from St Goar, go around a bend, and... |
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Marksburg Zoomed (93 KB). Who could ask for a more perfect fairy-tale castle? Yet its Disney-esque appearance belies its age; it is apparently about a thousand years old and is the only castle along this stretch of the Rhine never to have been damaged in an attack. Undamaged it certainly looks! |
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Schönburg (63 KB). Coming back down the Rhine as the sun was setting, we walked the city wall in Oberwesel and took some pictures of its resident castle glowing in the evening light. |
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Crooked Buildings in Bacharach (136 KB). Sadly, it was only when sunset had well and truly happened that we stopped in the town of Bacharach, which turned out to be picturesque beyond belief. Here's a shot, much cleaned up but still suffering from the lack of light. The town centre was all wibbly buildings and narrow lanes and generally lacking in straight lines. Imagine how it would look drenched in morning sunlight. |
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St Goar Panorama (530 KB). Come stand with me on the parapet of Burg Rheinfels in St Goar, looking out over the Rhine at sunset. Across the river you can see the town of St Goarshausen; it strings out along the river valley like a snake. You can see vineyards on the hills, waiting for spring to come. Turn to the left and you can see a castle on the other side of the river off in the distance; it's Burg Maus. Turn to the right and you can see another one; it's Burg Katz. (Tee hee, Katz and Maus. Oh, never mind.) Before you on the river you can see the shadow of Burg Rheinfels, the castle you're standing on. It's amazing to me that I can stand on one castle and have two others within sight. This valley must be even more blood-soaked than Scotland. |
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Tuesday of this week was Pancake Tuesday, a mysterious British tradition that involves making pancakes (but they make them very thin, like crepes I guess), sprinkling sugar all over them, then sprinkling lemon juice on that, rolling the whole thing up and eating it. I've never had pancakes this way before, being more of a maple syrup kind of gal myself. We're a few days late, but today Mike made these traditional pancakes and I got to try them. I can hear your scepticism: Lemon juice?! But I have to say, somehow the whole thing works. They were messy, dribbly, sticky, and quite yummy.
Last weekend we began attacking the latticework in the hallway. Work continues this weekend. Pictures at eleven.
Created at 20:51
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The Appalachian Trail was the hardest thing I have ever done, and the Maine portion was the hardest part of the Appalachian Trail, and by a factor I couldn't begin to compute. Partly it was the heat...In the baking sun, the shadeless granite...radiated an oven-like heat, but even in the woods the air was oppressive and close, as if the trees and foliage were breathing on us with a hot, vegetative breath.
--Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods
Thanks to a weird, atavistic loyalty to my home state, I find this perversely pleasing. It seems right and proper. I mean, if Maine can be out-wildernessed by Virginia or something, things are just not right in the world.
By the way, if you haven't read the above book, you should. You really should. It is, not surprisingly, screamingly hilarious. Just ask poor Mike, who had to put up with me snortling and chortling my way through it.
Now, where was I? Oh yes, the latticework.
Tearing it down proved much easier than expected. The lattice itself was mounted on slats attached to the wall, attached with small finish nails. Rawl plugs (molly anchors, sort of) secured the slats to the plaster wall, but they apparently had some trouble getting the rawl plugs into the wall, so they drilled out enormous holes, then filled them with polyfilla (spackle), then drilled holes in that and anchored the rawl plugs that way. Most of them came out of the wall with just a gentle tug, bringing a shower of dust and the remains of the polyfilla with them. (Which comes as a bit of a surprise when you're expecting to have to apply significant force.) Then it was just a question of breaking it all up into chunks small enough to throw away, which was also easier than expected because the lattice material proved brittle and easy to break. So, in very short order, we trashed the hallway, exposing the dark orange paint underneath.
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Before (89 KB). I've recycled this photo from when my stuff arrived last year, because we didn't take a Before picture when we started ripping. In this photo you can see the latticework on the left side, although not really in its full glory; you can't see the cheesy overhang at the top, or the burnt orange colour behind it. |
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Without the lattice (102 KB). Taken Tuesday. We took off the radiator and the shelf, to make it easier to clean up around the edges and also to simplify our own wallpapering. The people who put up the lattice didn't take off the radiator; they worked around but not very far behind it. There was very old wallpaper left behind it wherever they couldn't reach to tear it off. The white stripes in the orange are where the slats were; they painted the wall orange after the slats were put up. You can see the accumulated streaks of dust where the radiator has been radiating back through the lattice. You can also see some of the pits left by the rawl plugs. Beside the door, the wallpaper top layer has already been torn off, but the backing paper is still mostly there. This photo doesn't do justice to the shade of orange involved, and I was tempted to tinker with it, but although I guarantee I could produce a truly repulsive colour, it would never be exactly like the orange really looks; so I've left it alone. |
Before we started, the hall was a cacophony of different bits of decor. There was the white lattice with orange paint behind it. There's a textured wallpaper painted yellow that starts at one side of the door and goes up the stairs. The short segment of wall between the lattice and the door was a different paper (the same as in the dining room), painted a peachy colour. There are two other short segments of wall as you head toward the kitchen; one was done in the same wallpaper as the stairs but painted peach, and the other was done in the same wallpaper as beside the door, but painted the yellow of the stairs1. I may be mixing these up a bit. I can't verify it because somewhere along the way we decided that we might as well do the other two short segments while we were at it, rather than leaving them somewhat orphaned, so it has all been torn off now.
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Here's one of the orphan segments (89 KB), after we took off the existing paper (which was especially difficult with the two cables tacked down along the edge). Note the blue and red layers. These walls all have a lot of history! Someday, someone will tear off everything we've just done, and wonder what on earth we were thinking when we did it. Of course, that someone could even be us... |
During evenings this week, we've been plugging away at the main wall: peeling off the old wallpaper remnants (behind the radiator and on a short segment of wall by the front door), filling the holes again, washing off the old wallpaper glue, and generally preparing the surface. Once it was ready we painted over it with primer, because we weren't sure whether that orange would show through the wallpaper. I've never used primer before. It's just like painting with marshmallow fluff!2
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Half papered (88 KB). This was the state of play last night. We started from the left, having reached just past the right radiator support when this photo was taken. It's white wallpaper going over white primer, so the dividing line isn't obvious, but it's there. You can probably pick out where the texture ends. |
We finished papering the corner last night, and were about to start on the other two orphan segments, but then thought better of it: should we apply primer first? That blue was rather bright and might show through, and the other segment was badly damaged; it had dinner-plate-sized polyfilla chunks, which were a much darker grey, and the lower half had been replaced with cheesy fake wood that also might have shown through, or at least the dividing line might have. So Mike put primer on them and we called it a night.
The plan from the start was to put up the wallpaper, then paint it, using a half-tin of very faint mint-green paint that Mike's mum had left over from redecorating her bathroom. The carpet is green, after all, so we thought just a hint of green should work well without being overpowering. Before committing ourselves, last night we painted a big leftover piece of wallpaper to see how the colour looked in real life. We left it overnight to have another look at it in daylight. This morning we looked at it, shrugged, and went at it.
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And here's the final result: the main wall (95 KB), and the other two segments (90 KB). |
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Whew.
Not that we're done or anything. Now there's the question of what to put there: Do we just put back what was already there, or should we mix everything up a bit? Current opinion polls indicate that most residents favour moving things around. And that's a trivial question compared to the truly horrible, painful-to-contemplate question: Should we now do the other side of the hall? Oooh, it's an awful question. The paper goes all the way up the stairs, around the corner and into a couple more orphan segments on the landing. It goes around (and into) two very tricky, deeply-set windows. It goes up to the top of the stairwell, which is at least twelve feet straight up when you're standing on the step below it. I don't even want to contemplate wallpapering from a ladder! And then there'd be the painting to do when the papering was done, which because we've used a leftover half-tin of paint, might well run out before covering that much surface area. And because it was a custom-mixed colour, we'd have some difficulty getting more of it. In fact our best bet would be to get a completely new can, remix it as close as we could, and use that from the beginning. The two would never touch, so it wouldn't matter if they didn't match perfectly.
I'm tired just thinking about it. Time to go be lazy for a while, I think.
1Interestingly, it turns out that we don't agree whether there were really two different shades of paint in use. All along, I have seen two different shades, the yellow colour and the peach colour. Mike has seen just one yellow, everywhere, all along. So all along, I've thought nothing of leaving the hall with two different colours when we were done, because it was two colours already, whereas Mike has had some question as to whether it would be a bad thing to end up with two different colours in the hall! I point to the original photo from last year to demonstrate the two different colours. The photo is not in the best lighting, but I still see two colours. Mike sees one colour.
Unfortunately, we have already destroyed the evidence.
2It's very sticky, and not water-based, so when it came time to wash my brush, all I did was transfer the primer from the brush to my hands, so I looked like a mime. Even with soap, it didn't want to wash off. But Mike knew a trick that worked: Pour a glob of soap into hands, then pour granulated sugar on top of it. Work into hands. Presto, no more primer. Well, mostly.
Created at 19:49
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Simon has already found a new job. That didn't take very long. He and his wife are taking two weeks holiday in a nice semi-tropical climate before he takes up his new duties.
Linda always says that living well is the best revenge.
Last night, between bouts of standing around gazing at our handiwork, we took another look at the rest-of-the-hall question. Painful as the idea may be, we've tentatively concluded that, well, we really ought to do it. It's not as if we're overly fond of the current yellow colour anyway. What we will probably do is just paint the existing wallpaper, rather than re-wallpaper. This greatly reduces the magnitude of the task.
That leaves only the paint question. We're going to take a sample of the current custom paint to B&Q and see what the prospects are for getting a new tin of the same (or very similar) colour. That's a much safer course of action than trying to finish the whole job with this tin. It'd be awful to run out partway through. We'd thought to do this tonight when I got home, but we've both turned out too tired and Monday-ish to be bothered. Maybe tomorrow.
If we do get a reasonable match on the paint, there's then only the question of when to begin. I'm away this weekend (second trip to Wiesbaden), and the following weekend is Mike's birthday party, so it might be difficult to get the job done before then. But if we wait till after the party, we'd probably lose our momentum.
Created at 22:17
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Something of a milestone: Today I migrated Andrew, the Exchange administrator, off Exchange. His was the last mailbox still in it. The Wiesbaden migration is yet to be done, but they have POP3 mailboxes from an ISP, not Exchange mailboxes in the internal system; so I'm going to migrate them into GroupWise, but not out of Exchange, if you follow me.
So now there is only the proper disconnection and shutdown of the Exchange system left to be done.
Meanwhile the company reported quarterly losses yesterday, and its stock promptly took a 50% dive because after Enron, everyone is jittery any time any company reports a loss, so for all I know, we'll get bought out tomorrow...by a company that uses Exchange. Heh.
Created at 22:44
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