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february follies 2001 |
2/28/2001: Danielle Chynoweth has won the Urbana City Council Ward 4 Primary by a landslide. Woo! This is great news, as April's final election isn't hardly even a contest. Looks like there will be a progressive majority on the council!
The shelves are up on the wall now, the room is dirt-clean (meaning, I've vacuumed and put the rug in) and now has piles of books everywhere as I'm dividing them up into rough categories. In a few minutes I'll be leaving my office and heading home to start putting the books up on the shelves. I did some shopping too, got another little bookshelf small stereo (so now I can listen to CDs at home, woo!) and a puff chair. The new puff chair is black, so now I have one puff chair that matches each cat. This is rather by chance, as the black puff chair was one of three in the Art Mart when I went, and the only plainish one. I'm liking it a lot. You can just bet though, the grey cat will prefer the black chair and vice versa. Basically now just lots of sorting/cleaning has to happen, and I have to organize all the tools in the basement that are all over the house.
2/22/2001: Last night I had my second in-booth training at WEFT from 8 to 10 PM. The booth of course has no windows... going in, things were cold (yesterday's high was around 25F) but the ground was bare, because we've had some springlike weather lately - to the point that some bulbs are coming up in my yard. Well, coming out at 10 PM, there was snow everywhere. We got a full three inches of "flurries."
In other news, tonight I will be putting the shelves up on the wall. Yep, they're all done, two coats of polyurethane and the whole deal, and I will finally be able to do away with all the sawdust that's everywhere and actually move back into the living room. Whew. In fact I have to go and do that now.
2/16/2001: Today was meetings and a networking CCSP seminar thing, plus disproving bogus claims of weenies in ECON 300 who are trying to cheat and apparently ignorant of the fact that we like, keep logs. Tomorrow is more shelves, plus networking up the IMC, plus meetings.
2/12/2001: Whew. Coming back to work today is feeling like more of a vacation than the weekend did, since I put in something like 10 hours daily on shelf construction this weekend, and also last Thursday (I took the day off last Thursday to start the building). So... the shelves are built. There are two shelf units, which will meet in the corner to make an "L" shaped wall o' built in shelves that covers the far wall of the living room and also the side wall up to the window. Huge. The bigger of the two is 8 feet tall, 14 feet wide, and 1 foot deep. The smaller of the two is 8 feet tall, 4 feet wide, and 10 inches deep. They are made out of pine, solid lumber (3/4 inch thick standard planks) so they shouldn't be cheesy and bending around like those mail order shelves. On each shelf unit there are a few shelves that are permanently in place for structure, and then the rest of them are totally modular shelves which are put up with the usual holes-and-peg shelf rest system (the side walls have holes every inch or so, and little L shaped metal shelf rests insert in there with pegs). The bottom of both is open, so the "bottom shelf" of stuff will just be on the floor.
I have stained the shelf units, but I still have to stain the insertable shelves - maybe tonight that will happen if I can find someone to cover my scheduled hours at the Independent Media Center. The good news is, a single coat of stain has produced EXACTLY the color I wanted. That color is a warm orange, matching the mail order chairs and table (a bit darker and with grain, though) and also the floor. It is way awesome. I am happy just seeing them standing there unanchored, on their tarps.
Peeve: unanchored. Sunday morning I was wiping the sawdust off the top of the smaller shelf (which is the more unstable of the two, being thinner) while standing on the top of my ladder, which has a top step somewhere around my chest height. That height would be okay if I could lean on the shelf, but I can't - and it started to fall over. I jumped down and caught it, but not before one corner fell and gouged a chunk out of my freshly painted wall. Dammit. So some time was spent in (1) filling and patching the hole, which I still need to paint, and (2) acquiring a taller ladder from yet another neighbor (8 feet high this time). With the taller ladder, and chairs stacked around the bottom of the smaller shelf, all went without further incident.
So what's left? Well... the shelves need to be polyurethaned. Hopefully I'll only need one coat, but I might need two. After that, they need to be anchored to the wall. I've got brackets for that but we need to find the studs.
Much thanks goes out to Brynnen Owen, who has so kindly stored his radial arm saw in my basement. It is getting a lot of use. My house is now chock full of power tools borrowed from various people. I am sawing up a storm.
On Friday night, before going home and sanding the wood to make the shelves on Saturday, I went to a performance workshop at the Independent Media Center that was being held by various School for Designing a Society members. Patch Adams was there and we talked for a bit about CLAM and learning and performance and then the workshop/performance happened, which was wonderful. Workshopping a piece is where the people perform it, but then afterward, the audience can give suggestions - but only suggestions that are very concrete and can be tried out instantly, just tried on for size, maybe keep them, maybe not, but to see how the piece will look with various modifications and food for thought. A lot of good energy came out. There was a monologue, a trio, a really interesting sound collage, and a staged argument that really reminded me of uiuc.general...
Saturday was Sehvilla's 15th birthday and there was a collage party with potluck at the schoolhouse. Art was made, food was eaten, general merriment ensued. Unfortunately I had to leave early due to the fact that...
Saturday night I had in-booth training at WEFT where I learned how to operate the boards and generally run a radio show. The lecture part of the class was two weeks or so ago, and now I have one more in-booth training, and I'll be able to host a show or sub host a show and be okay with the FCC. Whee.
Not a whole lot of sleeping but lots of creating things, my favorite.
2/02/2001: Today it managed to reach about 18F but that's it. It was 0F when I left the house this morning to walk to work, with some kinda fast wind. It was a nose-hair freezing sort of morning, definitely time for triple pants.
I finally got my terminal up and working. As it happens, the problem was in the keyboard - there's a short in there when the keyboard is all screwed together. Taking it apart and shaking the pieces around led to dirt of various sorts falling out (no actual bugs like the time I found two dead wasps in a keyboard in APM3337 though). Putting it back together, it still had the problem (typing B, J, or T led to certain patterns of what appeared to be "line noise" coming out). Loosing the screws did the trick. The new terminal is awesome. It's a WYSE 60 and actually does vt100 emulation. The old WYSE 50 didn't, and so when I was lynxing around, the pages wouldn't draw correctly. Now I can surf the web in text mode to my little heart's content. Spiffy.
Today at work was mainly spent installing perl 5.6 (i.e. upgrading from the 5.5005 that came with redhat) and then installing all sorts of interesting libraries to go with that.
My amazon.co.jp order finally arrived so I think I'm going to go read.