Would it kill me to post something, already?

No, it would not. I’ve gotten very lazy about writing, but have been busy as a bee with photography and the ongoing destruction of our staircase, where progress comes in fits and starts. When we moved into the house, the stairs and railing and newel posts had been painted black, and the spindles cream, which was pleasing enough to the eye but of course showed every speck of dirt. And the paint became quite marred over time, but never quite enough to deal with. The spindles had been painted very sloppily, too, and I didn’t want to repaint them unless I could do it right and get rid of obvious drips. So for 15 years nothing happened, and then one day this summer I got it into my head that I was at least going to do the newel posts and see what lay beneath the latex paint on the banister. And of course, the next thing I know I’m in way way over my head, using every kind of stripper known to man in an attempt to get down to bare wood through at least 6 layers of paint, only the last of which was latex. The others were all heavy, nasty, lead-based oils, which give up their bond with wood unwillingly. For a while I despaired, but I took some time last week to really go at it, and again over the weekend, and now I feel like there’s a possibility that I’ll have the stairs done by Christmas. A really, really slim possibility.