Daybook

Descriptions of what I did recently; what most people think of when they imagine a “diary entry.”

Another Elfa Closet Done

The rehab of our lower level continues apace. The tile guys finished up today, replacing the tile around the tub and some floor tile that was damaged by the mudjacking last month. The grout has to cure for another week and the toilet has to be re-set, but the tub no longer leaks. Shortly we will have a guest bathroom again.

The painters begin their work on Monday. We haven’t ordered the new carpeting yet, so the carpeting won’t be replaced for probably another three weeks. In the meantime, there are plenty of odd jobs to be done down there, and yesterday I dove in on one of them: my workshop closet. I’ve been planning an Elfa buildout in that closet for literally years, but it hadn’t bubbled to the top of the stack until recently. To replace the crappy shelves I had in there with Elfa I first had to empty the closet completely, and there was nowhere to stack its contents until I was forced by the mudjacking to clear the eastern ten feet of my shop space. That in itself was an adventure in strength training; QST may be the only magazine in creation denser than National Geographic.

So last week I hauled hundreds of pounds of parts, tubes, sound boards, unfinished project lashups and much other junque out of the closet and stacked it in the newly empty space where those QSTs had been. And yesterday, level and cordless screwdriver in hand, I got the Elfa installed.

Elfa is a steel shelving system made in Sweden, built like a battleship and priced accordingly. As best I know it’s an exclusive from The Container Store chain here in the US. It’s based on a horizontal track mounted high (ideally in studs) from which vertical tracks are suspended. The vertical tracks are not fastened into the wall at all, so can slide side-to-side for fine adjustment. (Mine is biased four inches to the right.) There are several major styles (closet, kitchen, office, garage) and all kinds of interesting bits that click into the tracks. It’s basically a Meccano set for shelving.

I’ve used it twice before, in our upstairs office closet, and across two thirds of the back wall of our garage. It takes a little practice to get good at it, but there’s nothing especially subtle about the system. It was breathtaking to see just how much clutter we were able to scoop up off the garage floor and shovel onto the shelves.

Yesterday I filled an 88″ wide closet with a six-foot shelf bank, leaving a little room on each side for specialty storage for things like brooms, vac wands, and mobile antennas, including a full set of Hustler RM-series loading elements. The Elfa system includes pull-out bins, one of which I bought to see how useful it might be. Having filled it with plastic scraps, I’ve decided that it’s very useful, and on my next trip to Denver will get two more.

I’m still switching shelves around and moving them up and down to get a sense for the spacing, and may put a couple more 2′ shelves on the right side to make space for things more horizontal than vertical, like homebew lashups. That said, I’ve already re-shelved most of the stuff I’d pulled out of there last week, and still have almost twelve shelf-feet of completely empty space. As wins go, it was a biggie.

Highly recommended.

Unhappy Old Year

Jan 1st, 2012

by Jeff Duntemann.

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So. Once again we rebooted the calendar, and it worked. Whew. Couldn’t have happened soon enough. This year had its moments, but it wasn’t among the best I can recall, though it stands shoulders above 2002.

The year began with the worst flu I’ve had in 35 years. Lesson: Get your flu shots! Carol did. I didn’t. Q.E.D. There was other illness in the family that I won’t talk about, though nothing life-threatening. For that we have to move out into our friendscape. We lost Prudy Stewart, a stalwart from the local Bichon Frise Club, along with Harold Shippey, a gentleman in our camping group. Two of my grade school teachers died within a couple of months of one another: Mrs. Mary Clare Toffenetti, who taught art and French at IC school, and Mrs. Mary Veronica Condon, who taught third grade and also French. Dan Matthews, one of the kids in my grade school class, who had been a close friend for several years, died on Christmas Day. Just last night, one of our parishioners, who generally sat two pews behind us at church, had a serious heart attack. He’s in a coma and is not expected to survive.

All this since November 1, sheesh.

Oh, and my house almost blew up. Settling soil has been our bane here for years now. We had to empty the lower level and get the slab mudjacked, and are still fooling with paint chips and carpet samples now that the carpet’s been torn up anyway. All of my SF and most of my electronics magazines are packed and out of reach. It’s a mess.

For good things to report I’ll begin with the completion of Drumlin Circus, a 53,000 word short novel that came together in one furious six-week period, during which I wrote as much as 5,000 words in a single day. Jim Strickland and I put a tete-beche double novel on the market, incorporating Drumlin Circus and On Gossamer Wings, both tales from the Drumlins World.

Jim and I attended the Taos Toolbox writers’ workshop in July, conducted by Walter Jon Williams and taught by Walter and my SF mentor Nancy Kress. I described the workshop in two entries after we got back, and would have continued if my damned gas line hadn’t threatened to ignite virtually under my feet. (I hope to write a little more about the workshop in coming days.) I will say right now that if you have a little experience in SF or fantasy, Taos Toolbox is spectacular. Granted, it’s expensive, and almost unbelievably intense. Jim describes it as a 500-level graduate course in the art of the novel compressed into two weeks, and that sounds about right. Walter is currently accepting applications for the 2012 workshop, and I give it my wholehearted recommendation. I met a lot of wonderful people, workshopped 15,000 words of my current novel-in-progress, Ten Gentle Opportunities, and returned with new dedication to the craft of fiction. I’d hoped to finish TGO by the end of the year, but (as described above) the year did not cooperate. The new target is April 1. Snotty AIs, zombies dancing the Macarena, a copier factory gone rogue, magic as software, physics as alternate magic, and malware from another universe…hey, what else d’ya want?

On October 2, Carol and I celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary. We spent ten days on Oahu, generating enough gumption to start having the lower level rehabbed when we got back. It took everything we could generate, and more.

I joined the Writers Write! group here locally, and have made many friends there. The group’s motto is Just write the damn book! It’s advice I need to take.

Those are the broad strokes. Scattered among the days were little flashes of light and minor grunts of annoyance. My brakes have needed work three times. I met Cynthia Felice. My new superregenerative FM receiver has dead spots. I finished a nice steampunk computer table. That sort of thing; up and down on an almost daily basis.

I have high hopes for 2012. Carol and I have deliberately held back opening our Christmas presents until January 6th to get an upbeat start on the year, and 2012’s first 18 hours have gone pretty well. I won’t try to draw any conclusions from the data points presented. Hey, sea level dropped 6mm in 2010 alone. Blips happen, so let’s not read too much into any of them. It’s not the end of the Holocene…yet. Then there’s the Mayan calendar. Y2KXII, anybody? Let’s party!)

Happy new year, everyone. Strive to appreciate your friends this year. (You won’t have them forever!) Write more. Worry less. Go outside and check your gas pipes. Eat fat and drink sweet wine, and make sure you share what you have with others. I’ll be here when you need me.

A Forward-Looking Christmas

Dec 30th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

Christmas is coming a little late here. Christmas won’t entirely arrive, in fact, until a week from today–by order of the Lord of This Particular Castle. To avoid having our lower level out of commission until the vernal equinox, Carol and I have been furiously shopping for carpeting and slobbering paint-color samples on the walls, and getting estimates from painters and carpet layers. We lacked time and (especially) energy to mount a real Christmas tree, and when I went downstairs to hunt up my Lionel trains, I found that a couple of key boxes were blocked in behind all the other boxes of miscellany I had to pack up to prepare for the mudjacking. So no trains either.

This is why you haven’t seen much from me recently. We’ve done a lot of remodeling in our lives and always hated it. By the end of the day I’ve been in no fit mood to write much of anything at all. Carol and I have mostly sat on the couch covered with bichons while the smoke stopped pouring out of our ears.

We did spend Christmas Proper with a few close friends, but almost entirely avoided the six weeks of furious tearing around that a conventional Christmas seems to require. In doing so, I had an insight: Christmas as it has come down to us is almost entirely a backward-looking holiday. By 3 PM on Christmas day, the radio stations are playing colorless pop music again, and the wrapping paper has mostly been shoveled into the recycle bin. It’s over. All around the country, I can imagine exhausted Christmasers falling into their LaZBoy chairs and pondering the madness that has just concluded: endless mall-crawling, cranky relatives, dissatisfied toddlers, overly ambitious Christmas parties and dinners, toys that failed to assemble correctly, cakes that failed to rise, cookies that caramelized without benefit of caramel, and the supicious whiff of dog pee on the tree stand. In most years I can deal with all of that, even if, yes, I’m worn out when it’s over.

Not this year.

Christmas for us began on Christmas Eve. It will continue until the Feast of the Three Kings on January 6, a date my mother always called “Little Christmas.” I will play our Christmas CDs, put egg nog in my coffee, and keep the embargo on sugar lifted until that day. I will reflect that most of what I have ever wanted is already my own: mind, means, mettle, a soulmate who has stood beside me for 42 years, four great dogs, three thousand books, a unique moment in history, and all the tube sockets I could ever use. (Hair, meh. It just gums up the sink.) Carol and I will revel in the peace and quiet that began to reign at 3 PM on December 25th, and make a point of consciously reveling in that peace and quiet until, well, something else noisy and unavoidable rises out of the mist. We will look forward to it. Forward, in expectation. Not backward, in exhaustion.

Merry Christmas, all of you. Stay alive. Stay in touch. Don’t look back.

Coal That Does Conduct

Dec 22nd, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

We got 10″ of new snow last night, and it’s still coming down. Given that it’s going to be a winter blunderland out on the streets today, we decided to stay inside and get a few things done closer to home. One of these things was to spend a little time measuring the resistance of coal.

Reader Joe Bryer was good enough to send me eight pounds of coal samples, in two Ziploc bags. One bag was high-quality Pennsylvania anthracite. The other was bituminous, its origins unspecified. To take the measurements, I made a jig out of a piece of scrap plastic. I drilled two .0785 holes a quarter inch apart. The distance was arbitrary. (The size of the holes is that of standard probe tips.) The idea was simply to make all measurements with the same distance between the probes.

I measured several spots on five pieces of bituminous, and in all cases the resistance was higher than my DVM’s top reading of 20 megohms. The anthracite was a completely different story. The resistance varied from place to place on any given sample, and varied widely even on a single sample. The highest readings I got were in the vicinity of 180K ohms. The lowest was 12K. I wiped the samples with a dry rag prior to testing them.

This is promising. The 1/4″ spacing between the probes was not quite arbitrary. The carbon button microphone element in an old-style telephone is about 1/4″ in size. I have several of those in the drawer and all of them tested at between 5K ohms and 10K, depending on how you orient the element, and whether you tap it with a screwdriver. It is, after all, just a little container of small carbon grains. So I think it would be worthwhile sifting some sand-sized granules of anthracite and trying them in a mic element lashup.

Joe Bryer pointed out something I hadn’t known: Bituminous and softer coals like lignite and peat are sedimentary rocks, whereas anthracite is metamorphic rock. Pressure and heat can break down some of the long carbon chains and ring hydrocarbons of which coal is made and free up the carbon, which can then, in a dense enough fragment, conduct electricity. Hydrocarbons, even very dense ones, don’t conduct electricity and many are very good insulators. Graphite, which conducts electricity very well, might be considered the highest grade of coal, or at least the variety most affected by heat and pressure underground. (It isn’t burned as fuel because it’s not common compared to coal and very difficult to ignite.)

The next thing to test is carbon from barbecue briquettes, which I will have to beg from friends since I no longer burn charcoal for grilling. If I can find some of the drafting pencil leads I used in drafting class umpty years ago, I’m going to grind them up and test them as well. (My friend Joe Flamini W4BXG says that he’s done that himself.) In the meantime, I have a place to start, and will now set my mind to building a microphone lashup to test conductive particles in. More as I manage it.

Coal That Doesn’t Conduct

Dec 19th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

My friend George Ott surprised me with a lump of coal yesterday morning, after church over at St. Raphael’s. He even wrapped it and put a ribbon on it! I could barely stand the wait to get home and check its resistance. And (drum roll, please) the lump is…an insulator.

Or a damned reasonable facsimile. With my DVM set on its 20 megohm scale, the resistance didn’t read at all, even with the probes set pretty firmly in the coal about an eighth of an inch apart. I tested at eight or ten different points on the lump, since carbon is funny stuff generally and coal is not a uniform substance. The DVM reads a 10 megohm resistor right on the money, and failed to read a 22 megohm unit. I use that DVM a lot and certainly haven’t seen anything wrong with it. But no matter how close I set the probes, I got no reading at all.

I put the lump against my belt sander and ground a flat face, which was interesting in terms of the tarry smell that came off the lump. No difference. I whacked a corner off the lump with a coal chisel. No difference, even on the fresh and very shiny fracture face. With the clean and very sharp points of the probes no more than a sixteenth of an inch apart, the resistance was higher than 20 megs. Wow.

I’m not enough of a rockhound to know what sort of coal it is, and George didn’t know either. (He got it from a blacksmith who fires his forge with coal.) It looks like anthracite in that it’s quite shiny, but beyond that I just don’t know.

Another of my readers is sending me a sample of both anthracite and bituminous, and that may help. Some of the online sources I’ve read describe coal as a semiconductor, but I think by that they only mean a substance with significant resistance. I’ve seen nothing to indicate that some types of coal would be insulators across very small fractions of an inch.

However, among other projects I hope to get to this winter is a crystal detector lashup, steampunk style, on an oak base with a copper pipe cap to hold a mineral sample for testing as a cat-whisker detector. One doesn’t think of coal as a candidate, but it certainly won’t take much work to do the science!

Basement Hydraulics

Dec 15th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

9 comments

Talk about a weird feeling: I stood downstairs in one of the bedrooms after the mudjacking crew had drilled six 1 3/4″ holes through the 6″ slab and down almost two feet into the soil. They stuck a hose as thick as my arm through each of the holes in turn, forcing liquid concrete into the soil. Once all the holes had gotten a dose, the hose was moved to a hole near the north wall, and the crew boss pressed the pump button once, twice, three times.

I watched as the slab rose smoothly, almost half an inch in the space of two seconds. Whoa.

It’s been a messy, dusty, ad-hoc sort of project. In summary: They drill a number of holes through the slab. (In our case it was seventeen.) They pump liquid concrete (“mud”) through a hose into the soil and/or voids under the slab. The voids fill up as the soil rises beneath the slab. Eventually, with no more voids to fill, the pressure of the liquid concrete lifts multiple tons of concrete slab back to where it was before it began to sink. The liquid concrete stabilizes the soil beneath the slab, and with some luck we won’t see the slab settle again.

There were a few weirdnesses. Here and there liquid concrete forced itself up between the slab and the stem walls (and out of a few of the holes as well) like a glistening blob in a third-shelf horror movie. The bathtub didn’t quite return to its former position and may have to be pulled and re-set.

Still, as best we can tell, the operation was a success and the patient not only survived but rose from the dead. There’s much mess down there still, with plastic taped up all over the place and my fiction and magazine stacks all boxed and inaccessible, but the flaw that precipitated the whole business has at least been dealt with. Given that we had to empty the rooms completely, we decided to pull the carpet and replace it. And with the carpet gone, there’s no reason not to re-paint. Carol has been meeting with decorators. I’m designing a new layout for the furniture. It will have been a huge amount of work (and way, way too much money!) but when we’re done, the lower level will look very good.

More on the project as it happens. The wind you heard through the pines last night, however, was a massive sigh of relief.

I Want a Piece of Anthracite for Christmas…

Dec 10th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

7 comments

Yes, I want a lump of coal for Christmas. Two actually: Santa, if you’re listening, see if you can get me four or five ounces of a good glossy anthracite, and a similar quantity of mid-grade bituminous. I’m not sure where else I’m likely to find it. (Ok, ok, eBay. Last resort…)

I haven’t been bad. I’ve been curious.

A question occurred to me the other day while I was hauling boxes around the lower level: Does coal conduct electricity? And if so, how well? I know that carbon does, but of course you have to specify which kind of carbon. Diamonds do not conduct electricity. Carol’s engagement ring is big enough for me to have put an ohmmeter across its large facet thirty-odd years ago. The carbon rods running down the centers of conventional carbon-zinc batteries conduct very well. Mechanical-pencil lead conducts electricity. Resistors, in fact, were basically painted lengths of pencil lead until relatively recently.

Coal, now. Hmmm. I would run downstairs and do the science right this minute, but I’m not sure I’ve held a piece of coal in my hand for forty years. Uncle Joe Labuda burned anthracite in a coal stove to heat his flat down Back of the Yards around 1960. I was fascinated by the lumps of coal in the bin behind his stove for their luster and even more by their smell, which was a less acrid form of the coal smoke that hovered over the neighborhood all winter, at least until people started installing natural gas space heaters.

Online research suggests that the resistance measured across the thickness of a one-centimeter cube of anthracite runs from the mid-hundreds to low thousands of ohms. That suggests that sand-grain sized particles of coal could be used to create a carbon button microphone. My friend Art Krumrey actually did this circa 1963, by beating on a carbon rod yanked out of a dead flashlight battery, and loading the grains between a soda bottle cap and half of one of the thin steel puck-shaped containers that large rolls of Scotch tape used to come in. He basically duplicated the circuitry of a primordial telephone connection, and we sent our voices over fifty feet of wire without any active devices at all, just a few dry cells in series with the cobbled-up carbon mic and a pair of dynamic headphones. It was boggling how loud the audio was, so loud that it overloaded the headset unless we spoke in practically a whisper.

This was how telephone systems worked before amplifier tubes were invented: The voice audio signal coming out of the carbon mic was already high-level, being a variable resistance in series with a high-current power source. In fact, electromechanical repeater amplifiers were created by mechanically coupling a dynamic earpiece to a carbon button mic. With decent batteries to drive the system, repeater chains like that could carry voice signals hundreds of miles without a vacuum tube in sight.

What I really want to know is whether a steampunk-era garage inventor could have created a usable carbon button mic using granules of coal, of if purer carbon would be required. If I can find a lump of coke that might work better, and turning coal to coke is not exactly alchemy. (I’m not sure I want to do it myself.) If the resistance of a lump of good anthracite were low enough, it could also function as the cathode of a carbon-zinc primary battery, which would be interesting all by itself. Water-cooled carbon mics the size of pie pans were used in series with high-speed alternators to generate voice-modulated RF before the advent of RF power tubes. It’s a delicious steampunkish concept, full of sparks and ozone and odd things turning too quickly for their own good.

Of course, I have a Drumlins World story concept that involves simple electromechanical wireless voice transmission systems. The sinister Bitspace Institute has a very secret radio communications network, and when a pair of spindly teenage boys independently invent spark radio, well, interesting things happen–especially when you throw a few drumlins into the mix.

Still taking notes, but even a few ounces of good coal could make for some interesting experiments, just as my steampunk Geiger counter did last year. Once the lower level is done I hope to lash something up to measure the effectiveness of different kinds of carbon granules in microphone service. Whether the story itself gets written or not, I expect to learn something, and that’s good enough for me.

Behold the EggMcSpamFin!

Dec 7th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

The place is a mess. Not as messy as it’ll be by tomorrow night, but it’s still a mess. The movers got everything transferred to the uncarpeted portions of the lower level yesterday, and the carpeting has been pulled up. Plastic tarps are all over the place. Tomorrow the drilling begins.

In the meantime, when Carol and I broke for lunch an hour ago, I tried something completely different. I scrambled a single egg in a bowl, dumped some butter into the little one-egg fry pan that I’ve had for years (left) and with the burner on medium made a scrambled egg disk. I then threw a Bay’s English muffin in the toaster, and while it was toasting I broke open a Spam Single onto a Corelle plate and heated it up to a nice sizzle in the microwave. When the muffin came out of the toaster I buttered it good and proper, threw the scrambled egg disk on a muffin’s lower half, lowered the sizzlin’ Spam Single onto the egg, and then slapped the muffin lid on the whole business.

Damn, that was good! Cheap, too, as lunches go. Eggs are about 20c each. Spam Singles run about a buck. A single Bay’s English muffin costs me about 40c. Might have used a nickel’s worth of butter. Total $1.65. Almost entirely sugar-free. Filled me up completely and will probably carry me all the way to suppertime without any need to snack. It would be less fattening without the English muffin, but try as I might, I can’t do completely without English muffins.

Highly recommended.

The Great Big Honking Sliding Number Puzzle

Dec 2nd, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

I’m doing one of those sliding number puzzles; you know, the ones that have fifteen tiles in a matrix that can hold sixteen, and you have to slide them around until they’re in order. Except that the matrix is the lower level of my house, and the sliding tiles are things like 7′ tall Hundevad bookshelves, credenzas, a 61″ TV set and associated tableage, a treadmill, a queen-sized bed, Carol’s desk and chair, two vertical filing cabinets, a two-drawer lateral file cabinet, eight or nine hundred books in boxes, and enough boxed back issues of QSTs to make me cease wondering where the missing mass in the universe is hiding. And that’s the abbreviated list.

The goal of the puzzle is to get everything now resting on carpet onto areas where there is no carpet. The problem is, three quarters of the lower level is either carpeted or already committed to Big Heavy Things That Don’t Move, like my workbenches and shelves piled nine feet high with stuff that has nowhere else to go. On Tuesday morning bright and early, a crew of much younger guys with strong backs are going to show up here and want to know where to put everything. That means I have to tell them. And that in turn means solving the puzzle.

I leveraged a good deal of work I did nine years ago, when we were gearing up to move everything from Scottsdale to Colorado Springs. I drew nearly all of the big furniture we owned at that time in Visio (or adapted furniture shapes already in the product’s stencil sets) and then drew a floor plan of the house to which we were moving. I dragged the furniture shapes around in Visio until they fit, and when the truck pulled up in front of our rental house, we gave the mover guys a printed copy of the floor plan as I drew it. A year later we did the whole thing again, this time for the new house we had spent a year building. I had to re-draw the floor plan, but the furniture hadn’t changed and the shapes were still useful. Tugging them around the plan allowed us to get the furniture where it had to go the first time, without much need later on to wrestle large massive objects onto dollies and shove them into new arrangements with my fiftysomething back.

That worked well and was actually a lot of fun. It was easy, furthermore, because we had a whole house to play with. This time I have the furnace room (where much of that Big Heavy Stuff That Doesn’t Move actually lives) a single unfinished and uncarpeted bedroom, and portions of my workshop. As it happens, I can get it all in there, but the furniture must be placed in a very specific order and with considerable precision. The treadmill will clear the furnace room door with about 1/2″ on either side. (It won’t clear the other doors at all.) It’s going to be intense, my friends.

The carpeting was damaged by condensate spilling out of our air conditioner this past summer, so we’re ripping it up and replacing it with something a little more robust and a little less pink. Since the carpeting will be gone, we figure it’s as good a time to paint as any, particularly the lower level great room, which looks like it was painted with melted strawberry ice cream. If you wonder we we don’t entertain guests down there, that’s certainly one of the reasons.

So our most intense week in well over ten years continues apace. Carpet samples litter the great room. Vinyl flooring samples for the rear entranceway lie about next to the woodwork while we search for harmony. About six shelf-feet of component data books still need to be boxed, as well as most of the contents of Carol’s office.

I’ll report our progress here as time allows. Christmas cards will be a little late this year, sorry.

The Critical Difference Between “Some” and “All”

Nov 30th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

I am sore. Since we got back from Chicago a few days ago, we’ve been picking up the lower level of our house in preparation for some messiness: We have to have the east end of the slab mudjacked to raise it a little and keeping it from sinking any further. The damage isn’t huge so far, thanks to a little-known method of framing lower levels of homes like ours, which basically suspends the walls from the main level. The lower-level slab can thus move independently (mostly) of the walls.

The mudjacking contractor originally told us that they would only need to pull back the carpeting on the east and south facing rooms a few feet. Further analysis (which we learned only yesterday afternoon) showed that those east and south facing rooms will have to be emptied completely. My workshop is mostly unaffected, but the eastmost section of slab has sunk a little, and I have to move whatever sits on that section, to the first seam.

Alas, what sits on that section are two 150-pound particle-board shelves containing sixty years of QST (with a density only slightly less than National Geographic) plus 35 years of CQ, the full run of Ham Radio, a spotty collection of 73, plus fifteen ARRL handbooks, four shelf-feet of component databooks, and several dozen other miscellanous tech books. Oh, and the tops of the shelves are piled high with homebrew projects.

And that’s just my workshop. In the great room are another eight or nine hundred books on six robust Hundavad shelves, a treadmill, a couch, a 1937 Zenith cathedral radio, and two oak tables supporting a 61-inch TV and associated electronics. In the guest bedroom are two more tall bookshelves (fortunately not densely populated) a bed, a two-drawer lateral file cabinet, and two waist-high teak cabinets. In Carol’s office are another two-drawer lateral file cabinet, her desk, a rocking chair, a tall bookshelf, and miscellanous furniture.

Readers who have been here may begin to get a grip on the magnitude of the challenge. All that stuff has to be moved onto firmer slab, which exists in only three places: the furnace room, the unfinished bedroom, and the western two-thirds of my workshop. All three of these places have stuff scattered about in them. So we have to empty those places out so that we can fill them with furniture and boxes from the rest of the lower level.

Oh…we have seven days to do this, and counting. From a dead stop.

So last night I was downstairs stuffing books in boxes, schlepping stuff to the garage, and piling it on the higher sections of steel shelving that we already have. (I’m going to buy another Gorilla Rack when I go out later to buy more boxes.) One of the lateral file cabinets is broken and will be scrapped, but Carol has to empty it first. ARC is going to get several goody-bags of resale material, which means that more time will be spent culling the collection.

It’s almost like moving, except we’re not going anywhere.

So I’m sore from hoisting boxes of medical books and photo albums onto a cart and then onto shelves. The QSTs haven’t been touched yet. I had hoped to write a longish Contra entry yesterday evening, but by 8:30 PM I was too wrecked to do anything but sit in my big chair and take notes on the coming days’ logistical challenges. I think I can do this. It may well be excellent strength training. (Moving here from Arizona in 2003 certainly was.) But man, it’s gonna hurt.