Thursday: still at home sick

A. is still at home sick. Tomorrow her school was rescheduled so she could go do IEP related assessments over at ABRHS. Let’s see if that happens.

This has been a weird week. At the beginning of the week, my gmail account was signed up for Nespresso and a Dutch dating website. I have only just now gotten around to fixing both of those and wow, they generated a ludicrous amount of email in the meantime.

But I’m catching up over here. I read the Matt Levine columns for the week, which was highly enjoyable. I communicated with my sister about a house related question, and got a prompt and definitive answer, which was really nice.

Yesterday, MB came over for a visit, dropping off Girl Scout order and having dinner and hanging out. That was nice. He had a headache, tho, which makes me feel bad for him.

Earlier yesterday, I worked on end of year donations and other financial matters that are not on autopay. Love autopay so much.

I also read _Her Robot Wolf_, another Jenny Schwartz, first in another series. The usual, familiar components: an AI of non-human origin, an extremely cool spaceship, heroine has fancy powers, hero is a remarkably nice person, very sane characters, slow development of relationship, problematic family of origin. A surprising number of Schwartz series are variations on the Just Two People Kinda Stuck Together For An Extended Period of Time theme, albeit the reasons vary from series to series. I think this is the first one where the hero basically kidnaps the heroine. To be fair, she definitely assaulted him first. It’s all remarkably civilized and well-behaved as these things go. Nothing as bonkers as that Georgette Heyer novel where Mary Challoner shoots Vidal, after Vidal kidnaps her for having disrupted his plans involving her younger sister. I should go reread Devil’s Cub and see how I feel about it these days.

I also got an early text this morning asking for a Facetime, which I took, because I figured it would be something I should look at. JB and maybe E had gone to Mercier to talk about the carpet for the stair treads. This has been such a saga. Back when I was first panicking about flooring, I was really worried about the main stairs because there’s a lot of glass, and the space isn’t going to let me put furniture in there and people were super opposed to carpeting there (I was inclined to agree with that part) so I was thinking horrible echos would ensue. Initially, it was tiled, too, and tile on both corridors opening off it on the main level and in the basement, too, but I successfully thwarted the tile when I realized wall tile was spec’ed for the floors which, yeah, that’s not going to work. I asked for a carpet runner, and was told it was impossible, because in addition to the stairs curving, each tread had a slightly different curved shape as well. I attempted to negotiate that and was thwarted, so I started working the okay, but could we do something with that carpet runner. I eventually found a carpet the architect agreed might work and they mocked it up, but the whole mockup was unbelievably screwy and weird. Finally, JB decided to take the mockup to Mercier and ask the people who would actually be doing the work, and their response is, “You want a waterfall runner? Because we can do one.” So then the question was, which carpet, and Mercier just basically wants something with a non-geometrical pattern on it, because otherwise the geometrical pattern will look super weird going down the stairs.

So, I’ve been trying to figure out just how many people were sucked into a ton of work because the architect incorrectly asserted that you couldn’t do a normal stair runner down these stairs:

The architect (obviously)
E, as the person at O acting on behalf of the architect in many situations
J and C at O, doing the stair mockup
JB project manager at the builder, trying to make this all actually happen
Me, as the owner
R because he’s stuck answering all kinds of questions about but which carpet

Probably I’m missing someone. But that’s a helluva lot of people, and none of us thought to say, well, did the carpet installers think this was going to be a problem?

I almost don’t believe that this is actually going to work out. But we’ll see.

Other accomplishments of the day: got A. signed up for the school outing a week from Friday, rescheduled her Saturday hair appointment to a week later, told her about the plan for ABRHS for tomorrow and discussed what she needs to get through after dinner (shower, pick out clothes, get to bed early). My sister got back to me about which table base she wants of the two options I gave her. I updated a bunch of slides, now that we know the cool metal folks aren’t going to be helping us out (which is fine — things will go faster this way). It was nice to get the changes I made yesterday to the shelves and wallpaper and so forth all into the finishes slide deck and see things really start coming together aesthetically. I don’t think we really need anyone in on that at all, altho if something cool pops up I’ll take a look at it. As it is, I’ve got a steampunk shelving thing I’m planning on ordering from a place in the UK for the decorative shelving, and some really great brackets for the main shelving.

Also, I found the mixed lots section of gemsngems today. Mmmmm.