I don’t know what’s happening with the weather patterns over Baltimore here, but if you ever told me I would be wearing shorts on November 4th, I would have laughed in your face. This is heaven on earth, and I don’t want it to end.

Finished (for now.) 10:20PM, and the hallway, Pink, Blue, and Office rooms are sanded to 100 grit; the pink room is at 80 but the sander began to leak water (???) when I tipped it to change out a belt. I decided not to tempt the gods by continuing.

Tomorrow I get to rise at the ungodly hour of 6:30 to meet a bunch of folks at the park and ride for a meeting in DC that I’m less than enthused about; I’m going to need a triple shot of coffee to stay awake, I’m sure. Whoopee. Thankfully, there should be a shiny present on my desk when I get back to the office.

The Halloween Report. I ran home after work, made sure Jen was OK and got her some dinner, lit the candles, turned the lights on, and waited for the deluge. The night started slowly, with a young fairy princess and her dad (dressed like an escaped prisoner—when he shook my hand, his cuffs banged me on my elbow), a brother and sister (Yu-Gi-Oh and a spider) and another young boy (Power Ranger. Who knew they were still in?) A half-hour later we got a swarm of six kids, who were half entranced by the bowl of candy and half by the cats, who were nervously eyeing the front door. About an hour after that, we got a group of thirteen year-olds, who liked my pumpkin. And that was it. We have, by my estimation, about two years’ worth of candy left. It’s going to take a container ship to offload all this stuff.

Well, except for the Kit-Kats. You can’t take those.

“This Isn’t Fun Anymore.” Sunday we lured our friend Dave back over to the house with the promise of potato leek soup and stuck him in a room in front of a floor sander; I don’t know if he knew what he was getting into. Saturday I had pulled all the baseboards in the bedrooms, so we went nuts on the floors and got three of them down to the bare wood. The century-old polyurethane did not want to give up easily, and it took multiple sanding belt changes to get down to the wood. (Apparently the rental business is much like the razor business: the tools are cheap but the belts are ridiculously expensive.) Personally, I found the standing floor sander kind of fun, once I learned how to use it, but using the handheld edger was sort of like wrestling a greased badger on a tile floor. The home office is the only room left to finish, and I need to edge that and the hallway this week.

Thanks again, Dave, and we owe you big-time.