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wall palimpsest
Friday, September 9 2011
Gretchen had obtained some great tickets for a WNBA game down in Newark (for some reason the WNBA has been evicted from Madison Square Garden for the season). She and two friends would sit with their feet on the court beneath the basket on one end of the court. Corey Booker, the mayor of Newark, would eventually show up, and Gretchen would even get to exchange a few words with her basketball hero Tamika Catchings (she's on the Indiana team, which was playing New York). Later the three would go out for Ethiopian food in Newark and it would prove too spicy (and, based on what I would end up seeing in a styrofoam box, the leftovers only marginally transportable).
Meanwhile I've been preparing the west half of the south wall of the laboratory for a new set of shelving. I dismantled all the old ad hoc shelving, which had consisted mostly of a workstation featuring a caseless-PC. This PC had allowed me to plug in boards or tap into a PC power supply, though it has always been an old PC (based on a vintage-1998 AMD K6 processor), and I'd been using it less and less, and mostly just for the power supply. I used to do all my soldering over there as well, but now I do that stuff at the north end of the laboratory, where I can quickly consult the web or plug into an Arduino. With all the shelving gone, I've had to clean up the wall, filling all the drill holes and repairing the cracks in the drywall. In the laboratory I prefer the walls to be palimpsest of their experiences, so instead of smoothly spackling-over the holes (and I don't actually have any spackle), I've been filling them with wads of toilet paper mixed with wood glue. This leaves behind an indication of what was there, an indication that can be very subtle and ghostly once it's all repainted white.
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