And So On

Happy Friday, everyone! It's rainy and chilly up here. We've got only a few plans for the weekend - nothing major - leaving time for us to reattach radiators, probably fire up old Bessie, continue working in the basement, and so on.

Over the past sixteen months, it's been a pleasure to relate to you the trivialities and tribulations of our lives here in the Ocean State and our progress as we worked to make our New-to-Us House a home. What's more, it's been an honor (and in truth, a smile-making surprise) knowing that many of you have taken a few minutes from your busy days to check into Provident Pilgrims to see what's going on with Rob and Sue.

As it will ever be, all things must end, and so it is with ProPil. Today's is the final regular post. The vast majority of our work on the house is complete. The excitement and anticipation of exploring a strange, new locale is past. Sue successfully graduated and landed a great post-doc position up here, and those were our primary aims for undertaking this adventure.

If a reason arises or an urge strikes, I may occasionally upload a picture or type up an update, but for the time being, ProPil's 311 posts will stand as a completed body of work. The site will remain accessible in its current form, unless Blogger succumbs unexpectedly to the foreclosure crisis.

Sue and I want to thank you, our readers, for your endless encouragement and steadfast support. We also want to assure you all... we're not going away.


(I stole this from Geninne's Art Blog, because I like it.)

PS
Congratulations, Katie and Graham! Welcome to planet Earth, John Tristan!

PPS
Front page of the ProJo today: Jobless rate hits 13%. Ouch.

Uncharted Waters

Morning, team. Happy Thursday. We spent the morning shoveling the driveway. It's still covered with slick ice.


Just kidding. Hee hee. (Notice the color of the house?) That pic is from JAN29, 2009, but it does sort of feel like winter is here. It's 54 degrees in the house today, and 36 outside. We went for a nice long run though, so we're pretty warm.

The front page of the ProJo has a story about downcity development and vacancy rates: Did Downtown Providence's boom go bust?

The newspaper could have done some actual research and put together a worthwhile three- or five-part series talking about the past, recent history and current status of the downtown area, but the ProJo is terrible, so they got a couple quotes and ran the story.

And an “economic bomb” is coming to the city if Bank of America chooses to move elsewhere. “Every property owner is scared,” said former Mayor Paolino. “We’re in uncharted waters, right now.”

Seems like with winter settling in, we're buckling down to plow through some projects. Sue'll continue working on reformulating her F-32 application (a government grant) for a DEC1 deadline, and she's also, among other projects, dutifully studying two hours each morning for the E-triple-P - her professional licensing exam (I have no clue what it stands for) - which she hopes to take in December.

Work for me is pretty manageable. We got some decent proposals out in the fall, and now we're in planning mode for the rest of the year - trying to figure out how to hit goal in a depressed economic environment. I'm excited to spend some days and nights hunched over the new desks in the basement.

Rasp and Blue

Happy hump day! How is everyone doing this morning?

We're doing well (thanks for asking), but man... last year we made a rule to only turn on the heat on NOV1. We failed to live up to it and cranked Bessie up as of OCT28. Well, it's a mere 55 degrees in the house this morning, and it was *hard* to get out of bed. I guess I have to reattach the radiators.

(We had taken a few apart to paint behind them, and we planned to sandblast them clean and paint them silver... but never got around to it.)

Anyway, after we removed the burning bush this weekend, I built and hammered into a place a third garden bed.



Sue thinks it's starting to look like a farm back there, and I'm thinking, darn right! Ha. Next year we'll have a real harvest! I'm considering planting some fruit bushes (rasp and blue) where the tree used to be.

In other news, I'm getting pretty antsy about restarting animated collage projects. I think I figured out how to mount the camera downstairs, so it'll be easily adjustable. Here's a sketch:


Two potential problems: 1) I wonder if someone is walking upstairs, will the camera shake? 2) Do they sell locking reels, or how can I lock them, so the board/camera won't suddenly crash down onto the workspace?

Ultimately, I'd like to build a multiplane rig with several planes of "floating" glass - like this - but for the moment, I'll experiment with the simplest approach.

Burning the Burning

Happy Tuesday, folks. Sue spent the weekend in Tampa with most of her grad school girls. She went to the beach...


...ate paella...


...chased some geckos...


...and took pictures of breakfast. Hee hee.


I took pictures of Jon helping to cut down the dead burning bush.


For those who only recently tuned in, this was a pretty momentous and sad event. You should be able to reconstruct a history of our relationship with our beloved tree/bush from these posts:

• ProPil Pop Quiz #3 (AUG2008)
• Budded Out (MAY2009)
• Triple Trips (JUN2009)

The branches were all dead, so the wood was soft. The stump though was challenging...


...and we dug a trench all the way around it, and chopped many roots with an axe.


Eventually, as if acknowledging that its time was over, it wavered and gave up...


...and we yanked it out. (It's a little sad to me that the stump resembles a heart.)


We cleaned up many of the smaller branches with fire - burning the burning bush.


Next, we planted John Lennon. Remember? See Big Bonsai.



He'll grow up into a different type of burning bush...


...but a burning bush nonetheless.

PS
Sure thing, C! We'll bring some Frankenstein Seeds down to Christmas.

Airport Twice

Happy Friday, peoples!

I will be going to the airport twice today, but I will not be doing any flying. At noon, I'm dropping Sue off. At 4:00, I'm picking Jon up. And speaking of Jon, or John...





Happy birthday, John. You'd have been 69 years old today.




PS
There is a connection between this post and our ongoing home improvements. Do you know what it is?

Business As Usual

Nothing much new in Providence. Front page of the ProJo today suggests it's business as usual:

RI state revenues down more than $30M in 1st quarter

Biggest RI employees union OKs pay cuts

On the latter story, back in September, I talked about Carcieri ratcheting up the pressure in Three Full Days.

I'm pretty bummed VIPS never called back, so I guess I have to find another volunteering opportunity.

Fall Weekend

Happy hump day, peeps. It's super rainy up here. We actually had some thunder this morning. Sue's going to drive me into work.

She's psyched to be going down to Tampa this weekend to hang with her grad school girls. I'm pumped about hosting my high school homies up here.

Did you know a group of Brown students protested the celebration of Columbus Day last year (on account of the natives who were mistreated by colonists), so the university changed the name of the holiday to "Fall Weekend"?

Were it that such a salute could right past wrongs.

PS
I'm posting one other picture from Portland that I thought was pretty neat.

6 Feet 6

On Saturday, we hemmed and hawed a bit since it was raining rats and frogs, but we ultimately did race. When we registered, it seemed like maybe half or a third of participants dropped out of the race on account of the weather. Fortunately, although we were prepared for the worst, it stopped raining during the race.

A total of 78 people raced - teeny tiny. The JCCRI race in Providence in September had 265 participants. Anyway, here are the results.

We cut our times by a lot! I dropped 1min 21sec, and Sue sliced her time by 1min 25sec. She sprinted at the end to get in under 24min, and she was happy about that. It was a very friendly (i.e. flat) course.

Afterward Sue said we should hang around, because we might win something. I was doubtful, but then...



...we won our age groups. Hilarious.

When we accepted our medals, the guy at the lecturn said, "Sorry, if I mispronounce your name. Robert Jer-off?" Sue got the old "Wen-zee" gag. In my age group, as it turned out, the race was so small I was only racing against five other dudes. Sue was racing against four other gals.

Note the age and time of the winner. He was like 6 feet 6.

Wanderings

Happy Monday, everyone! We hope each of your respective weekends was fun.

On Friday afternoon we split town for Portland, Maine. We made the plans several months ago, A) because we haven't explored much/any of New England since we've been up here, B) the house is mostly in shape and doesn't require our every-weekend toil anymore, and C) Maine is supposed to be beautiful. We timed our trip by the foliage, though we were a little early.

Since the trip was planned we saw this article pop up in the NYT, so we've been looking forward to good food. We visited two nice restaurants while we were there. Bar Lola was an A+ in our estimation. David's earned an A-.

We also got a chance to see my mom and aunt's childhood home. Sounds like it wasn't in the ritzy part of town back then, but it is now. Falmouth Foreside is apparently shi shi.


Maybe it's because two blocks down, even though there's no beach, is the ocean.


Here are some of our pics from our wanderings.





Can you tell that the "high-rise" in this picture above is actually a huge-mongous cruise ship? Yesterday morning, it had just docked, so lots of people were getting off in foreign-looking clothes, and predictably, filling up tour trolleys.




We visited the Portland Head Light on Cape Elizabeth...


...and the ruins of Fort Williams.


We also visited Betsy and Anne in Yarmouth, and on our drive home, swung through all the outlets in Kittery, finally stopping for a quick dinner in Portsmouth, NH. Nice little place.

Oh, and we did run our 5K. We'll provide our race report tomorrow.

Good Stuff

We'll have some good stuff Monday. Have great weekends, cool peoples!









PS
Oh, David. Say it ain't so.

The Cracks

Woah. It's pretty chilly all of a sudden. Apparently it feels like it's 38 degrees out, and it's only getting up to 60 today.

I'm hosting a little meeting at work, so the house is starting to smell like the Trader Joe's pumpkin bread I'm making. I put dried cherries and raisins in there, so it's sort of holiday-ish.

Anyway, yesterday I mentioned that I had neglected to talk about item #14 on our list of home improvements, because it had slipped through the cracks. And that's an apt little idiom for this project - what it amounts to it fixing little cracks in the ceiling.

Way way back when in House of Mysteries in July last year, the final picture shows a hole in a pipe that had been hidden by the floorboards in my closet (floorboards that I have yet to replace, a task represented by #18 on our list). The plumbers replaced it, because it had secretly leaked over the years into the ceiling in the foyer and caused the ceiling to deteriorate.

Other places in the house had similar problems, but we weren't sure why. There are no pipes running above them. In the dining room, for example, we had some little cracks, and once we started chipping away at the ceiling, lots of the popcorny stuff came down...


...sometimes in big chunks.



It's ironic, since Sue hates the popcorn ceilings. She'd like them all to crack up, so we'd have a reason to replace them with something nicer. They are *everywhere* in the house except for the upstairs bathroom, basement and attic. We guess that it was the cheapest, fastest (but mainly the cheapest) way to make the ceilings look decent, as that would fit with the theme of all the other home repairs completed in the house before we arrived.

So at first, like around the attic pulldown, we fixed up the popcorn with this patching spray stuff (See Lots of Ps from April 28, 2009). Pain in the tush, because it got all over everything within a two block radius...


...on your clothes, on the floor, on your head, on the walls - miserable. Plus, it did not dry pure white. So I was not looking forward to using it again.

Then I talked with the paint guy at Adler's, and he suggested using actual white ceiling paint and adding in some popcorny stuff.


It still dripped and got on lots of stuff that didn't need patching, but it was a lot easier to use, and it did dry pure white. Here's how the dining room fix came out...


...and unfortunately, I couldn't find a before shot of the place in the foyer that needed patching, but here's how it's looking after one coat.


See how I need to put on a few more coats?

PS
Happy October!