stuff done: Friday-Monday

1. Added the necessary scene to my DDSS fic, researched a couple factual issues, and made some preliminary edits. Then I got Vicky to look over the beta draft and made a bunch more edits in response to her advice. (I probably would have made even more than that, but the archive went live three hours early so oh well, maybe after they're no longer anonymous.)

2. Went with Vicky and Mom to see A Child's Christmas in Wales as performed by the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival... oh wait, excuse me, the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey. (I always forget they got fancy. My image of them is frozen around the mid-90s, back when I was part of their Junior Corps: aka, when I did unpaid summer ushering and concessions work for them in return for free drama lessons. I quit when they started requiring payment for the lessons while still not giving any monetary compensation for the ushering and concessions work.) The performance was very good. We had seen it at least once before, many years ago, but none of us remembered more than vague impressions so it was effectively a new experience. We were all pleasantly surprised by how many songs there were -- really, it's as much a musical as a play.

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23. Started working through the DDSS archive. Hopefully I will finish that on Tuesday and can then get properly started on the Yuletide and Yuletide Madness archives.

random thoughts on family birthdays and gifts

My mom and I arranged my birthday gift to her several months in advance, to the point where she and I went out to buy supplies for it together.

See, she and my dad inherited six pictures from my paternal grandmother, which were nicely mounted behind glass in fake-gilt frames... only the gold paint was badly faded and flaking. So Mom asked me to repaint the frames, because it's a tedious and annoying job she didn't really have the time to deal with.

For various and sundry reasons (some more justifiable than others) I haven't really had the time to deal with it either, but I am finally getting around to it. Tonight I took out the first picture, laid it on some old newspaper I acquired specifically for this project, carefully applied masking tape to the glass right up against the inner edge of the frame (I can't just pop the picture out, because that would require removing the backing and the hanging wire, and neither Mom nor I wanted to deal with putting all that back together), sanded off as much of the old paint as I could (plus a couple pieces of ancient Scotch tape, ugh), and applied a first coat of new gold acrylic paint.

I am going to leave the second coat until tomorrow evening, but now that I know what I'm doing I think that will go faster, as will the other paintings. I don't know if I'll get all six done by the time I drive back to NJ on Saturday the 31st, but I should certainly have three or four ready to transport, and anything I don't finish before the new year I can just keep around in a corner for Mom to pick up in February when she and Dad come up for my birthday.

(We have a family tradition of going out for a fancy restaurant dinner on people's birthdays, though we usually follow it with some kind of homebaked dessert. In my case, we also usually attend a classical music event of some sort. That started because I kept getting cheap tickets to local concerts through my church's service auction, but then one year my parents were all, 'Why don't we go see the Met Live in HD performance of Rusalka; your local cinema is broadcasting it that weekend!' and I said sure, why not, so the classical-music-event-on-Liz's-birthday-weekend thing has apparently taken on a life of its own. And you know, as birthday traditions go, I am pretty okay with this one. *wry*)

Anyway, I think I will need to buy a second bottle of the gold paint, but I can do that on Wednesday after work, since I will be at the mall for unrelated reasons (*cough* buying bras and socks at Target *cough*) and can hit up Michaels on the same trip.