Oct 6, 2023 — Caseous Anzactile
Greetings fellow humans.
I am sorry to report there are no photos from my personal collection this time. There were none to chose from. Instead, I picked something that Medium handed me when I gave it the keyword “blue.” Because I could.
The week was… a thing. It went somewhere. Let me see if I can unravel it to at least some degree.
First, just after publishing last week’s post I learned that a friend from the Santa Cruz Mountains died suddenly and very unexpectedly. It was one of those things that reminds you of your own mortality and how little time we have on this rock. The sheer surprise of it set me back a bit. John, you are missed, and I wish the best for all the family.
So, that set the tone for the week.
Then one of my monitors stopped working. Well, it mostly stopped. It went black and stayed that way, but if you powered it down for a few minutes and then back up it would work again for a few seconds before going black again. I’m guessing it’s a heat related problem, but who knows. I’m no expert. What I do know is that it is about 13 years old. None of my monitors last much longer than that.
In any case, I do so much work on this computer that I needed a replacement ASAP. And because the computer itself is so old I had to buy an oddball monitor cable. The graphics card only has DVI outputs and the new monitor only has an HDMI input.
The timing there wasn’t ideal, as I have been researching replacing the computer itself. It’s getting weirder with time: Chrome continues to hang regularly in an oddball way, and Firefox has recently started throwing a new issue at me: it sometimes crashes when I move a tab from one window to another. But what to replace this beast with isn’t clear. I might buy a NUC (as sold by System76) with Linux already installed on it. That would be an easy and relatively inexpensive update and it would clear a bunch of junk off my desk. But I am also pondering laptops and tower systems. It’s complicated.
Also, last week I mentioned I needed a new office chair. That’s been dealt with. I didn’t want to spend a couple thousand dollars on a high end chair, so I went to Staples and sat in about twenty different chairs they had on display. Eventually I found one — and only one — that seemed reasonable, with good lumbar support (a key feature for me), and that wasn’t too expensive. But (of course) none of the local stores had it in stock, so I had to order it online. It arrived yesterday and I’m sitting in it now. I’ll have a better sense of how well it works for my back next month when the next issue of the Blueridge Bulletin goes out. For the moment it seems fine.
In terms of home projects, it’s still pretty slow. I caulked down the toilet I installed a while back. Not sure why I waited so long to do that, but I did. And I continue to work on the filler bits for the hinges and door latch indent on the main bathroom. I was asked about those, so here’s the deal: ages ago we took down that door and replaced it with a curtain (at the same time as we replaced the closet doors with curtains). Every one of those doors got in the way of things. Dumb design. But at least with the bathroom door I didn’t want to get rid of it entirely. Some future owner might not like the curtain and want the door back, so we stuffed it into a closet downstairs, along with the hardware.
But if the door might go back up, we can’t replace the door frame, so the recesses for the hinges and the one for the door latch are still there, and they’re ugly.
To “fix” those, I’ve cut some bits from 1/8" plywood that are shaped to fill them. Those are in the process of being painted, and will be installed once that is done. They’re too thick and will stick up a bit, but the idea is that they can be removed and the door rehung easily if someone wants to do that. I’ll include before and after photos, probably next week.
In other news, I went on a walk in Vancouver with a friend (Hi Ducky!) on her birthday. It was a lovely day and we had a good time walking along False Creek and catching up on things.
And I got a bit more work done on the community association website. That project will never end, but there are good things about continuing to work on it.
Otherwise I spent a lot more time watching the slow motion train wreck that is Washington DC. I just cannot turn away, and that feels very wrong. But I continue to hope that tfg (“the former guy”, but never capitalized) winds up in jail soon, and that his cronies in congress all get voted out for being more interested in social media engagement than in governing. Of course the realist in me knows that is all unlikely. Money talks.
So that’s my week. How was yours?
Cheers!