Wave your hands in the air and party nerdy like you juss' don't care

The dearth of posts on WAD this week had to do with two things: one, I was crazy busy helping another team with a deadline while doing a partial punch on MHRC; and two, Guy and I were getting ready for a party at our house, the Happy Kitten Highrise.

Here's the deal: about 18 or 20 months ago, Guy decided we should paint a couple of walls and cabinets in the house. I've mentioned this on and off, mostly in posts about the last phase of this renovation, known as Operation Clean This Place Up. Guy spent a fair amount of time in between projects, jobs, and injuries/illnesses to paint a few walls and strip and repaint cabinets in the hallway and bathroom. Photos of the HKH looking foxy-fine are forthcoming, mostly cuz I want to show off the incredible amount of work that we've done.

Architects fall into two camps when it comes to home improvement: those who live for repainting walls and installing bamboo flooring on every free weekend, and those who say, "Fuck painting." Guy and I fall into the second camp, for the most part. However, Guy got a wild hair after we finished passing the ARE back in late summer of 2005 and started this whole let's-paint-some-shit-around-here thing. At the end of 2007, I got a wild hair to get rid of clutter and instigated Operation CTPU, to which Guy readily agreed. But any of you out there who have done renovation projects know that in order to finish the job, you need a deadline. Hence, Guy and I picked March 17th for a deadline. We didn't quite make it, but by eventually settling on April 5th as our party date, it made us clean the house, get rid of clutter, and Get Things Done in general.

Doing the renovation proejct was all Guy's doing. I helped him pick colors and occasionally got him into DA's wood shop to work on cabinet doors, but that was the extent of my help. Hence, preparing for the party fell mostly to me. While Guy helped get rid of some detritus around the house (his primary task in Operation CTPU), i cleaned. And I mean cleaned. As in, spent a couple of hours on my hands and knees like Cinderella, scrubbing our tile bathroom floors with a bucket of warm water and some Oxyclean. Swiffing and sweeping the entire house twice in order to get rid of the ubiquitous Colorado dust and our ubiquitous cat hair. Wiping down counters and backsplashes, mopping the kitchen and some areas of the wood floors where cat barf or stray paint haunted us. Guy vacuumed our few but funky rugs and wiped glass tables, both tasks that I hate doing.

And I got and cooked food. Lawd, but did a Shorty get her grocery shop on. I made a trip to Sam's with my sister and two visits to the grocery store to pick up all my supplies--mini quiches, shrimp and cocktail sauce, mini crab cakes, chips, salsa, hummus, more chips, ingredients for spinach-artichoke dip (which did not get as eaten as I had hoped--I think I should've used my old recipe that uses sour cream and mayo instead of sour cream and cream cheese), ingredients for mini cheesecakes (which were hoovered up like mad, Shorty knows how to rock dessert), ingredients for chocolate fondue (which I didn't even get to break out, which means I'm gonna have to eat it here somehow), crudites, and sodas. Guy, mercifully, bought wine and beer, and he even made a sausage roll (STL Fan, if you're reading this, it's that sausage roll Guy's brother makes for Xmas Eve lunch at their dad's house each year, with the Ritz crackers, YUM!).

Overall, we had a great crowd, good food, excellent wine, and a great shindig overall. Folks were impressed with the job Guy had done, and they really enjoyed the view and the space we live in. It's been said that only architect like Modern architecture, and we had the room full of archinerds, knocking on concrete slabs and playing with artwork-hanging hardware, asking about paint and tile, and so on. You can dress us up, but you can't take us out. Unless it's to another architect's house--then it's okay.