Tiny whimpers at the door turned into larger ones. It was 7:45 a.m. and Willow needed to go out, so James stumbled into shorts and a shirt and took her out. I was determined to wait it out until the alarm rang, but nature screamed suddenly, and that was the end of that. Sorry, seven hours of sleep, can't make it today.

It was a bit after nine when we arrived at the Farmer's Market (copped the last parking space) and it was already too warm for me! We bought a cucumber, grape tomatoes, some fingerling potatoes, a beef stroganoff pot pie, some chocolate cherry cashew cookies for a dessert, chicken salad, goat cheese, peaches, that luscious Pine Street Market bacon, and James got a little sweet potato tart. Capra Gia had two young goats with them, and they were already lying sleepy in the shade. Leashed dogs trotted, panting, around us, including a darling Italian greyhound hiding under a greyhound of the same black-and-white pattern.

The Artists Market was this morning as well, so we walked along Mill Street to and from the farm stalls surrounded by pretty earrings, necklaces, paintings, and other geegaws, and some huge firepits guaranteed to last a lifetime.

One lady at the Farmer's Market proper had flowers, including marigolds and begonias, both which my Uncle Guido used to plant in our front yard flowerbed every year. She also had geraniums, which we used to buy when we went to the cemetery, because they were the flowers we could afford. Made me think of Mom.

When we got home we had to start work.

Earlier in the week, James had gotten out of work about noon. He'd had his lunch, and in walking back to the kitchen, noticed the Ikea shelf we'd bought two years ago to put up in the kitchen over the baker's rack to get the items we use seldom, like the stock pot and the sugar, out of the way of what we use all the time, like the Bisquik and the rice. He thought "Hey, that shouldn't take me long to put up," collected the drill, the measuring tape, a pencil, wall anchors, and other supplies, unloaded all the containers from the baker's rack, moved it back, and set to work.

When I got in he said, "There's a small hole in the wall."

And no shelf, sadly. He'd assembled the shelf, measured, gotten it level, drilled the holes, and put the wall anchors in, top and bottom. Then he screwed the shelf into the two top wall anchor holes. The shelf looked a little off to him, so, before he set it in permanently by screwing in the two bottom screws in the two bottom wall anchors, he gave the shelf a small tug to make sure it was fastened securely.

Well, one wall anchor never deployed at all, and popped straight out of the wall leaving a 3/4 diameter hole. The screw had fed into the other wall anchor at an angle making it unable to deploy, and that pulled out of the wall inflicting collateral damage, leaving the drywall looking like someone had punched it with a fist. Sigh.

So we had to go to Lowes today to buy a patch kit; we found a nice one, with screening, drywall compound, and a putty knife all included (we bought some extra compound just in case). As we came out of Lowes they were giving away free hot dogs and water, so sometimes there is such a thing as a free lunch. :-)

Then we unloaded the baker's rack again, enough so that we could move it, and James had the two holes patched in a trice. We just had to wait thirty minutes, which, of course, I used to work on the laptop. Installed HTML Pro for web pages, Paint Shop Pro 5 (I don't do anything complicated on the laptop; if I want to, I can install Gimp for that) for images, VLC to play video, and Audacity to try to record off the BBC (but I can't because for some reason it picks up background sounds in the room, too; it's like a microphone is open), and WinRAR. The only thing I had trouble with was, of all things, Windows Media Player, and that was only because, when I had gone into the install panel to delete Windows items I didn't want, like Outlook Express and Front Page, I'd accidentally deleted Windows Media Player, too. Once I re-initialized it, it was fine.

The wireless signal still drops out occasionally, but I believe this is the router's fault because it happens on my desktop and on the netbook as well. To keep it from kicking me offline, I usually have BBC's iPlayer running Radio 3 (classical music) in the background.

Anyway, this stuff didn't dry in thirty minutes. Or sixty, for that matter. And when it was almost dry, we discovered the screening for the hole was showing, so I put another thin coat of the compound on it. The thing about this stuff is that it goes on a bright, bright pink, like a bougainvillea flower, and fades to white when dry. The second coat on the hole is fading, but it's still pink. Dang it. So this project probably won't be done until tomorrow.

We hope to cut our losses and use the two wall anchors still in the wall for the top part of the shelf, and use some heavy plastic wall anchors for the bottom. This means the shelf will be a foot lower than I wanted it (just high enough that the stock pot just cleared the ceiling), but I figure we can use the top rack of the baker's rack for the smaller containers (pioneer porridge, kosher salt, steel cut oats, etc.), and with the stock pot off the baker's rack shelf, if the rice container doesn't fit on the taller shelf, it can be on the rack, and the shelf can still hold the flour and Bisquik, which only James uses and can reach, and the sugar and the Splenda, which I use so seldom it won't be a hardship to pull up the stool to get them.

Sigh. This is, of course, if the other two metal wall anchors do their job. Either that or we'll have another patching job next weekend.

[Later: Boy, did this turn into a comedy of errors! The drywall patching compound finally dried and we went to paint it, only to realize there wasn't a proper wall-painting paintbrush in the house! I finally pulled out my inch-wide craft brush that I use for painting big projects like shelves, and painted all the places that were patched, as well as a bunch of marks on the wall. We had gotten rid of a lot of speckly food spatters by washing down the wall with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, which works superbly, but some of the scuff marks would not come off. Plus there were places around the doorway where the paint had worn off the metal corners of the doorjam, so those are now covered. The paint went on light, got darker, then hour by hour lightened until by the time we went to bed you couldn't tell what had been patched. Small comfort for a disappointing afternoon.]

Labels: computers, food, frustration, home improvement, shopping

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