Everyday Stupidities

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood and I have a really annoying cold. I have always hated it when people told me to blow my nose because of the nasal overtone in my voice, but it is doubly annoying when nothing will come out but I'm full up there. Right now is a great example of that: I sound (and feel) like I'm underwater, and I'm blowing my nose constantly and sniffling, but there is no vast outpouring of mucus. Considering a busy weekend is coming after tomorrow, this is really freaking annoying. Speaking of annoying, I was over half an hour late for work today because the Blue Angels jet group is in town for Seafair, so the I-90 floating bridge gets closed for hours at a time because it's in their flight path... thus all this traffic takes other roads to get around Seattle. There was a five mile backup to the road to work, and a fifteen mile backup on that road. And the flight show is Saturday so I think I gotta leave home an hour early on Friday to get to work on time, w00t!

Speaking of being up early, due to my wife having a staff meeting at her work at 8 a.m. ("seven seconds of information they could have emailed us, presented over two hours" she says) I was awake long before I shoulda been this morning so I installed that bathroom exhaust fan. And it took an hour and a half, what with trips into the fluffy white attic (oh look, the breaker that handles the bathroom fan also handles the attic light!) and down to the bathroom to retrofit the hole in the ceiling (from 8"x8" to 7"x9" -- saw and spackle and shim). Anyhow, by 10:15 a.m. it was ready for my much-needed shower and... it's just as loud as the one it replaced. Er, the goal was to go quieter. But it's new, it's clean, it's installed some semblance of correctly, and I got 99% of the mess vacuumed up before I left the house for work (it'll be that 1%, a stray white particle of fluff under the kitchen table, that my wife will somehow see and then ask why I didn't clean up)... and I bet she won't notice the change until I point it out. One project down, several dozen to go.

[24 hrs later: She didn't notice the fan or the fluff, and my vanity got the best of me so I pointed upward after she finished her shower... We've secretly replaced your bathroom exhaust fan with Folgier's Crystals. Let's watch. Color her surprised and shocked. She agrees, the volume is still the same.]