Bill Roper's Journal

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!

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 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...

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. :)

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*

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 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.

There are just limits to what you can get done in a weekend, especially when you have two dogs who are anxious to compete for your time. I appear to be Calvin's "safe person" and when he is threatened by Ruby, he will hop up on top of me in my chair looking for protection. This annoys Ruby, because Calvin is now hogging her person. (This is not to say that the dogs do not love the other people in the house -- I just appear to be the household alpha.)

The Christmas tree did not get straightened up in its stand today, because that's a three person job really and I was not going to get that level of cooperation. But one of the tubs of Christmas decorations has gone back to the basement and most of the decorations are actually up which is a good thing.

The driveway was also shoveled by Julie and me in various shifts. Julie does not quite realize that the apron is part of the driveway, but I have explained this to her and hope to have better luck next time. Gretchen suggested that I should fire up the snowblower, which probably would have been the best idea if I already had gas and was sure that I had the appropriate snowblower oil *and* had an empty gasoline container. Maybe before the *next* major snow. Today's was about five inches, which is definitely a depth where the snowblower becomes worthwhile.

I bought more plugins and software upgrades while they are on sale. Now I just need to *do* something with them...

And I cleaned off the top of the bookcase in my bedroom, putting the stuff that had accumulated there away for its safety. I'll need to remember where I put it when I need it. That's the tricky part. :)

Tomorrow, it's back to work and I have a *lot* of things to do. Happily, I updated the password that was going to expire today when I logged in *yesterday*...

We decided to install a baby gate at the top of the stairs to keep Calvin, The Very Hungry Dog (a.k.a., The Appetite on Four Legs; a.k.a. Dr. Chew-It-All) on the first floor which is both much more dog-proof than the upstairs and also not a zone where Sunshine the Cat (a.k.a. What Do You Mean, *Dog*?!) tends to wander. Also, it keeps Calvin from eating all of Sunshine's food. This is all a great theory.

I bought an extra tall gate so that I could get it to hit the flat part of both banisters at the top of the stairs. Unfortunately, this particular gate design has a plastic ramp that sits on the ground and if it is installed so that you hit the banister posts, then the edge of the ramp goes over the lip of the step, which is a Bad Idea (TM).

Ok. Let me install the gate on the landing instead. Except if I put a 36 inch tall gate on the landing so that the foot is in the right position, then it doesn't contact the banister post there. A 30 inch tall gate will work.

The 36 inch tall gate is now tagged to return to Amazon tomorrow and a 30 inch tall gate of the same design is now on order.

I have now failed at two consecutive weekend projects, which is starting to annoy me.

I am going to go get the recording laptop and record some scratch tracks. I *could* do this in the studio, except I would have to do more rewiring under the console and that seems counterproductive...

Today is garbage day, so the trash cans needed to be removed from the side of the garage where I park. Also, the weather didn't suck, which meant that this was a splendid time to unload the van and get all of the Dodeka boxes back onto their shelf. Accordingly, I parked in the driveway after lunch.

I moved the brooms that sit in front of the bookshelf where the gridwall sits and looked at the bottom shelf. There were two boxes of ancient peel-and-stick vinyl tile that had come to the house with us. It struck me that no one in the world really wanted that tile. So I tossed it in the trash, which is now *much* heavier. Then I started looking at other things on the shelf to see what I could dispose of.

Do I *really* need a large box full of Chicon V reimbursement forms? I think not! Or credit card slips for a imprinter? Heck, no!

I did find some things that might be useful that we had forgotten that we had, like some craft boxes designed to be painted that Gretchen had purchased at one time or another and that I am sure that the kids will want to get their hands on. And things that were less useful, but still interesting, like a World War II bayonet.

And finally, there was the bag that contained the rest of my coin collection, removed from the albums that it had once occupied and placed into rolls -- if it wasn't in coin sleeves. The odd coins were mostly in sleeves. A two cent piece, three cent nickel and silver pieces, a half dime, various other very old coins -- although I didn't find the Flying Eagle cent that I thought that I had bought at one time or another. But it's possible that had lurked just out of my price range, much like the St. Gaudens $20 gold piece that I could have purchased for $45 way back when.

It's nice to have found it. Some time, I need to show the kids what Dad used to do for fun.

Coin collecting was a lot *more* fun when you could collect coins from circulation. Sadly, that's pretty much an obsolete practice unless you want to collect a lot of clad coins.

Which I suppose is a valid hobby.

Still. :)