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We own a lot of audio CD's and DVD's, and (naturally) frequently want to migrate their contents to hard disk and/or the cloud. So a few years ago we bought an external DVD drive with writing capability (so we can also use it to produce CD's, take backups of stuff on the hard disk, etc.) and a USB cable to plug it into the back of the desktop computer.

Somewhat fewer years ago, I tried to put a CD into the player and found that the central spindle that holds the disk in place had come loose. It's about a cm in diameter, and serves the same purpose as the plastic spindle that allowed you to play big-hole 45-RPM records on a small-hole 33-RPM turntable, except there's no smaller format so it's always supposed to be there.

There are two problems here: first, one of the three radial springs is missing, and second, the whole thing isn't attached to the turntable. The first turns out not to make much difference. The second I remedied by pushing it back onto the axle, and that's been working fine for a year or two: it comes loose, I put it back, I put a CD onto it, carefully, and I import the CD.

A week or two I tried this drill, and the plastic spindle came off in mid-import, producing a horrible clackety-clack sound as the turntable tried to continue spinning the disk. I stopped importing and tried to eject the disk, but that didn't work because the spindle was blocking the sliding door from opening. I unplugged it, got some tools, and managed to get the CD and the spindle out safely, but I didn't want to continue using the CD player until I had a better solution. Samsung's customer-support community says "this piece cannot be replaced, and is not available; here's a list of places to buy new external CD drives", so I figured I had nothing to lose by tinkering. I did some image searches and kept getting car parts ten times larger and heavier than the thing I needed, so I tried word searches on "CD player spindle" and variations thereon. I didn't find exactly the right thing, but I found something that appeared to have what I needed attached to a larger disk, so I ordered some hoping I could just detach the part I needed. (They don't come in quantities smaller than five, and even at that the shipping exceeded the cost of the parts, but I figured having some spares to experiment on and damage wouldn't hurt.)

They arrived yesterday. The plastic spindle has the right exterior diameter, but the wrong interior hole diameter so I can't easily put it on the axle, and it really doesn't want to come off the larger disk, so I gave up on that approach. I unscrewed various parts from the CD tray, but nothing that seemed to match the things I had just bought, so I put everything back together.

I still have the broken spindle, and it works to hold CD's in place; the only problem is there's nothing holding it in place. So I got the glue. I don't think there's any high strength requirement, only durability and sticking metal to plastic; silicone glue should do the job. After an hour or two for the glue to dry, I was able to put a CD into the player and import it, with just one teeny problem: the tray door no longer locks closed, so I had to hold it closed with my thumb for the duration of the import. Anyway, this will work until I get sufficiently annoyed with holding it closed that I buy a new one.
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We had our traditional Christmas-eve dinner of beef Wellington, with creamed spinach and honey-glazed carrots and various kinds of Christmas cookies. Watched the Grinch and Rudolph, then Midnight Mass broadcast live from the National Cathedral, so we weren't out driving or interacting with hundreds of H. sapiens on Christmas eve. Walked the dogs, started the dishwasher, and got to bed only a little after midnight.

I woke around 8 AM, did some exercises, ate "first breakfast", checked the dishwasher, and found on triage that about half of the items therein were clean, while the other half looked as though they had just come off the table after a large meal. So I hand-washed the latter, leaving the drying-rack and the stovetop piled high. I emptied the filter, and can try different combinations of dishwasher powder and drying solution, but there may be a new dishwasher in our near future. Anyway, made some charitable donations in other people's names, then started on poffertje batter.

Eventually [personal profile] shalmestere woke up and we made and consumed our traditional Christmas-morning brunch of poffertjes, bacon, and blood-orange mimosas, then opened some presents. Of course, the big "present" from us to us arrived a week ago: a Prescott Renaissance C-bass recorder. (Insert photo here.) But other notable prezzies included (from her to me) Kees Boeke's edition of the works (certain and alleged) of Solage, and (from me to her) a well-reviewed novel based on the life of a 13th-century Irishwoman. And chocolate -- lots of chocolate. Happy Jolabokaflod!

Dinner, of course, was latkes. [personal profile] shalmestere doesn't believe in applesauce, and we didn't have any sour cream in the house, so we topped them with butter and Greek yogurt. And just to make clear that we're not really Jewish, we had (pork-and-beef) kielbasa coins sauteed in butter as the protein source for the meal. Played some Solage together on F-bass and C-bass recorders, watched "A Child's Christmas in Wales", walked the dogs, took out the trash, and went to bed.

Today I'm officially back to work, although not going into the office. Today's holiday rituals include delivering assortments of Christmas cookies to the neighbors and donating more money to worthy causes.

Two friends are coming over tomorrow and/or Saturday to play early music, so we have house-cleaning and pre-cooking to do.

Da Weekend

Apr. 14th, 2024 07:08 am
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Baked a loaf of bread Friday evening. It came out a bit underdone in the middle -- I think I set the timer for 45 minutes, should have been 50 or 55 -- and there's a horizontal-plane split that makes the top quarter of each slice inclined to split from the lower three quarters. Tastes pretty good, but not useful for anything resembling a sandwich. Probably ought to make another batch sooner than next weekend.

We've got almost all the held mail from our three-week trip to Spain: there's one package that the Post Office says is "held at customer request", but I went there yesterday with the tracking number and they couldn't find it. But we retrieved a box of dahlia bulbs from the next door neighbor, and a box of violet-adjacent baby plants arrived (and were planted) Friday afternoon. Gardening yesterday was postponed due to rain and wind, so we went to Trader Joe's and Home Depot instead (getting a bunch of potted plants at the latter). Today looks more promising on the weather front: we need to put in the aforementioned dahlias, and the pansies and violet-adjacents that [personal profile] shalmestere bought yesterday, and the Thai-chili and bush-bean plants that I bought yesterday, and I want to start some basil seeds indoors before moving them to the front lawn. And there are more bean seeds left from last year; might as well put those in too, so they produce a few weeks after the ones I bought yesterday in plant form.

When we returned from Spain, one of the smoke/CO detectors was chirping, not to say "please replace my batteries" but to say "please replace me". So I bought two new detectors (I think the one in the attic has completely given up the ghost, not even chirping) yesterday at Home Depot, and need to install them.

The two large suitcases we took to Spain have been emptied, nested with their smaller siblings, and put away in the attic. There's still a suitcase that [personal profile] shalmestere took to the living history show a month ago; I'm not sure what needs to be done with that stuff. And there are a few items of clothing that I took to the same living history show; I think they're clean enough that they only need to be put away.

This afternoon we're scheduled to attend the "celebration of life" for Richard Pace, a fixture of the NYC and Amherst early-music scenes. He was a decent amateur musician, specializing in voice and dulcian/bassoon, and a prolific fund-raiser, and he had a wonderful, infectious, boyish grin than I'm sure people will bring up repeatedly at the event. Immediately after that is an album-launch concert by local early-music group Alkemie which we may or may not get to depending on our energy levels.

It would be nice to accomplish some house-cleaning and stuff-triaging today, but I don't know how likely that is. There's Too Much Stuff piled up.

And as mentioned before, the weather is nice today, so we should walk the dogs in the park.

Today...

Mar. 1st, 2024 03:45 pm
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... I had the day off work ("March global reset day"), so I've been doing miscellaneous household things.


  • Took dog to vet for shots and annual exam. Made appointment for dental cleaning next week. Picked up flea/tick pills for both dogs. We still have two months' supply of heartworm pills.

  • Watered plants on enclosed porch. They don't need much water in the wintertime, but they were starting to look a bit withered, and an hour after watering, they look much happier.

  • Scrubbed and applied Rustoleum to rusty spots on the handrails of the front steps.

  • Took down candle-lit houses from front window. Some people take down this stuff on Dec. 26, some on Jan. 1, some on Candlemas, some on Ash Wednesday, but we've missed all of those, and now it's March. Also put away the Xmas-themed front-yard lights (which [personal profile] shalmestere brought indoors two weeks ago).

  • Mostly filled out form for historic-district home-renovation tax credit. Not sure how much of the cost to attribute to which part of the project; e-mailed contractor to get a cost breakdown because only certain parts are eligible for tax credit.

  • Paid some medical bills.

  • Put away some clothes that were hanging up to dry in the basement.

  • Made lunch, using up the last sniglets of frozen salmon that weren't big enough for a dinner for two.

  • Picked up prescription refill, and a couple of OTC drugs, from pharmacy. Bought some groceries.

  • Tacked down the felt weather-stripping in the front door: it was crumpling every time the door closed, and this offends my sense of rightness. Also whacked a loose door hinge pin back into place, ditto.

  • Took a nap.

  • Checked work e-mail. Started triaging a bunch of probably-low-priority bugs that were assigned to me over the last few days, but found that most of them had been closed already.

  • Went to dinner & Trader Joe's w/[personal profile] shalmestere.

Da Weekend

Nov. 4th, 2023 01:56 pm
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We have no commitments for the weekend, so we're Getting Things Done. [personal profile] shalmestere has her own list, largely either laundry or dollhouse-furniture, but here's mine.

  • Haircut ✓

  • Bake bread ✓

  • Clear space in basement for trunk freezer (we just had an electrician put in a line to support it, but there's a bookcase full of stuff where the hypothetical freezer needs to go) ✓/2

  • Mow lawn & sublawn ✓

  • Pay bills, file paperwork for car-insurance claim

  • Put away clothes piled in spare bedroom

  • Make tent walls -- won't get finished this weekend, but "substantial progress" ✓/2

  • Walk dogs in park ✓



Progress has been slow so far: I think my vaccinations yesterday (COVID and flu) left me getting tired more quickly than usual. But I've washed, damp-dried, ironed, and measured a couple of pieces of tent canvas, and am about to cut them into trapezoids. This requires a large area of unobstructed floor, which means the kitchen, which means I had to vacuum the kitchen floor first. Marking straight lines c. 7 feet long on fabric presents some challenges: I think the most reliable way is to use the chalk-line we bought years ago for laying floor tile. The chalk-line tends to shed a lot of chalk as it's pulled out, so (not wanting spurious chalk lines on the fabric) I pulled it out over the sink, so now the sink is full of blue tailor's chalk.

Da Weekend

Oct. 1st, 2023 07:09 am
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When it stopped raining yesterday, we went outside and planted some bulbs. And I edged the front edge of the yard with decorative bricks. And replaced the low fencing around the front sublawn. There are more bulbs to be planted, and there are still some gaps left behind by the front-walk construction, so I think we need to buy a couple of bags of topsoil, and probably some mulch -- I hope we can find some that aren't water-saturated, after the past few days of rain. And I need to bake bread today.

[UPDATE: we planted most of the bulbs yesterday, and bought mulch, and topsoil, and potting soil, and sand (which I used to fill gaps between the brick edging and the sidewalk). The rest of the sand may be used for annealing ferrous-metal clinch nails, or something like that. Baked a loaf of sourdough bread. Picked raspberries, and turned them into a mixed-berry smoothie with yogurt and tofu.]

I want to attach about a hundred loops to the shoulder of the tent roof, and toggles to the top of the walls, to hang the walls from the loops. Ideally, the toggles and loops would be equally spaced (in the 6"-9" range) around the perimeter, so the walls can be attached equally well wherever you start. I'm not sure that'll work, since the tent is oval rather than circular, but even if it were circular, there's another problem: how do you measure the length of a tent edge, and the distance from one toggle to the next, with sufficient accuracy that the latter divides an integer number of times into the former, with no remainder? I can measure them both in such a way that the quotient is whatever I want, and it'll come out pretty close, but the remainder is much more sensitive to measurement error. On the divisor side, the Law of Large Numbers works in my favor: if each one has an error bar of 5%, their mean has an error bar a factor of sqrt(n) (i.e. about ten times) smaller, or 0.5%, so the quotient is fairly predictable. But if the dividend has even a 1% error bar (which is quite optimistic -- it's almost 50 feet of length, measured on a heavy mound of fabric that can't be laid flat), the remainder can be literally anything from zero to the distance between toggles.

Perhaps the answer is to set up several checkpoints along the way, dividing the perimeter a priori into halves or quarters, and reset at each checkpoint. This way each quotient is only about 25 rather than about 100, so I can have as much as a 4% error bar in the dividend before having no control whatsoever over the remainder. And if one of them comes out horribly off, I can fudge that checkpoint a posteriori and try to correct it gradually between that checkpoint and the next.

About Sept. 14 or 15, I noticed a scratchy throat. On the 16th, I started coughing. It's over two weeks later now, and I'm still coughing. Two different kinds of COVID tests both reported negative, and it doesn't feel like flu (no fever, no general body aches, little or no nausea, no "my hair hurts"), but it's lasting longer than a cold usually does. Yuck. I'm due to see the doctor again on Tuesday.
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Tuesday morning the contractors arrived to demolish and rebuild our front steps and front walk.

The house was built in the 19teens on the same pattern as Archie Bunker's house from "All in the Family": stairs up to the front porch, door from front porch into the living room, which segues imperceptibly into the dining room, and then there's a narrow passage from one side of the dining room to the kitchen. A staircase from one side of the living room leads to the second floor, bedrooms, and the only bathroom, and a staircase from one side of the kitchen leads to the basement.

Conveniently, in 1939-1941, New York City sent a horde of photographers around to take pictures of every building in the city, and those photos have now been scanned and keyed to locations on the map, so we know what at least the front of the house looked like at that time. (The site also includes a 1980's photo of many of the buildings.)

Some time between 1910 and 1940, the front porch was enclosed, with windows all around -- the shingles are still visible on the formerly-external wall between the living room and the porch -- and they put a double French door at the entrance to the enclosed porch. The front steps were apparently all brick, with the steps going straight up to the double French door. Some time between 1940 and the 1980's, somebody replaced the double French doors with a single door (opening inward) and a storm-door or screen-door (opening outward), and then decided they needed a landing at the top of the stairs, so they extended the stairs out from the house a foot or so, which entailed adding some bricks to the stairs. Also between 1940 and the 1980's, the brick-edged (probably bluestone) front walk was replaced with concrete, and the wooden shingles on the walls were covered over with aluminum siding.

Around 2010, we planted a pair of quince trees in front of the enclosed porch. We got one or two adequate crops from them, but mostly they were unattractive and annoying, producing fruit that was full of worm poop, and they grew to overhang the enclosed front porch. So in 2020 we cut them down (along with the overgrown arborvitae between our front yard and the next door neighbor's, visible in the 1980's photo). Their roots were still in the ground, and closer to the house foundation than they should have been, so we hired a tree specialist to take out the roots of both quince and arborvitae. That happened in September 2021, and the machinery used to grind out the roots also put some big cracks in our concrete front walk. I asked the contractor to reimburse me for the cost of repairing the front walk, he refused but offered to have "my concrete guys" repair it "at cost", and I accepted that as a mutually face-saving solution that would get the walk fixed without him having to publicly admit that his machinery had broken it. After that, he never returned my phone calls, so it never got fixed.

So a few weeks ago I encountered my architect neighbor while he was talking to the contractor who had just redone his front steps, patio, and retaining walls. It seemed to be good-quality work, and my neighbor recommended the contractor, so I invited him to look at the steps and the front walk. And we reached agreement on what he was going to do, for what price: the steps will be rebuilt and extended another foot out from the front of the house, mostly brick but with a slate landing, and the front walk will be rebuilt, brick-edged with slate in the center. This Tuesday (two days ago) they showed up and started knocking down the brick staircase; Wednesday they did more of that and ripped up the front walk; and today they're starting to rebuild the staircase. Photos when I get a Round Tuit.
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Yesterday [personal profile] shalmestere read aloud a post from one of her FB friends about getting rid of excess stuff so one's friends and heirs don't have to deal with it all. On this inspiration, she started triaging T-shirts: keep in bedroom, keep in attic until summer, donate to Amherst Early Music auction, give away to SCA or living-history people, give away to thrift store, throw away. (Is that technically "hexaging"?) And suggested that we start tagging our books in LibraryThing with where they should go after we're gone; I think she's already found a home for one or two historical-costume books from periods that aren't our main interest.

Meanwhile, I went to the basement. There were about a dozen screen windows that have been waiting twenty years to be put into actual window frames. I didn't install any of them, nor even measure them to figure out which window frames they would fit in, but I threw out one that was wrecked, and consolidated the rest with the screen windows in the garage so at least they can all be dealt with at once. Put some glass storm windows on the curb for recycling. Put some cardboard framing supplies on the curb for recycling. Threw out a whole lot of wood scraps. Swept parts of the floor that haven't been swept in fifteen or twenty years (cough, cough!). Put seven sliding closet doors out on the curb for recycling/composting/trash. Ditto one solid wooden house door. And a bunch of finished-and-painted plywood shelves that no longer fit the closet book-wall in our spare bedroom after its renovation 2-1/2 years ago. Moved some pine board-stock and long pieces of molding out to the garage, to be with their friends. Sorted the remaining hardwood board-stock by width and put it all in one corner of the basement. And then [personal profile] shalmestere came downstairs and was so impressed that she threw out dozens of scraps of open-cell foam (keeping a few large pieces to use as padding in instrument cases). There's now quite a large pile of stuff for trash, composting, and recycling on the curb, and the basement (while still fairly packed with stuff) feels much roomier and more passable than 24 hours ago.

And then [personal profile] shalmestere pointed out that today is MLK Day, and there will be no trash, composting, or recycling pickup today. Trash will probably get picked up tomorrow, but composting and recycling not until next Monday. I don't know whether the wood scraps and doors count as "trash".
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So we spent yesterday puttering around the house, reading, cooking, watching the dogs sleep, and staying indoors because it was 12°F outside. Suddenly I heard a ticking noise, quite regular, about 2/second. I figured it was probably a radiator warming up, but thought I should check anyway... and there was water dripping from the living-room ceiling onto the living-room floor. I pushed the leather sofa out of the way, ran to the kitchen and grabbed a bowl to catch the drips, and ran upstairs to see where it was coming from. I didn't see any puddles on the bedroom floor, but there was a pile of dark sawdust near one end of the bedroom radiator, and it appeared that there had been water damage to the parquet floor tiles around the radiator (2-3 feet horizontally away from the place where water was dripping from the living room ceiling. About this time the dripping from the living room ceiling slowed and stopped. So we went back to our reading, somewhat nervous that the ceiling was going to fall in.

the gory details )
The "right" answer is probably to replace the whole radiator, as we did in the spare bedroom as part of its renovation two years ago: modern radiators are smaller and work better than these 50-plus-year-old ones. But that's not happening for the next few days, probably not the next few months. And I was planning to put in an electric heat pump anyway, on the theory that they're more energy-efficient and don't generate CO2, much less CO, inside the house, and they double as air conditioners.
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A month and a half ago [personal profile] shalmestere and I attended a wedding in Massachusetts, which meant packing for a weekend away from home. So I grabbed some undies, socks, toilet kit, dress shoes, suit and tie and threw them into an overnight bag.

When we got to the hotel that night, it occurred to me I really ought to try on the suit, which I hadn't worn in years, and found that the pants didn't close around my belly. Really didn't close, even sucking in my gut. Fortunately, there were spare buttons sewn to the inside of the suit, so I decided to add a button two inches over from the one that normally anchors the front closure; with a jacket over it nobody would know it wasn't closed properly. But we didn't have sewing supplies with us, and the hotel front desk didn't either. So I whipped out my phone and looked in the immediate neighborhood for things that looked like drugstores (or even a sewing store, although I didn't think that was likely), and saw a Costco. I had never been to a Costco, and was under the mistaken impression that it was a chain drugstore, like Rite-Aid, CVS, or Walgreen's.

Anyway, we drove to Costco in the morning and walked in. Immediately I felt as though all my senses were under assault. The store was huge, the piles of stuff were huge, the individual boxes of stuff were huge, the crowds were huge, and there was almost no organization by category; the only way to find anything specific was to walk down every single aisle. We walked out an hour later with about $200 worth of things we hadn't known we needed, but no sewing kit. So we found an actual chain drugstore, bought a $2 sewing kit, returned to the hotel room, I moved the button, we went to the wedding, it's all good.

Except that now we had Costco membership cards. Once you've paid for a membership in something like that, you feel a certain obligation to use it. So yesterday, in the course of an expedition "out the island" (returning a kitchen appliance that was the wrong size, dropping some surplus clothes at a thrift store) we stopped at another Costco. And again I felt as though all my senses were under assault. We walked out with $500 worth of stuff, including three or four items I had known we needed and a whole lot of meat (which wouldn't have occurred to me, but it made [personal profile] shalmestere happy). We were unable to find a number of seemingly-basic things we wanted: Costco has enormous quantities of everything, but surprisingly little selection. And almost none of the meat fit into our already-stuffed kitchen freezer, so it's in the "cold zone" of the fridge; we'll have to use it up fairly quickly, so we have a protein-heavy week or two ahead of us. And we still need to go to a normal grocery store today.

We've been talking idly for a few years about putting a small trunk freezer in the basement. There's an obvious place to put one, but it requires (a) moving other stuff out of the way, and (b) having an electrician install a power plug there (which shouldn't be a big deal -- it's right under the circuit breaker box -- but there's no power outlet there now). So that project is under discussion again. Costco, of course, has trunk freezers, but only one model, and I really didn't want to buy one without doing steps (a) and (b) first, not to mention the usual Consumer Reports research before buying a home appliance.

Anyway, I think I'll take a pass on the next Costco expedition and leave it to [personal profile] shalmestere.

Da Weekend

Apr. 2nd, 2022 07:50 am
hudebnik: (Default)
To do this weekend:


  • Buy & apply grass seed (although much of the front lawn has been planted in perennial flowers, so we'll need less grass seed than in past years) ✓

  • Buy ✓ & install sink disposal (they're allegedly "easy to install", which is true of most appliances and fixtures until I run into something about our old house that doesn't match the assumptions of the person who wrote the instructions, like where does the electrical supply come from?)

  • Design & acquire materials for new music-stand top ✓

  • Finish taxes

  • Walk dogs in the park (today, as it's supposed to be cold and rainy tomorrow) ✓

  • Declutter Something

  • Dust Something

  • Fix Something

  • Pay bills

  • Administer dogs' monthly pills

  • Draft set lists (for two potential concerts: one at Pennsic, and one at a living history show in three weeks!)

  • Practice music for same

  • Inventory & triage shawm reeds

  • Text underlay for a piece of Ars Subtilior I transcribed from Chantilly last week ✓

Da Weekend

Nov. 7th, 2021 09:14 am
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  • Watch "The French Dispatch" in theater ✓

  • Pick raspberries (although it's been pretty cold the past week, so there may not be any ripe

  • Buy drugstore stuff ✓

  • Buy groceries

  • Plant more bulbs in front lawn ✓

  • Pick up ordered books at indie bookstore ✓

  • Talk with tree guy about repairing the front walk he broke

  • Call heating-and-plumbing people about annual checkup and radiator problems

  • Follow up with harp maker (who appeared to be mostly finished with our commission in June, but we haven't heard from him since)

  • Follow up with ceiling-repair guys (who gave me an estimate a month ago and I never got back to them)

  • Pay bills

  • Practice shawm

  • Call piano tuner

  • Clean dog teeth

  • Trim dog nails

  • Remove air conditioner from bedroom window ✓

  • Buy charger cord(s)

Da Weekend

Oct. 30th, 2021 08:29 am
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  • Watch "Dune" in theater ✓

  • Watch "The French Dispatch" in theater

  • Watch something Halloweeny on DVD or streaming ("Coraline"? "Young Frankenstein"? "Something Wicked"? ...) ✓

  • Pick raspberries ✓

  • Pick up groceries from CSA (Saturday morning) ✗

  • Buy other groceries ✓

  • Buy gardening supplies at Home Depot ✓/2

  • Plant bulbs in front lawn ✓

  • Architectural walking tour of neighborhood (Saturday afternoon, weather permitting) ✓

  • Pick up ordered books at indie bookstore

  • Restore burglar alarm connectivity (it somehow lost touch with the router last week)

  • Vote (at courthouse, or wait until Tuesday and vote in the neighborhood)

  • Talk with tree guy about repairing the front walk he broke

  • Call heating-and-plumbing people about annual checkup and radiator problems

  • Follow up with harp maker (who appeared to be mostly finished with our commission in June, but we haven't heard from him since)

  • Follow up with ceiling-repair guys (who gave me an estimate a month ago and I never got back to them)

  • Dress up and hand out candy (Sunday afternoon) ✓

  • Pay bills

  • Practice shawm

  • Clean dog teeth

  • Trim dog nails

  • Remove air conditioner from bedroom window

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Last Sunday [personal profile] shalmestere and I walked the dogs in the park, and on the way home we spotted a realtor's "Open House" sign, on a house we had previously noticed for sale. So on a whim, we went in to look around. Or rather, I sat on the front lawn with the dogs while [personal profile] shalmestere went in to look around, then she came out and we swapped roles.

The most obvious facts about the house: it's brick (ours is frame with aluminum siding), it's on a larger and busier street than ours, and on the other side of that street is the one-square-mile Forest Park (which, as D. points out, means "the view out front will never change with development"). Like ours, it has a detached garage in back -- single-car rather than two-car, but there's a driveway where a car could park without blocking the sidewalk. (And the street is busy enough that nobody's going to park blocking the driveway.)

The front yard is about the same size as ours, but fenced. The back yard is slightly larger than ours, and mostly grass rather than concrete, with a large tree (maple, I think; it would presumably need regular professional trimming to keep things from falling on the house). The tree overhanging the south side of the house presumably means a rooftop solar panel wouldn't make sense, unless it were on the garage.

The kitchen is about the same size as ours, but more practically laid out: we currently have a bunch of square footage, but we seldom need to dance in the kitchen. (Although I have used the kitchen floor to cut out panels of tent fabric....) The living and dining rooms are somewhat more distinct from one another than in our house. Where we have an enclosed porch separated from the living room by a formerly-exterior wall, the house in question has a small sun-room adjacent to the living room (it faces north towards the park, so not all that sunny, but it has a west-facing window too). Come to think of it, almost every room follows the design principle of "light on two sides", unlike our current house in which even the rooms with two or three exterior walls have windows in only one of them (presumably because other houses are six feet away on either side).

There's a half bathroom on the ground floor, one of the obvious shortfalls of our current house (at least if you have visitors, which we expect to have again someday). On the second floor are a full bathroom and three bedrooms: a master bedroom about the same size as ours with decent closet space, a smaller bedroom with decent closet space, and a still smaller one with no closet space that struck both of us as a good office.

Most of the basement is finished as a "family room", with a semi-built-in workbench in one corner. The stairway down to the basement leads into the middle of the basement, rather than one end, which I guess makes it less of a gauntlet. One unfinished end of the basement is boiler-and-laundry, while the other unfinished end is storage and an oil tank (which means the oil pipes have to run across the ceiling of the finished section to feed the boiler). I've never lived with oil heat before, so I don't know what that implies.

All in all, it has a lot of practical or aesthetic advantages over our current house. It costs half again as much, but we could afford that at present. The big problems, of course, are that our current house isn't even on the market, much less sold, and it would be a big hassle to prepare it for market, sell it, and move two blocks away.
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When we reinstalled the bookshelves in our spare bedroom cum office, we realized we still had more books than would fit (some of them had been in piles on the floor, some in boxes). In particular, several boxes of math- and computer-related books retrieved from my University office when I moved out of it had been in the attic cum sewing-room for years, posing an obstacle to using the floor for laying out pattern pieces, and we saw this as an opportunity to triage and shelve them.

I've managed to categorize one box of them for giveaway, but the rest really didn't fit thematically with the wall of fiction. So [personal profile] shalmestere pointed to some floor space next to the desk and said "could you fit another bookcase here? And indeed, that space wasn't really being used, and would seem an appropriate place for computer-related non-fiction. So I took some measurements, went to Home Depot, bought some oak 1"x10", and started building a bookcase to exactly the right size and shape.

A few days ago I cut all the boards to length and checked them for squareness. Some of the cross cuts were pretty good, some needed a little fine tuning with coarse sandpaper, and some needed more work than I was prepared to do that day. Last night I got back to them and started in with a block plane, as I predicted that cleaning up the ends of these hard oak boards with sandpaper would take the rest of my natural life.

The plane didn't seem to be working very well, and I thought "maybe I need to sharpen the blade." I took off the blade, turned on the grinding wheel (one of the two power tools I own), and set to work. After a few minutes the blade didn't look any sharper, but it did look as though it had about half a dozen different bevel angles rather than one. So I pulled out the book on everything you ever wanted to know about hand tools but were afraid to ask, and read the section on sharpening plane blades. Naturally, the author does it with an oilstone rather than a grinding wheel; I figured this would take longer but couldn't produce a much worse result than I already had, so I started over that way. (The book also tells useful basics like which side of the oilstone is coarse and which fine.) And it produced a much better result: the bevel is now all at a consistent angle. But the proof is in the cutting: I remounted it on the plane, and it cut much better than before. So after an hour or so, all the boards were decently square and I could start putting them together.

Except that we want to be able to adjust the shelf heights, which means drilling holes at several heights on the insides of the uprights for movable shelf brackets. I measured and marked a couple of plausible hole positions, drilled a test hole in a piece of scrap to make sure the bit diameter worked for these shelf brackets, wrapped masking tape around the drill bit to keep it from going all the way through the boards, ... and found that both power packs for the cordless drill (the other of the two power tools I own) were dead. One of them is plugged in now, but this happens every time I try to drill anything, so I think I need a new drill. (The drill is old enough that I can't find replacement power packs for it online.) And, while I'm at it, more sharpening oil. And maybe a proper honing stone. And come to think of it, I need some plywood or masonite or something for the back of the bookcase. Some of this I can get at one of the hardware stores in walking distance, but some will require another trip to Home Depot.
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In summer 2019, we had all the second-floor windows replaced (except one in the bathroom that they convinced me was better left alone). In preparation for that, I took down the plastic slat-blinds in the two office windows and partially dismantled the window frames. We started looking for wooden shutters to put in the windows, but everything we found at Home Depot seemed too plasticky.

In summer 2020, we had the spare-bedroom/office renovated: the paneling and plaster came down, replaced with drywall, the acoustic-tile ceiling came down, replaced with drywall, and among other things the window frames were finally rebuilt. [personal profile] shalmestere found some used wooden shutters on E-Bay that were almost the right size, and mail-ordered them.

As of yesterday, Jan. 10, 2021, the shutters are finally installed. There were some stumbling blocks.


  1. Each set of shutters had one broken slat, which we repaired with glue, a bamboo skewer from the kitchen, and some plastic wood, then paint over.

  2. Each set of shutters had a wooden strip to screw into (and in turn to be screwed into the window frame) on one side, but not the other, so I had to make two more wooden strips.

  3. The shutters without wooden strips had partial hinges to attach them to said strips. I went to Home Depot and bought four matching hinges to replace all the existing ones.

  4. The new hinges were somewhat thicker than the existing ones, so I could no longer get away with attaching them to the surface: I had to chisel out rabbets for them so the hinge surfaces would be flush with the wood and the hinges could close completely.

  5. I chiseled rabbets on the shutter edge first, then lined up the wooden strip next to it to mark where the rabbet on the wooden strip needed to be. Some of the rabbets as I had originally placed them conflicted with the existing holes in the wooden strips for attaching said strips to the window frame, so I had to re-chisel the rabbets, fill the old rabbets with plastic wood, and paint over them.

  6. Using four wooden strips the same size as the two they came with made the shutters about half an inch too wide to fit in the windows, and the "right" width wasn't any standard lumber width, so I had to plane some of them down. Through a sequence of trial and error, all four strips are now slightly different widths.

  7. The two windows aren't exactly the same width, so I had to keep track of which two shutters, and which two strips, went in the right window and which in the left.

  8. The first time I put things together, which I think was Jan. 7, I installed the shutters in the left-hand window, and they were a little too wide: they fit very tightly in the window, and didn't quite lie flat. The next morning when I tried to place the shutters in the right-hand window, they fit with half an inch to spare, so I decided to swap one shutter from the right window with one from the left, in hopes that both would then fit nicely.

  9. So I did that, and the widths came out right, but then the hooks and handles didn't match up because the shutters from the right window had them at different heights than the shutters from the left window.

  10. One fix could have been to move the hooks and handles, but I thought that would be a highly-visible hack. So instead I swapped the shutter back to the window it had come from, and swapped only the strips (which were distinctly different widths).

  11. But swapping which strip went with which shutter meant the hinges didn't exactly line up, so I had to move two of the rabbets again (and fill the gaps with plastic wood, and paint over them).



Anyway, it's done now, and one can walk into the office or through the hallway naked without flashing the world outside.
hudebnik: (Default)
Back in the summer, we put about a thousand books into boxes in the garage, so we could take down the bookshelves in the closet, so the construction guys could demolish and renovate the spare bedroom cum office. They did that, but we had to do some of our own construction work (mostly crown molding) after they left, and we had to get new parts for the bookshelves in the closet because the closet is now a different size and shape, and Home Depot kept not having the right parts in stock, and and and... as of Dec. 31, we were down to the last ten boxes of books to reshelve, hoping to finish it before the end of the year. So we were in the office re-shelving books. And [personal profile] shalmestere said "What's that? That ticking noise?"

Indeed, there was a ticking noise coming from the closet. I thought it might be coming from outside -- rain, or squirrels, or something like that -- but when I put a hand on one of the shelves, it slowed down and stopped. I took my hand off the shelf, and it didn't come back... until about ten seconds later. So I put my hand on the shelf again, just in time for the top shelf to suddenly drop an inch or two onto the second-to-top row of books. With one hand holding the top shelf in place, I started frantically grabbing books off the shelf with my other hand and passing them to [personal profile] shalmestere to pile on the floor. We got all the books off, then took down the shelf so we could examine the situation. One of the vertical brackets that hold the horizontal brackets that hold the shelves that hold the books was no longer flush against the wall, and the screw that held it to the wall was no longer in the wall. We emptied out another shelf, took it down too, and got a better look.

I spent the next two hours trying to find screws with the right combination of diameter and length, and recharging the power drill, and trying to extricate a broken-off screw from its hole in the wall, giving up on that and instead moving all the screw holes 1/4" to the right, and screwing and unscrewing things over my head while standing on a folding chair, and punching new holes in a steel bracket so there would be more screws holding it to the wall next time. To make a long story short, the shelves were up again before midnight, but I'd really prefer to replace some of the screws with longer ones before we put books on them again, and that'll require a trip to a hardware store. So we still have piles of books all over the floor, in addition to three boxes of books-to-give-away and two boxes of books-we-were-about-to-reshelve, and there are still five boxes of books in the garage.

Anyway, around 11:00 I quit all this, walked the dogs, and came back to watch the ball drop. Not the one in Times Square this time: we were watching Wolgemut's Musical New Year's Eve Countdown, which cut away at 11:59 to Clan Tynker's fire-dancing-and-juggling show, which included gradually lowering a large flaming ball made to look like a coronavirus particle. We toasted the New Year with milk and cookies, brushed our teeth, and went to bed.

Le Weekend

Nov. 15th, 2020 08:00 am
hudebnik: (Default)
I started a batch of sourdough bread dough Friday evening, and was persuaded Saturday morning to use it for croissants rather than bread, so I worked in a stick of butter that wouldn't normally have been in a bread dough. But the croissant recipe I was using as inspiration has four sticks of butter, rolled into a plate, chilled, and folded repeatedly inside the dough. I wasn't convinced I could do the full rolling-chilling-folding-rolling-folding-rolling-folding thing at this point, and it had leaked a lot of butter out the edges the last time I tried, but I sliced another stick of butter into pats, arranged them in the middle of the rolled-out dough, and folded both ends over it, then rolled it out again, rotated 90 degrees, and folded both ends over the middle again for at least an approximation of how they're supposed to work. The croissant recipe also calls for sugar, and I left that out. Eventually I used half of the dough to make half a dozen croissants, and shaped the rest into a smallish loaf, which will presumably be very buttery bread. We'll see how they turn out.

Spent an hour or two yesterday raking and mowing the front lawn, and moved a couple of potted plants (one Thai-basil, two Thai chili-pepper) from the back yard to the enclosed porch before it gets too cold for them.

[personal profile] shalmestere and I hung up a couple of posters in the recently-renovated office. We still have to triage and re-shelve about a thousand books in the office, and there's some wall space still un-covered with artwork, and we still have to install the wooden blinds in the windows (they're just propped up in place now). And we need to get the radiator fixed or replaced, because when I turned it on after the contractors moved it two inches out from the wall (to clear the new window frames) it leaked water on the floor. And while we're at that, we should get the radiator in our bedroom fixed: for at least the last five years it's been very reluctant to heat up, and only one end at the best of times. I sent out a CFP on Angie's List a few days ago.

And we had an hour and a half music class yesterday afternoon, on "ornamentation for wind players". We didn't get a lot of specific advice we didn't already know, and we already have Ganassi, Ortiz, Conforto, etc. but the teacher had dug up a lot of fascinating textual references -- people in the 16th century advising one another how to or how not to ornament, describing particularly compelling or offensive performances they'd heard, etc.

I spent an hour or so helping with [personal profile] shalmestere's construction of the #capecult Edwardian cape that all the historical-costume-vloggers are doing this year. Having previously gotten at least one piece inserted backwards, she wanted to be reassured that all the pieces were in the correct orientation, and I concluded that the shell pieces were correct (albeit one sleeve two inches longer than the other), but the sleeve pieces of the lining were swapped left-for-right. (This is an easier mistake to make than it sounds, because the sleeve pieces of this cape are basically rounded triangles, almost-but-not-quite equilateral.) Fortunately, they were only pinned in place, not stitched, so I pinned all the lining pieces to their corresponding shell pieces in the ultimate orientations, things matched up pretty well, and she was able to put the thing on with all the pieces as a sanity check. So I think it'll be sewn together by the end of today.

This morning I'm scheduled to pick up a CSA farm share, followed by the usual angst about how to fit it all into the fridge, then to donate blood mid-day, then we have a music class at 3, then another music class at 6. It'll be busy.
hudebnik: (Default)
The house was built in the 19teens, so a smidge over 100 years old. There were a bunch of renovations in the 1970's or 1980's, combining two bedrooms and a bathroom into one master bedroom and a large bathroom, and covering the walls of the remaining bedroom with light-blue faux-wood-grain paneling, which we've ripped down over the past year or so. And now things have kicked into high gear.

a bunch of pictures )
hudebnik: (Default)
Picking up on this post...

So Sunday evening we both climbed on chairs and [personal profile] shalmestere held the new light fixture in place near the ceiling while I connected the wires and tried to screw in the 8 screws that had held the previous light fixture to the ceiling. It was difficult finding the holes and getting the screws into them while holding up a light fixture -- it's not terribly heavy, but anything you're holding over your head for several minutes on end gets wearying quickly. And by the time I was putting in the third screw, the first one would fall out of its hole, and while I was putting in the fourth screw, the second one would turn out not to be in its hole at all but rather just propping the fixture away from the ceiling, and so on. But after a lot of sweating, cursing, and swearing, I got all 8 screws apparently holding, we climbed down from our chairs, I turned on the circuit-breaker and the wall switch... and nothing happened. Obviously one of the wires had become disconnected in the course of all the screw-futzing. But we were both too tired and demoralized to deal with it at the time.

We had other commitments for Monday and Tuesday evenings, so didn't get back to this until Wednesday evening. By which time I had had several ideas:

  1. even if I can't attach the round mounting bracket from which the fixture is supposed to hang by a hook-and-chain, I can probably hang it from something else by a hook and chain, which will mean we don't have to hold it over our heads throughout the process;

  2. the existing screw-holes are probably too torn up by now to hold any weight, and I'll need to put the screws into new holes, moving the fixture at least an inch from where it was before;

  3. if I'm doing that anyway, I have a stud-finder that will tell me where there's something solid to screw into (hoping and praying that there is something somewhere near where the fixture needs to be);

  4. these are self-drilling screws, and the professionals who mounted this thing in 2017 probably put them in with a power drill all at once rather than drilling a hole, matching up the screw with the hole, and driving it in with a screwdriver.


So I climbed up on a chair (and a large coffee-table museum catalogue and the two-volume OED), unscrewed the existing screws (some of which did indeed fall out of their torn-up holes with no unscrewing necessary), and attached the hook between the light fixture and part of the junction box. I reconnected the one wire that had obviously become disconnected, then (with the fixture apparently securely hanging by the hook) flipped the circuit-breaker and the wall switch, and the light came on! Progress!

Next, I used the stud-finder to plot out where there was a wooden stud behind the drywall. Fortunately, there was one running parallel to the long axis of the fixture, not far from where the screws on one side had been drilled before, so I figured I'd only need to move it maybe an inch, not enough to be visibly off-center in the room. No stud on the other side, but I figured four 3-inch screws into wood on one side should be enough to hold the minimal weight of the fixture, with four 3-inch screws into drywall on the other side just stabilizing it a bit.

Next, I grabbed the power drill, put in a screwdriver bit (which I don't think I've ever used before, in the twenty years I've had the drill), and started putting in screws on the stud side. Each screw was about equally likely to go solidly into the ceiling or to push the fixture away from the ceiling, so whenever the latter happened, I backed off, pressed the fixture more tightly against the ceiling, and tried again. Unfortunately, whenever I pressed the fixture against the ceiling, the hanging hook unhooked, so I needed to reconnect it every time I wanted to put my arms down and take a break.

At some point in this process I had another idea:

5) We own a stepladder, which would get me higher up with more stability than standing on the OED on a museum catalogue on a folding chair.

So I retrieved the stepladder from the garage, and with [personal profile] shalmestere standing on a chair and holding the fixture against the ceiling, managed to drive all four screws on the stud side, which held things firmly enough that she could stop holding and I could drive the other four screws by myself.

The light still worked, and it didn't seem about to fall off. The hanging hook was still poking through the fixture, but I figured that's harmless, and it means it'll still be there if I ever need to take the thing down again.

Attached the diffuser with six fairly-easy toggles, and the light still worked. Yay! Put away stepladder, power drill, drill bits, screwdriver bits, four manual screwdrivers, folding chair, museum catalogue, and OED.

Made raspberry bars from the raspberries we've picked over the past week. Ate them with milk. Walked dogs, brushed teeth, went to bed.

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