Five Done!

Progress: I hired a roof dude, my second Angie's List adventure.  The first was the plumber, to fix a leak under the sink, but that did not go well.  He says "Go buy a new faucet, then we'll talk ($68 please)."   But the roof guy was better.  No holes in the roof causing wall mold, that he can see.  He patched a couple broken tiles and fixed a bit of flashing.  I'm officially taking a wait-and-see attitude toward the mold.

I also did take another bath, with more tealights, and took a photo.

The new paint is yellow, which contrasts with the purple/taupe fixtures rather more starkly than I'd planned, but I do like the color, and it's becoming less jarring as I get used to it.  All funky purple southwestern wallpaper is now gone.  My friend Sharon will come up again next week to finish up the painting.  I'll post pictures when she's done.  I've been about as useful as an crustacean, though I've offered to assist.  I did make this helpful contribution for her however:

I consider it a study for a painting I am planning.  Jack was in LOVE with a carpet that had two gigantic red lobsters on a blue background, and I told him I would not get that for his room (because I really prefered the carpet he selected before he learned of the lobster carpet's existence).  But I promised to make him a lobster painting, in its stead.  Here was the carpet in question:

You can see that it would be hard for me to let him have this, not the least reason being that I am pretty sure lobsters have ten legs, not eight.

Aside from that, I also obtained a fire extinguisher for the kitchen, thanks to an unexpected trip to Costco with friends Gigi, James and Jonathan.  But being red, with lots of fine print, I'll need to work out a way to take an appealing photo of it...

A few first goals

It is difficult to think of 101 things to do, frankly.  The first 30 were easy, and the next 20 were sensible, and then it started to require significantly broader thinking.  Having always been a fan of things that refer to themselves, an easy goal to add was "finish the list."  Fittingly then, that is the first goal I crossed off.  It was an alarming 21 days after I started the list.  I had better pick up the pace if I am to finish these up!

I also lit a bunch of tealights and took a bath.  It was too tempting to try out the tub in my new house to wait until the list was finished.  However, I don't mind doing it again before crossing it off, so I can take a photo.  My bathroom has cool new paint, so the photo will look neat.  Which brings me to my "Strip wallpaper and paint walls" goal.  That one is well underway (thanks to my childhood friend, Sharon Gunderson).  Unfortunately, in between "strip wallpaper" and "paint walls" there emerged a previously unforseen step "scrub mold off walls." 

For now I am delaying formal mold remediation, after having read some gripping materials on dual-moisture barriers, and concluding that the possibility of condensation beneath the wallpaper was not negligible.  I have, however, also contacted a roof maintenance person.  Ahh, home ownership.  This is only the beginning I am quite sure.

The Task

For many years, I messed about achieving things, and waited for my "real life" (presumably enabled by these achievements) to begin.  Mostly this entailed putting off fun things in order to go about my achieving activities.  Also some important stuff got set aside, occasionally to my regret.  Achievement is not without its various costs, it turns out. 

But now I'm done with a lot of the usual achieving activities that people do: I have a Ph.D.  I have a house.  I have a job that I like much better than the job I aimed for (and missed), which may even deserve the moniker "career," whatever that is.  The demands of this job are sufficiently broad that I'm pretty sure I could continue my achieving activities indefinitely.  But it occurs to me that this is a form of laziness, and that I had better do something else: if not instead of, then in addition to.

But on the other hand, 16 year of amateur achieving and 17 years of professional achieving has left me ill equipped to follow another path; I am terrified of what might happen if I curtail my monomaniacal pursuit of performance.  So, in an attempt to avoid the laziness I mentioned, I have created a list of 101 non-work non-achievements to be executed in 1001 days.  I appreciate that there is a certain pathology here.  But here we go.

Link:  101 goals in 1001 days