glenn and i moved recently with the intention of being away a few months, and everything we needed fit in the back of a jeep. more prep and packing work than i would have liked, but moving in the right direction.
we had a long, heavy rain a couple of weeks ago, and i came home to find our sump pump had failed and a couple of inches of water were all over the basement.
a few hours with a utility pump and a lot of mopping made the floor passable again. luckily, i had moved everything of value to higher ground, but there were several boxes on the floor marked “belongs elsewhere”’, “not sure”, etc. from my last sorting effort. thanks to mother nature, decision made! the whole muddy-water-soaked pile went out in the trash, and i’m much closer to finishing this goal.
the basement’s actually quite livable now, but i would like to get it trimmed down all the way. i’ll be out of town for a while, but should find it a much simpler chore when i get back.
looks like there are some clinics coming up this week:
http://aahealth.org/calendar.asp
putting on the calendar, hope i can get in!
my doctor’s office isn’t offering it, and http://aahealth.org/ is only providing it to targeted priority groups. i’m striking out with cvs, walgreen’s, rite aid, target, etc. any leads on where to get a shot?
btw, here’s a potentially useful link i found:
no success for me there, but it might be helpful in your area.
the closest i’ve come there is http://www.passporthealthusa.com/ i called, and they say they don’t have any vaccine in stock yet. i’ll keep checking back. any other ideas?
i’ve eaten little-to-no meat for many years, but have never bothered to read about the health requirements of vegetarian diets. i need to take the time to make sure i’m getting all the nutrients i need.
i’m surprised it’s not easier to find the american heart association’s basic “family & friends cpr” class. their class locator finds three pages of training centers in my area, none of which are offering it. it’s all classes which include first aid training, classes for healthcare providers, etc. i’ll keep looking, but guess i may have to settle for more class than i want. :-\
i took a five-day internet break for a “vacation at home” last week. i purposefully made no schedules or todo lists, but put in some quality basement purging time anyway. in addition to trashing and recycling, i made a pile of items to sell or give away. when i had them all together, i did a photo shoot, and when i got back online, i used the photos to post ads on amazon, craigslist, and freecycle (avoiding ebay until amazon/craigslist fail me). two items have sold, and several have been claimed. it’s satisfying to remove them from the basement to the front porch and later see that they’ve disappeared.
i just finished processing the last of the five answering machine tapes! all the voices i want to keep have been split into small files. 813 small files! now i need to figure out the chronology of the tapes and piece the files together into one per person. looking forward having a file of all my first partner’s messages and some files to share with friends of themselves from 15+ years ago.
torrential downpours and a faulty sump pump produced a thin layer of muddy water over most of the basement floor. i keep everything important off the ground, but getting the water up, shifting everything to one side of the basement, mopping, and repeating for the other side at least gave me a view of the uncluttered, stripped-to-essentials cellar we could have with some more hours of devoted junk thrashing.
i’ve managed to do nothing on this goal in recent weeks, but have a reason to hope for the coming ones: the hot weather. as the temperature edged past 90 in recent days, errand trips to the basement reminded me how pleasant it’s going to be to put in some hours working down there. :-)
i finished the time-consuming process of picking out the messages to keep from the first of the answering machine tapes.
as an exercise in quicker gratification, i also posted the audio from another tape which contained a piece of music i wrote in college:
http://jeffcovey.net/music/recordings/1993/multiple_exposures/
when i didn’t find this in the first batch of tapes, i thought it was gone forever. i’m glad i found and preserved it!
i got my first batch of photos back from scancafe, and am reasonably
happy with the results.
getting them done was more of a chore than i expected. scancafe lists
several levels of quality you can request for your scans, so i dutifully
sorted my prints into the many to receive their standard scanning and
the few to be given special treatment. i enclosed clear, detailed
instructions of what i wanted done, and was surprised to get an email
reply saying that all photos in one order could only be scanned one way.
there was even a suggestion that they ship the package back to me from
india (!) and that i divide it into three packages and send them back.
i asked that they please do what i requested as long as the photos were
already in another hemisphere. with enough complaining, my issue was
kicked up to a manager who still said they couldn’t possibly do it, then
did it anyway.
the scans look quite good on a computer screen. i chose a half dozen,
including representatives of all the scan qualities, and copied them to
my digital audio player. i took it to a drugstore, connected it to a
machine there, and had prints within a couple of minutes. (what a
world!)
this is the final test of my comfort level in keeping the digital copies
and throwing the original copies away—can i convert the digital media
back to physical media whenever i want?
the results were good, though not the miracle i’d secretly hoped to see.
when i brought the new prints home and compared them to their originals,
my first thought was that some of the new prints looked better, thanks
to color correction applied by scancafe. but it only takes a moment to
see that much of the fine detail is lost. the people close to the camera
are clear enough; those in the background are slightly blurred. branches
on trees, bricks on walls, tiles on roofs—all of these lose their
crispness and definition.
i would estimate the results as 88% of the originals, but note that for
95% of my photos, that’s all i’d want. when it comes to stacks of photos
i haul around from house to house and never see, i’ll happily take the
small decrease in quality in exchange for tossing the prints and having
fewer boxes the next time i move.
for the 5% i really care about, i think i’ll keep them awhile. there’s
always the nagging fear at the back of my mind that next year will
introduce an amazing new technology in optics, and i’ll wish i hadn’t
been so rash this year.
i was happy to have finished editing the mp3 of the first cassette until
i started on the second and realized it was a copy of the first.
i dug out the cassettes to compare to the files, and found the company
has mislabeled them.
spent 45 minutes or so checking the beginnings and ends of each side of
the cassettes and figuring out which file matched which tape. not so
easy since a lot of the tapes were copies of each other, sometimes
45-minute sides copied onto 30-minute sides. or started somewhere in
the middle and copied to the end.
gah!
finally worked it out and confirmed all the tapes had been transferred
completely.
but found that i actually had only four unique tapes, plus three others
that were partial or whole copies of the others interspersed with
recordings of radio talk shows.
why did i do this to myself a decade ago? i must have been making
backup copies to preserve the originals, and not doing a very systematic
job of it.
so the bad news is that i’m starting over with editing, but on the good
side, i have three less hours to go through.
i was too sick to think clearly over the weekend, so during the hours that i was up and about, i devoted my self to more basement purging. found boxes behind boxes and emptied a couple of them.
found a bunch of cassettes, kept four to send to a digitizing company.
found mountains of photos, reduced them by about 80%, sorted the rest to send for scanning.
gathered all of the books and cds in the house, put the ones worth selling on amazon and shipped them in two big boxes to amazon’s warehouse so they can take care of fulfillment. hopefully, any lesser profits from doing it this way will be made up by not having the stuff around the house and not having to box 50 items separately and make 50 trips to the post office. this also got rid of two product boxes that were laying around the basement (from a dvd player and a set of speakers).
in the end, i filled the huge recycling bin to the top, and lugged the enormously heavy thing to the curb last night. good riddance!
i thought all my photos were in one place. in the course of uncovering
boxes hidden behind other boxes in the basement, i found one full of
prints dating back as far as preschool. i’m a few months/years too late
for some of them; something (silverfish?) had a good meal on them, and
several are 1/3-2/3 eaten.
so i’m once again sitting in the middle of approx. seven oodles of
photos, about to sort and pick the ones to immortalize.
good
i gave up trying to find a way to automatically split the answering machine messages by the “beeep” and let mp3splt divide them according to silence. with a little playing with the parameters, it can do a good job of turning one huge file into a bunch of small ones to review. i’ve been going through them a little each day and saving the important ones. i’ve already grabbed nine messages from my (now deceased) first partner. it’s wonderful to hear his voice again.
more ungood
this is actually good news as well, it just means more work ahead: in the course of pursuing another goal (clean the basement), i found five more cassettes i want to preserve, including one of a piece of music from college that i thought was lost forever. i wrote the company that did the first batch of tapes to ask whether they can take these as well.
i’ve started taking one day around the middle of the month and doing everything on my todo lists. it can make that day rather painful, but seems to be a good way of clearing the slate for the coming weeks.
in cleaning the house, i found my stack of vhs tapes and picked four i wanted to keep. i shipped them to a studio that’s putting them on dvd for me. my audio tapes are all on mp3 now and my photos are being scanned, so this will be the last of my analog media to be digitized.
i’ve been terrible about making time for music in the past month, but did sit down at the piano a couple of times this week. i always forget what good exercise it is for my fingers. i can feel them get stronger and less likely to be injured by typing at the computer.
i did gather all the old computer hardware, photograph it, and put it up for free on craigslist. someone should be picking it up today; that’s one more eyesore gone.
