Category: Life

Our House Gets Painted: Day 2 Scraping Originally uploaded by lyzadanger. This is how it looked yesterday.

Our House Gets Painted: Our Color Palette Originally uploaded by lyzadanger. Great peace of mind comes from this for me. We hired a professional color consultant to help us figure out what colors to paint our house. It’s not something that a regular person is probably going to be good at. For more information on [...]

My New Car! Originally uploaded by lyzadanger. Yeah, all photos so far have been taken with our little Fuji point-n-shoot (we call the camera Snappy) so they’re not awesome, but I think this might be the best of the bunch. OK, enough cars for now!

Our House Gets Painted: Scraping and Stripping Begins Originally uploaded by lyzadanger. After five or six months trying to get our house painted by a shyster who ultimately absconded with about $3000 and our Schwinn bicycle, we’ve finally nailed down some actual professionals to strip our house to the wood and then paint it. It’s [...]

My New Car! Originally uploaded by lyzadanger. I’ve been quiet the past few days and part of the reason is that I’ve been making all of those time-consuming motions of purchasing a “new” used car from a private party. It’s been a while since I’ve played this game: interest rates, title transfers, mechanical check-ups. But [...]

Quiet here because I sojourned to Seattle this weekend with Mr. Pencil to visit my father and stepmother on the occasion of my father’s birthday. They’d just come back from Provence and Monaco and went to great lengths to take nice photos of the vines in Châteuneuf-du-Pape for me. We ate at Rover’s and there [...]

I just called my mom to talk to her about various translations of Homer. I’m lucky in that I have a mother who can spout off the merits of each translation. I feel uneducated, however, that when I mentioned what I thought to be an obscure trifle I had tripped upon in an academic introduction [...]

Good: I had a great, informal couple of drinks with one of my older friends, Gregory, this evening. I’ve known him since I was 15 (that’s 13 years), and I kept having scandalous flashbacks of all of the pieces of our friendship as we chatted easily about the now. There was high school (well, his, [...]

In a strictly chronological sense, I should start with Homer’s Iliad and only then read the Odyssey. But. Sometimes I feel angry that historians and translators are so closely focused on their academic and historical pursuits that they forget to make things readable, tolerable or even interesting. Thus I have a copy of The Iliad [...]

Cerne Abbas giant, Dorset Originally uploaded by artisan7. See what I mean about tee-hee? Modern villagers must be scandalized.