Happy New Year, all! I hope you saw in the new year happily. I did, with Handsome Son coming over and lugging stuff around and to the dumpster, and generally helping, as well as claiming a couple of things I promised him.
Then we had a great dinner of pumpkin sausage soup, then fritters and peas, and finally a great apple rum raisin crumble. There was farm produce throughout, apples from local tree, maple syrup from Mittens trees, pumpkin from farm.
We brought in the new year early, he needing to go off on his own plans, with a nice prosecco brut, and declared it a very good time.
Yesterday was divided between getting started at all, and weaving up a storm in the studio, for which go here if you want to see.
I have completed both my New Year's resolutions, no need to get all carried away with ambition, namely to update my copyright notice to read the correct year, and to predate my checks with the same idea, so that by the time I write further checks, I'll be used to the right year.
And my prospective car buyer came over on another inspection, is interested, will decide in a few days, fine by me. We had a lovely conversation about art, freecycling, cars, language learning -- he's Filipino Chinese, has Filipino, Chinese and English, and is relearning Mandarin.
He asked to come in and see my art, really intrigued by it, and interested in watercolor painting himself. Very interesting man, full of family anecdotes and gentle complaints about his inlaws. So it's more than just selling a car. He grasps that the social links are good, too, with the business taking place at the same time! And I finally found out why he has a Filipino first name, which seems Spanish, and a Chinese last one. Parents from Fukien province, he was born in the Philippines.
It occurred to me just now that he was my first footer! old New Year's tradition, that the first person to cross your threshold in the New Year, usually right after midnight, has to be a dark haired man. Since HS had left well before, he didn't first foot this year. So I will have good luck this year anyway, since C. is dark haired, yay.
So it came to pass that Handsome Son was in dire need of wardrobe space, he having filled his clothes closet with sundry other items or vital importance, and I sent away for a clothes hanging system thing to give him as a present.
Faced with the prospect of having to assemble such a thing, he reorganized his place, made plenty of room for his good clothes, suitable for job interviewing, to hang without being squashed up, and I had this thing on my hands.
So either send it back or make it work for me. There's a long concatenation of items here, to wit: one large very good electronic keyboard, not used by me ere eons, complete with all the works and the stand to put it on, portable and just fine, in search of an owner. So I emailed an old freecycle friend to see if he had any ideas. He works with church groups and all kinds of people who need stuff.
This keyboard had to come out of the place where I planned on putting the assembled wardrobe clothes hanging thing, because there was another concatenation here, too: I would like to get rid of the clumsy computer station thingie which holds my laptop, scanner and printer, and takes up room in the spare bedroom beyond its scenic value.
Soooooo, if I could assemble this clothes thing, and install it in the walk in closet, and hanging part can house clothes, and the small shelves at one end could house the computer and its friends, and be plugged in just around the corner, freeing up space in the room for other better items. Or just space.
Duncan slept through it all. You see him on the bed guarding my scarf. He was wondering about these concatenations, in case they involved cats.
So the afternoon was spent banging and practicing vocabulary and studying tiny multiparted diagrams which were in English only, what a relief, and using my handy rubber mallet to make the metal things fit snugly into the plastic things, worked a treat. Except for a couple of times when I got a thing snugly fitted in backward, the kind of thing that can happen to anyone.
And here it is, waiting for me to remove that shelf to the left and enable it to snug into that wall, after I've moved a lot of stuff, that is. And got someone to help me remove the shelf.
While this was happening, freecycle friend got back to me to say yes he had a taker for the keyboard, and did I know anyone wanting to sell an old Honda but not as old as his 95? aha, I wondered if this was the next home for my old beater, since Caesar is a crack mechanic on his own cars and could probably do the doings for a lot less than the garage charges, for himself. Leaving me free to sally forth for a new one. Well, at least I need the new one before I can part with the old one, but you get the gist.
So, keyboard waiting in the front hall, me waiting with bated breath, to see if the afternoon has turned out to be pretty successful all in all. Not bad for a rainy old day.
