It's Showtime

After talking about it lots, my mom and I finally are making good progress on the curtain. She got the necessary hardware from a medical supply place and we installed it and hung the un-altered curtain!

I'm pretty damn happy with the way it looks. The curtain is 22' x 16', and the wall is 19'3" x 10' so a significant portion of the curtain had to be cut off. The width was fine, but yesterday we cut the bottom portion off and plan to use this to make curtains for my bedroom which will use the same type of track that we used in the living room. I would ideally like to not alter it and let it lay on the floor, because it makes it look really cool, but considering that I don't want to ever dry clean this thing and it doesn't make opening and closing it very easy, it's far from a reasonable option. Sanchez really seems to like the curtain material (and fortunately not in a manner that involves lots of scratching) so while we were working on it, she'd stroll up and down the length of it like it was her own catwalk (pun intended):

In case it's not obvious, I got some furniture in the living room by now :P I don't think I posted about this before, but I brought over my old futon that used to be my bed that's setup like a chaise lounge, a small single seat chair that can be used as a bed if folded out and in combination with the ottoman, and then a full size couch that folds out into a queen sized bed (or close to it). I'm using my old dining room table for the time being, which is far from "nice"
or "cool", but it works.

After talking with my friend Nick about the layout of the place in general I changed the approach from what I'd originally planned. I'd planned to have a really large living room setup and have the dining room table sort of in the kitchen area, but once I filled it with furniture a bit it became obvious that I could have both the dining room and living room in the one large room and leave the kitchen more as a kitchen. I think I'm going to get a metal island w/ a wooden top (maybe butcher's block) for kitchen but at this point I can't decide if I want to have shelves under it, have it be open so I can slide stools under it, or maybe even both.

Unrelated, I've started stripping the paint off of the large cabinet of drawers that I got with the garage. It's pretty much a huge pain in the ass because there are something like 70 drawer openings, and each one has 4 corners that need to be scraped with a tiny knife etc etc. It's gonna look really cool when it's done though, and it will be a great place for me to store random stuff.

Changing topics again, I had my first "get together" this Saturday. It wasn't the official house warming party (which everybody keeps asking about, and will happen), but just a fairly lengthy bbq/hangout session. It went well, with the whole back patio full of people, one of my friends drunkenly peeing in the stones surrounding the paver stones at the end of the night, and even a little impromptu dancing. A few people stayed over, and the futons came in quite handy. Here's a bad pic from the top of the spiral stairs of the bbq in action:


I think Sanchez had a little too much to drink herself:

The Mysterious Noose

I featured some pictures in the last post of the demolition occuring next door. Well, when I woke up two days later I looked over to see if any changes had occured that were picture worthy... I saw this:

Can't see anything special about that picture? Take a closer look:


Yeah, that's right... there was a noose hanging in the old jail. And when I came back at lunchtime, it was gone! My first thought was that one of the construction guys put it up that morning to pull a joke, but then I went back into the pictures I'd taken two days earlier and sure enough, lurking in the shadows is the noose still.

It's still possible it was a joke, but a tad creepy none the less.

Destruction...

I posted an HDR picture (high-dynamic range image made from combining different exposures) a while ago, and have been dying to do some others. I've used a program called Photomatix Pro to do these.

Note to people familiar with image editing: A trial of the program is available which leaves watermarks on the image saying PHOTOMATIX PRO in 3 places. I realized today though that you can get around this by processing two sets of files separately: one set that's the original pictures, and one set with the original image re-arranged on the page. After you do this you just re-arrange the altered image to match the original and cut out the areas where the watermark was in the original image. Paste over the original image and it's as good as the registered program.

This is the view from my window of the demolition going on next door. I set up a bookcase in front of my window as a tripod and plan on taking more of these to track it over time. Yeah... I definitely shouldn't started this before they tore it down.

(I'd highly suggest clicking through to the full size version)

**Jump back in time 3 weeks ago**

As I think I mentioned, the old jail across the street is getting torn down. Apparently they decided it wouldn't be worth trying to save it.... which really is too bad considering how cool it was, but I can understand that financially it might just not've made sense... or at least they didn't care enough to make it work.

I really had wanted to take lots of pictures of the progress of it being torn down... but didn't do the best job. I did manage to get some before it was torn down and then I took some HDR pictures tonight (make sure to check out the end the post for this).

The side facing my house:


The side facing Carson:


The side facing 13th St:


A couple crops showing the facade's detailed brickwork:
Early evening lighting:

I'm a bad blogger.

It's been quite a while since my last update on here, and I'm afraid that this isn't going to be a proper post either. I've been wanting to put together a blog for a while now, but haven't for various reasons. Some of these are legitimate ("I don't have internet at my house yet, and rely on just barely stealing neigbors wi-fi signals." or "I want to finish sanding and polyurethaning these transition strips") and some aren't ("I reallllly want to finish this Arrested Development 3rd season disc!" or "Man.... last night was a doozy.")

Either way, this post is more of a holdover than it is a real post. I want to take good pictures of a lot of stuff that's been going on and give proper explanations.

The Reader's Digest version though is that they've started demolition on the jail across the street, my mom and I are slowly making our way through the to-do list, I'm getting my furniture and other things into their places, and the contractors have finally started coming back to deal with the odds and ends that are left to complete that they're responsible for.

OK, more to come soon.... promise :)