Walk Softly and Carry a Big Schtick

Today is garbage day, so the trash cans needed to be removed from the side of the garage where I park. Also, the weather didn't suck, which meant that this was a splendid time to unload the van and get all of the Dodeka boxes back onto their shelf. Accordingly, I parked in the driveway after lunch.

I moved the brooms that sit in front of the bookshelf where the gridwall sits and looked at the bottom shelf. There were two boxes of ancient peel-and-stick vinyl tile that had come to the house with us. It struck me that no one in the world really wanted that tile. So I tossed it in the trash, which is now *much* heavier. Then I started looking at other things on the shelf to see what I could dispose of.

Do I *really* need a large box full of Chicon V reimbursement forms? I think not! Or credit card slips for a imprinter? Heck, no!

I did find some things that might be useful that we had forgotten that we had, like some craft boxes designed to be painted that Gretchen had purchased at one time or another and that I am sure that the kids will want to get their hands on. And things that were less useful, but still interesting, like a World War II bayonet.

And finally, there was the bag that contained the rest of my coin collection, removed from the albums that it had once occupied and placed into rolls -- if it wasn't in coin sleeves. The odd coins were mostly in sleeves. A two cent piece, three cent nickel and silver pieces, a half dime, various other very old coins -- although I didn't find the Flying Eagle cent that I thought that I had bought at one time or another. But it's possible that had lurked just out of my price range, much like the St. Gaudens $20 gold piece that I could have purchased for $45 way back when.

It's nice to have found it. Some time, I need to show the kids what Dad used to do for fun.

Coin collecting was a lot *more* fun when you could collect coins from circulation. Sadly, that's pretty much an obsolete practice unless you want to collect a lot of clad coins.

Which I suppose is a valid hobby.

Still. :)

I had expected to be tired after Windycon, so I arranged to take Monday off. This was clearly the case, because both Gretchen and I managed to keep falling asleep during the second half of Tracker last night as we were watching it on the DVR. Well, the good news is that it was recorded, so we were able to watch it tonight and understand who the heck this character was who had popped up by the end of the episode.

The other reason for taking Monday off was that I *also* had Tuesday off for Veterans' Day and connecting everything together for one long session of getting things done seemed like a good idea. I have many things to get done.

The first was catching up on the convention laundry. I popped that into the washer before heading out for lunch and a couple of stops to grab stuff for dinner. When I finally got home, it was nearly time for Gretchen to go pick up Julie from school, so the right order of business was to put the load of wash in the dryer, fire up the studio computer, and install the new version of Cubase and the various plugins that I had picked up from Universal Audio with the latest upgrade.

This is easier when the computer fires up. After a bit of messing around, I realized that it wasn't just the computer being stubborn. It was everything plugged into the particular power strip I was poking at, which was apparently dead, dead, dead.

(Now thinking about it, it's just possible that the GFCI had triggered on that outlet, but thinking about it some more, there are two power strips plugged into that outlet and I'm pretty sure the other was still delivering power, based on what lights I saw on the assorted bits of equipment. These power strips / surge protectors are about as old as the studio, so having one fail isn't a great surprise.)

Anyway, I ordered a new power strip / surge protector that should be here tomorrow and will then start trying to figure out which plug needs to come out of the wall, because all of the cords are running under the console. In the meantime, I figured that I would unplug and remove the old Focusrite Octopre unit that's going to be replaced by the used Apollo 8 unit that I bought from Jeff Bohnhoff. Unplugging was easy, getting back up off the floor less so, getting the unit to slide *up* and out of the rackmount was simply not happening without a second person there.

Before dinner, Julie was down in the basement and was good enough to push the unit up so I could extract it. Then it was finally time to *open* Jeff's unit, which had been sitting in its package for weeks. That was easy enough. The unit looks to be in excellent condition and has now been installed into the rack. Assuming that the new surge protector arrives tomorrow, I'll get it plugged in and wired up.

And maybe I'll install Cubase 15...