What I've Been Doing All Evening

I already wrote about my impulsive purchase of last week. Yesterday, I finally decided on the platform for my hugemungous new Mitsubishi HDTV. After weighing my options, and finding most furniture either very expensive, too wobbly or both. But I did find one, at Big Lots of all places (with a 20% off coupon too!). The style is sort of "early apartment," but it's rather minimalist, and will be dwarfed by the big teevee machine, so sturdiness was really most of what I was going for.

I started assembly at about 7:30. I moved everything to the edges of the living room, and unboxed all the pieces on the rug. There were lots of pieces. . .

I even used the instructions! 

 Things were coming along just fine. I had the (old) TV on for company, and by this time it was around 8:30.

Things started to move rather quickly. About this time, the instructions told me I'd need somebody to help me. Hah! Ouch! I knelt on the claw of the hammer. . .

 About now, I decided to eat some chicken, and watch whatever that new show after Community is. Married Friends? Maybe it was The Umpteenth Show Tried in This Time Slot? I dunno. But I was done eating so, back to work. This took about another half hour. . .

 I'm really coming along now! Let's flip this puppy over, and see what she looks like.

 

Okay, so it's dusty, and has all the A, B, C stickers on it, but I'm almost done! At this point, I took the hinges and doors into the TV room to watch 30 Rock.  Back in a flash, slapped those suckers on, a little Pledge, and voila!

Ain't she a beaut? Okay, that's a stretch, but it should do the trick. And hey, it's an AmeriWood! Seriously. Back to blogging soon. But I'll be dreaming of the imminent arrival of. . .

I suppose I should mention that I had a few parts left over. . .

Holiday Weekend Project: The Garagening

This is day 3 of my 4-day holiday weekend, and I was not going to allow this one to pass by without accomplishing something. So today, we had the culmination of a three-day project to turn our 3-bay storage bin into a 3-bay garage.

- Step 1: Take the cars outside, and drag everything out

- Step 2: Divide crap into good crap, garage sale crap and crap crap


- Step 3: Throw crap crap away, and break down boxes


- Step 4: Gather and price items for sale


- Step 5: Hold garage sale

- Step 6: Give leftover sale items away for free, donate them to charity or throw them away

- Step 7: Aftermath. . .Clean up all remaining items, and tuck everything away on shelves or perimeter wall

Everything is done except to drop off all of the leftover crap to charity, which will happen in the next half hour.  There is still garbage to go to the curb, of course (has to wait until Wednesday), two pieces of furniture with no home (under the blue blanket), and a Pilate's machine left by The Former Roommate (to be Craig's Listed very, very soon).  In fact, about 1/5 of the stuff you see on those shelves is from TFR, so Richie if you're reading this, come gitcher stuff!  But the end result has made me very happy (and tired, sweaty and dirty).   Now, for 1-1/2 days of rest and relaxation. . .

Computer Woes: The Big CD Project

My new Mitsubishi Galant has an MP3 CD player, much like my Jeep did. But after much trial and error, I figured out that the Galant's player only plays actual MP3s. So, all of my music that was in WMA (Windows) format would not play. No problem, since I found a program that will do a conversion for me. Unfortunately, it leaves the original file intact, which is causing a huge duplication problem.

Add to this, the fact that I'm undertaking--finally--a CD ripping project. I'm taking our 400-500 disc collection, and ripping them all to the computer. At least I figured out how to do that relatively automatically, and in the MP3 format in the first place. But I already had 5,000+ tunes on the computer, and this is making the duplication problem grow by leaps and bounds.

I've found programs that allegedly will help you find duplicate music files, and delete them. But it is far, far from perfect. Songs with sound-alike titles, or different versions of the same song pop up in the delete list. So, I think I'm going to have to do this deletion project manually. On thousands upon thousands of songs.

My car doesn't have an input for an MP3 player (though one is available for over $200), so I'm sort of stuck with the discs. But once this project is complete, that's really not much of an issue. MP3 CDs hold over 150 songs after all. But I still feel like I'm a step or two behind current technology. But it is a step.

Weekend Projects #2, 3 and 4 Complete!

There are weekends where you get absolutely nothing done, and feel guilty about it. There are those that are planned lazy time, and there are the ones where you plan projects for yourself, and actually do them. This was one of those for me.

I came away wounded and achy after my big project, switching out the fenders on my Jeep. My other projects by contrast were fairly easy. #2 was trading out the power supply on The Other Half's computer. This might have been an ordeal years ago, but having done it before, and with easier-access computers these days, it was easy-breezy. All done in about 15 minutes.

Project #3 was to obtain and set up a quieter fan in my office. We moved my office to the front of the house, so that I wouldn't disturb TOH when he has to sleep at different hours than I do. But the problem is, the front of the house gets warm, and the fans in our house are all too noisy. They require me to turn up the TV too loud to compensate, which kinda defeats the purpose of moving in the first place. So, I found a vertical, oscillating "fan tower" that promises to be noiseless. $27, so even if it turns out not to suit my purposes, it's no big tragedy.

Project #4 was seemingly simple: obtain a filtered water pitcher. Our ridiculously expensive Maytag Ice20 refrigerator's water line freezes up over and over, so we wanted filtered water in a different way. Options for pitchers are more varied than they used to be, with different brands and sizes. I opted for a slim 9-cupper jobby that was marked down from $25 to $11.

It's kind of weird though, with a sink attachment included, and a hose that snaps into the handle. And there is only one spot in the afore-mentioned refrigerator that it'll even fit.

But looky there, four projects completed! Now, I'm going to settle in with a box DVD set of Angel, Season 1 to watch for the first time. As a huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, this could almost be counted as project #5. No use wasting time blogging, as it seems there are no readers today anyway. 18-whopping people at last check. Whoopee.

Weekend Project #1: Jeep de-Aging (Pt. 2)

I didn't want to do it, I really didn't. After changing out the fender flares on the left side of my Jeep Wrangler yesterday, I just wasn't sure if my body was up to it. My fingertips are bruised from trying to hold the plastic nuts while using the socket wrench on the bolts. My elbow is bruised from when the wrench slipped off of the impossibly shallow bolt heads. My skin is slashed on my wrists and on my hands from the edges of the fender flares.


But I decided, damn it, I'm going to do it. Otherwise, I'd put it off for a week, a month, who knows? I'd have one side with fresh new fenders, and one side with 11-year faded ones. So I saddled up, and rode that bitch. But this time, even though it is exacting work trying to hold those little nuts and bolts, I wore work gloves. I thought it would slow me down, but it didn't. I was able to hold the plastic nut much better, and the gloves got shredded instead of my hands. There were little bits of suede all over the fenders when I was done.

Anyway, here are the results. The photos don't give the full effect, unfortunately, because the old fenders just look dusty in the top photo. In fact, they were faded to an uneven light gray, with even lighter speckles here and there. The new fenders are black, black, black.

So, I washed the truck--and got suckered into washing The Other Half's car as well--thus completing weekend project #1!

Weekend Project #1: Jeep de-Aging (Pt. 1)

I'm in the house on a break from my first part of my first project for the weekend. I have a 1998 Jeep Wrangler Sport, and while it still looks pretty good, its age is starting to show.

The great thing about owning a Jeep Wrangler (or CJ) is that to the general public, they all look the same. Ask my Mom to point out the difference between a 78 CJ-7, and 87 YJ, a 97 TJ or a 2007 JK, she couldn't do it. For the uninitiated, the CJs had rounded rear wheel openings, the YJs had square headlamps, the TJs brought back the awesome, updating yet retaining characteristics of classic Jeeps, and the new JKs made the front end look like a loaf of Spam (I want one anyway).

People who pay attention to cars and trucks probably recognize my TJ from the 1997-2006 span. But only two things really give it away as one of the early TJs: different side mirrors, and aged fender flares. The fender flares are made of vinyl, and they have a tendency to fade in the sun. Worse, the fading is irregular and spotty. Nothing makes them look new again.

Except: buying new flares! So, I had my mom get me a set off of eBay for my birthday. Thinking this would be the easiest car repair I ever undertook, I started to day at about noon. Basically, all this involves is unbolting the old flares and bolting on the new ones (plus replacing the parking lights). Easy right? Yeah, I thought so too.

I could add a new "enhanced interrogation technique" to the CIA's list by suggesting this chore. "Stress positions" would be the key word here. For most of the bolt removals/reinstallations, you need both hands. And you need to get them into awkward, unnatural positions. To make things worse, Chrysler used bolts with very shallow heads, making a constant grip with the socket wrench impossible. So after 2 hours, I needed a break. I managed to get the front left fender, parking light, and accent piece changed out. I started with the bolts on the left rear, but grew weary quickly. Need lunch. Need band aids. Need rest!

So my weekend project may go over two or three days. And we haven't even gotten to Weekend Project #2: computer power supply!

My Saturday Project: Turn 1-Car Garage into 2-Car

Actually, the joke is, we have a three-car garage. But last winter when The Ex-Roommate was staying with us, his stuff took up most of the third bay. No matter, it's just for storage anyway. But early this year, when we decided to swap our guest room for my office space, the first-bay was taken up by the overflow from all of that moving.

We've parked The Other Half's Volkswagen Golf in the driveway ever since. I got fed up today. Partly because Stupid Monkey Planet is coming over to help me work on my Jeep Wrangler, and I'm embarrassed that the garage looks so terrible. And the other reason is, in our neighborhood--which consists entirely of homes with three-car garages and three-car driveways--it is not uncommon to see sixteen to twenty cars parked outside, just in the four houses across from and adjacent to our house. It looks like a friggin' parking lot, and I don't like adding to it.

Still, it wasn't easy. We have a vanity that was removed from the guest room, and won't fit in the new room. We had tons of The Ex-Roomate's stuff that still populated the guest room. And we had 10 years worth of accumulated stuff in two closets to deal with. My first notion was to haul a bunch of stuff to Goodwill. Instead, SafeNest called, looking for donations. So, we boxed up a bunch of the clothing items and left them on the stoop.

Next, I piled a curbload of stuff out front with a "take me, I'm free!" sign, and had 99% of that stuff taken in about 10 minutes. More stuff in the garbage, and (unfortunately), the rest piled around the edges, and especially the now STUFFED third bay. But as the evidence shows, I now have both our cars in the garage. Whoopee!!!

Now, it is time for the real work to begin. . .fixing the Jeep. Ugh. At least I enjoy the Monkey's company, even if I detest working on cars!

Greenlee Gazette Office Gets Makeover

I intended to flood the blog with posts today, since yesterday consisted of one solitary post. But starting somewhere around 12:30 pm, I decided to clean my office. While I'm glad it is over now, it took me nearly all day to complete.

Chief among my tasks was to do something about our DVD collection, which has gotten out of control. We had three slide-out tubs that have served us for a few years, but they'd spilled to over-flowing. A make-shift small bookshelf, and some space on my main bookshelves have served a (dusty) duty for quite a while, but I've been very unhappy with them for a long time.

So, I enlisted the aid of my friend (and reluctant blogger) Lesto, to build me some half-shelves for my big book cases. Those cases have stored many and sundry items from my bygone eBay days, but were too deep for DVDs. Les' ingenious notion was to build these tiers, to allow two rows of DVDs on the same shelf. So, thanks to Lesto (and my willingness to divest myself of many of those quirky bookshelf items), I now have order for the first time in a long time.

Now, back to blogging.