Saturday I took advantage of the freakishly warm weather (before the arctic cold blew in Sunday morning) and finished sanding the cabinet I’d started several months ago. After having spent a total of about 12 hours in a mask over the course of this project, I’m going to say this will probably be the last furniture heatgunning project I take on. Everything will get dipped from this point forward, and my fingers will thank me now that I have no skin left on them.

I have to buy a pair of new shelves and cut them to fit, a big piece of luann for the backing board, and have three new panes of glass cut. Finally, the original brass hardware is soaking in citrus stripper, and should be clean in another day or so. We’re thinking a medium colored stain, nothing too dark, and this will make a fantastic bookcase.

Update: I found a picture I took of the cabinet before it got stripped:

With the cold air in town, we also tested out the insulating job I’d finished on the window last week, and the verdict is success, mostly: I didn’t get each pocket entirely filled filled with insulation. I have to pull each spring out, stick some sort of wire down the hole, and break up the empty space at the bottom of each space, then stuff some more insulation in there. But the part that is insulated is toasty warm compared to the other windows in the house, and that’s worth it to me.

In other news: I had no idea Bill Clinton was going to be in Catonsville yesterday. If I’d known that, I would have gone to see him, elbowing the retirees out of the way to shake his hand. Crap.

Trivia corner: Am I the only one who didn’t know that the largest denomination the U.S. Treasury prints is the $100 bill?

And finally, a New Favorite Drink: The Lychee Martini, introduced by good friends at a dinner party on Saturday evening over a table of Korean food. Who knew that radish kimchi was so good? (Now, the problem: Identify radish kimchi from the hundreds of different varieties on the shelf at the Korean grocery.)