It's all smoke !

Within the first few days of 2006 I have already completed a few mini projects... here's the list, in decending order of smoke-ness :-)

1. Can you tell the differences between these pics:

Picture A:


Picture B:


In order to "transform" the staircase from A to B, it took me an entire day to sand it, polish it, and paint the first coat--plus three hours of clean up because of the heavy dust. I then needed to spend three nights applying extra layers of paint.

It also cost me $100....

After all these efforts, the staircase actually looked exactly the same! I now experienced what King Solomon said ... 人 一 切 的 勞 碌 ， 就 是 他 在 日 光 之 下 的 勞 碌 ， 有 甚 麼 益 處 呢 ？

2. Tiramisu.... This was relatively more meaningful, since i had a lot of my first-times:
a. The first time I made a tiramisu, of course;
b. The first time I made a cake for myself to celebrate whatever I need to celebrate;
c. The first time my housemates and I took a picture together...



How's the cake? I think I put too much coffee on the bottom layer of the lady fingers so some liquid started coming out after the first day. Also I need to use real espresso next time since the regular coffee, however how strong it is, was not enough.

3. Framed a few pictures! The process was fun and enjoyable, and it's not complicated at all. All I needed to do was to put the sticks together and keep them intact:



4. stretched a canvas.... Wow this was a very complicated process, and could easily damage the art too. The complicated thing was that it's easy to break the stretcher strips when installing the cross bars. The steps I followed were similar to this.