Loneliness and chemical burns

So Belle is touring Europe for work and I am left holding down the fort. Its easy to forget how much other people make your day to day life easier and more fufilling than rolling through life alone. I made belle a promise that when she gets back from Europe I will have the rest of the paint stripped from the bedroom wood trim, and maybe have the walls primered. I have been stripping (lead?) paint every night until my hands can no longer take the chemical burns and am on pace to have the project done.

I am awed by the strength and motivation my father had while when he would stay up to the early hours of the morning working on projects. Recently I have found myself putting in extra hours both on the job and at home. I falter where my father succeeded in his extended work days. After pulling a 30ish hour 'shift' writing 'critical' code a couple weeks ago I returned home around noon with belle. Unline PaGyver my temper was short and I was overly affected by my exhaustion, I snapped at belle while trying unsuccessfully to get some fast food. I don't know how my father did it, but he worked tirelessly on countless projects and never once in my mind can I recall him being in the weakened state I was in. He would work to 2-4 in the morning and then get up at 6 to cook me my standard pancake breakfast. I think I am starting to understand how this was possible. I find myself much more motivated to not necessarily appease belle but to surprise and delight her. I think that love is a strangely strong driving force. I feel that I could continue to strip paint off walls for far longer than I could write code, because the end goal is satisfying someone I care for rather than a slightly larger than normal paycheck. 

Belle will be back in June and I know the wood will be stripped by her return. The same way PaGyver knew he would finish the antique baptist church stained glass windows on time. Each chemical burn is a step forward, we are up to the mid room window and she is not yet 1/4 through her trip. The race is on and I will win.

Sticky fingers.

Lots has happened so it is about time for an update.

Did some mini projects during the week which included playing with fire, which has always been a hobby of mine. I burned the paint off of the brass chandelier in the office and re-wired it. It was not too bad to get the paint off, and we left some of the tarnish and burnt paint on for the distressed steampunk feel we are going for with the office. Rewiring it was quite a pain because of how the thing was built, in my confusion I ended up soldering it together 3 times, then running late live wired it in with rubber gloves on. Fun times.

Sunday was family day with Belle's mom, uncle and grandfather coming over and MaGyver coming down. We did the standard tour for the fam and before hitting original mike's for dinner I prototyped the first couple tiles for the penny floor. I had built a jig that was supposed to let us resin in a 1'x1' tile at a time, but in testing that simply did not work. I had also hand laid a tile with pennies and a resin top coat which came out much better. Based on this we decided to forgo laying tiles and simply penny over the existing floor. As of tonight, we have laid and coated about 2% of the floor, and it looks really good. Pics to come (I don't want to touch my phone with such sticky fingers.)

Once the floor is done, the office will be complete, just need to shuffle furniture around after that.

In addition to that we also removed the old in window AC unit, which was very gross. The kitchen looks noticeably better.
Scraped some more wall paper off the bedroom walls.

Meeting more of Belle's family was very cool, all very nice people (Hi!). Grandpa had some very interesting stories and it was very neat seeing him relate to some of the older parts of the house. I wonder if after another generation the nostalgia of seeing a push button lightswitch or a raised tank 'crapper' will be forever lost. I enjoy those details of the house for their difference and uniqueness, and it was interesting to see someone to whom they were so ordinary and familiar.