woo-hoo, Friday!

It’s day 8 of my little February manini project, and I’m thrilled that I’ve been able to get this momentum going.

Although yesterday was not a bad day in all respects — not even close — the thing about the paint on the frame was really frustrating. I put another coat on this morning, then pretty much decided that just wasn’t going to work out at all, even if I put six more coats on there.

I’m nothing if not resourceful, though, so I just grabbed the can of spray paint I had set aside for another project, covered up the garage floor with some newspapers and cardboard (convenient, since the car is at the shop and the garage was empty), and put sprayed two quick coats.

Lessons learned:

1. I should have just used the spray paint in the first place.
2. I really do prefer satin paint to gloss paint.
3. Holy carp, I had forgotten how much spray paint stinks. Note to self: save all spray-painty projects for summer. (Yes, once the frame was dry enough to pick up, I moved it into the house for final drying and opened the garage door to air it out.)

No pictures yet, since I still have to reassemble the metal to the wood frame, which I won’t be able to do for another couple hours, and by then it will be terrible light for taking pictures. But I’ll definitely do a before and after at some point.

~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~

That was thing #27, technically yesterday’s thing. What about today?

Today I didn’t have a ton of time to devote to projects, so I chose something small: figuring out the Zinio + library account situation (#6 on my list).

A few weeks ago, I got notification from the library that they now have access to a large array of titles through Zinio, and that I can somehow connect that access to my personal Zinio account. For a magazine junkie like me, that was music to my ears.

Like most things involving the library computer system, however, the process didn’t look to be very straightforward, so I knew I’d need a little time to jump through the hoops. So, I chucked it onto the to-do list and let it sit there for a while.

This afternoon, I finally sat down to do it, and — surprisingly — it was much easier than expected. It took only a couple of minutes to get the accounts connected, then a few more to figure out how to add the titles I wanted to my personal account so I could easily access them.

By far the most time-consuming bit was paging through forty-five pages of offerings and figuring out what I wanted. I added a nice selection of artsy-craftsy titles, some interesting-looking shelter titles, and a few general-interest titles to my list. I didn’t add anything that I already subscribe to personally, although they did offer a few of those. I like to directly support with a subscription those magazines I read pretty much cover to cover, and if any of my new finds end up falling into that category, I’ll do the same with them.

Does your library have a hook-up with Zinio or a similar service? Have you found any great new magazines lately?