Reality Sinks In

There are bottles sitting on my shelf of the hard cider I make that are 17 years old.

SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD.

When the f@#* did I get so old??

Moving VII: Blow by Blow

— Unpacked all the boxes that were in the kitchen and did the best I could to put the items within them away.  Recovered the hand blender, several key pans and all the missing silverware, but unleashed at the same time a spate of iced-tea brewers, pizza trays, casserole pans and other storage-problematic infrequent-use items.  Have deduced by inventory of the total kitchen contents that there are still at least two boxes of kitchen items buried somewhere in the mess, and my entire beautiful bamboo tray full of small conveniences, too large to store anywhere and too nice to get rid of, remains undealt with.

— Removed the card table from Jack’s room and put it in the kitchen, along with two chairs.  Biggest improvement of the past two weeks–  it’s small enough to fit the space, gives me a surface and takes the place of the currently totally non-functional real table, which is buried under boxes in the living room.  Now Jack has a place to sit by me while I cook again, and we both have a place to sit down and eat like human beings.

— Purchased a basic black plastic stepstool from Home Despot, for everyone’s use, including Dragonia’s.

— Cleaned Jack’s room out completely by moving everything that was left inside it either into the living room or into storage, making a place for him to play.  Assessed sofa-beds at Ikea, with an eye towards purchasing one for him to use.

–  Reconnected the wireless Internet router, and got it running.  Restored Internet to the Wii.  (The laptop, which blew up on my last trip, remains non-functional.)

– Located the old bedroom curtains and retrieved them from the pile of garbage bags.  Purchased a curtain rod from Home Despot and hung said curtains in the bedroom.  They are too long for the new windows, but provide over 50% of the mission-critical light obscuration that might allow me to start sleeping past 6:40 AM and/or get more than 5 hours of sleep a night.

— Assessed rolling kitchen workstations at Ikea.  Identified potential target for delivery at the same time as the hypothetical sofa-bed.

— Assessed track lighting at Home Despot.  Data inconclusive.

— Measured bedroom doorway and assessed door options at Home Despot.  Doorway is 29 inches wide, effectively 28 and 3/4, allowing for hardware and small variations in the surface.  Rail systems for sliding bi-fold doors come in 24′” or 30″ increments.  Bi-fold doors themselves come in identical sizes.  Conferred with salesperson and was informed that there is no such thing as a 29″ bi-fold door (29 being an odd number), nor any “off-the-rack” standard door that is 29″ in width.  Such a door would have to be custom-made, at increased time, and possibly increased expense.  (Wow…  who’d have guessed that?  Oh wait!  I did!)

— Took picture of remaining undealt-with chaos in living room:

— Gave up and drank more beer.

Moving VI: The Tide Turns

I have found the Braun power hand blender.

This is it.  This is the moment when it all turns around.

Maybe.

Happy Mother’s Day

…’Cause lemme tell ya, life is just SO much more manageable with these puppies…  I don’t understand why when this kind of chemical technology exists that they’re not just pumpin’ it right into the water supply.

–Iris, extolling the virtues of prescription anti-anxiety medication

from the Comments: Ace’s Axiom #2

The previous From the Comments contained this assertion by me:

Let me just take a moment at this juncture to refer you to Ace’s Axiom #2, which is: If it seems obvious to you that something should be done, and yet it hasn’t already been done, there’s probably a reason why. Which is closely related to Ace’s Axiom #3: Nothing is ever simple or easy.  Anything that seems simple or easy will turn out to be ineffectual or have to be changed later on.

… resulting in the following counterpoint by Neuro:

Noted, but have you heard of Neuro’s Counteraxiom #2? That thing that you have been putting off for months or years because of being daunted by it will turn out to be fairly easy and would have made your life so much better all this time had you just done it when you should have. I’ve been stung by that one so many times with finances, health, comfort, aesthetics, etc. I’m trying to get better about it.

Well…  yeah.  On paper (and in practice), much better attitude with which to live your life.  It’s just that it doesn’t reflect my experience!  For every sink-fixing success (if you can call that a success), I get two air-conditioner failures, plus an instance of gluing things to the windshield of my car backwards.  My health is a story of things that were supposed to be simple turning out to be complex, often decades-long complex.  And my job (my current job anyway) consists of riding herd on a team of people I’ve never met who don’t quite speak my language, making sure that the “simple” things they’re supposed to do don’t go off on bizarre tangents or turn into nightmares.  Kinda colors my thinking…

I think my seminal experience in this regard had to be the grass at my house in Ivory Grove:  a 1910 three story Victorian surrounded by normal landscaping, including some very tall, very old pine trees, and having just enough property around it to make it feel, err…  not like Sealand.  The front of the property, to the west, had a tiny lawn;  the back, to the east, a very cute patio and a sort of secret garden with holly trees and grapevines.  The north, by constrast, where there was  a small strip of land between the side of the house and the fence marking the neighbor’s property, contained nothing but dirt.  Bare empty dirt.  I found that confusing.   Flushed with the short-lived enthusiasm of the new homeowner, however, I assumed that it was just something the previous owner had never gotten around to addressing, and set about analyzing how best to fix the problem.  The conclusion I came to was that since the north side of the house was in shade for almost the entire day, on account of all the tall trees, whatever grass had been there had probably ceased to get enough sunlight and died out.  So I did a little research, found a shade grass used on golf courses that needed almost no sunlight, got myself a hoe and set to.  How hard could it be, right?

The first thing I discovered, immediately, was that the soil was not what it appeared.  Only the top eighth of an inch could properly be called soil;  the rest was apparently some sort of construction backfill, containing (among other things) huge stones, chunks of glass of every color and three-inch wide hunks of concrete with hexagonal bathroom tiles attached.  It was, shall we say, not ideal for hoeing.  But I persevered.  I used a shovel to pry out all the really ridiculous stuff, and worked everything else over like a pioneer until I had a useable plot.  Then I seeded and watered and watched.  And in a relatively short period of time–  about a week–  I had brand new, green, growing grass.  It looked lovely.  One of my neighbors, who had never said anything to me before, saw it over his back fence and commented about how nice it was, and gave me the thumbs up.

Then we had our first good rainstorm.

It turned out that the grading of my property and the grading of the adjacent, much larger property, all led imperceptibly downhill, all to that northern strip.  So as soon as the rain started in any earnest, the whole thing became a freshet of running water.  Furthermore, that water contained the runoff from everything around it–  and what was around it, by and large, was pine trees.  So after the rain stopped, and the water went away, the whole expanse was covered in a quarter-inch thick layer of pine needles, sterilizing it as neatly as if I had taken a flamethrower to it and then salted the earth.  The grass died.  Quickly.  It persevered only in a little pocket over by the very corner of the property, where we had filled in the hole left by the stump of a mulberry tree we’d ground out, and there was a tiny hump that the pine needles tended to flow around.  It was…  educational.

Plus I sold the house, of course, later, when I got divorced.  So it all wound up being moot anyway.  Except in the sense that I have a fun story to tell, and I now spout axioms about the limitations of my own ability to affect my environment in positive ways.

I do wonder sometimes if it’s still bare dirt, now, at least two owners later.  But I’ve never had the opportunity to go back and check.

The Amber Horizons Cross-World Beach Party

… is scheduled for tomorrow.   It starts on Aderyn Quinnell’s Myst Haven West sim in Second Life  (234, 113, 22) at 3 pm PDT/ 1600 Cavern / 6 pm EDT, and then is supposed to switch to Beach Party Amber’s Ahnonay age in Myst Online: Uru Live Again at 5 pm PDT/ 1800 Cavern / 9 pm EDT.  Except that MOULa has been down for  unscheduled maintenance for the past three days, with a message reading “Down for unscheduled maintenance.  Hope to be back up tomorrow…”

Odds are if the Cavern tanks for the weekend, we’ll just hold the entire party in SL and then reschedule the Cavern portion some other time.  Either way, though, I have a 5-hour-plus  program of beach music gettin’ ready to go, including (but not limited to) The Beach Boys, Sophisticated Savage, The Ventures, The Greaseballs, Smashmouth, Bob Marley and a variety of Hawaiian and island music, both traditional and modern.  You can listen by clicking the Amber Horizons radio link in the Navigation sidebar.

And if you’re in-world, of course, c’mon down.

Moving V: For Want of a Nail

Somewhere…

Somewhere in one of these boxes…

…is my Braun power hand blender.

from the Comments: Damping

From Neuro, regarding Moving IV:  Epic Fail—

As you know, I’m Mr. Annoyed By Noise, particularly low frequency noise, so I would do all I could to fix that low hum (I had that once in a house from the electric hum from the furnace’s electric parts, and simply freely suspending the solenoid instead of having it mounted to the side saved me six months of a constant hum).

It sounds like the key here is vibration damping with soft material. If the closet being open matters, you could wedge a rag between the door and its jamb, so it is still closed but it can’t vibrate as easily (maybe the door itself is serving as a resonator). You could also buy foam from a hardware store and cushion where the AC meets the window frame with it.

That is all very good advice.  Whether any of it will make any difference, I’m not sure yet;  it’s going to take some experimentation.  I have determined, for instance, through a bit of direct observation that in addition to the Resonant Hum Occurring From No Known Source Except the Operation, there is also the Thermally-Conditional Intermittent Rattle of the Front Plastic Air Vents, and the Vibration-Induced Overhead Rattle of the Plastic Venetian Blind Mechanism.  And a noticeable lack of Noises Created by Direct Contact Between the Unit and the Window Frame, which one would expect to be a pretty large, inclusive classification on the Great Classification List of Air Conditioner Noises.

Instead of the sheet, consider installing a real door if you’re going to be there a year or more. Maybe the landlord would knock the price off your rent if you do the labor. Home Depot sells slab doors for $21, and then there’s some hardware, so maybe under $50. (How hard could it be to install it?)

How hard can it be?!  Oh, my friend…   let me just take a moment at this juncture to refer you to Ace’s Axiom #2, which is:  In a world where absolute moral values are hard to come by, Cheese is Good.

No, wait–  that’s Ace’s Axiom #1.   Let me just take a moment at this juncture to refer you to Ace’s Axiom #2, which is:  If it seems obvious to you that something should be done, and yet it hasn’t already been done, there’s probably a reason why. Which is closely related to Ace’s Axiom #3:  Nothing is ever simple or easy.  Anything that seems simple or easy will turn out to be ineffectual or have to be changed later on. The doorway may not be square.  Or the places where the hinges have to go may be totally rotted out and patched with spit and tape.  Or the opening may be a totally irregular, non-standard size that will require a custom door to be made at high expense.  Or there might be nowhere for a door to effectively open to when it is hung (which there isn’t, the way my furniture and the hallway are arranged.)  And I’m not even trying hard here.

That having been said, yes, I have to put a door up.  One of those split-type closet doors that runs on a track and bends in the middle.

Also, at the risk of seeming sarcastic:  if you’d like to jump in the car and roar over here and give me the benefit of your expertise and ATP, feel free.  I got all kinds of people who are willing to give me advice on what they think I oughta do.  I’m a little short on people who are willing to actually help me DO it…

Moving IV: Epic Fail

Started trying to put things away today and mostly failed, in large part because the apartment now resembles one of those sliding-piece picture puzzles:  everything is mixed up with everything else, and there is no place to move it and sort it out, because every space one might move it to is already filled by something else.  I took a crack at sorting out the cider-making equipment first, then the Christmas stuff, then the things of Jack’s that will be kept, then the things of Jack’s that will be thrown away, stacking things atop one another, grinding my back again and again against the low archways and torturous spaces, and getting more and more frustrated, until finally I realized I was walking in circles, which is what I do when I short-circuit.  And all the while the temperature outside was steadily, perversely rising…  When the sweat started dripping off my forehead and chest and onto the rug, and I saw that the bacon grease in the cast iron pan from the morning’s breakfast was still a clear liquid, I realized with a not-so-silent curse that I was going to have to shelve everything else and put the air conditioners in.

The air conditioner that came with the apartment went into its spot in 10 minutes, with a minimum of fuss, because various pieces of wood were nailed around the window and sill to accommodate it long ago.  It, of course, is useless:  it’s old, spits out almost no cold air (I honestly can’t even tell if its compressor goes on), and is in the living room, which has no containment and is unusable anyway, on account of being filled with BOXES.  The air conditioner that I brought with me from the old apartment is new, and works like a champ.  It took me over two hours to put it into the bedroom window, because some nuance of its underside contour prevented it from being safely stable in the new location.  I had to figure out how to stabilize it, scrounge up the wood to shim it, size the wood without a saw (because I don’t own one) by knocking serrations in it with a hammer and screwdriver and then breaking the it with my heel against my old cutting board from Ivory Grove, then manhandle it all into place by myself, with Jack trying to show me what he was doing on Spore every five minutes.  I got it operational, but I’ve discovered that while it’s operating, some nuance of the architecture makes everything in a five foot radius of it vibrate with a profound basso hum, which can only be alleviated by opening the closet door (eliminating any containment of the cold air.)  And it’s plugged into the only grounded outlet in the entire bedroom, which just happens to be the same outlet that Eve is plugged into, since the bedroom was the only place I could put Eve other than in Jack’s room.  And there’s no door on the entrance to the bedroom, so there’s no containment of the cold air anyway.  I have thumbtacked a sheet across it as a temporary measure.  It’s every bit as ghetto as it was when I did it in the previous apartment, and in my house at Ivory Grove before that, and pisses me off just as much, and works just as well.

I have decided that tomorrow, I am going to start throwing stuff out wholesale, in garbage bags, without sorting it.  Fuck this noise.

In the meantime, it might be below 80 in the bedroom now.  And I have a cold Magic Hat #9.  The inside of the bottle cap said, “Wise choice, my friend.”

Indeed.

The Magic Number

Hey, it’s Jack’s birthday today!  He’s 9…

(Last single digit birthday.  <sob>)