June 11

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Working through the magazine bringing all of the existing articles up to the new page design standards, starting at the top and going to the bottom (of our local directory, actually, rather than the nav bar department sequence).

Working on our client's Budget Bathroom Makeover.

We decided to remove the hideous sliding glass tub doors, which I did yesterday, and replace with a shower rod and curtain. The removal left a thick, persitant bed of scum it took hours to scrape, dissolve and scrub off the walls and tub.

Scraped the walls. Filled holes with DAP CrackShot, a great new product I recently discovered (thanks to a clerk at Economy Hardware who actually knows something) that's always been needed. It fills cracks and holes without shrinking, eliminating the taping required to cover cracks, sands smooth quickly and can be used indoors or out. Plus it can be used to skimcoat. In short, it does it all. Well.

Hastone sent a man to measure for the stone we selected on Saturday. He didn't speak much English and my Chinese is, well, I used to know the New Year's greeting. And there's hundreds of dollars of stone at stake. We had a totally Lost in Translation encounter. The last item to measure for is a threshold, I explain. A marble one exists but it's too small and the wrong color, we want a new one.

Here, roughly, is the exchange. ... "That one good, no need friend." "Want to match threshold with bath shelves." "Close curtain no see." "Open curtain see." Waste money. Keep curtain close." "We want waste money." "Waste money bad. No do." ... Closes his notebook, end of conversation. Maybe this is wolfish face of capitalism in the PRC.