With Hima’s birthday coming up, we pulled another Extreme Cubicle Makeover, turning her cubicle into a replica of the Disney Cinderella Castle. You can read about it and see pictures here. I have to say that we’re getting pretty good at this sort of thing. If you want to turn someone’s cubicle into a castle (or maybe your own), you should read through and get a few ideas.
Last night Erika and I went to the neighborhood Christmas in the Heights party thrown by our wonderful neighbors Bailey, Mark and Michelle. Bailey showed off his culinary talents with a huge table piled high with great food, making the rest of us jealous. It was certainly the wrong night for Erika and I (okay, well, Erika) to cook our first chicken. She used a recipe from Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, and the bird turned out great, very juicy. Good stuff.
For the party, we’d bought Erika a single can of Sofia, the champagne in a can from Niebaum-Coppola Winery, available at stores like Cost Plus World Market. I tell you what, that stuff is great! I’m not big on champagne – to tell the truth, I can’t stand it and I even avoid it on New Year’s Eve – but I got a couple of sips of this and I loved it. I’ll definitely look for a bottle of this for the coming New Year’s celebrations.
Been tooling around in the Jeep with the top down, and I even made part of the trip back from Dallas that way. Everybody in Dallas had a great time riding around in it, and I’m glad I bought it. It’s a lot of work getting the top up and down, but I knew that going in, and I tend to leave it in the garage with the top off. I need to build clips on the garage wall to hold the windows and the doors, though – they’re cluttering up my workbench.
Not that I’m using the workbench for anything. I think that’s going to be my resolution for the New Year – sell the saws, sell the nail gun, etc., and not build a dang thing. I can’t get motivated about building stuff. I strolled through the aisles at Lowe’s today and found 8′ tall bookcases going for around $150. I figured that I could buy a handful of them, stain them, and turn our library room in the house into a real library in a weekend, as opposed to struggling with the saws for months and producing a sub-par product. Building things for relaxation is one thing, but I don’t want that kind of product in my actual house – the stuff I build needs to be burned to protect innocent bystanders from actually using it. Last weekend, Erika and I ripped out the plant stands that I’d built for the backyard a few months ago. We both have very, very high standards for the quality of stuff we put in the house, and I’m not ashamed to say that the things I built don’t meet those standards. Sure, I could spend a couple of years becoming a good woodworker, but why bother? I’d rather spend a couple of years becoming, say, a good C# programmer, and then work for a month of weekends to pay a pro to build good bookcases for the library. It’d all even out.
