So my weekend went something roughly like this ...

Saturday, 10am: I wake up, a bit late for me these days, and wander groggily into the kitchen to finish masking the cabinets and begin priming.
1pm: I finish priming the left half of the kitchen and take a much-needed shower. V then gets me out to lunch and a little shopping.
6pm: After a little break i return to kitchen priming. I complete the cabinets by midnight as V watches the old Judy Garland piece A Star is Born.

Sunday, 8:30am: Assisted by my alarm, i rise early and set about adding white semi-gloss (technically, "foggy skies") to the primed cabinets. Through an amazing show of resolve i complete the process after five straight hours of work.
2pm: V informs me that i've painted most of the cupboards shut, necessitating a bit of sanding and repainting.
5pm: We head over to Fremont for some relaxation in the form of dinner with the folks. Afterwards we manage to catch most of the Oscars.
10pm: Back to the grind, putting our new Restoration Hardware hardware on the cabinets. First handle ... and it won't go on. Hrm. V and i fuss with it for 20 minutes and discover new modes of cursing. Before giving up entirely, we try putting a different handle on a different cabinet. Works fine. Oooooookaaay. Another one, no problem. Turns out that for our first handle we picked the only bum one in the bunch.

Monday, 12am: We close the book on the kitchen and turn towards tidying the house for our 8am appointment with the appraiser. I somehow find the energy to motor through the final stages of beautification and hit the hay at 3am.

It's now Tuesday night and my arm is still whining about wielding a paintbrush all weekend long. But the end result is pleasing. And the kitchen is now ... officially ... done. For all our efforts, the appraisal took all of ten minutes. We're now impatiently waiting for word from our loan officer regarding the magic number the appraiser came up with.

V is currently watching the latest episode of Dirt on tivo. As near as i can tell, the entire show is built around Courtney Cox shocking everyone who still regards her as Monica Friends Geller. There's her weekly masturbation scene and constant crassness, bitchiness, and opportunism. This week the plot seems to have devolved into sub-All My Children levels. Has Vincent Gallo sunk this low too? Well, Ebert did trash Brown Bunny.

Speaking of AMC, i was perusing the official show website the other day ... these actors have got the whitest names ever. Are they all from Buttf@$#, Iowa? I guess middle America is the place to find people who actually regard daytime drama as high art.

And speaking of racism, i spent an hour earlier this evening perusing the works of science fiction writer and Asianweek op-ed bigot Kenneth Eng. For those who haven't heard the story, he's caused a furor this week after publishing an editorial in the weekly Bay Area publication entitled "Why I Hate Blacks". It's filled with hateful racist diatribe and is wholely laughable, if not for its nasty potential social effects. What's more amusing is this guy's bio, billing himself as the youngest published science fiction writer ever, having put out Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate at age 20. Wasn't the kid who wrote Eragon 15? Beyond that, a quick read of the book's first few pages as well as some of Eng's blog postings reveal his pseudo-scientific treatments of race and religion. I had to stop going through his crap. It's like reading Ann Coulter or Debbie Schlussel. You can spend all day getting riled up by their blustering, but in the end that's what they want ... to keep your attention.

My initial glee over Winning Eleven 2007 (abbreviated title) has been tempered a bit lately by the AI's amazing skill at corners and crosses. I'd like to know what fraction of the goals i've conceded have come from those situations. Attackers just won't be marked when the ball comes in from the wings. And while i appreciate having a player of Shevchenko's skill in my squad, he's just a little too good at maintaining possession and beating defenders. Especially when held against his recent real life performances.

Last but not least, i caught the highlights of Chelsea's Carling Cup final win over Arsenal Jr. Great resolve from the team to come back from a goal down (nearly getting run off the pitch in the first twenty minutes) to equalize and triumph on the strength of a brace from team MVP Didier Drogba. His winner was an exquisitely weighted header off an Arjen Robben cross. But the big stories were the game-ending brawl (thankfully for me more reflective of a frustrated Arsenal than more bad Chelsea behavior) and the horrific injury to Chelsea skipper and emotional leader John Terry. Having miraculously returned from a midweek ankle injury to start in the final, he suffered the full force of a boot to the face when diving for a header and meeting an attempted clearance kick from Abou Diaby. Watching the footage, i could feel the impact in my own skull ... no two ways about it, he was kicked full force in the face. Terry was out cold but thank god seems okay now and returned to celebrate the win with his team. That guy is a true iron man, and my hat goes off to him.