Paint

The latest purchase my parents have made for me (via the gift card they bought me) is orange paint. I used it to paint the living room walls. These are a couple photos of what it currently looks like - i still don't have all the stuff i want on the walls, nor is the mural finished, so things may yet change.


At 2am i decided the chimney oven cover (the coloured circle in the corner) could use some other paint, i may have to commission a Special Painting in the middle of it. The red and gold remind me of the paint job on traditional Peruvian mirrors.

And in case you were wondering, biking home with a couple gallons of paint is decidely fun.

Flight

Uganda, June 5, 2007. I bought my ticket over the weekend.

No, i'm not going due to watching a recent film about the place; i'd heard of Idi Amin before even watching Mississippi Masala. I'm going because i want to get back to Africa.

My current plan is to circle Lake Victoria counter-clockwise. I've a contact in Uganda thanks to my boss, an Ugandan immigrant. From there i'll travel to the border with DRoC, peer across, and wonder where that last great cryptozoological creature is, let him know i'll catch up to him soon enough. South to Rwanda, witness the river in that country. East to one of the tourist hotspots, look at a nice crater. North, but not too far north, not too far east, or i'd be back where i started. But to Kenya nonetheless; i used to have some friends from there, still have a spearhead she gave me. And back across the river, maybe do some white-water rafting (if you're gonna do it for the first time, might as well be at the source of the Nile, eh?), maybe fish some Nile perch, maybe just enjoy the land. At least that's the current plan - it will probably change substaintially once my feet touch African soil again.

And don't worry, i've already told my brother what to do with the life insurance money (yes, WCC gets a scholarship in my name, to support those who travel - now i really gotta watch my back, everyone's gonna want me dead).

It should be a great trip. Maybe when i get back, if the ceiling mural is done, i'll finally have that house-warming party.

Work hours

If i had taken Monday as a vacation day, i wouldn't have had to work this week yet i would have put in my 80 hours work per two weeks (in other words, by Monday i had put in 72 hours of work and i still had a work week to go on the two week pay cycle). Of course on Monday i still had well over 40 hours of work that needed to be done, so i'm still doing lots of work. The overtime is nice, and after this post i'm buying some computer gear for myself, as well as pricing plane tickets for my next vacation (planned for most of June). Unless i pass out from exhau

Would of liked to...

Lest you think i have no life outside of work, i finished this piece yesterday:



Here are some other wood projects i finished recently. Note the identical composition in all the photos - a sure sign i haven't been getting enough sleep.

For those of you who haven't been following along... i started practicing wood working shortly after i bought a house (approximately 6 months ago) - my mother bought me a few power tools to help with house repairs and i was off. I'd never worked with wood before, but i read as much as i could find on the internet and that makes anyone an expert.

Since then i've tried to make the time to practice, but my creativity in this realm far exceeds my skill - i've many sketches of what i'd like to do, but not enough time to practice my way through them all. Instead i am only able to complete smallish projects like the above.

I'll try to get some better shots of these projects.