I managed to squeeze out a fairly productive day, in many ways. When I got home (a little early), I started by reading the paper, an activity I normally do after 9PM. I then brought in the articulated ladder and did coat one of patching on the stairwell ceiling where I mis-drilled when running wire for our bedroom sconce lights and outlets a while ago.

I love the articulated ladder – it comes in so handy for things like working in stairwells…where it can easily be used as a scaffold. This time was no different. I have to do more work on the patch, since it wasn’t quite dry enough for me to do work on a second coat and whatnot this evening. But at least it’s much more difficult to see and shouldn’t take a lot of work to finish up.

I also ended up uninstalling my Norton AntiSpam software today. I hadn’t updated it for over a year (since I didn’t renew the subscription a year ago), and I had encountered several problems with it in the last three to six months. It would randomly ‘crash’ (or hang, rather), and basically flood the network with traffic so nothing would work. A restart of the computer would immediately resolve the problem. But today I came home to an error message that it needed to be uninstalled and reinstalled to fix whatever was wrong with it. I got a second error when trying to diagnose the problem — that the registration had been tampered with?

I have no idea how something like that could’ve happened, unless one of the recent crashes/hangs in the last two days just happened to magically corrupt the software settings. Stranger things have happened, but I was actually looking for an excuse to uninstall it. I don’t have any intention of reinstalling it. It’d probably be different if I used Outlook [Express], which I loathe, since it supports much tighter integration with said application.

So I’m going without spam filtering (aside from what I do at the mailserver level with aliases) for the time being. I might have to look into other alternatives, but it shouldn’t be too bad right now.

I also played with electricity this evening. I finally took the time to install and wire the boxes, switches, and outlets in our bedroom. All we need to do now is paint the bedroom and pick sconce lights. The switches and outlets are functioning (although the switches currently don’t do anything due to lack of light fixture), and it’s quite nice to not have to use an extension cord behind our bed for the alarm clocks, etc.

That wiring project took most of my time this evening — about an hour and a half. I needed to cut slightly larger holes for the sconce (ceiling) boxes, and then do all the magic pulling/stripping/installing of wire. I left turning off the electricity as long as possible to make the situation easier to handle (read: keep the room illuminated without use of a flashlight). That worked out quite well, and in an hour and a half I managed to cut larger holes, get everything wired up, and put everything away.

So it was a fairly productive evening. Go me. Now if I could just get enough ambition to deal with basement cleaning… Then we’d be getting somewhere.

As a random note, I didn’t have to word verify to post last night’s entry. I was good to go without issue. Tonight’s picture is from Kirstin’s day #2 outside the womb. It’s pretty crazy to see how much bigger (and cuter, if you ask me) she’s gotten in the last five months.

So that said, I’m heading to bed. Until next time…

“You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”
– Yogi Berra

–MZ