Bill Roper's Journal

Apparently, it was going to be *that* kind of day.

I was awakened early this morning, because our new landscaper arrived and wanted to go over what he was doing with trimming the assorted bushes. I eventually got myself together, we compared notes, and everything was fine, except that I probably should have gone to bed earlier last night.

The next order of business was to start doing laundry. I tossed my load of shirts in the washer and Gretchen and I headed out for lunch.

Gretchen had ordered a Halloween themed mug to be shipped out from JoAnn Fabrics and it arrived yesterday -- broken. There was a great deal of bubble wrap enmeshing the mug, but it doesn't help so much when the handle is protruding. She determined that they would take it back at the store so we headed up there after lunch and I returned the mug for cash.

So far, so good.

Off to the basement to put in the load of Gretchen's jersey and move my shirts to the dryer. The first thing to do, of course, is to clean the screen in the dryer vent. I pulled the screen and the heavy layer of lint *fell* off the screen and onto the floor, propelled by a lot of what used to be paper that had been in a load of wash that I had not participated in. Oh, dear.

I cleaned up the fallen lint, grabbed the lint trap brush, and went to work, removing a lot of dead paper from the bottom of the trap. The shop vac picked everything up and I moved the shirts to the dryer, the jersey to the washer, and headed off to the studio to do some mixing.

Before I started, I needed to straighten out my on-line subscription to the St. Louis Post Dispatch (which I have for Cardinals news and pretty much nothing else), but which had become much too expensive. I went to try to cancel it, but I had to log in first and the web page for cancellation would not accept the account number that appeared on the on-line screen that showed my account information. Huh. That's some fine design. The error message said I should call the offices, which were (of course) closed for the weekend.

I eventually managed to log in, asked to cancel, was offered a much better rate, and that's all good.

Off to mixing. A good bit of cutting, pasting, and tweaking later and I had a pretty acceptable mix in hand. I still needed to finish it up, but it was time for the shirts to come out of the dryer and they would then need to be hung up immediately. Gretchen's huge load of jersey went to the dryer, the third load went into the washer, and I went upstairs to hang the shirts. They were just a touch damp, but that's ok, because better that than over-dry and wrinkled.

I still needed to go to Sam's Club and Mariano's for groceries, but I decided to pull up the laundry cam and check on the dryer before I left. This was a good choice, because the dryer had stopped with the dreaded d90 error which I have come to learn means that the lint trap is full of crud. Apparently, the early-afternoon cleaning had been insufficient.

Back to the basement I went, where I got to remove the heavy, damp load of jersey back to the laundry basket, because cleaning out the lint trap with laundry in the drum just means that you will get the clean laundry dirty again and that's counter-productive. I gave the lint trap another good cleaning out, vacuumed everything up with the shop vac, sucked at least one big damp piece of lint out of the trap with the shop vac, called it good, put the laundry back in the dryer, started it up, and went out for groceries.

I picked up everything we needed from Sam's Club and then stopped at home to unload with Julie's help, because there were perishables and it was miserably hot today which would have resulted in the perishables perishing if I left them in the car while at Mariano's. Off to the next stop, where I actually managed to find *exactly* four hidden cartons of Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi hidden away behind the mountain of Caffeine-Free Pepsi. It probably would not have been there if it hadn't been so well hidden, because they are having a half-price sale this weekend, so the soda costs what it used to cost when it wasn't on a good sale before the last several years of inflation. I had a bunch of coupons which expire tomorrow (and a bunch that expire later), so I made sure to buy anything that we needed that I had a coupon for which is how I ended up with two cartons of ice cream -- because we *need* ice cream, right? Miserably hot, remember?

Back home, I unload the groceries and inform Gretchen that I have frozens that will need to go in the freezer immediately. Gretchen is dismayed by this, because she has just filled up the freezer with all of the frozens that came back from Sam's Club. Well, I bought the ice cream, so it's my job to figure out how to fit it in the freezer, because I can't eat all of it right now...

I said, "I can't eat all of it right now."

Freezer Tetris followed and everything fit.

I rested for a few minutes. Gretchen suggested that it was time to start dinner, because she had to pick up a grocery order from Walmart later in the evening. I asked her to please go ahead while I went downstairs, because I had just checked the laundry cam and discovered that we had another d90 error on the dryer.

I pulled everything out of the dryer and put it back into the laundry basket again, grabbed the lint brush and removed another metric ton of lint (ok, probably a few cubic inches of lint, but it seems like more when you are spreading it around like a toxic aerosol -- which is pretty much what my nose thought of it), cleaned everything up with the shop vac, pulling *another* giant piece of damp lint out of the trap with it, and then put everything back in and started the dryer for a third time for this load.

While I was downstairs, I popped back into the studio to check on the mix. And I noticed that something funny was happening -- the right main monitor speaker was cutting in and out. This is bad, because speakers are expensive. On the other hand, maybe the problem was with the Mackie Big Knob that routes all of the signals. I plugged things and unplugged things, but the intermittent problem was continuing to intermit.

Well, the Big Knob has three speaker outputs. Let's plug the speakers into the third output.

Sound! Lots and lots of sound!

Ok, speakers are fine. Let's plug them back into the original channel and twist the volume pot on the back a bit with the sound turned off. Back and forth and now let's turn the sound back on.

And everything is fine. Probably just some dust or oxidation that a little manual adjustment took care of. This is good, because I really don't want to have to replace the Big Knob.

I went back upstairs and had dinner with Gretchen while we watched another episode of "Burn Notice". About this time, my phone went off with a work emergency. One of my compatriots posted messages from the log and I knew immediately what the problem was, so I went upstairs to help handle the problem while Gretchen headed out to Walmart to pick up the order.

I had correctly diagnosed the work problem, so it was fixed without too much difficulty. Yay me!

Meanwhile, Gretchen had acquired the Walmart order, plus some additional groceries from Jewel, which included the blueberry muffins that I had asked for, because apparently I wanted pastry for dessert, not ice cream, despite having overloaded the freezer with ice cream earlier.

The giant load of jersey finally finished drying a few minutes ago (confirmed by laundry cam before heading down to the basement). It is now upstairs, the third load of laundry is in the dryer, and I am going to head off to bed and hope that nothing else decides to break today.

My major chores for today involved more laundry, because I needed to wash my shirts, and a load including Gretchen's shirts, and...

Julie cleaned out her room last week and three baskets of laundry came out. I had washed two of them so far. The problem was that Julie was not extremely good about sorting the laundry, so when I dumped one load in and heard things going "klunk", I figured I had better find out what sort of laundry makes that noise. It turned out to be an alarm clock and a tube of lip balm. The other load had a lot of clothes that still had Goodwill tags on them -- which I removed! -- but I didn't notice the other loose tags hidden away in the laundry, so the very wet tags had to be fished out of the washer so they didn't get into the dryer, shred to tiny bits, and contaminate the lint trap.

By now, I should have learned. But the last load was there and it appeared to be just a sheet and a few blankets. Nothing went "klunk" as I poured the load from the basket into the washer, so I assumed all was well.

I was wrong. Oh, so very wrong.

When I looked into the washing machine after the load was done, there was shredded something everywhere. I pulled out the sheet and shook it off, dropping shredded guck on the floor. I did the same for the blankets. Damp guck continued to cling to them, so I tossed them back into a laundry basket, because they were clearly not going to go into the dryer any time soon.

The washer was full of shredded guck. I fished a lot of it out by hand and threw it in the trash. Some sort of cloth and mesh framework came out with it and I finally came to realize that an elderly solid foam rubber pillow had been part of this load. It had not appreciated being washed in this way and had decided to die in the most spectacular fashion possible.

Happily, the shop vac was sitting right there, so I plugged it in and cleaned out the washer; then vacuumed up the vast majority of what had hit the floor. A garbage bag is going down tomorrow to clean up this incredible mess.

There is going to be a family conversation about what to put into laundry baskets and what *not* to put into laundry baskets. In general, this is going to be *laundry*, not items that are *not* laundry, unless there is nothing in the basket except *not laundry*, which has happened on occasion when we needed a container to move a lot of books from one location to another.

I am unlikely to toss a full basket of books into the washing machine.

I hope.