Oh! And…

Had promised

[info]la_directora

that I’d keep posting when I work out, in the hopes that it would help inspire others to do the same…

Last workout post was Monday.  Since then…

Tuesday I attended a conference in the med center and did a lot of walking from site to site – probably walked a couple miles during the day.  Wed AM had a session with the trainer. I did 30 min cardio (treadmill, incline) Thursday night; Friday I did brisk walking around campus at homecoming activities but no formal workout.  Sat I ran up and down stairs at the stadium over the course of the game (not purposeful exercise, just being hyper social person) and then Sat PM I did another 30 min on the treadmill (no incline, speed-walking).  Sun AM had a session with my trainer. 

Hope that’s inspiring enough!

NaDeCluMo and the “Oh-Hell-Box”

This episode of NaDeCluMo is brought to you by Old House Syndrome and the “Oh-Hell-Box”.

When I go to the hardware store, I tend to overbuy in order to avoid having to run back for more parts midway through. These spare parts tend to accumulate in disorganized piles in my garage. I don’t throw them away because I might need them someday; I never actually use them because I can’t locate the right part at the right time.

So as I was decluttering the garage, I designated collecting places for various categories.  If it’s “plumbing stuff”, it goes in this box.  “Electrical stuff” goes over there.  You get the idea.  My Dad calls these Oh-Hell-Boxes … for reasons that will become obvious shortly.

Which leads me to old house syndrome.  When you go to fix something in an old house, the repair is simply an opportunity for something else to break.  Often everything in a particular system will be ready to collapse at once, and so when the first element goes, the others follow right away.  In plumbing, that’s usually because things like rubber washers tend to degrade over time, and so if one washer is bad, all of the others probably are as well.

In this case, the toilet flow valve had ceased to function.  You had to physically manipulate the valve to get it to start refilling the tank after a flush, then again it took human intervention to get it to stop the water flow once the tank was full.

So I trundled down to Home Depot and picked up a replacement valve.  Grabbed a new flapper as well, since those tend to die on the same schedule as the valves. That repair seemed to go fine, but of course manipulating the shutoff valve on the toilet made its washers break down and I ended up with a nice leak in the valve. 

Enter the Oh-Hell-Box.  When you’re doing a repair and something else breaks, giving you that “Oh, Hell!” moment, the Oh-Hell-Box has the bits you need to do a quick repair without having to go back to the hardware store.  In this case, I had a spare shutoff valve of the correct size, and so the repair was accomplished in just a few minutes.

Of course, manipulating the water supply line to repair the valve seems to have led to a leak in the water supply line… on the bright side, I have a spare water supply line in my OHB (though it may be too short)!

On other fronts, I also bought a wedding dress this weekend.  Went to a place with many, many dresses and tried on a bunch; picked the one I liked the best and discovered it cost the least as well.  So I must’ve done something good recently to get such karma.  It’s a relief to have that task out of the way.

Just took Mom and Dad to the airport, after a restful weekend, and now need to get back to work.  Let’s see if I can find the initiative to do so!

Stuff

Spent the day at Homecoming, where Rice actually managed to pull out the game with a successful field goal in the last 10 seconds of the game – giving them a lead of 1 point.  This made the crowd Very Happy. 

My parents are in town (for the afore-mentioned homecoming) so I have not been decluttering much.  And not much positive feedback on the decluttering, because it’s just not the sort of thing my parents notice.  Which is a good thing, I think – I like having family who will not criticise my home when they visit.

Saw a couple people I hadn’t seen in years – that’s sort of the point of going to homecoming, right? 

For this month’s family bookclub, K’s brother chose a movie.  The Gods Must Be Crazy, in particular.  It’ll be easier to get a movie finished on time and I’m curious what the discussion will be like.  And looking forward to watching the movie, which I remember as very entertaining when it came out and I haven’t seen it since.

At the game, they were passing out these inflatable tubes designed to make a lot of noise when they’re wacked together.  Handy at the game, where you can make enthusiastic noise without wearing out hands or voice (and all those waving tubes make a good visual image). After the game, Mom volunteered to take the three sets of tubes we’d been issued (one each for Mom, Dad, me) and take them to my nephews.  Which led me to wonder if she’s mad at my brother about something?  Giving noisemakers to three hyperactive boys doesn’t seem like a kind and generous thing to do…

Not much else going on.  I’m desperately behind on Important Stuff but I also desperately needed a break.  Maybe these days off will renew my sense of energy and initiative….

Supposedly will take tomorrow to go buy a wedding dress.  Wish me luck.

Chain reaction

[info]la_directora

  read someone’s post about exercise, which inspired her to work out. 

Then she posted about it, which the guilt trip impetus I needed to get myself to work out today. 

So she’s suggested I should post about working out, to inspire someone else on the path to good health and buff bodies.

I did my time on the treadmill, while watching the last half of Buckaroo Bonzai – I’d forgotten how silly that movie is.  Particularly silly are the costumes, which can’t possibly have been entirely serious even back in the 80’s when that movie was made – could they?   It’s hard to really laugh while trotting along on a treadmill so I settled for sort of smirking at it all. 

Not making great progress on the “to-do” list for the week, in part because I got a call this AM about a meeting where my attendence was apparently essential but somehow notifying me of the meeting got forgotten… to be fair, someone sent me an email sometime Friday but it didn’t seem to go through until nearly too late.  Good thing they called.  Though I’m not at all sure my attendance was all that critical anyway… and it kept me from working on my planned projects for the day.  Sigh.

I was in a much grumpier mood before the workout, though. 

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.

  • Not too much to do, right?  Sigh. I better find some food and get some work done.

    • Appreciating small stuff

    After a not-too-exhausting day I cut out of the office only to find myself sitting in obnoxious rush-hour traffic.  Then looked up and saw that I was positioned to admire a remarkable sky – big dramatic clouds moving smoothly across a brightly colored sunset.  Kind of put things back in perspective.

    Have fallen rather flat on decluttering these last few days unless you could could the clearing of projects off my to-do list at work – had a couple big deadlines and ended up without time to do much neatening.  Did get sorted out a couple last invitations and got some laundry done.

    Realizing my cluelessness – wanted to send invites to a couple of overseas friends.  But can’t really stamp the reply card, can I?  I mean, if I put a card in a postbox in Japan, and it had a US stamp on it, would it go anywhere?  So just left those unstamped.  They can RSVP via the website, I s’pose.

    My cough gets a little better day by day.  Today was doing some cardio on the treadmill and wondering if at this point I’m really just suffering from asthma, no leftover cold at all.  Seems to get better with asthma meds, after all. 

    Tomorrow AM my 7 AM faculty meeting (usually drives how early the day begins for us) is trumped by K’s 7 AM flight out of town – he’ll have to be at airport much earlier than that, of course, and it’s a fair drive to get there.  So by tomorrow night I’ll be a zombie – a zombie eating pizza with friends for someone’s birthday party, but a zombie nonetheless.

    And am close to that now so will sleep soon…

    Voting…. with the stars

    So I grabbed a cup of tea, something to read, and my marked-up election guide (in case I forgot a name or something), and wandered over to the polling place.

    First delay was my neighbor Rita, who found it inconceivable that someone might deliberately walk somewhere.  Seeing me with my book and cup setting off down the road, she popped out to offer me a ride somewhere, sure I must be having car trouble.  I reassured her and we chatted a while about her kitchen renovation, which sounds Very Cool.

    Then I delayed myself by mis-remembering where the polling place is these days.  Voted early last year at a local grocery, so hadn’t remembered that they changed things from the local school to the local library.  The new school building is cool, though, and they’ve done some lovely landscaping.

    Headed over to the library – a pleasant walk through a park filled with playing kids.  One of them bumped into me and caused me to splash tea over the front of my shirt.  Ah, well, it’s not like I’m dolled up anyhow; working from home today so I’m decked out in sweats and a t-shirt and hair wadded up in a bun. 

    Ducked into the meeting room where the polling was to take place.  First impression:  there’s a lot of people in here.  Second impression: a lot of them seem to be carrying cameras.  Big cameras.  At that point I figured out that a major candidate (Chris Bell) was standing in line to vote. 

    There were two lines to stand in.  His was quite short and offered chairs to sit in while you wait, but under constant media surveillance.  The other was rather long, but blissfully out of the public eye.  So I (in my baggy sweats and stained shirt) stood in the long line and watched the paparazzi (sp?).  Sort of a boring assignment; watching a guy sit in line and wait to vote is rather like watching grass grow, really.

    But I’ve voted now and can now get on with my day.  Will be following the election results on comedy central, where Jon Stewart will be having Dan Rather as a guest commentatior.  Should be pretty entertaining.

    NaDeCluMo notes

    We worked on decluttering the roof yesterday afternoon… crawled around and cleaned out the gutters, which had gone so long they had several inches if earthworm-filled dirt in them and several sizeable shrubs taken root.  And chopped back most of the incursion of vine that had managed to grow up over the incoming power lines and form a sort of hedge along one corner of the roof.  Unfortunately, the draping vine allowed a lot of leaves and debris to collect underneath, which attracted a colony of ants.  Some of them stung me as I chopped away at the vine so now I have itchy, painful bumps on the arm.  To go with the soreness that is developing where I got my flu shot this afternoon.

    Last night ran around and picked up a lot of the junk that had collected while I was sick.  Consigned a half-bag of stuff to the goodwill pile, too.

    Today haven’t done so much.  Worked pretty hard this morning, ran to get the flu shot, then on returning felt suddenly and overwhelmingly tired.  Laid down for  what was supposed to be just a few minutes then woke in the late afternoon.  Sigh.

    Time to do some final self-education about local politics before I go vote in the AM.

    [info]demusetta

    brought this one to my attention:

     

    Handholder

    You go out of your way to build bridges with people of different views and beliefs and have quite a few religious friends. You believe in the essential goodness of people , which means you’re always looking for common ground even if that entails compromises. You would defend Salman Rushdie’s right to criticise Islam but you’re sorry he attacked it so viciously, just as you feel uncomfortable with some of the more outspoken and unkind views of religion in the pages of this magazine.

    You prefer the inclusive approach of writers like Zadie Smith or the radical Christian values of Edward Said. Don’t fall into the same trap as super–naïve Lib Dem MP Jenny Tonge who declared it was okay for clerics like Yusuf al–Qaradawi to justify their monstrous prejudices as a legitimate interpretation of the Koran: a perfect example of how the will to understand can mean the sacrifice of fundamental principles. Sometimes, you just have to hold out for what you know is right even if it hurts someone’s feelings. What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.

    Peripheral to NaDeCluMo

    Streamlining one’s electronics helps reduce clutter, doesn’t it?

    So something in our patched-together gamush of audio stuff is broken and causing distressing secondary noises when we try to listen to music.

    Could replace the individual component that’s not working, of course, but perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate.  We have a bunch of different components all patched together, all different brands, some only partially functional, many a decade old… perhaps it’s time to do some proactive replacement, end up with a single system that does it all.

    But I’m feeling undereducated about my options, so this is a call for advice…

    Things I like about the current system/would want in a new system:

    • remote control (would be nice to be down to one remote)
    • ability to select from more than one speaker array:  can listen in the front room, can add in or switch to the speakers in the library, have a slot to expand to another room if I want to.  So one stereo can serve the house
    • needs to have at least 6-CD changer. Could maybe enjoy more but Keith isn’t interested in one of those 300-CD changers or anything like that.  After all, that’d be only a fraction of his collection so he’d still have to trade out cds all the time. And he sort of enjoys reading the cd jacket info while listening, so not interested in making a big music server and putting all the original CDs into storage.
    • Went to a lot of trouble to string cable and mount surround-sound speakers.  Would be nice to use them.
    • Simple controls.  Which this doesn’t have.  Would love something with few enough buttons that my mother could figure out how to use it.

    Questions I know too little about:

    • options for video.  Our current assembly had receiver/amp, secondary amp for the surround-sound speakers (which function as a component rather than using a speaker slot), dual cassette deck (never gets used, can jettison), CD changer, VCR/DVD player (DVD player seems to be broken), and television.  We don’t use the TV much right now, so its utility is in question.  But wondering if there’s value in a product that plays DVDs (with video) OR CDs, that could be used as audio system alone or used as AV system.
    • Integration with computer.  Currently have this lovely computer with a nice big screen (bigger/nicer than the TV), and its own (good-quality) speakers.  Mostly convinced that there’s not much added value to trying to integrate these resources but does anyone know something I don’t?

    Also:  good local places to see a good selection at a good price?  Is Fry’s really a good deal, or is it all about selection, or is that place just a bunch of hype?

    Anyway… input is desired and welcome.  We need to decide something sort of quickly since living without music is a sacrifice….

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