Mon Nov 17 09:22 EST 1997 Weekend Update: November 14-16 P.S. My grandfather turned 96 this past Saturday. ------------------------------------------------- Winter in New England has arrived, dumping several inches of cold, icy, crunchy, hard-to-manage snow in my area. I started the weekend out with an attitude problem and snow was just an added bonus. Joy has been wanting to redo the living room since we moved in. The wallpaper in there was large and flowery, quite victorian, but woefully mismatched to our furniture. We hemmed and hawed over the approach to take for months and months. We thought that the easiest thing to do - if the seams weren't bad - was to paint directly over the wallpaper. On her birthday, and with Thanksgiving approaching, Joy could wait no longer for my foot-dragging over which approach was the way to go and painted the room. Then she asked if I would mud the seams. As I did so, some of the paper bubbled up and I was getting really worried about how this would turn out. I called some people who know and they recommended stripping the wallpaper, which frustrated my wife no end because she'd already painted it! Still, we steeled ourselves and set about the task, all six of us in the room peeling and scraping. Underneath the wallpaper is horse hair plaster. It has the sandy texture of a cement sidewalk (where it isn't cracked). Fortunately, the walls were still in pretty good shape for being 138 years old. My next step was to skim coat the walls trying to make them smooth all over so that Joy can then repaint them. My first surface wasn't coming out the way I had envisioned and my tension level was rising as I realized this job was going to take longer than the weekend, and certainly longer than I wanted to deal with. I managed a first coat before retiring late on Friday night but I wondered if I had caused more damage than fixing up the room. On Saturday, Joy took most of the kids to church for a Children's Christmas rehearsal and left me to begin the second coat. By now, skimming turned into slogging and I was ready to quit. I was looking for diversions to procrastinate so I called my friend, Rich Gonzalez, to comiserate over The Old House projects. He recently renovated his kitchen and I helped him mud the seams on new drywall (a different job than skimcoating entire walls). I must have sounded worse than my usual jovial letting off steam because he called me back and said he was heading over to help me. And help he did. Just having Rich in the same room, easing the burden made the second coat go on not only faster but easier. After the second coat, I began to think that maybe, just maybe - with a little more patience and time - I might be able to get these walls into paint-able condition. Of course, the all-important question on Joy's lips were "do you think we can finish the job before Thanksgiving?" The truth is, folks: despite "copping a tude" this weekend, I love my wife and will do what I can to please her. On Sunday, Miranda and I did a duet (she signed while I sang). The song we selected was called "Thank You (for giving to the Lord. I am a life that was changed.")" and we last sang it at my mother-in-law's funeral. The Pastor was preaching about using our time wisely and I felt moved to tell the story of someone who seeks to accomplish important things in this life (not simply doing a lot of things). The song went well, thankfully, and I am grateful. The sun is out today and we're on a small warming trend. I hope it is enough to melt what we have on the ground now, but my son is cancelling me out wishing for more. Mark .+*+ .....Cadence Design Systems, Inc. ***+*+. __..''' 270 Billerica Road A house is made .*+*+**. _____[]_ Chelmsford, MA 02184 with hands. '**++**. /___/\___\ ^ (978) 446-6451 , '*I*'.::/___/__\___\ /*\ \_0__, A home is made ..I *..: |[] [] []| .:/*\ M with hearts. ######==################### ._/__=_. .|\. -------------------------- 'O====O=' metcalfe@cadence.com