I.A.M. Musing About…

So… what’s the deelio with me then? What have I been up to? What, if anything, have I been accomplishing lately? What do I want to / will be accomplishing?

Good questions, all.

Well, let’s see… Over at Atomic Fez, I’ve been happily prepping four books for release at the end of March / beginning of April! Read about that here.

That’s… pretty much it, actually. Books are consuming all my daily life, really. Well, waking life, certainly.

Other things have occasionally taken place. Sleep, for instance. That seems to be a once-every-twenty-four-hours pass-time. Food, also, seems to be recurring, but with more frequency than sleep.

The bathroom has finally been completed – hooray! – thanks to the fact we “got a man in”. The final stumbling block to me doing the job was when I realized that today’s tiles are made slightly different a dimension than yesterday’s tiles were, so the new tiles wouldn’t fit perfectly in the space the old tiles were in. The result of that was that all of the tiles needed to come off the wall, with the probable need of repairing yet more wall-board, plus having to trim a big whack of tiles to weird shapes around the window in the wall [image, left], aaaaaand who knows how much else in the way of complications. Merely trimming the tiles to fit around the window was enough of a complication to make my head spin, so we called a guy for an estimate, accepted it, and he started last Monday.

By the time yesterday arrived, he’d re-built some of the wall at both ends of the tub, removed the inner sliding window in the wall and tiled the inside of that hole, replaced all the wall-board, removed the shower doors with a curved rod and shower curtain, replaced the shower head, and repaired some of the wall outside of the existing tile area as well as extending the tiles so they better cover the area which gets wet. End result: what feels like a brand new bathroom!

So that’s excellent.

One of the oddest things discovered during the process of readying the wall for the new tiles was the fact that cardboard was used as a construction material.

You see – and this is starting to sound like an episode of Holmes on Homes, isn’t it – the wall surface of the gypsum board was a bit different than the surface of the wallboard behind the tiles might have been, were the shower wall-board attached directly to the studs. So, behind the thinner shower wall board some 1/4″ cardboard was placed to fill the gap to maintain a flat wall surface.

No, really. That’s what someone did [see image, left]. Probably it was my (now late) Father-in-Law, as this was the sort of “good enough without spending any money” approach his work around the house took on from the mid-1980s or so.

Anyway, it’s all done properly now.

Preparations are nearly complete for attending World HorrorCon in Brighton at the end of March, and then onwards to the SF-based Odyssey 2010 (aka: “EasterCon) the next week-end.  How the hell we’re going to pay for it is something we’ve not solved, but it’s nearly impossible to make a go of it selling books without proving to people they actually exist by having them on a table at a convention somewhere, so there we are. There’s a few days I don’t have to stand in a Dealers’ Room selling books, so I’m planning to hit the British Museum and the National Gallery again, plus possibly a pub or two. Look to see daily summaries here again covering that in all its glory.

So… that’s about it for me, I suppose.

What’s new with you, then?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 2:18 pm and is filed under BLOG-O-RAMA, LIT-O-RAMA, NEWS, Personal, books, horror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.