The Mandelbear's Musings

10:03 pm - Sorted

As near as I can tell, all the information I need for computing sales taxes has been separated from all the information I don't need, but will eventually need for computing income taxes. All of the receipts and other 2007 correspondence that I know about have been sorted.

I still need to go through the actual sales information, figure out what was paid for where, and fill in the blanks. Probably over the weekend. Yes, I should have kept better records. Dumb bear.

09:23 am - Getting it all together

Spent a few minutes this morning sorting receipts. For the first time in decades, I actually have all of last year's receipts sorted before the end of January. Cool! Of course, that doesn't include bank statements and most of the album-related stuff, but it gets a major bit of clutter off the desk. Perhaps more importantly, it keeps this year's receipts from piling up and creating more clutter.

The next major push is sales tax, which I only have about two more weeks to do. Fortunately, all I really have to do for that is to identify each sale by amount and location, so I know which county to assign it to. Should be straightforward; hopefully I can have that done by, say, Friday.

08:26 pm - Piles and piles

Today I began the annual ritual called "Sorting the Charities". It's a real pain for me to keep track of charity contributions -- many of them send a request every month! That's a lot of checkbook to check back through, and they're obviously hoping I'll miss one. (We'll ignore the fact that maybe if I paid in January, they wouldn't keep bugging me all year.)

Anyway, my technique for coping with this deluge of begging letters is simply to toss them onto a big pile and sort through them in late December, in time to write a big batch of checks during the holiday season, when I'm feeling generous.

Eventually, of course, I have to decant the pile into a box before it reaches critical mass and explodes onto the office floor. Last year it took two boxes. This year it took three.

Rather than take over a large chunk of the living room for a folding table, as I did last year, I went out to the garage and found a 2'x4' chunk of half-inch oak plywood, and set it onto a corner of the office counter weighted down with the UPS that I took out of service last night and turned off while it's waiting for a new battery. It's the corner normally occupied by the guest computer, but nobody is likely to be using it until Saturday at the earliest.

I have gotten through the oldest box, and the plywood is currently covered with some 30-odd piles of envelopes. There are a few charities that don't bother putting a logo or a return address on their envelopes -- those go straight into the recycling bag, as do the ones I know I'm not going to support this year, but that somehow slipped past me on the initial mail sort. Folks, if you want my money, you'll make it easy for me to tell who you are.

I think what I'm going to do next is go through the last box and the small pile that's accumulated in the last few weeks. Then I can give the middle box a cursory run-through in case I missed anything.

Maybe next year I'll make a file folder for every charity, keep careful track, and pay a few every month. It would make a lot of sense. Bets, anyone?

10:52pm Update: done sorting. Now I just have to find the most appropriate (not always the most recent) item to pay in each stack, possibly decide what else to drop, and write checks. Tomorrow. I also have to go through my other piles of procrastinated mail and see what needs urgent attention; fortunately these are much smaller.

03:49 pm - OK then

The Big Pile of Luggage[tm] in the bedroom closet has been Dealt With. It's nearly as high, but doesn't stick out as far, so at least it's an improvement. More than that, it's been Organized.

• Briefcases, messenger bags, and daypacks are now in The Big Suitcase, which is back up in the garage attic. The Big Suitcase was originally purchased for a trip to Japan where I had to carry some extra gear for a demo; it was cheap, flimsy, and probably wouldn't stand up to many more trips.
• Totebags, zippered totebags, dufflebags, and small shoulder bags are now in separate containers. More random luggage, actually. They're back in the closet, but stacked up neatly.
• Shoulder straps are now hanging up with the coats, snapped to a coathanger.
• Pants that no longer fit are in a couple of plastic bags. Some of them are in decent enough shape to give to Goodwill; others are better suited for being cut up for rags. A couple of size 40's in good condition have been kept -- I currently take 42, and I'm trying to lose weight. (Of course, that's what I said about the 38's, too.)
• A few items in really bad condition have been thrown away.

In addition, I've done a little more magazine and box recycling.

Current Mood: productive

01:51 pm - Seems to be the day for house-cleaning

With both me and the chaoswolf in a mood for cleaning, the game of 3D house-tetris has gotten considerably more exciting. And since our recycling bin was emptied this morning, there's actually a place to put the old magazines, cardboard boxes, and packing material.

(Brief digression: one of the UPSs in the server closet is mourning for its dead battery. Sounds like a cricket in heat. It's been ordered, darnit! Shut up already.)

I've managed to clear enough space in the garage attic for three suitcases so far, which gets them out of the bedroom closet. I think I'll take down the old, oversized rolling suitcase and stuff it full of bags and backpacks from my closet before putting it back up.

Helped the Wolfling tetris bookshelves and boxes yesterday, and pick up recycling today -- there might even be room for her fiancé when he comes down on the 15th. Meanwhile, because the Wolfling has been doing her laundry, there's finally room in the front closet for all of my CD inventory and packing materials. So one can finally get to the cookbook shelves. Yay!

And I've been making room in the studio bedroom corner for the recording system. Soon.

09:10 pm - Weekend wrap-up: Puttering along...

Modulo my walks, a drive with the flower_cat last night, and a outing with the Cat and the chaoswolf this afternoon that I'll get to later, my weekend has mostly been spent puttering around the house. That's what I do when I'm trying to avoid, you know, real work.

I've reluctantly come to the realization that, if I haven't read one of those stacked-up magazines in the decade or so they've been sitting there, I'm probably not going to get to them in the next decade, either. And the ones that I have read, that are sitting in piles in the garage attic? Recycle time.

Note to self: it's time to stop when the dust starts making you sneeze.

Today was very pleasant. At the Cat's suggestion I went out this morning and got bagels and lox for brunch. Yum. House of Bagels might not be a real New York bakery, but it's close enough. Along the way I stopped at the nearby Whole Paycheck Foods to get some nose-watering salt. I asked for "uniodized" and got a blank look, but then I noticed the three-pound boxes of kosher salt on the top shelf of the salt section. Score! Less than $3 for pure sea-salt with guaranteed, God-gets-mad-at-you-if-you-cheat no additives. )Tried it this evening: works just fine.)

After brunch the Cat and I took the Wolfling to Stanford -- it seems she's been curious about the place where her parents met and fell in love, not to mention other places on campus she's been hearing about. As it turns out, the coffeehouse appears to be either defunct or being renovated -- what used to be the main entrance is now a bike shop; the tables are there but there's no sign on the door and the place looks far too clean to be in actual use.

Then she spotted the bookstore, so we took a side-trip. It turns out that, regardless of its total absence on their web site, they do have a shelf for alumni, student, and faculty music. I'll go back during the week when there's a manager on site.

We also stopped at the museum to wander around the Rodin sculpture garden (always one of my favorites), and looked at the Quad and its centerpiece, the Memorial Church. It was locked -- I don't remember it ever being locked during my time on campus -- but the mosaics on the front are as gorgeous as ever, and you could get a glimpse of some of the stained glass through the window on the front doors.

Did I mention the Golden Bough concert last night? I thought not.

Computer geekery a post or two upwhen.

10:47 am - Boxes

I find it perversely amusing to see how much of the clutter I'm currently dealing with consists of boxes for things I didn't have to return before their warranties expired, multiple years ago.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled LJ drama.

10:06 pm - How I spent my weekend

My main line of geekiness this weekend centered around getting my former workstation, Trantor, ready to serve as a new recording machine (under the nodename Dorsai). Not as much progress as I'd hoped -- I spent quite a lot of time chasing my tail because the gigabit ethernet card on my former recording machine, Harmony, suddenly decided to be referred to as eth3 instead of eth0. WTF?

(Aside: since my internal domain is thestarport.org, all my node names are stars or planets, mostly from science fiction. Machines used primarily for audio, naturally, get names mentioned in filksongs. The laptop is Argo; you've already met Harmony and Dorsai. Most of my early workstations had names from Star Wars; Dantooine is currently being used as a print server. Tatooine, Moseisley, and Hoth are long out of service.)

Anyway, Trantor finally got renamed, and has a shiny new GigE card, and both it and Harmony have eSATA headers installed in case I want to use external hard drives recording media. Only thing left is the software, which will initially be 64studio.com (an easy upgrade from Etch). At some point I mean to try the 64-bit version on Dorsai, and also UbuntuStudio. One way or another, I'll have Dorsai in the bedroom studio and ready to record with sometime this week.

Meanwhile, I did quite a lot of uncluttering. Moved most of my inventory of CDs -- 5 boxes worth -- into the front closet (now that chaoswolf has much, though not all, of her stuff out of it), and did quite a lot of re-arranging, consolidating, and uncluttering in the office. This included moving two defunct computers (Algol and Flare) up to the attic, recycling two empty boxes that had somehow gotten stored in the attic right where I wanted to put the computers, and moving a mostly-empty shelf up two inches so I could slide a computer under it. I also got Dorsai out from under the desk to where I could work on it. Which in turn required consolidating some of the CD-shipping stuff into a file box.

I'm still left with a couple of items sitting out on chairs, including a storage drawer full of old floppy disks that no longer fits on the shelf I moved, and the box of CD-shipping stuff that was originally in the spot where I moved Dorsai.

Oh, and I finished ripping the last of the pile of CDs that's been hanging around in the office waiting to be ripped.

So although I didn't quite reach my goal of an operational recording set-up, I got quite a lot done. Not complaining.

11:15 pm - Odds, ends, and griffins

Finally figured out where my other Griffin iMic (USB audio interface) had to be: sure enough, it was in a box. I'd put it there during the massive cleaning frenzy last fall when we had our plumbing redone.

It'll be useful, perhaps, now that I've sent the other one off with the Griffin stereo mic that I'm no longer using, to somebody who shouldn't be reduced to voice-posting from her cell phone when she wants to get a song on the web. Shipped off the cute little Behringer interface with an orphan mic and preamp to somebody else in a similar position. It's good to get rid of clutter, but even better if you can find a good home for it in the process. It's called turning it into somebody else's clutter paying it forward.

Spent the last hour or so practicing with the chaoswolf. Good thing. I tend to get distracted; the more I practice the less likely that I'll screw up on stage at Loscon. The Wolfie still needs some work on timing, but she's close enough for filk.

I should go crash now. But I won't.

Current Mood: productive

10:21 pm - Fighting the clutter

It's been a while since I posted about "clutter", and at least as long since I did anything about it. It's been sneaking up on me.

So I spent an hour or two this afternoon cleaning up my side of the bedroom, sorting loose objects into some conveniently-available shoeboxes and generally trying to make room for the computer I hope to install there tomorrow for recording. And while I've been sitting here reading LJ, I've also been doing some long-needed maintenance on some of my web files, and simultaneously ripping the sizeable stack of CDs (mostly Janis Ian, from last year's holiday sale) that's been sitting for months on top of the computer I hope to install in the bedroom.

You see how it all fits together? It's all one big, um,... cluttered web of dependencies.

I'm still looking for one of my two Griffin iMic USB interfaces (the other is sitting on my desk, part of the clutter).

09:03 pm - The rest of the day

After lunch (which consisted of half-a-dozen potstickers and half a block of tofu to use up the rest of the dipping sauce) I went out for a drive with the flower_cat. On the way home we stopped at Bed, Bath and Beyond to buy a new quilt for our bed. Most of what they had was appallingly expensive, but they had a nice black, king-sized comforter on sale for $55. Less a 20%-off coupon. Win.

After that we stopped at Cosentino's -- the Cat's favorite upscale grocery store -- to get ingredients for dinner. Which chaoswolf cooked! It was delicious -- a tomato, mozzerella, and basil salad (which the Wolf ate!), and an odd but tasty concoction of kielbasa, hot and mild Italian sausage, potatoes, sweet onion, and garlic baked in a big package of crimped Aluminum foil. So basically steamed. Yummy.

Found my missing arch support, so I won't have to buy another pair. Found it in the trash, where I had tossed it along with a couple of genuinely dead insoles from other shoes.

Got my lab results back from Kaiser -- or at least, on the web. Their website sucks. The results weren't all that great. LDL low (35, should be >40), triglicerides high (292, should be <199; still, a third of what they were 6 months ago, so the new statin is working). The disturbing one was creatine kinase: 437, should be <200. Could mean heart problems, though there are other possible explanations. The shoulder problems? We'll see; I'll probably hear from my doctor next week.

Made a little progress on clutter in the bedroom, mainly triage on footgear. Tossed some shoes that were clearly dead, and packed a bag of old-but-useable pairs for Goodwill. Swapped quilts.

Some more progress on re-organizing the fileserver; things are pretty much all in the right places now, except for moving a couple of CVS modules around. CVS, unfortunately, doesn't handle this kind of thing very well, which is why I'm looking at replacing it with git or svk. Anyway, things are ready for tomorrow morning's backup snapshot. Which will be archived, seeing as it's the first Sunday in the month.

11:34 pm - 15 more minutes in cyberspace

Copied most of the remaining directories -- all the ones that matter, anyway. The filksong directory was the big one; there was a nasty moment when I realized that I'd copied it onto itself by way of a symlink I'd forgotten about, but yesterday's mirror confirmed that there was no harm done.

You can plan a move like that for weeks, but as Patton said, no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. There's a reason why I make backups. And why the mirror is mounted read-only except when I'm copying into it.

There will be a fair amount of cleanup later: chasing down all the myriad symlinks, cross-references, and so on. Let's hear it for grep and find.

07:25 pm - Another 15 minutes in cyberspace

This is basically an update of this post where I explain my plan for re-arranging the fileserver to bring sanity to my backups.

The major change comes about from noticing that /vv/srv already has a fair amount of stuff in it that doesn't need to be backed up, and isn't worth moving. In particular, it has the mail spool, the news spool, and the Debian mirror. Ok then.

So the local collection of websites and other things that I might otherwise have moved into /vv/srv now goes into /vv/share, which makes more sense anyway because it's mostly the kind of stuff that Microsoft and Apple put into their "sharing" control panel applet -- web server and file server data.

It's an open question, of course, whether personal websites like chaoswolf.org and steve.savitzky.net belong in /vv/share or /vv/users. At the moment, it doesn't matter: they're both in the same partition, and both get backed up and archived in the same way.

So the project for this week is to actually, like, move the data. It's a little more work than it looks at first glance, because I also have to make the same set of moves on the backup drive in order to keep from making duplicate copies of tens of gigabytes of audio. And with anything moving out of my home directory, I also have to move the CVS repository tree as well. The reason for doing it now, apart from getting it over and done with at last, is to get it into the monthly backup snapshot on Sunday morning.

10:19 pm - Sunday evening wrap-up

After my walk and a little lunch, the flower_cat and I went out for a drive. Turned around earlier than usual because I was feeling sleepy; we both collapsed on the bed when we got home.

Neither the kids nor I had managed to get our bedrooms picked up, so I didn't have to pay up, but we went out for sushi anyway on the excuse that the Y.D. was getting A's in three or four of her classes. Worked for me; the Cat was in no shape to cook dinner, though she felt a lot better this morning than she had for the last few days. We're guessing it was a combination of an arthritis flare-up and some flu-like virus.

The Cat was annoyed because none of her favorites -- oysters, soft-shell crab, octopus -- turned up on the boats, and she couldn't attract anyone's attention to order some. For some reason it never occurred to her to ask the assertive teenager next to her to intercede, in spite of the fact that the Y.D. was, as usual, the only one ordering. I'd have told her, but as usual didn't realize how upset she was getting. I'm afraid I'm not very perceptive about what people are thinking.

In spite of not finishing the job in the bedroom, I did get a little picking-up done in both the office and the bedroom, plus about half an hour filing 2007 receipts. Recycled some years-old magazines that I was unlikely ever to so much as glance at, and a sizeable stack of blank paper and empty notebooks from years ago. I can use the shelf space for other things, thanks.

Only minor progress dealing with the clutter in my file server. This week, hopefully, I'll get a little more accomplished in that direction.

09:52 pm - The weekend challenge

We were supposed to have Stanley Steamer in to clean the carpets upstairs in the kids' rooms, which were supposed to have been picked up. Ha! OK, my fault for not checking last night. And vacuumed -- I was pretty sure they needed vacuuming, but the flower_cat assured me that it wasn't necessary. I understand your memory is the second thing to go as you get older. I forget the first.

Meanwhile, the office is a mess, and it would be nice to get our bedroom carpet cleaned, too.

So...

OK kids -- super_star_girl, chaoswolf -- this means you. $20 each if you can pick up and vacuum your rooms by Sunday night. Dinner out at Kobe if you can do it by dinnertime. And an extra $10 each if I don't have our bedroom in the same state. (The office will take longer, but almost everything on the floor is in boxes now.) "Pick up", by the way, means all loose stuff in boxes. Not piled on top of the bed or shoved under the desk. You can put the boxes on top of the bed, or whatever, on the day the cleaners come.

10:04 pm - 15 minutes in cyberspace

The purpose of today's computer clutter control is to get a start on my near-term goal of bringing some order and sanity to the crawling chaos that is the household file server. The non-geekish may want to skip this one.

The main motivations for this are the recent disk crash on the workstation, trantor (no lasting harm done, but there's nothing like a near miss to make you more cautious), and the fact that I've acquired a significant amount of offsite storage to use for backups.

In order to do offsite backups, I have to make a clear distinction between private stuff that has to be encrypted offsite, and the public and semi-public stuff most of which is on the web already and can simply be mirrored. Then there's the pile of stuff that's mirrored from elsewhere, including the Debian mirror, the collection of ripped CDs, and so on.

Right now these are all jumbled together, which leaves a few anomalies like saving monthly snapshots of things that will never change.

The main accomplishment for yesterday was writing the scripts to back up the configuration files in /etc on all the servers, and putting them in /home/Config.

The main accomplishment for today was setting up /vv/users and figuring out what goes there, and figuring out how to split up the current /vv/local/starport. Not much else, but at least now I know where things belong.

08:43 pm - 15 minutes?

All it takes to stay ahead of clutter is 15 minutes/day. According to my handy LJ tag search, the last time I spent that time was April 13th. I have just spent roughly the last two hours decluttering the office, and the results are barely noticable.

(Of course, that's partly because one of the two boxes I took up to the attic came out of the filing cabinet -- all of the tax returns and raw data for the 1990's. That was so I would have room for the 2006 file, so that I'd have someplace to put the rapidly-accumulating 2007 data. But I haven't started filing that, yet.)

In order to finish off the box of 2006 everything-but-the-taxes, I had to add the banking and investment statements. Which were in a pile under the 2007 statements. Which were being overtowered by the pile of charity requests for the last four months or so. Which are now in a box that is sitting where the 2006 box used to be. Which is on top of the previous batch of charity requests. (We save up most charity requests and sort through them in December when we're feeling generous and have a better idea of how much money we're ending up with. We may have to distribute the load better, or at least do more triage on the fly.)

The result is that several piles are shorter, and there's more room in the filing cabinet, but the total number of boxes of largely-unsorted stuff has remained roughly constant. Discouraging.

Elsewhen today, I spent a couple of hours uncluttering the file server. Next post upwhen, to make it more easily skipped by those not interested in the details of which directory ends up where.

I'm estimating that we'll be in this house for roughly another decade (after which we will most likely be forced to sell it to pay for our retirement). It will probably take us approximately that long to clean out the garage attic.

12:17 am - And cabbages, and kings

Which is to say that a great many chores and to-do list tasks got done this afternoon and evening, but very little actual work. No more recording, for example.

But I did, finally, go through the Pile of Stuff to the Left of the Keyboard. tPoSttLotK is where I tend to toss paperwork and such that doesn't have to be handled immediately, but looks as though it's going to need attention in the next month or so. What this often means is that stuff gets ignored until it's no longer relevant, but in this case I found a couple of health-related receipts that I'd been looking for for a couple of weeks. And a great deal of clutter has been eliminated, though there's still a small pile of things that will need attention soon.

Going back in time to the start of the afternoon, I found out that my car is waiting for some parts -- it'll be ready tomorrow. The front struts and bushings will get fixed under warranty; flushing and replacing the transmission fluid, power-steering fluid, and coolant will cost me.

Tried to set rat traps in the garage attic, and failed miserably, nearly getting a finger broken for my trouble. I'll go get glue traps on the way home tomorrow.

Went out for dinner with the flower_cat. We wanted to try someplace new, so of course the kids wanted to stay home and have something familiar. OK with us -- we went to Los Gatos to try Transilvania, a Romanian place we'd been eyeing for months. It is to yum!

We split an appetizer of grilled portabello mushrooms with marinara sauce and melted blue cheese, and a glass of a heavy, dark red wine whose name I unfortunately failed to catch. Then I had the sarmale (ground beef, pork, and rice rolled in pickled cabbage leaves, served with polenta, pickled cabbage, and sour cream on the side), and Colleen had the bulsz (polenta layered and baked with romano and mozarella cheese and served with a dollop of sour cream on top). Finished off splitting a serving of savarina -- sponge cake soaked with syrup and rum, with whipped cream and cherry preserve.

After dinner I got DNS going on the interim gateway (took all of 10 minutes), followed by the aforementioned clutter reduction.

And now it's time for bed. Past time.

07:56 pm - tracks and taxes

Spent the afternoon working on "Guilty Pleasures" and "Someplace in the Net"; doing new guitar and vocal tracks for both. I find that my head is in a really different place when I'm concentrating on a guitar part with no vocals -- definitely a light trance state when I'm doing it right. Doesn't keep me from blowing it occasionally, but, yeah, it's different.

Also added a "bongoid" percussion track to "Guilty Pleasures" -- I felt that it needed something. "Bongoid" is me banging on the back of a guitar -- sounds a lot like bongos only a little lower and more mellow. In contrast to Joyce's djembe that we've used in concert, it's not only a lot quieter but it has a slightly "woody", tone, with less ring. ([ogg] [mp3] -- comments welcome.)

We went out for sushi (celebrating super_star_girl's 15th birthday and improved grades and the chaoswolf's engagement) with a dump CD in the car player. The flower_cat noticed that my vocals were lower on the first verse of "Stuck Here" than on the rest of it, so I just fixed that.

The Cat is still feeling arthritic, and has gone to bed. So no more tracks tonight. There's a parent-teacher conference Wednesday; I may use that as an excuse to take another day. Anyway, I really only have vocals on "I Wanna Be a Webmaster" and "TEOTWAWKI", plus a percussion track on the latter, left for me to do. Then there's editing, the possibility of a harmony part from cflute on "Someplace In the Net", and maybe some more chorus parts on "Bugs" and "Daddy's World" -- I think it would be neat to give the chaoswolf a crack at those, since I wrote "Daddy's World" for her and it's not as if she doesn't know it.

Put together a box and started putting away the non-tax receipts from 2006. With a little luck I should be able to get started on data-entry this week. I also have to get the preorder checks deposited and the rest of the data-entry done. I've been lazy.

Did I mention taxes? OK, did I mention album-cover layout? Did I mention that I'm going to be busy for the next three weeks? I haven't dropped LJ, but my flist and Groklaw are the only blogs I read regularly at the moment.

Current Mood: accomplished

11:21 pm - Tire(d) tracks: my brain is fried

It's pretty clear that I'm not likely to get much more done today. If I persist, I'm likely to do something stupid. Still, the day hasn't been entirely unproductive.

Thanks to a little experimentation with compression, it looks as though "Paper Pings", "Stuck Here", and "Uncle Ernie's" won't have to be re-recorded. Stick a fork in 'em. I've done preliminary merging on "Little Computing Machine" and "Mushrooms" -- they just need a little volume adjustment and reverb.

Spent a lot of time -- too much, really -- beating on "I Wanna Be a Webmaster". It's not salvageable, but the experimentation was worthwhile. So that's six tracks worked on today.

Spent about half an hour organizing tax stuff. Not done, but it helps; I think I have almost all of the 2006 receipts filed now, and ready for data entry.

07:07 pm - The Time it is a-Changing

This morning, after getting up significantly later than usual (even factoring in the extra hour due to the time change), I finished up work on the Tres Gique concert at Consonance. This consisted mostly of fixes to scripts and makefiles; not surprisingly a couple of bugs showed up. There will be a little more hacking involved around cflute and tibicina's set, since I don't have distribution rights on the songs. That means I'll have to keep them out of the index, which in turn means I have to write an index.html file rather than relying on Apache's automatic one. Well, it's not particularly hard -- mostly cut-and-paste.

After that I went out for a four-mile walk. The weather has turned warm over the last week or so -- it's entirely possible that we've seen the last wet, cold week of the season.

As for album status, so far I've worked on four tracks today: "High Barratry", "Mushrooms", "Pigeon Flight", and "I Wanna be a Webmaster". "High Barratry" and "Mushrooms" were the only ones that involved more than tweaks. This leaves me with 7 tracks essentially done, 5 needing little more than editing, and 2 wanting new parts, and 4 wanting old parts rerecorded. I'll be taking a day off this week (having to take my car in for service makes a good excuse).

8 new preorders on paper, and 2 by PayPal since Consonance. The main task now is to set up a mailing list.

Spent a little while unpacking the last bits from Consonance -- I'd tossed my suitcase under the bed and collapsed in a heap after the con. Also boxed up the last of my old T-shirts and took three boxes up to the attic. Did I mention that I bought more banker's boxes? Office Max was having a 3-for-2 sale.

Current Mood: accomplished

04:36 pm - The day so far

Spent much of the morning puttering. In this case, installing a couple of new coat hangers in the office.

Had a late breakfast/early lunch, and went out for my walk and some errands at about 1:30. Any benefit I got from the exercise was probably cancelled out by the fact that the Post Office is only a couple of blocks from Yum Yum Donuts. I had two (chocolate and maple French -- my favorites).

Walked for about an hour and twenty minutes on the Los Gatos Creek Trail. Twenty years ago I was working at Zilog, a short walk from a section of the trail that I rarely get to anymore. I am gradually getting back in shape.

11:08 pm - Saturday wrap-up

I did, finally, get the new recording box installed. It took an extra trip back to the "office", which has a monitor and keyboard, because I'd neglected to set up the BIOS not to stop on errors. But after that, the afternoon wasn't particularly productive.

At about a quarter to five we set out toward Menlo Park for my office holiday party at Flea Street Café. Good food, great company, great conversation. Oddly, music didn't come up much at all.

Came home on surface streets -- a very pleasant little drive. Lots of pretty lights.

02:00 pm - [15 minutes]

It's actually been more like two hours -- I've been reorganizing the stuff on the floor in the "recording studio" area of the bedroom, trying to find a place for the new system. It's a lot bigger than the little fanless one, so it can't sit on the shelf anymore. That, in turn, causes the inevitable chain-reaction of moving stuff around. There's probably another hour's worth of work in there before I can actually use the space again.

I can't procrastinate too long, though -- there's still stuff on the bed.

10:34 pm - Puttering

This morning's puttering has involved putting clean dishes away, washing pots and pans, running a load of laundry, getting the kids to their respective destinations, paying bills, and getting a little programming done. This afternoon was more programming.

Somewhere along the course of the week I've also managed to request concert slots for Loscon and Consonance, ping co-conspirators collaborators about harmony vocals and the album cover, and track down the new zoo cards that I'll need to spend tomorrow at the San Francisco Zoo with the chaoswolf for "Zooparent Day", since she "adopted" a tiger for her birthday.

I'm not sure any of this really counts toward [15 minutes] of clutter reduction, though it helps in a general way.

07:48 pm - Weekend Wrap-up; [15 minutes]

Got in a good walk this morning, then stopped in at Guitar Showcase to see what was in their consignment shop. Since percussion tracks were on my mind, I picked up a tambourine (which I'll need for "TEOTWAWKI" and possibly "Bound for Hackers' Heaven") and a little wooden gizmo that's basically spoons for cheaters. Also a purple guitar stand. It matches the purple music stand perfectly, and the flower_cat thinks they look better in the living room than the black ones. I didn't think she'd object; she's the one who has to look at them all day...

Went out for a moderately-long drive in the afternoon, going through Los Gatos, Saratoga, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and finally back to San Jose by way of El Camino Real and the Alameda. It's always interesting to see what businesses are prospering, which have failed, and what new things have replaced them. A couple of new restaurants we'll have to try.

[15 minutes] Spent a little more than the cannonical time tidying up in the bedroom, and tracking down the last of the undersized shirts to go into the recycling bags, which I dragged out to the van. A little more time shuffling stuff around in the "studio" area to get things out of the way.

Current Mood: content

07:13 pm - [15 minutes] Saturday evening update

After a couple of hours of singing on top of what might be a bit of a cold, my throat is sore enough that I'm not going to do any more singing tonight. Maybe tomorrow, or I may stick to guitar work.

Went out to the Elephant Bar restaurant for dinner with the flower_cat and super_star_girl. Good place if you get there early; it starts to fill up around 6pm. The chaoswolf is still out with jilara at the Felton Highland Games, or maybe doing something afterwards. Not my day to watch her. (She just got home.)

[15 minutes] -- put in 20-30 minutes picking up in the bedroom, especially the closet and "studio" areas.

Current Mood: satisfied

09:36 pm - [15 minutes] clutter: office

More on the receipt box in the office -- essentially empty now except for a few warranty-related receipts and a couple of other items that are a little hard to classify. Of course, those always end up getting stuffed into odd corners and turning up years later, but...

09:06 pm - [15 minutes] clutter: office and b/r closet

Actually finished a magazine box in the office -- at least to the point where almost everything left in it, a stack about 1" high, is warranty-related receipts. OK, I can deal with that. 4.5 magazine boxes to go; only one has stuff from 2006.

In the bedroom, I now have the (currently empty) gig bag and the (currently empty) hardshell case for the Ovation in the closet, down on the floor behind my coats where they won't take up any space that the flower_cat might want to use for stuff on hangers. That leaves the (long-term-loan) Applause under the bed, and the Martin in its case leaning against the wall. That's ok; I'll be needing Snuggles (the Martin) for recording soon, but don't want her getting dusty.

10:41 am - [15 minutes] clutter in the closet, part 2

Finished (more or less) going through the shirts and pants on the lower bar in the closet. Found a few more tote bags. There are still a lot of shirts on the upper bar that no longer fit; probably this afternoon.

07:14 pm - [15 minutes] clutter control in the closet

Spent a good deal more than the cannonical 15 minutes mucking out my side of the bedroom closet, after an anguished wail from the flower_cat last night complaining about the three guitar cases, various tote bags, the 15" monitor that somebody had expressed an interest in months ago and never picked up, and the big pile of luggage.

Never mind that everything but the monitor is in my half of the closet. I hauled out two guitars and a gig bag last night, and this morning I moved the monitor out to a chair in the living room -- up for grabs, people! free to a good home -- and did triage on the tote bags.

Tote bags fall into four categories: especially large ones, those with unusual features (zippers, pockets, or waterproofing), those with sentimental value (pretty pictures, SF conventions, etc.), and junk. There were also some broken backpacks and the like in the pile of luggage. The non-broken ones will also go into the living room.

This evening I spent more time trying to identify pants and shirts that no longer fit. There are a lot of them -- evidently I thought I'd get back down to a 34" waist or a 15.5" collar some day. Those all went into a lawn-trash bag for Goodwill; I'll probably need another before I'm through.

Later tonight or tomorrow I need to finish the shirts and pants and start on the luggage.

10:34 pm - [15 minutes] uncluttering

Spent my 15 or so minutes today uncluttering the receipt box. A never-ending task, I'm afraid. And the dishwasher still has to be emptied.

11:13 pm - Talk like a pi rate

... that would be, for example, 30rpm = pi radians/sec.

[15 minutes] Not much uncluttering tonight; I'm not sure one can legitimately count the regularly-scheduled weekly task of taking out the trash and the recycling. Takes more than 15 minutes, though.

[album] Started writing the track descriptions. About 2/3 of the way through the list now.

[work] Spent most of the day deep in conversation with mr_kurt and finagler (sometimes one or the other, sometimes both; we talked about halfway through lunchtime as well). Got quite a lot hashed out about how to build elaborate structures out of content-addressed immutable blobs plus a few auxiliary structures. Hacked and slashed our way to a considerable simplification. Can't say much more until we publish it, unfortunately. But it'll be cool.

10:36 pm - [15 minutes]

25 more minutes of excavating in the receipt box has definitely made a noticable dent; the box now looks merely "full" rather than "overstuffed". The office is still a disaster area, of course. And unlike previous years I'm making an effort to unfold folded-up full-page receipts, which makes the folders thinner. So there's a chance it may actually fit in the box this year.

The office and garage are still disasters, of course.

10:12 pm - [15 minutes] clutter reduction

Made a little more progress on the pile of receipts. Progress still barely visible, but at least I have a little momentum going. Didn't do anything yesterday :=P.

10:11 pm - [15 minutes] Clutter reduction

Following ravan's example, I'm trying to devote at least 15 minutes / day to clutter reduction. Spent about 20 minutes just now sorting some of the pile of receipts that have accumulated since the beginning of the year. I should have been putting them in their proper file folders all along, but I hadn't put away last year's until a few days ago. Looks like there are several hours' work to go on that project.

Also did some yard work: specifically attacking grass and weeds in the front yard. Again, some progress; more to go. I'm not going to count laundry or dishes toward clutter reduction; I've been doing those all along.