Category: around the house

Broken Lettuce

Published June 25, 2009

It seems that today’s storm has damaged my lettuce. It is torn, perforated, and generally broken down. The storm also downed a tree at the entrance to my condo complex, and caused me to have a 1:30 drive home. Most of the time was spent within the last four miles of my house.

I was in a windowless conference room having a meeting while the storm rolled through, so I only heard the rain on the building’s roof, but I guess it was pretty bad out this way. Hail, 75 MPH winds, and lots of things falling over.

UPDATE: A portion of my basement floor was wet, and it appears as if the wind was also strong enough to either blow water in that basement window, or back water up against the window so that it could flow in. I wish I had been here to see this storm.

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Lots of Riding in Hot Weather

Published June 25, 2009

I’ve been riding my bike a lot lately. Not particularly far, but every day since Saturday. Here’s where I’ve been:

Saturday: River Bends Park, exploring new (to me) single track.
Sunday: Addison Oaks
Monday: Orion Oaks
Tuesday: Pontiac Lake Recreation Area
Wednesday: Stony Creek

Today’s ride at Stony Creek was one of the hardest things that I’ve done in a long time. The heat really, really got to me and I just couldn’t cool down / feel better. All the other days went rather well.

Now, bed with air conditioning. I finally turned on the AC after finding the inside of the house to be 86°F with even more warm weather on the way.

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IKEA: Food and a Full Car

Published June 15, 2009

As my CD rack is now empty, Danielle and I headed out to the Detroit area (Canton) IKEA and poked around for quite a while looking at book cases for my office. After a bunch of research before and talking while in the store, we came to a conclusion on what would work well.

Unfortunately, it didn’t appear that the boxes would fit in my car, even after I went out to the parking lot and remeasured the inside of the vehicle with various seats repositioned. We first left without buying the book shelves, but decided that if Danielle were to sit in the back, and things were positioned diagonally, we just might be able to fit everything.

Well, it fit so long as Danielle sat in the back seat. That’s three of IKEA’s BILLY book cases (two narrow, one wide, both tall) and doors for them (three tall glass doors, and one short glass/wood door). It’s impressive what my car can hold, if pushed to its limits. (Here’s a rather not good photo of Danielle sitting in the back of the car along with the boxes.)

While at IKEA we also ate some lunch, which is seen above. My meal, as shown above, was a rather good pasta and garlic bread with elderflower drink. Later on, before leaving the store for the first time, we also split a cinnamon roll.

I’ll post photos of the bookshelves and stuff later. They aren’t completely done being assembled, as I still need some binding screws to hold the two side by side cabinets together. After that I’ll begin filling them.

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Empty CD Rack

Published June 13, 2009

Last night I emptied my CD rack, and today I’ll be removing it from the wall. Boxing the CDs up felt a bit odd, because almost every single one was purchased listened to, enjoyed, and reasonably understood. With listening to music during all sorts of times, feelings, and experiences, a large, well-used CD collection is almost a story of years of one’s life.

Now that I have all the discs ripped I don’t need as ready of access to the discs, and the wall space could be better filled by a book / stuff shelf, so the CDs are being moved into storage in the basement. Still, I can’t help but feel like I’m putting aside a big part of my life and what makes me feel like me: music.

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My Random Day

Published June 9, 2009

Instead of a post talking about something in particular, I’ll talk about the last 28 hours or so of my day:

To start, as seen above, Danielle and I came across both Deluxe and Old Fashioned hot dog buns from Aunt Millie’s in VG’s. When comparing them, there was no substantial difference. Beyond the price (about $1/package difference) only a few things at the very bottom of the ingredient list, vitamin supplements mostly, varied.

This photo shows the large wrapped stack of boxes waiting on my front porch when I got home. These are CD-sized outside tuck corrugated mailers from Planned Packaging of Illinois Corp. which I will use to box my CDs and store them in closets in the basement. The CD rack in my office (see this fisheye photo) will then be removed and replaced with a bookshelf to hold both my and Danielle’s books.

After work I went for a ride around the mountain bike trails at Stony Creek. I hadn’t eaten properly today, polishing off a bag of trail mix before leaving the office, and this made it really difficult to ride. Despite this I pushed myself quite a bit, and thus I kept having cramps in my lower back. I think that lowering my handle bar will help with this, because most of the cramping came with trying to stand and pedal, but with the bar relatively high I could pull on it properly and likely overdid things.

Dinner tonight was two garlic chicken sausages from Trader Joe’s, along with salad, potato chips, a bunch of spicy cheese popcorn, and a bottle of Le Fin du Monde. I made a point of drinking the dregs from this bottle to experiment with the gastrointestinal results of ingesting a quantity of yeast. My next experiment will likely involve a teaspoon of bread machine yeast. Danielle says that I’m not allowed to do this when she is around, so it’ll probably happen next week.

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Changes Around The House

Published June 8, 2009

The more I use my Millet Hybrid Maxed headphone amplifier, the more I realize that my iPod canot properly drive my old standby Sennheiser HD 570 headphones. Since the Millet Hybrid Maxed is a bit too large (and fragile) to bring to work, I’ve begun ordering the parts to build an AMB Mini³.

I also ordered up some cardboard boxes, because I’ve decided that I’m going to take the CD rack out of my office and put all the CDs in storage in the basement. As seen here this takes up quite a bit of wall space, and with all the CDs long-ago ripped into iTunes I think this space would be better filled by a book shelf.

At the same time I’m also considering emptying the office and installing a hardwood floor, just to make for a nicer area to work in. Since moving the CD rack is one of the hardest parts of this job, after removing it and before removing the book shelf would be a good time to do it. I’m also considering putting hardwood down the hall and maybe into the dining area, but I’m not certain of this yet.

After this I’m also going to consider some other changes, like possibly moving my Mac Pro down to the basement, hanging from supports in the ceiling, so that it takes up less space in my office and is even less audible. I’d also like to re-rip all my CDs in a lossless format to more permanently archive them. We’ll see, though. These two tasks will probably take more effort than all the others.

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Salad: The Hard Way

Published May 23, 2009

There. Two rows of lettuce seeds have now been planted: Mereveille des Quatre Saisons and Forellenschuss. Danielle acquired both of these seed packs from Seed Savers Exchangeand had enough spare that I was able to plant some.

Per directions they were sowed 1/4″ deep and about 1″ apart, then after they sprout I’ll be thinning them to 8″ apart, as I want looseleaf lettuce. If I were growing them as heads, which isn’t really possible in that planter, they would be thinned to 12″ apart.

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For Sale: Metal Masters Mfg. Table and Chair Set

Published May 17, 2009

For Sale, US$500: One antique, Detroit-made table and chair set from Metal Masters Mfg. This is a set of four chrome and vinyl chairs and a sliding leaf table in excellent condition. I’d acquired this from my grandparents back in 2001 and used it briefly before putting it in the basement for storage.

This set is available for pickup at my house in Shelby Township (ZIP code 48315). The legs detach from the table with minimal effort, making it possible to transport in a small car.

UPDATE: This set is no longer for sale. Sorry.

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Flowers: 2009

Published May 10, 2009

Danielle and I swung by Denewith’s Nursery today to get some gardening stuff, and while there I picked up flowers for the front porch for this year. The long/skinny planters are getting a mix of blue and red salvia, the space around the tree got some blue and white mounding flowers, and the square planter got the plant seen above whose name involves the word chaos. Yes, it’s supposed to look like that, and no, I haven’t yet photographed / scanned the tags.

Lettuce seeds will likely be planted in the long / skinny planter, and I have to acquire a pot for the extra plant I purchased, something called the cigar plant. Now, to make it all grow…

More photos taken today of the aforementioned plants, and a few more which won’t go in my garden, can be found here: Flowers 2009.

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New Air Compressor Output Stage

Published May 9, 2009

Today I replaced the output stage on the air compressor given to me by my coworker Brian. Beyond a small handful of brass fittings I replaced the regulator, added a filter, and adjusted the automatic shutoff. It now turns on at ~80 psi and shuts off at just over 100 psi, and everything I replaced or moved appears to be operating smoothly. There is a leak in the upper compression fitting on the line between the pump and tank (seen on the right here) which loses about 2 psi per minute, so I’ll probably replace that with a flexible line. The hard shutoff which is built into the manifold also leaks very slightly, but as I don’t want to spend time finding a replacement I’ll let it be.

With the purchase of a rather nice Goodyear hose, blower handle and tips, brass quick disconnects, and a tire inflator from Harbor Freight, I think I’ve got everything for it that I need. It would be nice if it held pressure, but as I don’t intend to store it pressurized I’m not too concerned.

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