Beautiful house, Dorothy. Noting the electric baseboard heaters, I would ask pointed questions about energy costs if I were you, and take a hard look at the windows (have they been updated?) and the weatherstripping on outside doors -- since moving to this house, I'm relearning everything I had forgotten about drafts.

I have a date with Patrick the Painter, who returns next week, on Himself's birthday, to deal with the grey walls and damaged plaster in the guest room. The timing is good; I can get the curtains up and hang some pictures in there before The Brother & wife arrive for Easter. That leaves only the spaces with too many bookcases: our bedroom (which also involves an enormous and very overstuffed closet), the study (six full-sized bookcases and a filing cabinet), and the basement (eight bookcases and a full wall of storage shelving). Unfortunately, the bedroom and the basement also feature quite disastrous colour choices by our predecessors: baby-shit brown in the basement, and aubergine purple in the bedroom. The study is quite tolerable, by contrast -- probably because the walls are almost completely covered with bookcases.

Last week, I started on a massive editing project for Army Headquarters. It's a three-volume book on Canadian operations in Afghanistan, a project that has been badly handled over the last six years and is now seriously overdue. I hate it when a book is already in layout when somebody with signing authority finally notices that the editing sucks and decides to get it fixed. I have done this before, and it always means hot breath down my neck as I trudge through a massive hard-copy edit, followed by many rounds of proofreading as the layout people input only about 80 percent of the marked changes. I still don't have a contract in hand, as the poor, suffering staff officers in Ottawa wrestle with the civil service administration -- as close to wrestling with a pig in mud as you can get without actually rolling in mud. The Canadian federal government has a continuing crisis with its civil service pay system (google Phoenix and Canada, and see if you can figure out why they're not up to their necks in class-action lawsuits), so I kinda wonder when and if I'll get paid.