Slow moving out to Lyndhurst

I knew it was going to be a cold weekend.  Wintery weather was forecast.  Actually, it wasn't as wintery as predicted and there wasn't any significant precipitation after Friday night.

So I wasn't expecting I would be able to, but as it turned out I took a little time both on Saturday and Sunday to move stuff out to Lyndhurst.  I moved just a few things on Saturday when it was still quite cold, and spend more than an hour moving stuff on Sunday.

Fortunately, the inside of Lyndhurst isn't getting full yet, but I'm frustrated by the fact that the ladder gets right in the way of where I would be stacking boxes and plastic bins otherwise.

The key achievements this weekend were inside my house.  I wouldn't pull out the "transformation" hyperbole just yet, but some areas inside my house are better organized than they have been in years.  All 4 bedrooms saw substantial improvement in organization.  And improvement is getting easier too.

The 4th bedroom, the converted garage room, also called "the exercise room" has been essentially impassible for at least a year and a half.  I do walk through the room daily to go from hallway to garage, but that was the only clear path.  Starting from that path at the front of the room, further ingress was blocked by two large boxes, scattered tubes of caulk, planter pots, and other junk.  This gridlock was cleared on Sunday by moving several things to Lyndhurst, the 10 foot FM antenna, the 10 foot box containing backing rods for fixing concrete gaps around my house (which I didn't get around to doing in 2012 as hoped), the special self leveling caulk for filling gaps.  Also moving some things to the car for taking to Goodwill.  Plastic shopping bags were collected and put into box inside car also.  Also, the boxes that line the right wall have seen some reorganization and the equipment on top of them has been merged in with other equipment elsewhere.  It's now possible to enter into the room about 4 feet or so, and access all of the boxes on the right side of the room, and the piles of equipment on the left side.  The ultimate plan for the boxes on the right side is to have only one instead of two layers of boxes along the wall on the right side.  The layer that will remain is the now front layer which has been getting better organized itself.  There are now sorted boxes containing A/C adapters, X10 gizmos, RF cables, and AC outlet strips, among others.  Those will remain in this room for convenience, but stuff like old videos and magazines, typically in the back row of boxes, will get moved out, because they don't get looked at often if ever.

In the master bedroom, there was a pile of junk in the right corner that finally got cleared out, allowing the rearrangement of all the space in the closet so stuff is no longer filling half the bedroom.  There was a still boxed Belkin UPS which I plan to use in computer room eventually--it got taken to Lyndhurst with the help of a dolly.  There was a Denon 2900 which is still minty but I may never use again (because I have better stuff now, like Denon 3910 and 5900 currently in use, as well as an Oppo BDP-95).  The 2900 got taken out to Lyndhurst.  There was also a flakey 5900 that needs a new laser.  That was combined with another 5900 from the 4th bedroom and placed into the Skandia shelves in the 2nd bedroom.  So once that pile of junk was cleared, the remaining closet area was rearranged leaving my dumbbells  accessible for the first time in years, and everything basically tucked back in the closet, much neater looking.  Also some speakers on the high closet shelf were moved out to Lyndhurst, making room for some times that had been permanently in the near-closet-floor area.

In the 2nd bedroom, there was considerable re-arranging of stuff on the Skandia shelves, with some of the equipment I doubt much I'll use again being moved out to Lyndhurst.  The floor near the shelves was cleared, and the 3 main boxes on the bottom (for RF cables, AC cables, and computer cables) have now been cleared of surplus cables (that were spilling out everywhere in the room), and now back in place with their cables neatly wrapped.  For the first time in a year or more it was possible to move the chair around.

I didn't clear much stuff out of the 3rd bedroom, but I continued using it this weekend mainly for sorting out the boxes of cables from the 2nd bedroom, which was a major effort requiring many hours of work continuing from last weekend to this one.  I was able to remove the hardest thing to deal with of all--the picture of my mother, which was laying flat on the table. For sentimental reasons, I didn't want to put that picture in any box, but could no longer hand sit it on the mantle in the living room (because it rattles) or hang it on any wall (because the hanger is broken).  I found the perfect spot on top of my Skandia shelving in the 2nd bedroom for it.  So the picture of my deceased mother is now on display in the room that few girlfriends will dare to enter anyway (it's the computer and electronics workroom filled with electronics junk)--so that's the best place in the house for her.

I took the speakers from the master bedroom closet out to Lyndurst on Monday morning also to check the temperature out there.  I don't know exactly where I put the RF thermometer and was wondering if I could actually trust it anymore.  Well the room was as warm as the thermometer said, despite having just been through a night where it got to freezing outside.  So all is working fine, the room is staying warm with the heater on lowest power setting.  The Lyndhurst chemical smell is barely noticeable mostly, but when I went out there on a particularly humid morning last week it was more noticeable than I would have liked.

Now I wish I had taken "before" pictures of the other rooms, as I did for the 3rd bedroom in mid December.  Just believe me, the 2nd and 4th bedrooms were about as bad or worse.  And now, my house is become more like a house and less like a warehouse.  And that was really the point of building Lyndhurst.

New goal for February 1

The photos above are from my 3rd bedroom, as it was in mid December 2012.

I have made good progress in clearing out the 3rd bedroom since those photos were taken.  And I have even started clearing out the 2nd and 4th bedrooms as well, the 2nd now becoming somewhat passable for the first time in months.

No, I did not meet my goal of having the 3rd bedroom (the one eventually intended for a friend) entirely cleared out by January 1, but I have many good excuses for missing that goal.  I was ill for the 3rd week of December, and not fully recovered by the start of the 4 day Christmas weekend.  Then very cold and sometimes drizzly and windy weather set in.  We don't consistently get wintery weather during December in Central Texas, but it's been pretty consistently wintery for the past 3 weeks.  Having just gotten over a bad respiratory illness, I'm was not going to be carrying junk out across the back yard when the temperature is 40 and it's blowing at 15-20 mph or drizzly.  I did make progress during the early afternoon of December 28, when I hauled out all the big plastic containers filled with papers, books, and magazines that had been sorted to reduce volume by 70%.  That was the only nice warm afternoon in the past few weeks, just over 70 degrees, and I sacrificed my usual after breakfast nap to do the moving.  Moving actually goes quite quickly when you have stuff boxed up and ready to move, and I felt that was the time to do it.

So as not to consider this lack of meeting my goal slipping back, I've made a new goal, that of having the 3rd bedroom entirely cleared out, as I had been intending to do by Jan 1, AND having the 2nd and 4th bedrooms completely passible (i.e. no papers or junk on floor, so you can walk around freely) by February 1.  At least that's a forward moving goal, and one that also requires a lot more work inside my house where I'm likely to be mostly anyway, though it's also quite possible that foul weather, which often continues into mid February, will get in the way of that goal too, so I may have to triple down then with an even more ambitious goal, say that of having Lyndhurst nicely resorted and inventoried too, by March 1.

It also is a golden opportunity because now that the floor of the 3rd bedroom was cleared, that room has lots of space for sorting the boxes and piles of stuff from the other bedrooms.  Those other bedrooms have gotten so packed with stuff, no sorting can be done in them, the most you can do is pull stuff out of them and sort it elsewhere.  And since I can't carry stuff outside anyway, it's good to have all the stuff organized into containers for efficient moving when the weather improves.

Possibly the biggest bit of progress was made over the Christmas holiday weekend, starting on Monday December 24.  On that day, my nose finally stopped running so I could sort stuff without constantly having to blow my nose and re-wash my hands.  So I really got into the sorting thing.  When I started the floor of the 3rd bedroom was piled up to 18 inches high all over with papers, magazines, unopened mail, books, plastic bags, and so on.  During the previous few years, whenever I was cleaning up for one of my monthly parties, and there was stuff of this kind, I simply carried it to the 3rd bedroom.  OK, well, maybe it wasn't quite that simple, sometimes I carried it first to the master bedroom thinking I'd sort it out after the party.

After sorting all day December 24 I was really swinging the paper axe, so I continued right through most of December 25 and cleared a similar pile in the corner of the master bedroom, and a much smaller (but nasty) pile right next to the night stand.  (It was nasty because it was papers all built up around a remote control having corroded batteries.  I needed to carefully remove and detoxify the remote, put it into a plastic bag, and stash for later repair.)

About 2/3 of the stuff went to the recycling can.  Certain things had to be boxed, certain magazines I am saving, certain kinds of receipts and other paperwork, certain interesting looking articles, and some rarely needed manuals.   Those boxed items were put into 2 new 14 gallon plastic containers which were taken out to Lyndhurst on December 28.  Credit card statements and credit offer were mostly stripped out of their envelopes and advertising inserts and put in special "to be shredded" can.  Some of such were just dumped into that can without being stripped from their envelopes too, when I got impatient or was running out of time.  I opened so many envelopes my finger was hurting so I started using a knife to open envelopes--the first time I've ever done that.

So by the end of December 25 not only had I cleared the floor of the 3rd bedroom of all the papers, I had started examining the 6 large plastic containers (up to 28 gallon) in the corner of the room.  Most of them contained more papers of a similar kind as was on the floor, and I managed to clean out a sizeable fraction of their now obviously unneeded contents.  But I didn't finish that process, or continue it much during the next two work days, and then on December 28 I simply hauled all the plastic containers out to Lyndhurst and found some way of stashing them there.

I also hauled a fair number of old audio components out to Lyndhurst, and stacked on the high shelf on the north side mostly.  A typical component in that pile is the Sony DVD-7000 player.  That was the first DVD player from Sony, a Reference component for many years.  But since it won't play DVD-R discs, and it won't play SACD's or DVD-Audio's, it's no longer useful to me.  I think it could be sold for enough on eBay to make it worth selling, but not much more.

When it got warm for an hour or so on Sunday December 30th I carried a few more components out to Lyndhurst, including a Nikko Alpha III amplifier that was the darling of Audio Directions when I worked there in 1979.  Since then I've decided it really doesn't sound as good as my newer amplifiers, even the Parasound HCA-1000A.  But I don't really want to trash it either.  It's almost worth holding onto for sentimental reasons, though I'd be glad to sell it at a price high enough to cover the considerable effort required to pack and ship.

Now actually the floor of the 3rd bedroom is largely covered with open containers from the 2nd and 4th bedrooms that are getting resorted.  But that's progress toward the new goal.

In the process of doing this kind of sorting I always find interesting things.  One was an article from Jamie Galbraith writing in 2003 describing the evidence that JFK had positively decided to pull out of Vietnam by 1965 and positively not send actual "troops" (at that time, only "advisors" had been sent) to fight a major war to defend South Vietnam.  Then he was shot a month later.  The timing and many other known facts and speculations support the idea that the decision to pull out of Vietnam and Kennedy's being shot were not coincidental.  Jamie was making that point and has some first hand association with this as well as having spent a long time thinking about it.  His father, John K Galbraith, was an advisor to Kennedy.

Still, I have to say, the actual evidence presented was not exactly iron clad.  If you read the transcription of a Kennedy dialog Jamie included in the article (Kennedy actually recorded discussions in the White House, though not as obsessively as Nixon) it's a little vague, actually.  You have to know the context of the Cold War--the intense hawkish anti-Communist attitude in the US generally--to understand it.  
It's partly that Kennedy is NOT being so hawkish that makes the story.  He's not sounding like a peacenik either, however.  Noam Chomsky, notably and noted in the article, disagreed with Jamie's hypothesis, though I'm not sure Chomsky had read that particular dialog presented by Jamie, which was enough, but just barely enough, to confirm my new suspicions.  I was perfectly willing to accept the conclusions of the Warren Commission until sometime in the 2000's, and I had always thought of Kennedy as hawkier than hawk for his "missile gap" campaign ploy.  But now I have seen recordings of press conferences in which the press was basically ganging up on Kennedy for not being sufficiently warmongering.  In addition to possibly deciding to pull advisors out of Vietnam, Kennedy also resisted sending the Air Force to defend the CIA's invasion of Cuba, resisted escalating the Cuban Missile crisis, and did not cause a military confrontation over the construction of the Berlin wall, three things that made cold war hawks very angry at the time, but also quite possibly the reason we're still around today.  Kennedy said at one point that the President's number one job is to keep the USA out of war.  And he may have done that far better than his successors.  If he had succeeded in keeping the USA from fighting a full on war in Vietnam, things today might be far different.

If I had never sorted through these papers, I would have never found this very interesting article.

2nd weekend of December

December is already flying by, seems like Thanksgiving was yesterday.

This weekend main household accomplishment was mowing front yard, which had a haze of crabgrass shoots in the front growing to 18 inches high.  The actual St Augustine was only about 4 inches high.  It had not been mowed since two weeks before the election.  Since I only got started around 6pm on Saturday, and it took some minutes to get prepared, including cleaning my full face respirator (which fogged up fast so I didn't use it) I did all the actual mowing after sunset.  Actual mowing was done between 6:20 and 7:20.  Ambient temperature was around 70 during this time.  Thanks to security lights, there was no problem with light, though I did have to think things in advance more than usual (which I should do more than usual).  If this had been summer, I might not have gotten started until past 7:30.  Front lawn mowing is important because it defines the appearance my house has in the neighborhood, which needs all the help it can get, and recently I had fallen behind with everyone else's lawn having been mowed in the past 3 weeks.

The main accomplishment inside Lyndhurst was sealing lower gap of the A/C.  I used the grey poly foam provided by manufacturer for sealing.  (Actually, when installed into a wall, the manufacturer doesn't say anything about sealing the bottom, only the top and sides.  But they provide two foam pieces in case you are installing into a window.)  I cut off two small pieces of foam for the gaps on either side I noticed last weekend.  I was undecided on whether it would be good to supplement the foam with the clear sealing tape I also got.  I worried about what kind of condensation, etc., might occur on the inside of the tape, and then cause mold on the foam.  So I didn't do the tape for now.  The foam by itself might be best.  There is a tiny crack in the solid sealing done by the contractor on one side which could get some caulk, but  it doesn't seem to be the source of actual air leakage.

I was unable to fit the A/C bezel onto the A/C.  I need to pound the A/C frame with a rubber mallett to get it back into shape first.  I also need to get some machine screws, possibly 4-40, to hold on the bezel since I don't know where the originals are.  In fact, i thought I already bought one set of replacements back in April or so, and I couldn't find those either.

Before finding it wouldn't fit, I spent about half an hour meticulously cleaning the A/C bezel which had gotten quite a bit of bug grime from sitting in the open building for 6 months on the floor.  I used vacuum, cloth, and Q tips.  Some live bugs had gotten behind the filter.  After failing to fit to the actual unit, I put the bezel on a box so as not to be sitting on the floor again.

I decided to power up and program the A/C anyway, since it works fine w/o the bezel.  I first programmed it for 12noon - 12 midnight operation at 84 degrees, and Energy Saver (otherwise fan runs all the time).  But before long, it started running, despite the cold day and the heater being set at 1.0.  So I turned the A/C thermostat up to 90 degrees, and turned the heater down to 0.9.  It didn't run anymore.

But the real plan is to use a digital thermostat for the heater so it doesn't run above 70 degrees.  Currently it is hard to adjust the heater so that it stays that cool, even at setting "1" the heater maintains a temperature of 78, and I fear that if I did set it much lower, it might not heat enough below 70.  I spent almost two hours searching for the digital thermostat which I bought a year ago.  I looked in the 3 storage containers already inside Lyndhurst, and noted their contents in a new Inventory list on my kitchen Mac.  I looked in the 3rd bedroom, requiring me to move stuff out of the way just to get into the bedroom.  That was the main source of the small amount of stuff I took out to Lyndhurst this weekend, the other was the box for the Immersion Edition of Dark Side of the Moon with all discs removed, but full of kitsch, which I kept tripping on in the master bedroom.  I looked through all the stuff on the bed and most of the stuff on the floor and was getting very frustrated thinking maybe it had been thrown out by accident, or was in my rental storage unit.

Speaking of Dark Side of the Moon, I listened to both 4 channel and 5 channel uncompressed BluRay versions in the kitchen during the weekend, for the first time.  Both are very nicely done, though the 4 channel version shows the limitation of my surround speakers more obviously--they lack HF response.  I also watched two Discrete Mathematics classes from The Teaching Company, and watched random Chomsky and Vidal videos on the kitchen TV coming from YouTube through my Mac and the adapters I describe below.  I watched a new Anime movie I bought last week.  I downloaded Phoenix Slides for the kitchen Mac and tried it out.  I had to do multiple google searches to figure out how to let the new Mac let me run something downloaded from the internet (instead of being purchased from the Apple Store).  I made a post to my political blog about Apple and closed systems.  I uploaded a private label music CD of ancient keyboard performances to the ztunes directory of my iTunes collection.  I hadn't uploaded any new CD's for about a year because I kept procrastinating on installing a new external harddrive for my old Mac.  For this privately made CD I had to fill in all the information.

Finally, I began thinking about what this thermostat actually looks like.  It has a thick orange 8 foot cord attached to the box.  Wait, I had been seeing a thick orange cord on the chair in the third bedroom.  Well there it was.  Thinking is always better than random digging.  That final discovery was made after midnight Sunday night.  So I'll set up the thermostat this week or weekend.

In other news, Saturday was my sister's birthday, so my brother-in-law called on Friday night and we talked for 2 hours, starting with his latest fave 3D TV (he happened to have a few extras for sale), touching on his recent negative results in the polarity test I scored a few months ago,  and ending up with arguing about physics, frustratingly, he seems to have views very much at odds with special and general relativity and quantum physics, and yet, smart as he is, he doesn't see the conflicts, perhaps to his continuous invocation of Wittgenstein.  I had to beg off several times to get the phone call to end by 2am.  I called my sister on Saturday and we talked for just over an hour, mostly about her new car and new issues with her eyes.  On Sunday I also forwarded some questions regarding relativity to another friend so I can get these things sorted out.

I had a very good movie date with my lady friend on Sunday afternoon, watching the 4th installment of Oliver Stone's Untold History of the USA.  She brought her own coffee (and forgot to take mug with her) and didn't want anything else but I provided some peanuts which she soaked in lemon juice...I've decided that kills the flavor for me.  We also talked by phone on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights.

I washed bathtowels on a very full cycle and then washed cleaning cloths on the full sterilize cycle which takes 3 hours.  I ran the dishwasher on Saturday morning and Monday morning using timer mode.  I opened the box of new New Balance shoes and wore them for the first time on Monday.

I tasted Estrella Damm Inedit, an expensive Spanish ale.  It was very rich tasting, almost like food, which it is intended to go with (but I just drank small glasses all night).  Unfortunately, I spilled the last bit from a wineglass, and then had to spend about 20 minutes cleaning the table, remote controls, and other stuff.

I did some more video tests with a downloaded test pattern showing that the Mac DisplayPort through Composite adapter interlace output seems to have some jitter in the first few dozen scan lines, on both Sony CRT and Samsung LCD displays.  It does actually appear to have the full 525 lines of horizontal resolution anyway, but the jittering effect in the top lines makes the picture seem soft.

This jittering went away entirely when I connected the composite output directly to my DVDO, either in 480i otuput or 480p output settings.  That would suggest it is caused by interaction of composite adapter and the input of my Sony DVDR-HX900.  I was disappointed to learn that I cannot input any resolution higher than 480p into my outdated DVDO unit, so to get higher resolutions than 480p out of my Mac I will need to do something with HDMI.  Fortunately, my Gefen HDMI gizmo arrived on Monday morning needing a signature and I signed for it, hopefully that will resolve issues between DisplayPort and my HDMI switch so I can get 1080i.  I also unwrapped and inspected a BlackMagic Extreme video interface, which I plan to try out, but did not yet get around to hooking it up.  I re-secured the 5-way HDMI switch I have in the kitchen with duct tape.

Then I played back some videos on the Sony that I had previously recorded using the S-Video output of my previous mac Powerbook.  Those videos had no jitter in the top lines whatsoever.  So the jitter thing is new.  My guess is that it is indeed some kind of blanket copy restriction applied to the Mac DisplayPort when outputing 480i.  Or it could be happening within the DisplayPort->Component adapter I am using, except the adapter doesn't do that when playing into the DVDO.  It does not appear to be Macrovision per se, but something like that making the sync unstable into recording devices--that's a common strategy.  The DVDO is insensitive to this just as a display device would be, but the DVDO also does not have any analog 480i output, so its output cannot be recorded either.  The Sony DVDR-HX900 is sensitive to unstable sync by design, to allow copy protection schemes to work.  My opinion is that none of this should be happening unless I were playing copy protected media on the Mac, such as a DVD.  But it is a typical strategy to make all duplication impossible even if some of it would be legal as fair use.

I tried setting up new connection for Lavry AD10 to Behringer 2496 DEQ for the output of the L-1000T in my audio system.  This would give me even better quality FM through my whole house Sonos system.  But after trying to set up the Toslink cable, it turned out to be the wrong kind and needs to be returned to Radio Shack.

Just as it was getting dark on Sunday night, and my friend had left, I pulled a dozen large weeds that had been growing on the north side of Lyndhurst.  I put a large trashcan liner from the garage into a trashcan inside Oakhurst.  I almost forgot to put that can back into Oakhurst before it started raining.  I watered the potted plants near the front door.

And yet, as usual, I write this because I sometimes felt I was doing little more than goofing off the whole time.

Last week I did a lot too.  I paid my property tax downtown (and found I need to pay school tax separately, before January 31, at the Judson office).  I called and had plumbers come out for the Angie's list inspection, which was worth what I paid, but not much more.  I brought pants, jacket, and shirt to my taylor for minor fixes.  The pants had needed fixing for 2 months (I've been wearing a slightly worn-out spare in the meantime) the shirt had needed fixing for about 2 years, and the leather jacket had needed shortening for 3 years.  On Friday we had 30th anniversary symposium of the Department where I work, where I also finished putting together the  draft version of computer code I'm working on for a collaborator.

More cleaning

On the first Saturday in December, I resumed cleaning the inside walls, starting where I left off at the north edge of the french doors, and around to the north side to the far edge of the air conditioner.  (Except for the floor level below the air conditioner, the ladder was there, so I will do that later.)

The cleaning of the oil-painted trim around the air conditioner  was important because it really needed to be done before I finish sealing the unit on the inside, with a strip of foam in the gap underneath the unit.  I also need to cut (from the spare strip I got with the A/C) two tiny pieces to jam in either side, where there are also small gaps.

As it was there, I also cleaned the wood shelf on the north side just to the east of the air conditioner.  Like all the other shelves, it had accumulated a second round of bug grime, or something like that, with lots of actual dead bugs too, and a few live ones.  This dark bug grime accumulated in the 5 months since I cleaned this shelf the first time, in July or thereabouts.  The top of the shelf was the last thing I cleaned, because I knew it would get my cloth and water dirty.  Most other surfaces I cleaned were not visibly dirty.  I also cleaned underneath the shelves, which had been done before also.

I finally decided to put up the window screen as I was keeping the window open for ventilation until 11pm and I wanted to avoid mosquitos and other bugs.  I had never put up the window screen before because it came with a factory defect, a small hole in one side, and I was planning to get that fixed.  But of course I didn't get around to getting it fixed.  Now I think I'll just put some tape over the hole until I have a convenient time to get it fixed.

To avoid mosquitoes, I also put out my Mosquito Cognito outside in front of the front door.  I was not bothered by mosquitoes, and though the temperature outside dipped to the mid 60's I was very comfortable inside, with the electric heater.

I examined the gaps on the bottom corners of the air conditioner, and added a little more mortite on each side for the inner gaps (which are in front of a tiny channel that goes all the way out the back of the A/C for drainage).  There was basically nothing I could do to block that channel on the outside.

The side channels between the A/C Chassis and the Sleeve are filled with the dark foam strip provided by the manufacturer (the installation was done hurridly by the contractor, I tried to stall him so I could do it myself).  There are tiny gaps where the foam doesn't reach on either side at the bottom.  I'm going to fill those with tiny additional pieces of foam leftover from sealing the gap at the bottom when I do that.

Which I was planning to do today, Tuesday, but I found that I had no clean pair of scissors to cut the foam, so I spent 20 minutes cleaning two pairs of scissors instead.

Temperatures inside Lyndhurst are typically about 80 degrees, according to wireless thermometer I can read in my living room.  The heater thermostat was set to 1.5 so I turned it down to 1.0.  I hope to install the digital thermostat soon.

More Victories

I was going to title this weekend's post "Declaring Victory" but I see that I already did that on November 5.  Of course, shifting the goal posts is endless.

This might be a good time to recap progress made in November.  At the start of the month, I'd still been keeping the doors open all day and night for outgassing.  The floor was getting muddy in front and was strewn with junk, much of it intended to go elsewhere (the Oakhurst tough shed), such as the solar lights which had only been temporarily installed then removed for mowing.  Temporarily stashing them in Lyndhurst brough in bits of dirt that fell on the floor, and that had not been the only source of dirt.  So on November 5, I cleared up the junk on the floor, installed some lights but boxed the rest and put in Oakhurst, and did a quick mop of the front area.  That was unsatisfactory, but enough for my first declaration of victory.

On November 18, I moved all the remaining stuff on the floor to the back, and thoroughly mopped the floor, rinsed, and dried with a towel.  I touched up some of the Mortite on the outside of the A/C unit.

On November 24, I washed the inside east wall starting at the north edge of the french doors, wrapping around all the way to just past the southwest corner on the west side.  The intent was to make it possible to move stuff from the first house bedroom that needs to be cleared out.  Such moving could begin today because no further pre-use cleaning is required in that area.  I also cleaned the top shelf (which was nearly black from bug dirt again), the exposed portions of the bottom shelf, and scrubbed by hand the southwest corner of the tile floor, which had previously gone uncleaned on November 18.  There was a rust stain in that area which I mostly removed with my Dawn and Baking Soda solution and scrubbing.

I also installed the LED lights as the last incandescent used for the outgassing phase burned out and the building turned dark on November 23.  I decided that running the LED's on the lowest dimmer setting 24/7 would be acceptable because it only uses about 10 watts.  Unlike the incandescent bulb, the Ecosmart LED's make no noise on the Hunter dimmer.

The key part that remains uncleaned in the north side wall, and wrapping around to the west side and the corner of the east side.  The north side wall is not intended for junk storage, so the lack of having that fully prepared is not important now anyway.

Another key achievement was setting up the 15 year old DeLonghi radiator heater.  I removed from the exercise room and vacuumed it off first.  It is very clean and new looking.  I mainly used it for the 8 months I lived in San Francisco in 1997.  Keeping the control near 6 was great on Saturday evening with the doors open and a 60 degree wind blowing outside.  After that, I turned down the temperature control to 3 and the heat level to minimum, which uses about 350 watts.  At minimum, it could probably run all the time without hurting anything, even if the thermostat gets stuck.

On Sunday morning I went out to test the temperature.  The room was warm, dry, comfortable, and there was no smell.  I set the control down to 2 and set up a remote thermometer sensor I can read in the living room, from which I noted that the temperature remained fairly constant at 78 degrees with the 2 setting.  So on Monday I moved the setting even lower, to about 1.5.

The previous week I also obtained new door seals for the bottom of the doors.  I think keeping the doors not fully sealed has been of further help in getting the smell to go outside, and I'm pleased it seems quite easy to maintain temperature even with the door not fully sealed so far, and I think that the current heat-on-inside-cold-outside condition can usefully be outgassed for awhile.

*****

Overall, this was a little less than I had hoped for the four day Thanksgiving holiday weekend.  However, I did not really have four days available, just 3 because Sunday was my monthly party.  Traditionally I then also require Saturday for cleanup of the living room.  And then Thursday itself was Thanksgiving.  I often find Thanksgiving very boring, but had a short and sweet Thanksgiving dinner because a friend brought some very good Turkey (in the short list for best ever).  Mostly, on Thursday, I was relaxing from my work (or, more precisely, recovering from excess partying to 6am on Thursday morning).

So then I could still have had a day or two to work on Lyndhurst, but I'll count this weekend's work as only one day.  I have a good excuse for not doing more than that.  My kitchen computer, the one I do most of my web browsing on, died two weeks ago.  On Monday (November 19) my new Mac Mini arrived.  Since it has the Fusion drive,  I had to order online, but instead of arriving on Black Friday, as promised by Apple, it arrived 4 days earlier.  I gradually started unpacking, but it soon became clear I couldn't do anything until clearing away the old computer and related stuff, so I held off until the quickly arriving holiday weekend.

By late Thursday night, I had started to get into this, getting all the old stuff moved out and the new computer moved in and connected.  I also ran the process of copying all 200Mb of uncompressed audio files (in three separate folders) from the old USB drive to the new internal 1.2Tb Fusion drive.  On Friday morning, after not sleeping very well, I was back at it, getting my iTunes and Sonos systems working with my newly audio files.  That was the main work.  I also spent much time tinkering with the new system to get it back to behaving like my previous one.

So this holiday weekend had many high points, of which the Lyndhurst cleaning became only a small part.

1) Wonderful thanksgiving meal brought by friend.
2) Setting up new computer (equivalent to 1-2 days work).
3) Cleaning living room and kitchen for party (1 day work).
4) Cleaning Lyndhurst walls and setting up heater (1 day work).
5) Sunday discussion and movie party (full day activity).
6) Cleaning up after party (including moving keyboard back to center).
7) Paying utility bills (often lost during party cleanup)
8) Shopping for weekly and party food
9) sterilizing cleaning cloths (before and after cleaning Lyndhurst, takes 3 hours per load)
10) second short visit by friend on Friday
11) mailing party announcement (done by temporarily using bedroom computer)

On Wednesday night, during my dinner break from work, I also managed to visit Gabriel's Superstore to get rare liquors including Rogue Double Chocolate Stout and Isle of Jura Single Malt Scotch) and have dinner at Aldino's.  That almost seemed like part of the holiday weekend as well.

The Lyndhurst cleaning was a small thing, but I'm glad it didn't get forgotten, and that I still have a sense that progress is being made on plan, the plan to have one bedroom cleared out by Jan 1.  That plan looks more do-able than ever right now.  But I also know December quickly evaporates into Christmas Parties and other activities, leaving very little time on the side.  So I could, and probably can start moving bedroom stuff to Lyndhurst this coming first weekend in December.

I also need to finish sealing the A/C area, and start installing door seals.  As well as finishing the inside wall cleaning.

Declaring Victory

I had set a goal of having Lyndhurst done, ready for moving stuff in, on November 1.  As of November 5, I'm declaring victory.

I mean this somewhat in jest, but I did clean out the building this Sunday.  In my all-too-typical-sounding boast nowadays, it was transformed...transformed from a garden junk pile to splendid little room.  It actually seems that way to me.

It looks like I could lease it out now, although I'm not really done cleaning.  I cleared away all the junk on the floor--which was making the whole room nearly impassible--and swept the floor, then did a quick mop on Monday afternoon. The quick mop got the most visible dirt near the door, and made the mop water very dirty, but obviously more mopping needs to be done.  And though the walls look clean, I haven't done my cleaning of them at all.  The top of the shelves could also be cleaned again, they've gotten dirty from bug grime, even though I already cleaned them in June.

The solar lamps (which had considerable soil dirt on their spikes) got put in a sturdy cardboard box and put into the Oakhurst garden tool shed, along with other garden-related items like string trimmer spools.  I put two of the lights up, which added some cheer after the sun went down.  The box used was a box (in which I had received an L-1000T tuner from Europe) which had also sat uselessly on the floor for months.  Three plastic bins which I had moved out of garage in July got moved up to the big back shelf.  There was some loose bug grime and dirt on the back shelf which I brushed off with a towel.  This isn't intended to be permanent--I intend to clean the wall behind the back shelf--but it could be semi-permanent for the forseeable future.

I kept on working past dusk on Sunday afternoon, with dusk coming early because of the change back to daylight loosing time (I like daylight saving time so much I'd like to see it year round).  I brought out the Mosquito Cognito and unpacked one of 3 refills I bought last month but didn't install.  I think I avoided getting any bites, though I was annoyed by some pesky flies or stupified mosquitoes.  I eventually quit working around 10pm when I otherwise would have mopped the floor, but I was beginning to worry there really was a mosquito or two after me and my luck might run out.

After re-opening the doors on Monday at 11am, I noticed essentially zero smell, an excellent result for having had the doors closed for 13 hours.

OK, there still is stuff in the room, including the ladder, the halogen lights, and the boxes for the Obelisk (that needs to be assembled).  But nothing on the floor looks out-of-place.  The room no longer looks like an abandoned junkpile.  It's staring to look like the storage room it is intended to be.  Victory!

Finally mowed the front again

How many weeks has it been?  2 or 3 at most.  The crabgrass in the very front of my front yard had grown to 20 inches or so.  Definitely not a good backdrop for my political signs.  Most of the rest of the front lawn looked OK, with just an occasional crabgrass sprout.  Squeezing this work in before going to my office on Friday, I did the minimum for good appearances, the very front section around the Palm and Mimosa back to the beginning of the garage, and the south strip just beyond the garage.  Took less than an hour, including the time needed to wash out my full face respirator.  With a picnic scheduled for Saturday and rain forecast for Sunday, this was the last chance, and possibly the best chance before Election Day.