It has been a full day. I didn’t have to work, since Real Software took a company-wide holiday today (and yesterday), so I ended up spending almost all day on projects of one sort or another.

After brewing up some coffee, I cracked open the tub of drywall paste and went to work in the upstairs bathroom. On Sunday I got fed up with the absence of outlets in there and replaced the rusty, broken wall-mounted heater/fan gadget with a nice simple GFCI outlet. Yesterday I patched up the gaping drywall hole thus created; today I sanded down yesterday’s drywall paste, slathered on another layer, and smeared it around until it looked reasonably smooth. I’m not very good at this and may have to repeat the process tomorrow.

Then it was time to go look at a motorcycle. I’ve been thinking about buying a bike for years, off and on; the rising cost of gas and the beautiful summer weather have recently pushed me back toward “on”. I was talking to Peter Z. about this situation last week and he volunteered to help me pick out and fix up a cheap craigslist bike, so this afternoon we drove out to Newcastle and checked out an ’82 Yamaha. Our impressions were favorable, so I bought it, and we spent the rest of the afternoon dealing with U-haul employees (hard) and wrangling the machine home (easy). Sometime soon we’ll fix up the carburetor so it’ll actually start, and then I’ll go riding.

Back home: time for some gardening. There’s a big bush next to the entry which has always annoyed me – it sort of leans over the walkway and makes the front door feel hidden and cramped. I pruned it back a few weeks ago, which helped, but today I decided it was time for more drastic measures and cut away all the low branches. This revealed a lot of dead dry ground covered in dead dry leaves, so I shredded up the leaves, churned up the earth, soaked in a lot of water, and mixed in the leaf pieces. Then I planted some woodruff, which has been growing very successfully in the raised planter bed on the other side of the front walk, and some native oxalis. I’m not sure this is the right long-term choice, but it’s at least something to get started with.

Now it’s midnight and I’m sitting at my desk with some coffee. For some reason I feel like writing code. I think I’m going to run with that impulse for an hour or two and then get some sleep.