doing real life things this week.

today, i got some serious groceries done. still have to clean, and finalize the schematics for the cd shelf. i also set a doctor's appointment.

tomorrow, i get the wood for the cd shelf. i'll probably also do laundry.

thursday morning, i'll be transporting compost out to the compost people. they're some kids that grow tomatoes and give it away to hungry people. it's better than dumping the coffee grinds and tomato ends in the dumpster, where the organic material simply becomes useless.

friday, i have a doctor's appointment.

seems trivial. but i actually have a hard time making sure i'm doing things like this regularly. they tend to sit. forever.

i might get a mix of clarity done over the next few days, but that's uncertain.

i'm still not clear what i'm doing about drilling.

i'm kind of hoping home depot has a drill bit where i can just get them to do the holes. even if it's a buck a hole or something, it's better and probably even cheaper in the long run.

if not, something i'll want to check when i'm there is the price of bits. there are $20 drills in the pawn shops, but they don't have bits. i only really need the one bit. there's consequently basically no chance i'm going to buy a drill set. if i can just get one bit there at a reasonable price, i probably will and then get the $20 drill.

if i can't get the one bit? at the moment, i'm leaning towards finding some kind of co-op as a preferable option. surely, there's somewhere around here where i can just take a few pieces of wood in and drill some holes in them.

the other stuff i built is just screwing screws into particle board. yes, it's cracked a little, but it's the kind of thing where it's like "who cares?" - so long as it's sturdy. a makeup shelf doesn't take a lot of force. the stove is holding up the piece with the coffee maker. the little table i'm going to make is likely going to be lodged between a chair and a wall. these are items that don't need to be particularly sturdy, so long as they're handled intelligently.

a cd shelf is a different animal because it has to be standalone and has to keep up quite a bit of weight. so, i need to be drilling cleaner holes into bigger pieces of actual wood. i'll probably use particle board for the shelves, but i want solid wood for the bases. i'm probably simply not going to be able to screw the pieces together by hand.

i might try, though, if it comes down to spending $100 on a drill and bit set that i'm going to use a handful of times and then toss in a closet for twenty years.

actually, i'm going to need to drill holes for the pegs, too...

hrmmn.

i don't even know what size they are. i should figure that out before i go.

those shoes are also dead, the rain exposed holes in the bottom of both shoes, but i wasn't expecting them to last long, with the amount of walking that i do. these were very cheaply made shoes. i'm going to let them dry out and keep them for short in/out use, but they're useless for going more than a block.

i got a pair of pink cons about the same time, but i haven't been wearing them much because i tend to get stuck in one pair. those are now the main shoes, but i want to keep them out of the wet, too. so i'm mostly moving to those children's rain boots i got for the fall/winter/spring.

the cheap shoes were actually 2 for 1 so i already have another pair of cheap shoes that i can wear down to nothing for next year....

the usb card works, so i really did get a functioning usb 2.0 card from china for $4. it's not fixing the problem i hoped it would, though.

i have a really old motherboard with usb 1.0 slots on it. this is expanded with a 2.0 hub. i want to connect a 3.0 external drive to that hub. it works, but it's very slow through the hub - much slower than it is directly connecting it to the 1.0. it's a tb drive. now, the 1.1 is workable, but it means i have to leave the drive in an unheated area. the point of the exercise is to bring the drive into the living room, where i don't have to worry about it possibly freezing. i checked the temperature in there last winter and it's not actually that cold but i'm uneasy about it - even though it may even be better to leave it in a chilled environment.

i knew it was the hub the whole time, but i was hoping that upgrading to a 2.0 card would make it a little better as it would need to convert one fewer times. that didn't work out, which leads me to believe it's a model problem rather than a speed problem. in other words, i need to try a new hub.

for the $4, i can't complain, though. it's a valid upgrade and it may find a use before the motherboard crashes.

there's an added annoyance, though, which is that it doesn't read the wireless mouse or keyboard through the pci card until windows launches. it reads them on bootup when plugged directly into the motherboard. so, if i do get another hub, i'll probably leave them both active - the old one through the motherboard and the new one through the 2.0 card.

regardless, the actual pc in there is now built to it's maximum specs. there's nothing else the motherboard can take besides a negligible increase in clock speed. as old as the machine is, i have little reason to think it's going to die any time soon. it's still useful a backup pc, so it's still useful to have the 2.0 card in there. besides a little table that i plan on building in the next week, that's the last thing i wanted to do in that room...

heat's on earlier this year than i can remember in quite a while. i'm used to turning it on mid october or early november. i actually don't think i've ever turned it on the first week of october....

*shrug*. there was an abrupt shift rather than a slow cool down. it's just not going to hold over 21 in here very long when it's below ten degrees outside. and it doesn't look like it's warming back up to the point that i can get the heat back off.

it might not be on very strong for the next few weeks, but it's definitely triggered itself at 21 degrees. hopefully it's off early.

that was a nice little escape from reality over the last few days - i got a lot of listens of the new disc in - but i have to focus on doing real life things for the next few days, so it'll be mostly quiet here for a bit.