Sunday, September 22, 2013

Adventures in DIY

Before today's post, a rabies update. :) How many bloggers get to type that?!

This morning I went in for my second round of the rabies vaccine. It took two hours, again! Ted says this hospital has two speeds: Slow and Stopped. We sat in the exam room for an hour doing nothing but wait for the pharmacy to send down the vaccine. Finally, they came in with 4 needles packed with fluids. The Immune Globulin, the nasty one, involved 5 injections into my index fingers - one injection directly into each puncture site. They fill the site with fluid until it puffs up like a blister. The one on the tip of my left index finger hurt the most, as there are more nerves in the tips of your fingers. After that, it was a breeze. They had to give me the rest of the Immune Globulin in the arm (since they couldn't get it all in at the site of the bites), then a different shot in the other arm, and a shot in each side of my butt. One of the shots was magenta! After the inundation of medication I had to lay down for about 20 minutes; I was feeling a bit woozy and my arms were aching.

Total needle pricks today: 9;  Total pricks so far: 11

Now I go back on Thursday and a week from Thursday for 2 more shots.

My advice to you:  Never get bitten by a wild animal.

...

Now on to today's real post!

Ted and I have had this hand-me-down lamp for awhile now. The curves are kinda cool, but the color and shade (not pictured) looked outdated.


Enter SPRAY PAINT. I decided to simply make it silver, switch out the shade, and see if that improved things.

I decided to just paint the whole thing, top to bottom. I never understood why it had that white part near the switch. After looking at these types of lamps on line, I see that it's supposed to look like a candle in a candlestick. So I should have left that white, I guess. Oh well!

I taped up the twisty switch and the cord (I later decided to give the cord a light coat of paint - FYI bad idea. It's all sticky now for some reason).

Here's how the lamp looked after a few quick coats of paint:


OK, getting a little better. It's not as shiny as I had hoped, but maybe that's because I just used the cheap ACE brand of metallic spray paint. I hear the Krylon metallic paints are better.


While painting on our back porch, I had a little visit from our neighbor's chihuahua, Cami.



Isn't she adorable?

The cats did not think so, despite the fact that they're both bigger than this dog. Even 9 lb Minnie.


Anyway, you may have seen the finished lamp with its old shade in this post. I'm still not loving it. Now I'm thinking I would like to paint it a glossy coral color, so it looks like ceramic or porcelain, and I still want to find a large drum shade for it. I'm learning how to do this DIY thing well as I go along!

I'll continue to update you on the state of this lamp, as well as some other DIY projects I'm attempting.


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