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Now with (marginally) less crap

The other night, Oz wiped the hard drives on the old computers and the very next day he carried them and the two monitors off to Goodwill. Then he put all the packaging for his new machine into the trash and recycling. No one would say that the office looks streamlined, but it does look less like a junkyard.

Still on a closet-cleaning roll, I cleared out the brimming cabinet in the bathroom and tossed everything which was past its expiration date. Two grocery bags of nasty old bottles of unguents and what-all ended up in the supercan. The coupons with the 2006 expiration dates which have been sitting on the windowsill for the past year? Also in the trash.

But still …

Last night Oz came into the sitting room and said, "We have less crap in the house. But we still have a lot of crap."

"Yes, we are by no means crap-free. We are nowhere near to having a crap shortage." In fact, since I have been focusing my efforts on closets, the crap reduction is mostly not apparent at all.

I'm going to tackle another closet today. In the meantime, my office mocks me. All my decluttering efforts are mere procrastination in the face of the office's foot-high stacks of paper and shelves jammed with notebooks.

If, like me, you're interested in things too small to clutter your house, the Washington Post Arts Beat column visits a teeny tiny gallery at VCU.

Machinery

Oz got a new PDA, the result of a little retail therapy while I was in Ohio. When he went to install its desktop software on the PC, the PC choked. The little hamsters who run the hard drive cried "No more!" and lay down. He defragged the hard drive to little effect and then the machine went into constant reboot mode.

At this point, I started browsing the Best Buy site and quoting computer prices at him. That PC is my old one, purchased in 2000 and ridden hard since. Though parts aren't actually falling out and rattling around inside the case, some have ceased to function (though I expect the sound card merely needed to be re-seated) and Oz has reinstalled the OS at least once. It's been adequate for his at-home computing purposes, which mostly involve reading comics, but has become resistant to change.

It grew less resistant and stopped rebooting itself when I quoted the prices for new desktop systems and listed the specs in its general direction. This is totally not magical thinking. When I said, "So, wanna go to NTK?" the little hamsters in the old PC hopped back onto their treadmills and started scurrying like mad. Not falling for that, Oz started filling his pockets, the equivalent of me picking up my purse, and we hit the road.

Now Oz can read his comics really fast. A sleek black PC has replaced the two putty-colored machines under the table and an enviable LCD monitor has kicked aside the two giant putty-colored CRTs which have been dominating that whole corner of the office for the past couple years. The old machines are stacked in the corner.

In theory we'll have a net reduction in clutter out of this.

Eventually.

Zoologically

Llamas at the Natural Bridge Zoo

I've been messing around with our vacation pictures and put some of them up in a set. Not a lot of excitement there, but then we are not the most exciting people.

One of the unexpected treats of our trip to Natural Bridge was the Natural Bridge Zoo. It's not a big operation, but they have a nice mix of animals. Cute baby animals too, like a baby tiger, a jolly, bouncy baby bear, and a flirtatious, soft-nosed baby camel. I think this is the first zoo where I've seen giraffes from the right angle. Usually giraffes are kept in the deep pits (or so it seems) so that the viewing humans' heads are at about the same height as the giraffes' heads. That's just wrong. Here, we were standing on the same level as the giraffes with only a fence between us and we could get right up close. Wow! Giraffes are big and meaty-looking (hey, we're predators, we notice) when they're not foreshortened.

Another thing, I've never been in a zoo where the animals were looking at me as closely as I was looking at them. This was in part because the zoo let you feed some of the animals. But not the gibbons, who started showing off as we walked up and whooped conversationally. I whooped back, and the whoop exchange went on for a while as the gibbon brachiated around and rattled the cage every time we tried to walk away. I wonder what I was saying.

Okay, so the flamingos ignored us. I took their picture anyway and now I have a new banner graphic. Once upon a time, I had this idea that I would change my banners seasonally, but it's been kudzu all the way. The flamingos are perfect for summer. They'll probably end up being perfect for fall and winter too.

Into the mountains

Natural Bridge, Virginia, through the fisheye

We spent a couple lovely (but really hot) days out in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We stayed in Natural Bridge and did not quite all the touristy things, but most of them. As you can see, Natural Bridge is super gorgeous and impressive. My family came here once when I was maybe nine and at the time, I really wanted to go up on the bridge, not just walk under it. You still can't go up on the bridge, but I'm more mature now and better able to appreciate all that beautiful natural scenery from all the way down at the bottom of the ravine (which would look awesome from up high, I'm sure). The Cedar Creek Nature Trail, which runs under the bridge and 1500 yards back to a pretty waterfall, is worth the walk. And if you're not into hiking, never fear. This is basically handicapped-accessible hiking and there are lots of benches along the way. Supposedly there are also rock-dwelling poisonous snakes, or so we were told, but we suspect our young informant was bullshitting us. We stayed in the hotel across the way from the bridge entrance and the morning we took the hike, we watched a huge cloud of mist boil up out of the ravine to obscure the mountains. Spooky! The mist was all gone by the time we got to the bridge. Oh well, that's the price we pay for waiting till it opens.

However, the real point of this exercise, even more than the bridge, was Foamhenge!

We saw Foamhenge in a brochure of Virginia attractions and I decided that we had to see it. It's more convenient than Stonehenge, that's for sure. Also, it is fun to say "Foamhenge" out loud and frequently. One might even say it is addictive, but we'll be getting over it any day now. No need for an intervention.

Foamhenge, on Route 11 just north of Natural Bridge

We missed the solstice by a couple days, darn it. I wasn't thinking when we planned our trip. Still, Foamhenge was everything we imagined. Big, foamy, and it had a nice view from the hilltop as well as a fiberglass druid. Unfortunately, due to some cowtippers thinking outside the box, a few of the megaliths are missing. You can see Foamhenge from Route 11 as you're heading south. By all means, pull into the parking area and take the short walk up the hill. We were there at dusk and took the opportunity to play with my lighting gear. We now have lots of pictures of ourselves in silly poses amid the megaliths. No, I'm not posting them publicly.

Oh, and Happy Solstice, everyone.

Birthday week ends with a bang!

We had a glorious and (nearly) personal fireworks show, thanks to the James River Adventure Games.

Round about nine o'clock, we moseyed down to Libby Hill Park where we found one other person sitting on the bluff and looking west towards downtown. The fireworks started popping a minute after we got there and a few other people trickled into the park. Church Hill is a bit removed from Brown's Island, the actual venue for the show, but it's pretty cool to watch the fireworks over the skyline with the Lucky Strike smokestack in the foreground.

Somebody at the fireworks factory figured out how to make the shell explode the lighty-up bits in the form of a cube, so the spark-defined box made a frequent appearance in the display. That was the only new (to me) design. They had plenty of the sparkly kind which I quite like too. Also dramatic was the smoke plume spreading out over the skyline and below the crescent moon.

Who needs candles when you've got fireworks?

Old media

Today, for some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to clear out my closet so I could actually store clothes in it.

Back in 1995, when I moved into this house, I was one person (still am) in a 1600 square foot house with three huge closets. One closet was my attic and storage, one was attic overflow and off-season item storage, and the third closet was my clothes. Now we are two people here, with two people's worth of stuff in the closets which have additionally accumulated a fair amount of crap and dust over the past twelve years. There has also been some room juggling and now "my" room is the one with the attic closet.

I'm not sure what I thought was going to happen when I started the purge. I certainly didn't think it would take all day (yes, I'm still seriously underemployed). I found more books, a box of embroidery stuff and extremely grubby cross-stitches I did as a kid, a box of old dolls and doll things, helpfully labeled "C—'s stuff", very old shoes including a pair of my mother's black leather boots from the 1970's with three-inch wedge heels, a box of letters and photos (this I kept), two boxes of cassette tapes, and more.

The cassette tapes, wow! I haven't listened to any of them since I moved. Or my LPs, which I still have and have not listened to for even longer. The LPs are in a different closet. I used to tape my records so I wouldn't wear them out and also because I didn't have a record player at college and tapes were my only option. When I look at the titles, I can feel my dorm room springing up around me. My musical taste was so eighties, but that's when I was in high school and college. It's not like I had a choice. Cyndi Lauper, Tears for Fears, Howard Jones, The Police, U2, Yaz, Simple Minds, Kate Bush … And a fair number of Broadway recordings. There must have been a gay man inside me trying to bust out.

I also found the Georgetown University School of Languages and Linguistics language tapes which were doled out to every language major at the beginning of every semester. We were supposed to take our tapes to the language lab every week to get the week's audio lesson recorded onto them, and then listen to them for homework. We were regularly reprimanded by our professor: "I checked in the language lab! No one has been getting their tapes! You must get your tapes!" No one ever got the tapes. We recorded music onto them.

I found the tapes my grandfather recorded for me. Classical music from CD (he was an early adopter of new technology), carefully labeled in his engineer's handwriting. Back in the thirties and on into the eighties, engineers were taught to write properly and my grandfather's writing never lost its precision. Nowadays, the drafting is all done on computers and engineers have the worst penmanship. Engineering school just about did for my nice handwriting.

So I culled through my stuff and saved out the things most special to me. I have room in the closet for clothes now, partly because I moved some items to another closet. Obviously I have a ways to go with this stuff-reduction process.

Color space

Part of Birthday Month is presents. I got one today!

Last week, as I was wrestling with my cousin's wedding pictures and bemoaning the fact that the color on the monitor was not the same as the color on the printer or even the color on the other monitor, I recalled that they make calibrators for just this sort of problem. "Oz, for my birthday, I want … "

Now my PC monitor is all calibrated and on screen, my photographs look very nicely colored. My relatives and I are not quite so flushed as we were looking before calibration. (No alcohol at the wedding, so we were not flushed in reality either.)

I then tried to color calibrate my photo printer, which does a great job except that photos print darker than they appear on screen (no way around that, I guess, seeing as how prints aren't backlit) and the reds tend to pop more so my relatives and I look flushed in the prints. I ran through the calibration procedure and all seemed well. Then I printed a shot of my aunt. Red auntie! Back to the factory defaults. I tried adjusting the color space setting on the printer. Less red auntie! That'll do for now. These test prints are sucking up all my ink.

Eh. I'd like to be able to do my color correction on the monitor and have the image print with those colors. I'm not quite there yet. Since I mostly enjoy my photographs in electronic form, having the monitor calibrated is more important. But when I drop a print of my cousin and his bride into the CD mailer, I don't want them looking all red. (I inflicted CDs of photos on everyone, which they are unlikely to look at, hence a nice print to stick on the fridge.)

It's our birthday month!

This is not Monte Alban's bouquet. Not at all. (Though his birthday does fall in June too. Perhaps we should regard the baby's breath portion as his, seeing as how he's going to eat it anyway. And then barf. It's the gift that keeps on giving, really.)

Multiple sets of our friends independently came up with the "birthday month" concept. (Or maybe they stole the idea.) It started with one adult member of a household requesting that the other adult rinse the dishes (or walk the pugs, or take out the trash), and said other adult responding, "Oh, but it's my birthday month."

Depending on where one's birthday falls in the month or one's preference, your birthday month can be the calendar month or the two weeks prior and subsequent to the birthday. "Birthday month" accords special chore-dodging privileges in the mind of the birthday-haver. I think the birthday non-haver rolls his or her eyes and the birthday haver still has to do the chores, but nice try.

"Birthday month" doesn't really work in our house, because the only creature who does not have a June birthday is Sparky the cat. He's more of a chore generator than a chore doer anyway. Sparky's birthday month is unknown, but he was born in the summer too. Maybe we're all born in June.

Oz and I were discussing the feasibility of sticking the cats with the chores. He said, "Hey! It's our birthday year!"

That means no chores ever. Right?

Angle of repose

What is the angle of repose of a pile of books, mostly paperback? About ten degrees if they are in a random heap, much more if the heap has several stacks at its base.

How high can you stack mass market paperbacks, which have been read, before they tumble over with or without feline assistance? About ten books high.

How many paper grocery bags did I fill with books from the piles on the floor? Eight.

How many of those am I planning to get rid of? Two.

Another two are full of Oz's books. The other four are books I'd like to keep.

How much free space do I have on my bookshelves? None, unless you count the spots where the books aren't double deep.

How many Terry Pratchett books do we have? Not quite all of them. Yet.

Oz was resistant to Pratchett at first, but after the initial seduction by the Wee Free Men and immediate exposure to Guards! Guards! and Thief of Time, he realized that resistance was futile more or less. He's thanking me for this now. I think.

Do I still have a stack of books on the floor? Yes.

DMV

I renewed my driver's license today. The last time or two I was able to renew by mail and they kept using the same old picture from 1993. You'd think that wouldn't fly, but at the resolution they use, it's accurate enough. This time I had to take the eye test and get a new picture. This photo came out pretty cute except for the color. They seriously need to adjust the hue calibration on their camera. In the image I just about look like myself, except for a touch of pink and white raccoon to my look. My face came up really red, but the skin around my eyes came up really white. Oh well. I guess I can live with it till 2012. I wonder if they'll want to use the same picture till 2027.

(We have some really impressive lightning outside right now. The satellite signal is gone and the DSL is on the fritz. So much for high tech entertainment. At least we still have our DVDs and books.)

I went back to Ohio

Now I'm back in Virginia. One of my cousins got (re)married last week so it was a perfect opportunity to visit the extended family in Dayton and its environs. Most of my relatives live in Centerville, also known as "White-ville" according to another cousin's coworkers. And, I have to say, we are so white, it's ethnic. This possibly even applies to the non-white family members.

They sure are Northerners. The weather was pretty nice the whole time, low 80s and not very humid. Paradise by Virginia standards, but every time the Ohioans walked outside, they said, "Ugh! It's hot!" They got laughed at.

Since I've been back, I've been slinging wedding pictures onto CDs, printing a few copies of the choicer ones, and writing little notes. I have to say, we are a good-looking bunch. Or, at least, they are. I'm not in any of the pictures I have. I notice that I seem to have a lot of shots of relatives horsing around. Just what every wedding album needs.

Ah, it was a nice visit, but it's also nice to be back. Oz says that the cats really missed me.