Another Beautiful Californian Day
Mar. 8th, 2004 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aWell, it appears to be another beautiful Californian day. We've been setting record highs. My little Weatherbug says it's currently 78 degrees, off a high of 80, and when I went out a couple of hours ago to pick up mail and lunch I regretted not wearing my hat and worried briefly about sunburn.
Heat Bitch
In any case, this means that my home office is boiling. Well, maybe not quite boiling--that would take 85 degrees or so--but at least uncomfortably warm. I've recently thrown both the cats out of my office--they were lounging about, semi-comatose, amongst the heat and light--so that I could throw open a bunch of windows. I'm happy to say there is indeed a slight amount of breeze blowing south to north through the city right now.
The heat in my office is one of the few regrets I have about this house. Both my office proper and the adjoining sunroom are poorly insulated. The sunroom was a second-floor porch at one time. It's filled with nearly full-wall 9-panel windows, and the slanted, slatted roof at the top of it just shields the room from the heat with those slats of wood, then composite roofing material on top. My office proper is clearly the result of some weird renovation at some point in the house's distant past. The first four or five feet appear to have originally been part of the sunroom itself, based on the fact that the 9-panel windows continue in and the width remains the same before the room zig-zags. The back half was probably a more recent construction, based on the rest of the contours of the house. The end result? There's a flat roof on top of the entire office, again with pretty much no insulation.
The back three windows in the house are all in a fairly modern style, and could have screens put in them if I figured out the right way to measure them. All the 9-panel windows are much more difficult, because they pivot outward, and there's really no room for a permanent screen as a result. Fortunately, it looks like we have a bit of extra money because our taxes for 2003 are going to be a bit less than expected and a bounty of screens will probably be included as part of that money. (I don't trust our cats not to plunge to their deaths chasing a bee through an unscreened window.) I also want to look into how to lower temperature bleed through single-layer windows; I'm not sure of how much a heat issue that is, but I know it's where the cold comes from in winter. In any case, Kimberly & I are going to chat definitively about how to use the extra money sometime soon in the future, as the only thing missing from my taxes (a family partnership K-1 form) shouldn't change things much.
Reading Weekend
Over the weekend, I was lazy as hell. I did manage to do a first cut on our taxes, but other than that mostly sat on my ass and read comics. I picked up Keith Giffen's Formerly known as the Justice League at Comic Relief over the weekend, and that encouraged me to read the trade paperbacks comprising the first 12 issues of Giffen's original run, and that encouraged me to read most of Grant Morrison's JLA run, some in TPB, some in original issues, and that encouraged me to pull out various Christopher Priest runs, including JLTF, The Ray, and Steel.
I've learned once again that humorous runs don't stand up to rereading as well as other stuff, and I don't entirely know why. Even though I adore Christopher Priest's writing I read though his various series fairly quickly (well, what I read; I'm not done yet), and I all but skimmed the two Giffen paperbacks. Conversely, the Grant Morrison books absolutely enthralled me, even though I'd probably read them the most recently by a couple of years.
Humor's a tenuous thing, I suppose.
Heat Bitch
In any case, this means that my home office is boiling. Well, maybe not quite boiling--that would take 85 degrees or so--but at least uncomfortably warm. I've recently thrown both the cats out of my office--they were lounging about, semi-comatose, amongst the heat and light--so that I could throw open a bunch of windows. I'm happy to say there is indeed a slight amount of breeze blowing south to north through the city right now.
The heat in my office is one of the few regrets I have about this house. Both my office proper and the adjoining sunroom are poorly insulated. The sunroom was a second-floor porch at one time. It's filled with nearly full-wall 9-panel windows, and the slanted, slatted roof at the top of it just shields the room from the heat with those slats of wood, then composite roofing material on top. My office proper is clearly the result of some weird renovation at some point in the house's distant past. The first four or five feet appear to have originally been part of the sunroom itself, based on the fact that the 9-panel windows continue in and the width remains the same before the room zig-zags. The back half was probably a more recent construction, based on the rest of the contours of the house. The end result? There's a flat roof on top of the entire office, again with pretty much no insulation.
The back three windows in the house are all in a fairly modern style, and could have screens put in them if I figured out the right way to measure them. All the 9-panel windows are much more difficult, because they pivot outward, and there's really no room for a permanent screen as a result. Fortunately, it looks like we have a bit of extra money because our taxes for 2003 are going to be a bit less than expected and a bounty of screens will probably be included as part of that money. (I don't trust our cats not to plunge to their deaths chasing a bee through an unscreened window.) I also want to look into how to lower temperature bleed through single-layer windows; I'm not sure of how much a heat issue that is, but I know it's where the cold comes from in winter. In any case, Kimberly & I are going to chat definitively about how to use the extra money sometime soon in the future, as the only thing missing from my taxes (a family partnership K-1 form) shouldn't change things much.
Reading Weekend
Over the weekend, I was lazy as hell. I did manage to do a first cut on our taxes, but other than that mostly sat on my ass and read comics. I picked up Keith Giffen's Formerly known as the Justice League at Comic Relief over the weekend, and that encouraged me to read the trade paperbacks comprising the first 12 issues of Giffen's original run, and that encouraged me to read most of Grant Morrison's JLA run, some in TPB, some in original issues, and that encouraged me to pull out various Christopher Priest runs, including JLTF, The Ray, and Steel.
I've learned once again that humorous runs don't stand up to rereading as well as other stuff, and I don't entirely know why. Even though I adore Christopher Priest's writing I read though his various series fairly quickly (well, what I read; I'm not done yet), and I all but skimmed the two Giffen paperbacks. Conversely, the Grant Morrison books absolutely enthralled me, even though I'd probably read them the most recently by a couple of years.
Humor's a tenuous thing, I suppose.
