I saw panic room tonight with a friend of mine. My advice to you is not to see panic room.

Very productive day today. I got the wallpaper border down, all the holes patched and filled with at least the first coat of spackle. I also got most of the trim and casing wood scraped, and patched up a bunch of holes in the wood too. Some of the holes will require additional patching, but I think I can get the thing into shape so that I'm painting tomorrow. At any rate, I'll have to paint trim first at least once, so that can happen while the walls are still drying. I just have to be carefull there isn't any wet or tacky paint around when I work on them.

I made terrible progress today. I had to go to both Home Deport and the grocery store, and had to stop because I just plain ran out of time. I washed the border wallpaper with Diff once, scraped off part of a couple walls, ran over all the holes and stuff with a putty knife. Discovered some additional problems with the wall such as paint that is peeling badly and needs to be removed, large holes, sagging plaster. Most of it looks pretty straighforward, but it just involves time, and I don't have much. I was hoping to do the first coat of patching on everything, but fell well short of that goal. I decided not to work much yesterday because I went to New York and back, and I was pretty tired. Also, a friend of mine stopped by in the evening (Hi K), and it was a kindof needed social break.

So the patching will start in earnest tomorrow, and I may be set back a day, but what can you do?

I went to New York city for the day today, and I have to say, it was a little bit different, no, a little bit worse seeing the Manhattan skyline without the WTC. I didn't think I'd react that way, but I did.

So Kara took Katherine on a four and a half hour plane ride today. It sounded like it went really well, except she pooped herself so bad it got out of the diaper, out of the clothes, and onto Kara. Thank god she had spare clothes in the diaper bag. We'll never leave those out again. I talked to her this evening, and she is settling in nicely in the Woodlands area North of Houson, where my inlaws are. She's taking a weekend trip to Dallas to see other relatives.

Whew. OK, now that Kara and Katherine are out of the house (snif.) I can do all those things I've been meaning to do, right? Well, maybe. I teed up a big project for their absence - refinishing the "pink room" in our house. It's listed as a bedroom, but it's pretty damn small, so we decided to make it a study. When I say pink room, I mean PINK. Everything is pink. The walls, the trim, the shelves, everything. Ouch. Bright pink. And, I discovered today that prior to being pink, it was yellow. YELLOW. My, my.

Anyway, I'm trying to do a one man SWAT on the pink room, and today went pretty well. I was able to clean out everything in the room. Pull up the carpet, which was pretty gross (beautiful hardwood floors beneath), take down all the shelves and wall hangings, and generally clean it up.

The good news: the closet is in great shape, which hasn't been the case for any other room. The floor looks great. The walls are OK, except there are some big cracks, but I've done enough wall patching I think I can hack it.

The bad news: there appears to be water damage on one wall, and it's the wall that's proximal to the bathroom, which means we've got to recaulk pronto, unless the damage is really old. I took the mirror off the back of the entry door, and discovered that the door is totally trashed - there's a reason the mirror was there. Ouch. And the ceiling is suspended, which usually means the plaster above sucks, and it does. So I won't do the ceiling, but I'd like to dress it up a little bit.

All in all, a mixed bag, but I still have a lot of confidence that I can get it done by next Wednesday.

Well, there should be lots of updates to the Katherine gallery over the next few days and weeks. I took more pictures over the weekend. It started when the doctor called and said they'd misplaced the photos taken for the insurance company. See, she has a little horn growing out of the left side of her head, and we need to have it removed. I'm joking of course, it's a skin tab. Anyway, I took a few pictures so we could send them out, and then I needed to take the rest of the role so that I could get them developed. And then, well, here's a photography story for you.

My grandfather, Kermit Lagman, gave me a camera when I was very young. It's a Canon FX. These were only made for one year, and it's an SLR, but it's completely manual. So you might be wondering why I hauled it out on Sunday. Well, the manual aspect is of great value to me - it doesn't need batteries, so you can make very long exposures (I'm talking minutes to hours here) without worries about it crapping out. This is very useful for some of the night photography I've been doing where the exposure times are long. It also has a 50mm lens that has an f1.4 setting, which gives an extremely narrow depth of field, which could be useful for portraiture or other pictures where you want to blur the background.

Anyway, I had a role of old crappy Osco film lying around, so I shot it, and took it to the developers. The verdict is that the camera is excellent. It suffers from a slight alignment problem, so there is an extremely narrow black strip along the top of the photos, but this would be covered by a frame, or edited out after scanning. So now I have two cameras in use for photography. This is also extremely nice, because I can load two different types of film at once, one in each camera, and take shots of the same thing on both color negative film and slide film, which I've been trying to get a bit more into.

Anyway, then, Kara got the bug, and we shot another two roles. She shot an entire role of me playing with Katherine, and since she is fond of pointing out that I'm notably absent in my pictures, this is probably a good thing.

So I scanned the first two tonight, and I'll get the second two back later this week. I also plan on doing some serious low light photography while she is gone in Texas for the next week, and I'm expecting some stunning shots like the Route 2 and Winchester shots I put on the home page lately.

I haven't written because it was a really tough weekend. Katherine has been rejecting breast feeding in the afternoon and evenings, and getting very fussy and particular in the process. It's been quite hard on Kara and I - Kara is obviously unhappy at the rejection of breast feeding, and I am unhappy because even though Katherine doesn't want to nurse, she only seems to want her mom. So it seems that whenever I hold her, she cries, and I can't calm her down - Kara is the only one who can. So we went to bed completely exhausted and fried at 11ish last night. We totally gave up on any time for ourselves after Katherine went down. Saturday night was a similar story, except it took a bit longer for her to get to bed, and the whole weekend was a long pre-occupation with this whole nursing thing.

We have tried to back off any bottle feedings, but for the most part, Katherine doesn't get it. I think she just doesn't want to do the work associated with breast feeding as opposed to bottle feeding. We haven't been giving her the bottle a lot, but at least one really good feeding a day. So when she rejects the breast she gets fussy, and she gets hungry, and it becomes generally unpleasant for all involved.

We may have had a breakthrough last night. She was so fussy, we broke down and gave her a bottle in the evening. Then, after she had been sleeping for awhile, she woke up unconsolable, and Kara managed to nurse her for a little while. Nursing in the morning is not a problem, it's the afternoon and evening.

So as you can imagine, I've been a bit distracted.