Bill Roper's Journal

So it went like this...

The new baby gate arrived this morning. I dropped the old baby gate off at UPS over lunch and it is on its way back to Amazon. After work, I decided that I would see if I could quickly install the new gate and it turned out that I *could*, having figured out all of the problematic parts with the previous gate. The gate is now installed on the stairs and should, I think, prevent Calvin from coming upstairs. It does not *seem* to prevent Gretchen from coming upstairs, although it doesn't make the whole process any more pleasant. And Julie needs to see how to operate the gate so that she does not tear it down accidentally. I have called Julie and suggested a demonstration, which she has declined. I worry about this.

Meanwhile, the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter card for the Apollo 8 unit that I bought arrived from Sweetwater. It had come via USPS and the notice said that it was in the mailbox. This seemed unlikely and it was, as all of the mail had been left on the porch, because that box had no hope of fitting in the mailbox. I brought everything in and it was now time for dinner.

We have been keeping Calvin on an extra-long leash to keep him in the family room when he is not in his kennel, but after dinner, I decided we should let him roam free on the first floor and determine whether the new baby gate would keep him off the second floor. This cost us one wooden cooking spoon that had been used for dinner and which Calvin found while counter surfing. Ruby took it from Calvin and it died while I tried to take it away from Ruby without breaking it.

And then a little while later, Calvin went and laid an enormous load in the middle of the living room where he has been previously guilty of doing so. Great.

By now, I am *really* unhappy. I head back into the living room to turn on the lights and clean up the mess.

And I trip on Julie's suitcase, which is still sitting in the passage between the hallway and the living room where it has been for over a week since Windycon. I had been thinking that this stupid thing really needed to go upstairs. I had thought correctly.

Trips to the floor: one.

Swearing and shouting ensued, because I was unhappy with pretty much everyone in the house at this point, including myself. Happily, I don't seem have done any major damage to anything, so I was able to pull myself up on the stairs, get up, and clean up the pile of poop. In multiple trips to the toilet, but no more trips to the floor.

I had thought to drag Calvin to the living room and rub his nose in it, but he was having none of this, so I exiled him to his kennel. Then when I was done cleaning things up, I dragged the kennel full of Calvin to the living room, where he will remain until morning in exile there.

And then Gretchen and I finished watching our TV show. After that, I went to the basement to install the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter into the Apollo 8 unit. This is easier when the unit has not already been installed into the rack so that it can only be accessed from the floor.

Trips to the floor: two, but with more planning this time.

Taking the card out requires a lot of playing with a teeny, tiny Allen wrench (which I only dropped once). Then I discovered I couldn't lever it out with my fingernails, but I got Julie to come in and hand me the bit of metal that had once covered a expansion card slot in the back of a computer. That tool did the job nicely. The new card was installed, the screws put back in, the Thunderbolt cable that needed to go to the computer which I had carefully identified and rerouted was plugged into the Apollo 8, and -- as long as I was on the floor already -- I moved the rest of the cables on the assumption that this was all going to work.

I levered myself off the floor, walked through the procedure for registering the used Apollo 8 unit to my account, and all of that worked. Now, the only thing that needed to be done was to use the new, short Thunderbolt cable to connect the Apollo 8 unit to the Apollo Silver unit.

I called Julie to do this, because it has to be done underneath the console. She plugged the cable in and went back to her computer.

The Apollo Silver unit and the Satellite refused to pop up on the list of devices.

Ok, there is no reason this shouldn't be working, unless Julie has somehow plugged the cable in incorrectly. This means that I will need to inspect the cable install.

Trips to the floor: three. Once more with feeling.

Thunderbolt cables are finicky beasts and it turns out that Julie had twisted the Thunderbolt cable so that the lighting bolt was face up on the Apollo 8 and face down on the Apollo Silver. In her defense, I hadn't removed the cable wrap from the new cable and that was the way that it *wanted* to be plugged in. It was just wrong.

I unwrapped the cable, plugged it in correctly, and stuck my head out from under the console. Three devices were now present in the display. Yay!

I crawled back up into my chair, fiddled with things a bit more, discovered that all of my plugins were now recognized, and declared victory. I fired up Cubase, pulled up a recent project, and hit the playback button.

Everything sounded good. Very good. Probably better than before, which is what one should expect from the newer unit with the better converters.

So this project was a success.

I am going to go take some Aleve now.

Let me clarify that we are emphatically *not* looking to move. I mean, *not*. The mere *thought* of trying to pack up this place and move somewhere else is frightening and we really, really like where we are living. And if we *were* moving, it would be because we needed to move somewhere else. Since those conditions don't obtain, here we sit.

This doesn't stop us from looking at the occasional house though. And this house is really, really odd, so the family drove by it to take a look today.

The road running from the main street up to the double railroad track is gravel, but the road on the other side is paved. This is good.

There are what appear to be the ruins of the foundation of another structure that had once been on the property with *two* cars parked in what is now the ruins of the basement. Elsewhere on the property are two decrepit vans and a sedan, along with a motorboat on a trailer.

And there are *two* houses. I have no idea of why, although the main house appears to have been built around 1960, while the other house looks like it dates to the late 1940s or early 1950s. I could be wrong, as I'm leaning heavily on the style of the porch railings.

The property -- all four acres of it -- backs up on the forest preserve. Looking at the antenna and the satellite dish, I would suspect that Internet access is going to be a Starlink project, but maybe not. Comcast claims to service that address and might even be telling the truth.

The listing price is currently $750,000, which seems like a lot, but less than the $974,900 that Chicago Magazine shows it as being listed at two years ago. One concludes that it hasn't sold in that time, nor is it any better for two years (or more) of non-occupancy.

But it's a fascinating place and if we suddenly won the Lotto and had the money to buy it and hire someone to fix it up (which isn't going to be *anything* like cheap), well, then maybe we would consider moving.

Because then we could also afford to hire movers.

Listing inside

Gretchen was feeling under the weather and I was contending with allergies, so we got less done today than we might have. Our contractor came by to take a look at our siding problem, which sadly appears to be a bit more extensive than I initially thought, largely because I never spend any time on that side of the house. Oops.

We'll see how that goes.

Tomorrow, it's back to work.

I hope you had a good weekend!

Ever since this summer's great round of renovations, Gretchen's van has been parked in the driveway. As the weather turns toward winter and finds more and more interesting things to throw at us, this becomes less and less tenable. We have had a sleet storm. We have had snow. Even frost is a problem when you're hurrying to get Katie and Julie off to school.

Tonight, the temperature is forecast to drop to zero degrees. Accordingly, I suggested to Gretchen that we implement her idea for getting her van back in the garage now:

Sort out the mess in the library and throw out any empty boxes.

Move the remaining boxes that are in the garage into the library where they can be sorted out somewhere warm.

Put the broken down empty boxes in my trunk so I can give them to Vlad for his upcoming move at the next Windycon meeting.

Put whatever is left in the garage back more or less where it belongs.

This took longer than I anticipated (most things do). But when we finished, Gretchen was able to park in the garage again.

And so was I. :)

This meant that I didn't get anything else accomplished today, but I think I'll count this as a win.

A big win.

Especially tomorrow morning. :)

So samwinolj and Bonnie came over yesterday. Sam spent some time helping me get the router and router table set up in my garage and between us we managed to get six bookcases adjusted. That left two.

Now Sam had spent most of the time operating the router -- I had been busy pegging shelves and putting things back together. This meant that it took me a bit (and a phone call to Sam) to make sure I knew what I was doing. But before too long, daisy_knotwise and I had finished the last two bookcases.

Soon, we will actually put things on them. And we will be closer to the end of our long national nightmare. :)

In honor of the end of Daylight Savings Time today, we pulled out some steaks from the freezer and grilled.

In the dark. Which is how I'll be doing my grilling for months. And months. And months.

Well, until we get enough snow that I can't get to the grill...

That is to say, the last of the curtains that were hanging when this renovation project started are now hung again. The yellow bedroom is still without curtains, but it started that way.

Also, the first piece of wall-hanging art is hanging again, that being a round painted mirror that hangs between the walk-in closets in the bedroom. It was wrapped and sitting in a basket that got moved when we were putting up the bedroom curtains. Gretchen asked me if I wanted to hang it and handed me the bins full of picture hangers that we'd extracted from the wall when the project started. A few taps of the hanger and the mirror is back on the wall.

Looks good there too!

Gretchen and I did a little work on my side of the garage this afternoon; Gretchen and Katie did some more while I was at tumbling class with Julie blowing up green portals.

The result of this is that I am able to park my car in the garage again.

It will be a bit longer before Gretchen's car gets back in the garage...

If I unpack a box from the garage every day, we will be able to park both cars in the garage before it snows.

Unless it snows really early...

Unpacking will commence in earnest tomorrow.

Finally.

Well, more or less.

The last coat of polyurethane went down in the back room today. Tomorrow morning, they will come back and put all of the furniture back in place. Then we get to start unpacking.

There will be a lot of unpacking. :)

And then we will be done.