The Weekend Fruglar: The White-Washed Tomb
Weekends can be like quicksand, sucking time, money and productivity into a bottomless pit of lethargy and waste. Let's call those weak-ends.
Thankfully, this was not one of those. With the hourglass rapidly draining on my timeline to put my still-needs-work house on the market, the money-do list took precedence over all the old weak-end pastimes.
Up to bat was the garage, or more accurately, the primitive cave and giant spider preserve where my wife does laundry and my dad does handyman stuff. As I rarely go in there, I hadn't given much thought to the garage's sorry state until my real estate agent lady went in there and started waving red flags.
So, in the interests of making the home safe for housewives with money, the Fruglar Sr. and I took on the garage as a home improvement project. Our goal: to transform the unfinished walls and daddy-long-leg habitats into an appropriately sterile white laundry room. Drywall being too much of an expense and a headache, we resolved to MacGyver it by slapping on some dry-erase board looking white panels with construction adhesive and elbow grease.
Total supply cost was $177 and with about 8 hours of labor split over two days we were able to complete the most labor and time-intensive portion of the project. All that remains is to paint over the spot behind the water heater where janky pipes made it impossible to finish.
When I wasn't reinforcing the floor on my property value, I was sticking to the general course of self-improvement. Sunday morning was church, this time a semi-pentecostal outfit. The usual Southern California pew population: a lot of grey hair and pear-shaped bodies swaying to the standard playlist of updated hymns and pop worship. The pastor gave a meandering sermon, taking about 40 minutes to make one memorable point - that the embarrassing extravagance of Mary Magdalene's fragrant outpouring to Jesus was nothing compared to the extravagance of the gift Jesus was about to give to those who followed him.
As self-improvement goes, church visits don't seem to have much of an impact in and of themselves. I spent most of this sermon, for instance, making idle notes on first act challenges for a screenplay I'm working on. Taken in aggregate, however, the heap of mediocrity created from typical American Evangelical services piled one on top of the other serves as an important, if inefficient, check on daily life's drip-drip erosion into nihilism.
Also on the self-improvement front, I finished another book (I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had by Tony Danza) bringing my yearly count to 9 and keeping my book-a-week streak alive. As I prepare for my own first-year as a high school teacher in underperforming schools, I hope to read more books like this one, I just hope they get better. I don't know if it was just Tony Danza's cheeseball outlook but everyone in his school sounded like half-baked caricatures from every teacher-movie I've ever seen. Teacher-movies get really old after the first few - I don't want to be stuck in one for potentially 3+ years.
Less progress has been made in my ongoing struggle to increase the quantity and improve the quality of my creative output. In the crosshairs this week and for the immediate future is a script I've been working on since May 2015 when the idea struck me over the dinner table. These struggles revolve around the challenge of forcing the round peg of creative work into the square holes of an Excel spreadsheet chock full of output targets.
The only remedy left to me for this round-square conundrum is brute force. Three years of dinking around in creative self-indulgence have left me with a 2/3 completed script that's all kinds of untamed. So from here on out, the free spirit is getting shackled like a good cubicle slave and will deliver product on time and on target to get this script submitted to the contests that close by the end of spring.
The Fruglar, checking out.
Thankfully, this was not one of those. With the hourglass rapidly draining on my timeline to put my still-needs-work house on the market, the money-do list took precedence over all the old weak-end pastimes.
Up to bat was the garage, or more accurately, the primitive cave and giant spider preserve where my wife does laundry and my dad does handyman stuff. As I rarely go in there, I hadn't given much thought to the garage's sorry state until my real estate agent lady went in there and started waving red flags.
So, in the interests of making the home safe for housewives with money, the Fruglar Sr. and I took on the garage as a home improvement project. Our goal: to transform the unfinished walls and daddy-long-leg habitats into an appropriately sterile white laundry room. Drywall being too much of an expense and a headache, we resolved to MacGyver it by slapping on some dry-erase board looking white panels with construction adhesive and elbow grease.
Total supply cost was $177 and with about 8 hours of labor split over two days we were able to complete the most labor and time-intensive portion of the project. All that remains is to paint over the spot behind the water heater where janky pipes made it impossible to finish.
When I wasn't reinforcing the floor on my property value, I was sticking to the general course of self-improvement. Sunday morning was church, this time a semi-pentecostal outfit. The usual Southern California pew population: a lot of grey hair and pear-shaped bodies swaying to the standard playlist of updated hymns and pop worship. The pastor gave a meandering sermon, taking about 40 minutes to make one memorable point - that the embarrassing extravagance of Mary Magdalene's fragrant outpouring to Jesus was nothing compared to the extravagance of the gift Jesus was about to give to those who followed him.
As self-improvement goes, church visits don't seem to have much of an impact in and of themselves. I spent most of this sermon, for instance, making idle notes on first act challenges for a screenplay I'm working on. Taken in aggregate, however, the heap of mediocrity created from typical American Evangelical services piled one on top of the other serves as an important, if inefficient, check on daily life's drip-drip erosion into nihilism.
Also on the self-improvement front, I finished another book (I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had by Tony Danza) bringing my yearly count to 9 and keeping my book-a-week streak alive. As I prepare for my own first-year as a high school teacher in underperforming schools, I hope to read more books like this one, I just hope they get better. I don't know if it was just Tony Danza's cheeseball outlook but everyone in his school sounded like half-baked caricatures from every teacher-movie I've ever seen. Teacher-movies get really old after the first few - I don't want to be stuck in one for potentially 3+ years.
Less progress has been made in my ongoing struggle to increase the quantity and improve the quality of my creative output. In the crosshairs this week and for the immediate future is a script I've been working on since May 2015 when the idea struck me over the dinner table. These struggles revolve around the challenge of forcing the round peg of creative work into the square holes of an Excel spreadsheet chock full of output targets.
The only remedy left to me for this round-square conundrum is brute force. Three years of dinking around in creative self-indulgence have left me with a 2/3 completed script that's all kinds of untamed. So from here on out, the free spirit is getting shackled like a good cubicle slave and will deliver product on time and on target to get this script submitted to the contests that close by the end of spring.
The Fruglar, checking out.
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