"You gonna get another job?"...

[Volpone]

Everyone tells you how having pets will reduce your stress and make you live longer. Clearly the Experts don't actually own pets. 11pm. Time for bed. So I go to turn off all the lights and tuck myself in. Of course this means The Dog wants to go Outside. So instead I go back to the computer and fuck off for another 20 minutes or so. I hear The Dog barking so I think she's ready to come In. No, she's off somewhere, barking at something. Meanwhile, the golden retriever the neighbor is babysitting is also Out and proceeds to bark at me. By the time I get all this untangled and manage to coax The Dog back In, The Cat is at the back door and I have to keep him from getting Out as we come In. I succeed, but of course he manages to bugger off 10-15' and then just stop right in my way and act shocked and offended when I step on his tail. Meanwhile, as I'm typing this to come down from all that stress, The Dog barks at...something. I have no fucking idea. Has she hoarded a rawhide that The Cat got too close to? Who fucking knows. The point is, they only way owning pets reduces your blood pressure is when you put a gun in your mouth and blow the back of your skull out, allowing the blood to all go somewhere instead of into the rage furnace that comes from constantly dealing with pet fuckery.

 

[jack]

I haven't owned a pet in a while now. It's actually a relief.

 

[Volpone]

The heatwave finally broke--but it is going out kicking and screaming and determined to crush my spirit. Yesterday was unexpectedly below 90 and 4 days next week are supposed to be below 90. Today is supposed to be below 90 as well, so I was planning to go outside actually enjoy doing some outdoor chores. Then I got back from the afternoon dog walk and it was currently 90 out of 89. Had some errands to run. Got back and it was up to 92. Humidity is low and it's actually fine to do stuff outside, but it's the principle: Fuck you, you fucking fucks. It's supposed to only get to 89 today. Why is it 5:45 in the afternoon and it's 92?!

 

[Volpone]

Bleah. One of my projects is organizing the basement. Or more accurately, I've decided to turn part of the basement into a 20th century video rental store. I don't do streaming and since there are no video stores, I don't ever rent movies. I guess I could get a library card and get movies from the library, but it isn't the same--wandering around, looking at the boxes, picking one out and renting it, dropping it in the drop box. So it hit me I could keep one side of my basement for basement stuff and put up a divider and make the other half into a video store museum. And then if I want to watch a movie I can go down and pick one out. (That's part of the problem--I have movies I'd like to own, but I only have a finite amount of shelf space in the living room. A "video store" in the basement would solve that.)

But it is an overwhelming task. For various reasons, the side that I want to be the video store is the side I put all my existing shelves and cabinets etc on, so it's all got to go over to the other side. And I'll have to figure out how to fit it in with the stuff already piled against that wall. On top of that, when one of the guys renting shed space abandoned his car he left boxes and boxes of tools and stuff that I had to get out of the shed so I could clean it up. Some of it is probably worth keeping, so I've got to go through all that. Then there's the boxes and boxes of stuff that I decided to salvage from the last house I bought--stuff like file folders and camera tripods, DVD-VCR combo players, etc. And finally there's boxes and boxes of stuff that I used to renovate the place--cleaning supplies, power tools, paint supplies--you name it. So it's really just a miserable chore. Add to that that a storm came out of nowhere and is putting me into cocooning mode and that The Dog isn't bothered by many things, but when the shelter got her she had heartworm and apparently she spent 6 months in a crate in the basement of her foster home while she was recovering from heartworm, so she not only won't go in the basement, me being in the basement for extended periods is one of the few things that upsets her and makes her nervous.

Still...I've got at least 45 minutes before dinner and nothing else to do, so I guess I should get back down there a bit. How do you eat the elephant? One bite at a time.

 

[Lanzman]

Same problem I faced clearing out four U-Haul pods and getting the stuff into the apartment's attic, the garage, or now our shed. Just do it a bit at a time until it's done. It took us what, three years to finally clear the last pod? Something like that.

 

[Volpone]

Bleah. Decisions, decisions...complicated by OCD tendencies. Basement cleaning was a lot more productive than I thought it would be, so I've got some positive momentum on that. But it's also nice enough today to work on my TARDIS so I was all set to do that (more on that later), but I realized I also have a partially mowed lawn that could use my attention. So now I've got to choose one for starters.

The TARDIS is around 12 years old. It's an outdoor TARDIS so the elements have wrought havoc on it. Multiple repairs and waterproofing efforts have occurred during that time. It's also been moved halfway across the country and then 3 miles down the road a few years later. None of that has done its structural integrity any favors. At first it sat on a plastic sheet footprint, initially on bare earth but later with a brick under each corner. After the big move it sat on a concrete parking space. This looked nice and seemed like a good idea but in reality it allowed water to pool at the base instead of being absorbed into the ground so all the wood rotted from the bottom. When I got to the latest location I thought I repaired the base and I moved it back onto grass. But apparently the existing rot carried over to the repairs. And the ground underneath settled at different rates (even with pavers under the corners), creating warping. So I'm going to have to somehow get the whole structure up in the air so I can construct a new base under it. I have a plan, but I'm sure it is going to involve a lot of sweating and cursing and has a good chance of failure.

But I've recovered from the afternoon patrol, so I guess I should get to work.

 

[Volpone]

Decided to mow. Made a dent in what remained before it started to rain. After it got heavy enough to abandon mowing I decided to work on the TARDIS, but in the time it took to put away the mower it got heavy enough that it was pointless to try to do any outside work. So now I'm taking a quick break before heading down into the basement.

Oh. Big fun: I realized the boxes in the hall closet WILL fit in the kitchen cabinets. So I need to move those into the kitchen so I can move the boxes from the basement into the hall closet.

 

[Volpone]

Procrastination* anecdote: Now that I don't work nights and, indeed, my time is my own, I'm starting to settle into a fairly comfortable routine. Got hygiene, breakfast, news, etc, done in time to walk The Dog and still have an hour or so before lunch. So I decided to get back to work on the lawn. But we had some rain yesterday and so a few small branches were down. This spring I finally had time to burn a brush pile that had gotten bigger than my garage and grass is finally starting in where it was, so I'm loathe to start a new one until fall, so I gathered up all the branches, broke them down and burned them in the fire pit. Since I had a fire going and this had taken up a good chunk of my pre-lunch lawn mowing time, I decided to start lugging trash up from the basement organization project to throw in the trash cans. But once I got down there, I spotted this big rechargeable worklight one of my shed renters had left and remembered I'd meant to get it on the USB charger last night, so I decided to bang that out before tackling the trash. Also took up some cleaning supplies and other items I'd decided belonged upstairs. As I'm headed to the computer I'm trying to find the charging port on the light and am stopped. It has an old-school power cable like a laptop or some other electronics that charge with a transformer built into the plug. I head back down, thinking I'll see if I have one the right size in my old electronics box but then I get the bright idea to just search through the boxes of junk my shed renter left because the cord is probably in there.

Ultimately, I ate lunch a half hour late, didn't get any grass cut, didn't take out any trash, and didn't find the light's charging cord. Now I'm back from the afternoon dog patrol and gathering my strength to finally go tackle the lawn.

*OK, "procrastination" isn't the right word, "getting sidetracked."