Friday Free for All

Happy Friday!

We’re getting ready to head for Richmond this weekend for a three-day volleyball tournament.  It was during last year’s Richmond tournament, you may recall, that I visited the Poe Museum on that gentleman’s 200th birthday — but this year, I’ve got nothing quite so exciting planned (though I will point out that the Poe 24 Hour Birthday Bash begins at the museum tonight at midnight, with a seance at 2:00 a.m. Dress accordingly.)  There’s lots of sitting around between matches, so I’m hoping to finish off Stephen King’s massive Under The Dome. And yes, I’m enjoying it very much, thank you.

On the homefront, we’re under a cloud of dust as our ever-reliable handyman works to divide our somewhat enormous laundry room in half to create a kitchen pantry on one side, and a cozier laundry room on the other.  Doing so involves cutting a new arched opening from the kitchen, replumbing 60-year-old pipes (always a crapshoot in our house) and replacing the Hoover-era wiring.

It’s one of those small things that we think will make a big difference — at the moment, we really have no pantry space to speak of.  When we were redoing the 1950s-era kitchen when we moved in back in 2003, we took bad advice from the Home Depot kitchen planner, who convinced us we would love having a pantry with roll out shelves.  “It makes it SO much easier to find things,” he told us.

Wrong.

Problem is, if you stack even one can on top of another, as you pull open the shelf, Newton’s law forces the cans to topple.  So it’s completely useless to store anything other than cereal boxes and bags of chips. We’re looking forward to having a place with stationary shelves where we can stack pretty much anything and everything.

Finally, for those of you wondering what’s happening on the Project Blue Harvest side of things . . . well, things are still moving.  As usual, I can’t say much until everything finally firms up — and I know it seems this has been going on forever, but when it all comes together, I’ll explain everything.  Really.

Have a good holiday weekend.