Life is life. Little ups, little downs, nothing heart breaking. 10-year old saved up her money to get a Wii and now, 30 days later, it's got weird graphic problems that scream "BAD RAM" to me - sometimes there's little worms of bad pixels crawling vertically on the screen, sometimes there's rectangular blocks of random pixels. Sometimes there's both so it looks like you're playing the game through a set of curtains. Feh.

I've been taking Troll, Jr to kenpo instructor training and, while there,  I discovered that our Sensei didn't have as firm a handle on the testing requirements for our black belt test as he thought. Feh. Buuuut... at least SWHTL and I have some warning about it; we didn't actually get to the test and discover we learned the wrong forms.

We're getting ready to paint the living room, which means slowly dismantling it and finding places to stash about 500 cubic feet of books and knick-knacks; and furniture. We're taking the position that we don't care about the carpet - it's 20 years old and it's next in line to be replaced, but the stairwell is a challenge - we really don't have the gear to do a 20' deep stairwell.

Picking the color turned out to be exciting; I would have thought that every paint company on the planet would have a fancy website that would let you play with colorizing digital photos to see what your room would look like re-painted, but they don't. Well, Behr does, but they make you pay $5 and then IT DOESN'T FREAKING WORK. The applet just sits and spins. I had actually messed with doing it by hand, with photoshop elements, but I had a hellacious time trying to find RGB color matches for the samples SWHTL wanted to try out. In the end, I just kind of got close to what we wanted, then we painted 2' square sections of wall to see what the actual paint looked like.

I better primer that wall before we repaint, huh?

Overall, I've been using this as a way to force all of us to pay attention to the amount of crap we've collected. My theory is that, hopefully, the effort of getting it all out of the living room and into my office, then back again, will inspire a good deal of throwing-crap-away.

We'll see.