billroper | Entries tagged with stuff

Tomorrow is Cubs Opening Day and Gretchen is going to drop me off at the Skokie Swift so that I can reasonably get to the park since the Remote Parking won't be open for a weekday day game. Unfortunately, the Cubs have moved the Remote Parking lot this year so that it is over near Lake Shore Drive, which might benefit people who already have the option of taking the Red Line down to the park, but which is -- I suspect, as I haven't driven it yet -- going to be a lot more inconvenient for those of us coming from points northwest.

I guess I'll find out.

To add to tomorrow's entertainment, we got a notice from Public Works today that they are turning off our water for 6-8 hours starting at 8 AM tomorrow morning for work on a water main, followed by a boil order. This means that we are going to be getting up very early, while we still have water.

Pitchers (and catchers!) and such have been filled so that there will be some water available while I'm off watching the Cubs.

We had talked about making chili for dinner tomorrow, but -- all things considered -- ordering in Chinese is looking like a better bet. :)

I learned some new things at work today, which is always good.

And today, the ginormous box that the new mattress came in went out with the recycling and is no longer decorating our living room. :)

Sam was good enough to come over today and help us maneuver the very large, very heavy box of new mattress up the stairs. This was good, because I had grossly underestimated how hard it would be to bump the mattress up the stairs one step at a time.

This was not how we did it. Instead, we flipped it up the stairs end over end (with Julie helping stabilize the load) which meant that we got it there in three rotations. And a slide. A big long slide into the bedroom once it made it to the top.

Happily, all of this was accomplished with no injuries other than the nick that I gave my thumb with the scissors as we cut the plastic wrap off of the cylinder of mattress so it could unfold. Everything is plugged in and ready to go, waiting only for Gretchen to come help me put sheets on the bed.

And then I hope that we will both sleep well. :)

I am trying to figure out what I am going to forget when I leave for Thing tomorrow.

If I'm really lucky, the answer will be "nothing".

We'll see how I do. :)

Time keeps moving. The things that I need to do remain piled up. And I leave for Dorsai Thing on Friday, which will be fun, but doesn't move a lot of things in the pile. :)

Ah, well. You only live once, right?

Tomorrow I drop K off at the bus to go back to college. It's been fun having her home, but there are nearly two months remaining in the semester and they still need to be navigated.

We had some of the ginormous brisket for dinner tonight. We will be having more of the ginormous brisket for dinner for quite some time. I have purchased some lovely Turano French rolls for making sandwiches, which will be the first step in the process.

And I sat down with K and we got her income taxes for her summer job filed, which is a good thing.

I've started looking through the APBA cards in preparation for the upcoming draft. I have a bit more scouting to do, but the end is in sight. This is good, because it will allow me to pass them along to the last manager in the league who needs to see them in advance of the draft.

Tomorrow, I will get to go find all of the clocks that don't automatically reset themselves and make the necessary adjustments for Daylight Saving Time. And then I will happily enjoy the extra hour of sunlight at the end of my work day. :)

I got the notice that our replacement mattress has shipped and should be here in a week. My lower back is greatly looking forward to this -- except, perhaps, for what it's going to take to get it upstairs and onto the bed. The shipping notice says that the mattress weighs 150 pounds. Whee!

The treadmill left for its new home today and the library looks a good bit less crowded. This is good.

In keeping with the theme of moving things, today at work was largely spent rearranging things so that I could combine two classes into one. I think that's done and I can move on to the next bit of this project tomorrow.

Yay, me!

I picked up K from the bus for a week of spring break, picking up Chinese food for dinner on the way home, because it appears that finding suitable Chinese food in Muncie has been a challenge. This was followed by a lot of catching up and a lot of playing with dogs.

One of the projects that I wanted to finish before K got home was hanging the GAFilk quilt. This is because I wanted to get the ladder out of the upstairs hallway. The quilt is hung now and looks quite nice after Gretchen made a few adjustments in the way that the decorative rope that is holding up the rod was hanging.

There are a lot of projects that we want to get done this week. We'll see how they go. :)

I should have mentioned this a few days ago, but the iSense folks have accepted the warranty claim on our leaky mattress and a new mattress is going to be on its way to us as soon as they build one. I'm not sure exactly how long it will take, but I am certainly looking forward to it!

I spent some time today dealing with some smaller projects around the house. One of these was to take some measurements in the library, which is now done.

The next trick is going to be finding someone who wants our old Reebok RX-3000 treadmill which is sitting in the library taking up space. It is free to a good home. A good home is currently defined as "someone who is willing to take it away". :)

I am continuing my efforts to get the Flash pinball in the basement up and running. One of the projects that I may be able to handle myself is to fix some screw holes in the playfield where the screw no longer bites in properly, resulting in loose parts, which is not good. Filling these with toothpicks and wood glue has been suggested. Curiously, that is the same suggestion that has been made online for fixing Julie's bedroom door, which will not latch. I figured that I like the pinball machine better than the bedroom door, so why not experiment there?

The door still does not latch. It *might* latch if I had carved out a bit more wood to make room for the strike plate, because the door actually *does* latch if I *remove* the strike plate. But the toothpick and glue method is a bit messy.

I fixed one of our bathroom cabinets that had a similar problem using some very nice wood filler and I am thinking this may be a better solution to the problem. I will think about this a bit longer before taking a run at it. :)

Anyway, tomorrow it will be back to work, so projects will wait for a bit for me to catch up...

Now that the taxes are out of my hands, there were other things to do today. Happily, none of them was laundry.

I took a box of stuff to Goodwill over lunch, getting it out of the house. Then it was off to Sam's Club, where I restocked a great many items. I have been intending to hang the GAFilk quilt that Gretchen won in absentia out in the hallway for a while now and *that* is finally done. While getting that sorted out, I put away the old CPAP as a backup, which cleaned that mess out of the chair in the bedroom that it had shared with the quilt.

I am filing a warranty claim for our leaky iSense mattress. They requested photos of the stripped mattress and the platform that it sits on, so I got that done (with a bit of help from Julie to stand the mattress on end so I could easily get photos of the platform) and sent them off. We'll see what they have to say, but the answer should be "let us fix this now". If it is not, there is going to be a problem.

And I ran the next-to-last session for the computer division in our APBA league, so I just have one more to get to the end of the year. All of the adjustments are made for three of the four teams, so this should be pretty straightforward once the fourth manager reports in.

Meanwhile, Gretchen made a lovely pot of beef stew using the stew beef that I picked up at Sam's Club earlier in the day. And then we went back and watched the recording of the Olympic women's free skate, which was a lot of fun.

Now it is time to go put the bed back together. Happily, the mattress is sitting on the platform, not standing on end...

The Dodeka taxes are now printed, signed, and in envelopes ready to pay tomorrow.

All of the documents for our personal taxes have been downloaded and/or scanned and then uploaded to the accountant along with various caveats about "expect a revised form for this account" and "K had a summer job" and "please note the Certificate of Error for the property taxes". We'll see how that goes.

In other news, our iSense mattress has developed an annoying leak on my side. Today, I finally managed to call them and start a warranty claim. I am hoping this goes well. :)

Today, I finished off the sixth load of laundry in the six days following Capricon, which means that I am caught up on the laundry, at least momentarily. Yay!

I also went to the post office where I filed an extension for the Dodeka tax return so that should the IRS open it late again this year after I mail it on a timely basis, they won't try to charge me hundreds of dollars in penalties for late filing. I also mailed the Capricon sales tax, because the State of Illinois has changed the rules and no longer collects event tax from us when we file our sales tax for the year for reasons apparently unknown. Neither Gretchen or I recall having been notified about this change, although we seem to have been notified about all sorts of things that don't actually matter to us.

And I mailed a gift to one of Julie's friends. That cost $22, which is a painful amount of shipping charge and explains why paying for Amazon Prime shipping looks so good.

Meanwhile, I ran another 13 games of the second half for the computer division in my APBA league, so there are only two more rounds to go there.

And I finished making the adjustments to the Dodeka taxes, which means that I should be able to start putting numbers on the forms tomorrow.

After which I can try to get *our* taxes off to the accountant.

Whee!

I have to do a better job of stacking dishes on the counter. This is twice that a pile of dishes has decided to give way, sending them to the floor with an enormous crash. Happily, the dishes are Corelle, so they are very hard to break.

But in the two most recent crashes, we have lost one dish each. And when Corelle decides to die, it pretty much explodes all over the place. No one's been in the blast radius, but a lot of careful sweeping up was required for the sake of both people and dogs.

I suppose I should check and see if the dishwasher is empty and/or in the dirty dishes state. Then I could put the dishes in there and they won't fall.

*sigh*

A friend of mine is building out a basement studio and showed a picture of his new LED light fixtures. I looked at these and considered how cool they look compared to the fixtures in my studio. I came asymptotically close to ordering one for each studio room.

Then I considered that the lights that I have are plenty good enough and I have other things to do than rewire light fixtures. :)

Like taxes. I must get back to the taxes.

But we watched a bit of the Winter Olympics tonight instead. This is much more fun than doing the taxes. :)

I didn't get a lot of big things done today, but I did get three loads of laundry done. And I went down and prepped the keyboard so that it is ready to loan to Capricon.

I still need to finish up the Dodeka taxes, but I need some more data to do that, so that may be a bit longer.

I have a weekend coming up (three-day!) with nothing scheduled but laundry. This improves the chances that I can catch up on some of the other things that I need to do.

We'll see how that goes. :)

I am saddened, because facts are apparently slipperier things than they used to be.

I have seen at least five separate posts today on Facebook alleging things that vary from absolutely false to "let's rearrange the quotes in this interview to reach the conclusion that we want to get to". And, yes, in the latter case, I actually went to the trouble of finding the transcript of the original interview and carefully reading it. These posts came from people who I consider of varying degrees of reliability.

The whole thing makes me sad, because there are a lot of things that we could probably actually agree on.

It just isn't possible when there's so much contra-factual information out there.

(The longer it takes me to write this, the bigger the number of messed-up posts that I recall seeing today. I started at three...)

There is plenty of BS information generated by all sides of the political spectrum, just to be clear about this.

Ah, well. Hell, handbaskets, and all that.

I am gradually catching up on things, both at home and at work.

The problem is that as I catch up on one thing, another thing comes careening down the track.

The good news is that we went out to dinner with friends tonight and had some good conversation. And the chance to talk to someone who is not one of my coworkers is a fine thing!

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billroper

Filker.com

March 2026

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Bill Roper's Journal

Entries tagged with stuff

There's Nothing Like Fun at the Old Ballpark

Learning Experiences

A Very Heavy Box

Decisions, Decisions

Time Keeps Ticking On

Back to College

Rest Easy -- Later

Moving Things Around

Spring Break

News I Forget

Smaller Steps

Doing Things

Taxes and Stuff

Taxed

Crash, Tinkle, Tinkle

Lighting Up

Little Things

Weekend On the Way

Facts Are Apparently Slipperier Than They Used To Be

Catching Up