We made a point not to overbook ourselves this weekend, as it’s been a crazy couple of months with a lot of travel for Jeff. But since the next dozen or so weekends are spoken for, it turned into a bit of a hectic one after all trying to cram in various tasks and errands.

Yesterday was a cleaning day, and this time I won’t bore you with pictures of the process. I will, however, brag that the place is spotless – except for the sawdust all over the carpet. More on that in a bit.

Today, we kicked off the morning with the pool session of our drysuit class, which went pretty well. It was too hot to wear the fleece underwear, which meant the yucky drysuit fabric was sticking to my sweaty skin and the wrinkles dug into my skin from the pressure of the water. Other than that, it was actually more comfortable than I expected. The only real problem I foresee in using this particular rental suit is that the booties are too big for me, so they bend up unpleasantly when I pull the fins on over them. Plus, all that extra space in the feet is another place air can collect, and once my feet start to inflate the fins really want to go popping off. I’m going to try wearing a layer or two of wool socks to help fill out the booties in the ocean next weekend.

Pictures to come, I promise – someplace more photogenic than an indoor pool.

This afternoon, I ran more boring errands and then baked a bunch of cookies for Jeff’s office; I guess they do a big Halloween potluck and everyone is supposed to pitch in. (“Everyone,” of course, being code for “everyone’s wives.”) Not that I really mind baking cookies, especially when it’s from a mix. A little mixing, a little “dropping by heaping teaspoonfuls,” and I got to go straight to the fun part: smothering them in icing and badly-drawn Halloween motifs:

In the meantime, Jeff has been building me some new bookshelves. (Okay, they’re not just for me, but I’ll probably hog a pretty decent percentage of them.) We bought all the wood a few weeks ago, and Jeff started measuring and sawing out on our back patio.

He was able to cut all the shelves and sides in a day, but then he had some business travel – so all the freshly-cut wood, as well as lots of remaining wood (for the backs and the edging) came to live inside.

Our bar stools were moved aside to make room for all the cut wood; some of it is invisible behind the front rows of wood. This is why I’m not bothering to vacuum until the bookshelves are completed:

The backs – currently three 4×8 pieces of 1/4″ oak plywood, soon to be trimmed to roughly 3×6 – are standing up against the wall in our office in a most attractive manner. The edging – an enormous pile of really long pieces of wood, don’t ask me how long – went on the floor in front of the television, taking up space from the sliding doors almost all the way to the dining room table. Thankfully, Jeff cut those down to size yesterday.

Yesterday was all about routing (making all the grooves in the sides for the fixed shelves to slide into and the front edging to sit against). Today, he’s been drilling all the little holes on the bookcase sides that will allow us to position the remaining non-fixed shelves wherever we want. Here he is with his drill press:

And no, we did not rent that drill press. Alas, the drill press has a premanent residence in our closet. People go in there to hang up their coat, or see us scrounging around in search of tools or toilet paper, and they say things like “good lord, what is that thing in your closet?!” You have to ask Jeff why we own a drill press; I honestly can’t explain it.