howeird | Entries tagged with recycling

Got my short but time-consuming to-do list done. Slept in until 9, though it took several tries. Woke up about every 20 minutes between then and 7.

Unpacked the two boxes of Video cassettes and DVDs, and found one more box to unpack, it was labeled "Mom's albums" so I thought it was part of the stash of snapshots in a box I don't intend to open. But it turned out to be a set of photo albums which belonged on the big black rack with the LPs, 78s and such.

The flattened boxes more than filled the back seat, had to put a couple in the front seat and three in the trunk. Totally forgot the one on the driveway which the movers had bleached. I had not flattened it yet, and it was all closed with plastic tape, which is a no-no for recycling. I'll get it later.

Had the cardboard recycling dumpsters to myself, so it went quickly.

Back to the house, packed the trunk with the old ugly kitchen curtains and livingroom shades, and the short roll of Astroturf which used to go under the two litterboxes. Took those to Goodwill.

Stopped at OSH and bought a pair of garden hose nozzles (there are three hoses at the house, only one had a working nozzle) and an aerator/sprayer for the kitchen faucet. Previous owner had a Pur unit on there which did the aeration, but I hate those things.

Between my left knee acting up again (thanks to all the box hauling) and my right elbow still ouch-ing, decided t was time to try the massage place next to the nails place. Good call. Standard price scheme, and DDG northern Chinese woman who spoke reasonably good English, and walked on my back with her hands. There was actually a pair of rails for back walking, but she knelt next to me and pushed, hard. Good solid job, I shall return.

Stopped off at Target for bath rugs, parking was insane - full of vultures in the main garage, but plenty of spaces in the second garage which is the same distance to the doors. Go figure. Got to the entrance, the line for the cash registers went from the last register all the way to the other end of the store. There was one young man in the long empty corridor perpendicular to the registers, directing people to the next available register. It was even more insane than the parking, so I returned my cart and left.

Home, went online, ordered a pair of bath rugs at target.com, but when I tried to check out it gave me a 404 error. Tried three times, FAIL. Probably will try Penny's later.

Watched football games for the rest of the evening. Stated with a bowl of popcorn, graduated to Marie Calendar beef dinner. Thin mint ice cream FTW.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Watch what will probably be the last game played at Candlestick park, which should have been torn down in 1989 after the quake. Laugh at the phony nostalgia stories.

Current Mood: chipper
Current Location: WeirdHome

Morning, threw all the crap off of the left-hand bathroom sink counter into one of the cabinets. Transferred all my morning routine stuff from the right sink to the left sink. Backstory - the lights above the right sink don't work. Shifted the space heater to the right side, nearer the shower.

Took down the unsprung livingroom shades and replaced them with new ones. Now I have shades which can be pulled all the way down or all the way up.

Printed out the RMA labels for the defective webcam and put those and the cam into the trunk of the car. Moved the car way up so the rear door was easily accessed.

Bullet biting time: Sorted all the boxes into piles on the kitchen floor (they had been against the wall, across the floor, etc.). One wardrobe, piles of dishpack, medium, glasspack, small. Carried the file boxes from the floor in the office to the laundry room.

Took about an hour and part of my left knee to load all the kitchen boxes largest-first onto the rear seat. Tossed the file boxes into the trunk. All of this closing the house door behind me with each armload, because Domino wanted out.

Took a short break to watch a wee bit of the Army-Navy game.

Drove to the recycle center, spent 20 minutes unloading the boxes into a couple of big recycle dumpsters.

Next stop, Petco, got a case of Fancy Feast. Took a peek into the (closed) Humane Society branch, no sign of Kaan, I'm sure he was adopted quickly. In the same center is my CU, deposited a refund check from the movers. Stopped in at Great Clips, then Safeway for a can of Rot Guard.

Looked for drawers at Pep Boys, but they didn't have what I was looking for.

Off to Target, found the drawers I was looking for, and changed check-out lines 4 times before finding one with only 2 people ahead of me with only moderate amounts of purchases. Still took 15 minutes. I messaged Janice I would be late for our 3:30.

I was about 7 minutes late, thanks to Target being on a 45mph road a straight shot to the freeway. We caught up as usual, the last time this year because she has Commitments™. Her alarm clock was an Asian woman who joined us for just enough time to say hi, as they went off to a party. Very special, because Janice makes it a point to not introduce me to her single female friends if she can help it.

Home, noticed the white board was crooked, fixed that. Moved my calendar to the kitchen. Took down the ugly brown kitchen curtains and replaced them with white ones with blue trim. Much nicer.

Watched some high school championship football while having calamari rings, fish sticks and mixed veggies for dinner.

Repositioned the lime tree so it didn't block the webcam.

Spent way too much time troubleshooting the 4 internet radios. I think Logitech's server was down this morning, but I also wasn't seeing local wi-fi connections. Things came up when I rebooted the router.

Popped about 200 air-filled shipping filler cells from both my sister and Amazon, and flattened those boxes.

Installed a curtain rod and hung a curtain in the guest bedroom, also moved the toilet maintenance gear from the livingroom there. Master bedroom already has its set.

Domino still yowls if she loses track of where I am. Very annoying.

On the bright side, she has found several places to curl up.

And she sits on my lap, the arm of the recliner, the top of the recliner more than ever.

My final project for the day was hanging the Star Trek transporter. Found a good place for it by the front door.

Plans for tomorrow:
Sleep in (again)
Fold and put away T-shirts
Set up the electronic keyboard on its stand in the office
Play it by ear. Maybe see a movie. Maybe watch football

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: WeirdHome

Janice* and I have a tradition whenever we're both in town on Halloween to go see a movie, and avoid the trick or treaters. This time we went to dinner first, a Burmese/Chinese place in Palo Alto a couple of blocks from the Mountain View border called the Green Elephant. The food was outstanding. Huge portions, and delicious. The service was iffy, but only in minor ways - I had to ask for my rice and iced tea a couple of times. The waitresses were in costume, both women obviously Chinese, one looking very strange in a colorful Mexican skirt, white blouse and little South American hat. The other was in a more Asian costume, hard to describe. A black silk coat over a red and black dress.

The movie was Convicted, and all in all it was very good. Not my kind of movie, but very well written and directed, the cinematography ranged from good to Wow!, and my only complaint is they made sure not to cast anyone who was prettier than Hilary Swank. They made an exception for Minnie Driver, but the rest of the cast was amazingly unattractive. The plot was riveting, but there was one huge hole in it, they never showed what grudge the arresting officer had against the guy she arrested. For me this was critical, for Janice not so much. YMMV. Worth matinée.

Earlier in the day, I was back on the computer editing home movie video, but just before I was about to burn disc 6 (Reels 11-12), I realized that the home movies of the north pole, which took up all of Reel 12, were taken in 1970, Reel 11 was the summer of 1965, and I was missing the beginning of 1965. Found that on Reel 13. Looking closer, it seems Reel 11 was Dad's "Seattle Reel", and skipped around between 1965 and 1966, arranged geographically instead of chronologically.

Very odd. I always thought of Dad as a linear thinker, but I guess sometimes he drew his lines in a parallel universe.

Took three more items to Best Buy to recycle. The Sunday crew was not as AR as Saturday's had been. Dad's monitor, my leaky Epson printer and the major FAIL HP wireless all-in-one were the victims there. Then to Goodwill with two more fans, a VCR, two DVD players, a pre-HD TiVo and a pre-HDMI home theater switch/receiver.

That's all the big stuff taken care of. I still have a pile of hard drives to get rid of, including four external drives, two sort of working and two not.

After the movie and watching the Channel 2 wrap-up of the World Series/49ers/Raiders games, I made a Home Movies: Arctic Edition DVD, and started on the reel 13-11 project, which will take a few hours yet.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Import Janice's camcorder tapes (she took a friend from Fiji to Yosemite and Disneyland)

*Janice is a long-time pal; movie, coffee, bicycling and dim sum buddy. Nothing romantic.

Current Mood: content

This was the day to get all those pieces of computer gear which had been cluttering up the landings and hallways and computer room out of the way. And a big bag of outgrown clothes.

Plan A was to bring the clothes, a couple of pedestal fans and computers to Goodwill, and the rest to Best Buy. Went online to see what the policies were at both, and discovered that BB only takes three items per household per day. Goodwill said it takes working computers, but not peripherals or monitors. It takes fans and clothes. Looking at my rack of a thousand T-shirts, I decided to jettison all the swag T-shirts, most from companies I worked for, all at least two sizes too small for me. That filled up a whole large black outdoor trash bag, and freed up two 1' square cubes of rack space.

So, two scanners which were in the upstairs hallway and dad's old printer which had been partially blocking the downstairs landing went to BB. The clothes, two pedestal fans, my previous hand-built PC, Dad's computer and Mom's laptop went to Goodwill. I totally forgot about the VHS and DVD players and Sony A/V switcher/receiver which are on shelves in various closets. Maybe tomorrow I can get those to Goodwill. Dad's monitor and my HP wireless all-in-one can go to BB tomorrow I guess.

That only leaves a couple of bags of misc. circuit boards, wires and about a dozen assorted hard drives. And two piece-o-crap ASUS SATA DVD drives.

Home, spent some quality time with the cats. Sat in my recliner watching old episodes of Chuck with Domino grooming herself on the sofa next to me, and Pumpkin sacked out on my lap, upside-down. Watched the fish, the two baby jewel cichlids have come out of hiding, Mom & Dad still protect them some, but the big bad anacharis is now in the undergrowth hiding from them. They are now each bigger than he is. The babies are growing slowly, now about an inch long, and 3/4 inch high. Also whipped out copies of the home movie DVDs (1-4 done so far) for the NY relatives who are in them.

Starbucks, with a stop at CVS for wallet windows which they no longer carry. They stopped carrying wallets, which I can understand, but windows? That's like not carrying vacuum cleaner bags because you don't carry vacuum cleaners. Kept track of the World Series on the iPhone - Sports Tap is a great app. SF cardiologists are back in business, though it sounded like the Giants were never really in it, got behind 0-4 early and never broke out. Maybe the Halloween game will be better, what with Orange and Black being the colors of the day.

Home again, Edited reel 10, which is a stand-alone reel of our trip to Philmont Scout Ranch in NM, summer of 1964. Just about as soon as we got back Dad was laid off, and the remaining reels (11-15) are after April '65 when we were settled in Seattle. I'll do the DVD of reel 10 tomorrow, no time tonight.

Current Mood: nerdy
Current Music: Baroque Station on Pandora One