Bill Roper's Journal

We have an older shelf in the garage that somehow got one of the shelves badly bent. This caused me to worry about the stability of the unit, so I ordered a new shelf from Amazon that would fit the relatively small space. Since today is garbage day, I figured I could quickly assemble the new shelf, swap it into place, and dispose of the old shelf.

I was *so* wrong.

The shelf is one of the kinds with the removable boards across the shelf and four panels that need to be pegged together into the uprights to make the layer for the board to rest on. I had assembled a similar shelf from Home Depot many years ago and it was easy.

Except that this shelf had a pegging system that was extraordinarily finicky. Two thin metal tabs had to be inserted into narrow slots in the uprights and then hammered into place. The tolerances weren't. You might have to bend one of the tabs to get it to go in, but if you bent it too far, then it wouldn't seat properly all the way through the hole and would miss the second matching hole. It quickly became apparent that this wasn't a one person job.

So I called up K (who had returned home about half an hour earlier with her dinner) and begged for help. She wasn't thrilled, but came down to help me put this incredible mess together. I could not have done it without her.

When we got done, the shelf was metastable. The top section is held to the bottom by tabs that are extremely loose, so that you cannot pick up the shelf unit by the top half without causing it to come apart. It also seemed to be slightly off-square in an uncorrectable way. Oh, and the center brace on each shelf can be easily knocked out when you try to put something on the shelf below, because the tabs there aren't at all tight either.

I don't know. Maybe the instructions omitted the step involving a set of pliers. Or epoxy. Or something.

Anyway, K left and I went to work emptying the old shelf. Then I tried to move it out of position and the stack of 2x4s next to it fell on me.

Stop laughing.

I finally concluded that they were going to fall somewhere and weren't going to hit anything, so I let them go. Then I wrestled the shelf into position, put a few items on it to hold it down, because only gravity was going to help at this point, and put all the 2x4s back in the gap between the new shelf and the one to the left. By the time I finally got everything loaded back onto the new shelf, I was two and a half hours into this half-hour project and I was completely out of steam.

With the old shelf still to be dismantled and disposed of.

I called up K and begged for some more help. K had worked her full shift as a camp counselor earlier in the day and was not thrilled by this request, but she came down and did it with a bit of help from Julie.

So the old shelf is gone, the new shelf is in place. It will, I hope, remain standing.

Meanwhile, if you are shopping on Amazon, do not buy any of the shelf units with a tabbed design for the shelves, because whatever you pay for them is too much.

Gack.

With two episodes of "Superman & Lois" remaining, the non-streaming TV viewing cupboard is nearly bare, so we auditioned a couple of new shows tonight.

"The Lazarus Project" is a British import running on TNT. It's a lightly contrived time-travel story with a group of people who are able to travel back to the most recent July 1st and set right what once was wrong. So far, it's being interesting, although Gretchen finds it a bit dark (in the brightness and contrast sense, not the plot lines). We'll see how it progresses.

The flip side of this is "Stars on Mars" over on FOX. This show is a very silly version of Survivor set in a fake Mars habitat with someone getting voted out of the habitat each episode. William Shatner is hosting, which is just painfully funny. Thus far, we are amused, although we have no idea who most of the people are in the habitat other than Lance Armstrong and Arial Winter (the latter confusing the former with *Neil* Armstrong).

It's going to be a weird summer...

With a vanishingly small amount of broadcast TV left on the DVR, it suddenly struck me that "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" had made its way to Disney+. Like a lot of people (I suspect), we hadn't gone to see it in the theaters, because we figured it would be along before too long, and now was the time to finally watch the film.

I liked it a lot. Gretchen would have liked it more if it hadn't been quite so dark and low contrast, a trend in film that she's *very* tired of. It reminded me a lot of "Star Wars", which I suppose shouldn't be a surprise.

But I have always been fond of Hank Pym and Paul Rudd's take on the younger Scott Lang Ant-Man continues to be delightful. I also really enjoyed the family dynamic.

And I'm told that this is setting up the next series of Marvel films, although that's become a bit more complex due to Jonathan Majors' legal problems. We'll see how that all sorts out.

In any case, it's definitely worth watching. Especially if you've already paid for it. :)

The last two of the late season premieres that we picked up to watch are multiple episodes into their storylines now and we've gotten a better feel for them. Those are "True Lies" and "The Company You Keep". And it turns out that one of these shows is a keeper and one is not, although both are trending toward cancellation, which is a shame in the case of the stronger show.

Oh! You want to know what we think here. (We being me and Gretchen.)

Gretchen described "True Lies" as a comic book. This is somewhat insulting to comic books. But the show is lightweight in pretty much every possible way, the plots are cardboard, and the characters (for the most part) are unappealing. There are signs of life here, but it's pretty much a case of watching this to see if it improves before what appears to be an inevitable mercy killing.

And then there's "The Company You Keep". The pilot for this was pretty much a muddy mess and I think Gretchen would have given up on it immediately. I was a bit more stubborn. And we've been rewarded, because this has turned into a very nice little caper-of-the-week drama with an appealing cast.

The ratings, however, suck. And given the mess that the pilot was, I'm not surprised.

So if you are looking for something to watch and you've got access via Hulu or some other streaming service, consider watching "The Company You Keep" *past* the muddy pilot episode and see if it grows on you. Because I'd really like to see a second season of this show...

Because we finished the eighth (and final) season of "Psych" this week, Gretchen and I are currently short on things to watch on television due to the Olympic hiatus. She said to me, "Aren't there some movies we wanted to watch?" So I went browsing.

It turns out the new movie, "Marry Me" (Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson), is streaming on Peacock right now. It's not deep, but it's two hours of perfectly reasonable fluff.

That'll do.

Tonight's episode of "Agents of SHIELD" was really nicely done. I understand it was also Elizabeth Henstridge's directoral debut. She drew a good script and handled it well.

K has been threatening to bake a cake. The cake has yet to materialize, so I made brownies this evening.

Gretchen and I have now watched the first two episodes of Netflix's "Lost In Space" series.

The person who designed that planet should be shot.

We went to see the new Jumanji film tonight. I enjoyed it a lot. Gretchen thought that it was better than the previous film.

I could chatter a lot and drop various spoilers, but -- if you liked the previous film -- why don't you just go see it? :)

We went to see Frozen 2 tonight. It's a good enough movie, even if the plot is a bit predictable. But predictable in a sequel can be a *good* thing, because it means that you're not pulling rabbits out of your hat to invalidate the original film's continuity. And the songs were good. :)

Meanwhile, the one sentence review (with a bit of help from Tim Griffin):

"Hello, Arendelle, this is Elsa on the line..."

Gretchen and I watched the premiere of "Whiskey Cavalier" last night. It's promising. It reminds us of "Castle", in that it's a buddy cop show (more or less) with a lot of sexual tension between the two leads. And although it's in the spycraft milieu instead of homicide, the feel is similar. There's a wider trail of bodies in this series, though. :)

We'll see how it develops, but you might want to give it a try.