A banner moment for NaDeCluMo

I can now park my car in the garage. Woo-hoo! Never mind that I blew off a major work deadline and spent four hours puttering in my garage instead… Suppose it’ll now be a long night at the computer, catching up.

Free stuff for a good home:

Metal bike rack (for a car) – fits standard sedan-style cars. Old – probably purchased in the 60’s or 70’s, but bikes are pretty much the same shape still, right? Since I now drive a hatchback, seems pointless to own it.
Small desk with wheels. Made of some sort of particleboard with veneer, but not horribly cheap-looking. Currently dusty from living in my garage.
A pair of speaker stands – about 2 feet high, sturdy black metal base with a flat top on which a speaker can sit. Not really needed here since I installed surround sound and mounted all the speakers on the walls.

I will also be selling a mongo chipper-shredder but not willing to just give that away – paid too much money for it. Will advertise it in the local Craig’s list, I guess.

Getting rid of those things will make space to work so I can transfer the router table stand over to a different table, then trash the old dresser (cheap, throw-away particleboard veneer thing that already had substantial water damage). That’ll leave enough space to put in a sink and a drill press. At that point, it’ll also be quite a bit easier to park both cars in the garage.

Also this weekend I took a pile of old pictures that had been scattered around the house – some on walls that no ended up covered by shelves, some sitting on shelves – and hung them all on one wall (after hours of rearranging them to make them fit most pleasingly together). Have decided it needs some rearrangement – needs an additional row of pics on the right side to look more centered over the piano – but overall am fairly pleased. And cleared a bunch of shelf space by putting things up on the walls.

Threw away a bunch of stuff. Trash bin is now full, must remember to take it out tomorrow night so I don’t miss trash day.

At some point, I want to deal with all the loose pics by scanning them and storing them in some sort of digital scrapbook. But I haven’t figured out the right software to do this. I want to be able to store data about each picture (including, say, a paragraph of description about the pic and keywords for things like the people in the pics and the places the pics were taken and the year(s) the pics were taken) – and ideally the data is stored as part of the actual picture file, so can move the pic around and change its file name without losing the connection to the notes, I want to be able to work with pics stored on a bunch of backup media (CDs or DVDs, probably), rather than having them all on one big hard-drive, and I want it to be a format that many systems can easily deal with. And I want to be able to do the majority of this work on the Mac, since I have a big-screened Mac desktop and the only PC in the house is a small-screened laptop.

I don’t want much, right? If anyone has suggestions, let me know. Unless a super solution is just handed to me, this endeavor will have to wait, at least until after the wedding. I have too much else to tackle between now and then, no time to do any research.

My to-do list for things that have to be done before Wed lunchtime (when I pick up my parents from the airport and have SWORN I will really take time off to spend with them, because I’ve been too darn busy to pay proper attention to them lately):

Finish generating and analyzing the simulated data for my paper (requires learning a bit more R coding to make this happen smoothly)
Write up results as well as polishing methods section and then write up discussion section – and revise intro to incorporate some more subtleties that I was pondering while cleaning the garage
Finish the design of the Diabetes report card form I’ve been programming
Meet with colleague about family history project
Present poster at all-day conference Tuesday (maybe I can bring a laptop and get a bit more work done in the background)
Fix the toilet in the guest bathroom
Finish the last details on the picture-sorting and picture-hanging project
Clear up all the mess from the picture-sorting project off the guest bed so my parents can sleep there
Grocery shop and plan meals for guests
Take load of stuff to Goodwill – have another carload ready, currently stored in guestroom closet, so need to clear that out for family to use closet.

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