December 27 -- de-cluttering

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De-cluttering.


Letting go of the (large and space-consuming) reminders of past triumphs.  That's a two-drawer filing cabinet it's standing on -- it is over 2' tall.   (We did keep the little plaque [not too carefully] pried off the front of the base.)

Very first (non-chess, non-solitaire) computer game we owned.  Harder to let go of than the trophy, but we don't have a machine that could run it.   (Unless the one I use as a footstool might.  But it probably hasn't been turned on in 10 years, so maybe it would run and maybe it wouldn't.  And even if it could run, we don't have a monitor for it, nor a keyboard.....)

More games that no longer run on any of the machines we've had turned on in the last many years.  (Civ IV-VI are happily running on the newest machine. )

Handfuls of paper documentation.  Those were the days......

Many happy father/kid hours were spent with this game.

And it isn't just computer stuff that's going.  Pencils with no erasers.  Pencils with rock-hard erasers.  Dead pens.

Remember when Bic pens were mustard yellow?  I am sad that the white ones are no longer available.  The gray ones you can get now often come apart when you take the cap off.  Grrr.....

Does anyone younger than a boomer know what that green thing in the middle is for?  Talk about obsolete technology..........

I believe this is the first calculator I ever owned.  I bought it in the early 1980s.  As you can see, it was solar, and it worked just fine for years and years and years.  But hasn't worked for decades.

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May 15 -- house cleaning part 59 of 487

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My clean-sweeping project for this week -- the bottom half of the upstairs hall cupboard.

This is one of the stupidest cupboards............ The shelves are narrow, and very -- inefficiently -- far apart. The lower left quadrant needs to be sparsely shelved, so it's possible to get at the tub plumbing (shower behind this cupboard), but what about the rest?

This cupboard functions as a linen closet. I can't imagine what might go in here that would use the current configuration sensibly. !!!

At present, I am able to make use of less than half the space...........

I guess I'm going to have to build some shelves................


Sheesh.



It's considerably emptier than ere it was. And random stuff is much less likely to fall out.

That's good, but I'd feel much better about it if all that empty space was actually useful (without construction of new shelving!).

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May 8

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Housecleaning, part 58 of 457, or, Saturday Errands.


We took a load of cardboard and styrofoam to the not-dump. (It used to be the dump, but now it's the recycling center.)

They make you pay to drop off stuff they would pick up from your curb for free. Good grief.

Has anyone thought this through?

Why don't they want to encourage people to drop sorted stuff off? Do they WANT us to put the styrofoam in the trash rather than have to drive all the way to the opposite corner of town and then *pay* to drop it at the recycling center??????????

Sheesh! !!!!!!!!



Feh.




Ok.

Cleansing breath.



Artichokes in front of Whole Foods, wherein we purchased some more of that nice Crofter's Fruit Spread.



So ... globular. Don't you just want to pick one up, just to feel how nicely *round* it is? To check the heft?





Walked Wibbs after we got home; one pic from that walk.................



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house cleaning -- part 56 of 487

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Some house cleaning has taken place that hasn't been published..... Mostly because it's been mostly the "partial" sort. Something ameliorated but not *fixed*.......

One of my self-improvement goals is that I clean-sweep *something* every week. A shelf. A drawer. Something.

Yesterday I did the open kitchen shelf near the phone. I have a shopping bag full of stuff to donate to the Kiwanis thrift store, and almost nothing that was on that shelf is going back.

Huzzah.



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November 19, new gutters

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Some people clean the leaves and other debris from their gutters.

Some just toss the gutters and get new ones.

Dead gutter, hanging by a thread................



The old gutters themselves were in fine shape. But they leaked from every joint. We had tried replacing the sealant, to no avail.

Replacing gutters isn't as noisy as replacing a roof, and doesn't take as long, but still is not a fun way to spend money, or a day of your life.............

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November 18, new roof

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I suppose they have to start early, given how early it gets dark..........

This pile of stuff in the front yard began to accumulate around 7:30 am.





A portent of noise-to-come.

Compressor.





Delivery of shingles. The thing at the right is, of course, a conveyor belt, to lift the shingles up onto the roof.





First, tear off the old shingles. This makes a big mess.........

And is loud. Did I say all of this was loud?

I stayed home so that Wilbur wouldn't be freaked out by all the noise and all the strangers and everything. He clung pretty close all day.





Wilbur and I decide to escape the scraping/pounding/crashing for a while.





Hmmm.

Remember last year at this time, when we had a squirrel in the house? And it FINALLY went into the trap so I could put it outside?

We bought this house in the summer of 1985. From then until last fall we never had any critters bigger than mice get into the house. Last fall, the squirrel (a fox squirrel, not a little squirrel!), and this past summer, a bat. I was suspicious that the cages over the chimney were not functioning as intended...........

I asked the roof guy to check, and, sure enough, one of them had no top.....

He brought it down to show me, and I said "Sure, put the roofed, secure, kind on all three spots."






It is excellent that they can get all this done in one day.





Ok. Escaping all of that for the nonce.





The remains of the bottom-of-the-hill neighbors' front-yard garden. That green, center bottom, is parsley! Wish I had a parsley plant that size! All of mine went straight to seed, humph and alas.





Chiles.





That incredibly lush parsley........





Corn, leaves blowing in the breeze.





One of Mama Nature's arrangements.





Bradford pear.





I like the different textures on the house. See the two squirrel nests in the tree? I know fox squirrels make nests like this. I don't know what red squirrels do. And chipmunks (or "ground squirrels") make burrows in the ground.





Dry leaf, in the low late-November light.



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house cleaning -- part 32 of 487

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October 11 was the first sunny day after we got the rugs.

I really like the way the light comes in through the leaves.

You can tell just where Dad is, from looking at Wib.........





I wasn't trying to get him in every pic, honest.

The old and the new. I am really pleased with wrapping the cabinets around this corner.





The doorway into the kitchen is directly to the right of this pic.





I need to do something about pillows that actually go (fabric for one pillow draped over the far arm of the couch). And about something in which to put all those remotes. And maybe someday we'll do something about what is painted-over brick around the fireplace..........

Note the strip lights over the built-ins between the living room and the entry way.

We have purchased a couple of florescent torchieres for the living room. We have a halogen torchiere in the family room that has worked very nicely at lighting the whole room. We like light that is bounced off the walls and ceiling.....

Theoretically we'll prefer to spend our electricity dollars on light rather than heat, and the florescents draw *way* less current. We're still deciding how we feel about the quality of the light............... Should we decide we're ok with these lights, the old strip in this pic will come down.

You can get an idea that these rugs are blue, rather than just dark, from this pic.





Globe on desk between tall oak bookcases. You get a glimpse of its shadow earlier in this post.





And, of course, the family room still looks like this.

Sigh.

Too many things wanting my attention. Makes me want to get out a novel and ignore the whole mess!



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house cleaning, part 31 of 487

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So.

We are working on getting all the stuff out of the family room that moved in there so we could refinish the floor in the living room.

We have this little cheap desk. It's got the nice clean modern lines we favor, and has worked ok for us. We have been annoyed that we couldn't pull the drawers all the way out.

This was more than just annoying, one time, when we lost something over the back of a drawer and could not (NOT) retrieve it, as the drawers don't come out........ (Imagine here our struggles with the wet-vac hose, down behind the drawers, to latch on to the otherwise-unreachable envelope............. We finally did succeed, but this method is not preferred to, say, being able to remove the drawers!)

I thought we should take advantage of the desk being out of its usual position to yank the cheap one-step-up-from-cardboard off the back of the drawers' side of the desk, and see what we'd have to do to fix it so we *could* pull the drawers.....

So we did that.



We'll pause here, for a moment, to be appalled at the waste of space.



I mean.

They didn't even TRY to use as much space as possible.

Sheesh.

Humph!



Anyway.

After spending a bit of time examining the workings of these drawers, I couldn't see anything that would stop them from coming out.

So I took a good hold on the smallest one, and yanked it out.

And put it back.

Well then.

I guess they DO come out, after all. Hmmm.

I repeated the experiment with the second drawer. Same result.

Well. All righty then.

I tacked the chintzy board thing back on the back, and the desk is now back in the living room, flanked by its accustomed bookcases.

And we know how to get the drawers out any time we like.

Progress.

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house cleaning, part 30 of 487

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Rickety bookcase and other assorted junk, off to the thrift store just moments ago.

A LOT of the stuff that used to be in the living room will no longer be there, even after we are done putting back what goes back.





If "bokeh" means the light, etc, in the background of a photo (and I'm not sure if it is actually limited to the background.........), then what is the name for light artifacts of the sun hitting the lens, as we see here?

As you can see (in the reflection in the sliding door, over on the left), we are (finally) having a sunny day for the first time in over a week.

Yay.

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house cleaning, part 29 of 487

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I should probably start calling this "house revision" or something............

Here's how we spent some time yesterday.

The next thing to do was somewhat scary -- drilling holes in the back of the cabinet that will hold all the components, so the components wires can be plugged into the power and into each other.............

Here is our setup -- a piece of plywood on the floor of the garage, with cardboard over it to try to not scratch the cabinet.





Practicing with our spiffy new hole driller. (The bit is new; I've owned the drill for working on 30 years.........)

The "regular drill bit" in the middle sticks out quite far. I'm sure that's nice if you care if your holes are exactly perpendicular to the surface you are drilling, but in our case, where avoiding drilling into our lovely floor was paramount, it was this which sent us outside..........





Yay!

And ... oh, my, look at all the sawdust. Another good reason to be doing this outside.





Our guesses as to good places to put holes.











After we'd done the above, we remembered that a couple of the components have very sticky-outy plugs in the back. One, in particular, needs extra holes to accommodate them, if the component is to be entirely within the cabinet (rather than sticking out the front an inch or two).

(Pause for rant -- some of the components have recessed connections, so the plugs don't stick out so far. WHY DON'T ALL OF THEM???? I'd like to give some designers a smack uplongside the head............ Ahem. End of rant.)

So we drilled some more holes. And then paused to enjoy the lovely day, including a golfing excursion which put paid to the day's furniture futzing.

The next step will be to futz with the feet. These cabinets have feet which screw in and out, allowing you quite a bit of leeway as to how much space there is between each foot and the cabinet. As the floor they will stand on is not level (particularly just where they will go!), this is Excellent, and these designers get a pat on the head *and* their favorite beverage for a job well done.

We'll do our best to figure out just where each cabinet will go, and then will work on getting them all level AND lined up with each other Just So.

Then we'll go back to component-futzing.

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house cleaning, part 29 of 487

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These pics taken on Sunday the 13th.

Much assemblage has taken place. Almost all done by my better half, as I have not had spare energy to care about furniture. I did do all the futzing with the sofa cover, as that is the sort of thing he hates most, and I have helped a little more than that, but not much.

No wonder this furniture is cheap. I mean, it's cheap, and *then* it's a lot of work to put it all together!

The cowshe (as they call it on CuteOverload). Complete with a length of fleece from the fabric store, to keep the sun and the dog off the gray part. Not that the dog is anxious to jump up there from the bare wood floor at this point.











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