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Christmas & Carpentry
Dec. 25th, 2022 12:37 pm(Christmas & Carpentry)
I. HEAT. It is _hot_ in Hawaii this Christmas. The temperature is 80 degrees at the moment, which is perhaps a hair high for this time of year, but not unusual from what I've seen. The problem is that the Trade Winds have dropped out entirely. So it feels hot where it usually does not. But, our fans are on, and it's almost comfortable.
And we're not below freezing with no electricity like some of the mainland. (Yikes!)
II. PRESENTS. Kimberly and I opened presents this morning. Besides things we'd gotten from each other, we also got Wiedlin presents from overseas. I was able to wrap all of Kimberly's overseas presents without her seeing them, and she was able to get to most of mine in advance, so that was pretty cool because there was that much more under the tree. I got games and a book. (And right now I'm trying to classify the games into: maybe could be played at my dad's house; maybe could be played with Kimberly; and I really need to find some other gamers now that the pandemic is waning.)
More Christmas festivities are to follow at my dad's house at 2pm.
III. TREE. Upon our removal of the presents, Mango immediately started climbing up into the tree again. He'd only been deterred because it had been fully surrounded for the last few days.
IV. CARPENTRY. I never wrote about the finale of our great carpentry work. We had W. in here for 12 days total. It was absolutely exhausting having to make myself available for someone for that long, and having them working around my work area. That's because I'm an introvert which fundamentally means that interactions with other people take energy from me rather than renewing it (except perhaps within the carefully constrained limits of gaming). So not only was I being exhausted every day, I ended up working long days because I usually start at 7.30-8 and W. was sometimes leaving early at 3 or 4 but sometimes staying until 5 or 6! When He stayed late, I just kept working so I stayed available to him, so there were some days that ran 7.30-6!
Anywho, the project is done and we're very pleased with the results. We now have a bunch of cabinets and shelves helping to define the Family Room and I have cabinets and shelving in my office and Kimberly has a little bit of high shelving. It's not 100% as we imagined it, but W. did a superb job of taking our ideas and turning them into something workable. So, we got the open design we wanted, without making things feel claustrophobic (in the already tight Family Room) and it should all be sturdy and support lots of heavy books.
V. SHELVING. In the wake of getting the shelving finished, much shelving of books occurred. All of our literature and non-fiction is shelved and all of the science-fiction hardcovers. All of my roleplaying books. I've also been working on cleaning up my hardcover and tradepaperback comics and pulling additional ones out of bins and boxes (some have been shelved on closet shelves my dad and I built in 2020, but there's a lot of overflow beyond what I could fit there).
I've still got some troublesome comics that I need to find places for and I don't exactly know where all the games are going (but we have a still-missing set of shelving from the badly mismanaged Kickstarter by boardgametables; and there's a closet under the stairs that could do with some wire shelving or something) and the science-fiction paperbacks are looking challenging ... but we're getting there.
I worked every night for a few days after W. left but then I hit a hard wall 2 or 3 days ago, the result of three weeks of being available and busy following by almost a week of shelving. I just got back to forty-five minutes or so of work last night rearranging comics. Hoping to do more over this holiday.
It's pretty amazing seeing our books back on shelves. Kimberly and I both felt the same thing: like we'd suddenly brought our Berkeley life into our Hawaii home. Weird how much of a difference something like that can make.
And we're seeing so many things to read or reread!
VI. JULIE. Costco put up some air tire inflating machines in their parking lot last month, and when I had a surprise run into town on Friday, I decided to try them out as two of my tires had gotten low (as has happened over time as long as I've had Julie the Benz).
Worked great. Very convenient as it constantly measures the air pressure for you as you inflate. I was very pleased with myself afterward, for having fixed a minor automobile problem (with one of the two major ones, the AC problem, still awaiting Destination Auto, but also out of my hands).
Then, at my next stop, for a prescription at Walmart, I had an unpleasant surprise when I started the car up again. Julie told me her ABS system was out. Which is the antilock brakes, a safety feature. Sigh. I felt like I was on top of dealing with Julie's maintenance for about 15 minutes there. I'd hoped it was a temporary glitch but it showed up again yesterday (when I took Julie out to the beach to appreciate the sun and do some bicycling on Christmas Eve).
Consensus seems to be that it's most likely a sensor on one of the wheels. Without that the car can't figure out wheel speed and thus systems like the ABS don't work (and also cruise control, I discovered yesterday). So Monday I need to call up Destination Auto and see when they can see Julie, and hopefully it won't take months to resolve this one. Probably not a huge deal, but I prefer my safety features to be in place! And I can ask about the AC repair part that they theoretically ordered two months ago.
VII. HOLIDAY! And it's the holidays. No more work until the New Year ... though I expect I'll do some minor Designers & Dragons work here and there to finish up the current sections of some of my secondary projects.
I. HEAT. It is _hot_ in Hawaii this Christmas. The temperature is 80 degrees at the moment, which is perhaps a hair high for this time of year, but not unusual from what I've seen. The problem is that the Trade Winds have dropped out entirely. So it feels hot where it usually does not. But, our fans are on, and it's almost comfortable.
And we're not below freezing with no electricity like some of the mainland. (Yikes!)
II. PRESENTS. Kimberly and I opened presents this morning. Besides things we'd gotten from each other, we also got Wiedlin presents from overseas. I was able to wrap all of Kimberly's overseas presents without her seeing them, and she was able to get to most of mine in advance, so that was pretty cool because there was that much more under the tree. I got games and a book. (And right now I'm trying to classify the games into: maybe could be played at my dad's house; maybe could be played with Kimberly; and I really need to find some other gamers now that the pandemic is waning.)
More Christmas festivities are to follow at my dad's house at 2pm.
III. TREE. Upon our removal of the presents, Mango immediately started climbing up into the tree again. He'd only been deterred because it had been fully surrounded for the last few days.
IV. CARPENTRY. I never wrote about the finale of our great carpentry work. We had W. in here for 12 days total. It was absolutely exhausting having to make myself available for someone for that long, and having them working around my work area. That's because I'm an introvert which fundamentally means that interactions with other people take energy from me rather than renewing it (except perhaps within the carefully constrained limits of gaming). So not only was I being exhausted every day, I ended up working long days because I usually start at 7.30-8 and W. was sometimes leaving early at 3 or 4 but sometimes staying until 5 or 6! When He stayed late, I just kept working so I stayed available to him, so there were some days that ran 7.30-6!
Anywho, the project is done and we're very pleased with the results. We now have a bunch of cabinets and shelves helping to define the Family Room and I have cabinets and shelving in my office and Kimberly has a little bit of high shelving. It's not 100% as we imagined it, but W. did a superb job of taking our ideas and turning them into something workable. So, we got the open design we wanted, without making things feel claustrophobic (in the already tight Family Room) and it should all be sturdy and support lots of heavy books.
V. SHELVING. In the wake of getting the shelving finished, much shelving of books occurred. All of our literature and non-fiction is shelved and all of the science-fiction hardcovers. All of my roleplaying books. I've also been working on cleaning up my hardcover and tradepaperback comics and pulling additional ones out of bins and boxes (some have been shelved on closet shelves my dad and I built in 2020, but there's a lot of overflow beyond what I could fit there).
I've still got some troublesome comics that I need to find places for and I don't exactly know where all the games are going (but we have a still-missing set of shelving from the badly mismanaged Kickstarter by boardgametables; and there's a closet under the stairs that could do with some wire shelving or something) and the science-fiction paperbacks are looking challenging ... but we're getting there.
I worked every night for a few days after W. left but then I hit a hard wall 2 or 3 days ago, the result of three weeks of being available and busy following by almost a week of shelving. I just got back to forty-five minutes or so of work last night rearranging comics. Hoping to do more over this holiday.
It's pretty amazing seeing our books back on shelves. Kimberly and I both felt the same thing: like we'd suddenly brought our Berkeley life into our Hawaii home. Weird how much of a difference something like that can make.
And we're seeing so many things to read or reread!
VI. JULIE. Costco put up some air tire inflating machines in their parking lot last month, and when I had a surprise run into town on Friday, I decided to try them out as two of my tires had gotten low (as has happened over time as long as I've had Julie the Benz).
Worked great. Very convenient as it constantly measures the air pressure for you as you inflate. I was very pleased with myself afterward, for having fixed a minor automobile problem (with one of the two major ones, the AC problem, still awaiting Destination Auto, but also out of my hands).
Then, at my next stop, for a prescription at Walmart, I had an unpleasant surprise when I started the car up again. Julie told me her ABS system was out. Which is the antilock brakes, a safety feature. Sigh. I felt like I was on top of dealing with Julie's maintenance for about 15 minutes there. I'd hoped it was a temporary glitch but it showed up again yesterday (when I took Julie out to the beach to appreciate the sun and do some bicycling on Christmas Eve).
Consensus seems to be that it's most likely a sensor on one of the wheels. Without that the car can't figure out wheel speed and thus systems like the ABS don't work (and also cruise control, I discovered yesterday). So Monday I need to call up Destination Auto and see when they can see Julie, and hopefully it won't take months to resolve this one. Probably not a huge deal, but I prefer my safety features to be in place! And I can ask about the AC repair part that they theoretically ordered two months ago.
VII. HOLIDAY! And it's the holidays. No more work until the New Year ... though I expect I'll do some minor Designers & Dragons work here and there to finish up the current sections of some of my secondary projects.