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plans for a prismatic shelving unit
Thursday, September 29 2011
There were torrential downpours last night, the kind that inevitably result in power outages. Sure enough, at some point in the wee hours the smoke detectors started tweeting the message (in the old sense of that verb) that the power had died. It wasn't fixed until early in the afternoon. Driving south down Hurley Mountain Road on her way to the prison at around noon, Gretchen had to turn around and go north again because a large tree had fallen across the road and taken out the power line. That was probably what had taken out our power, which had probably lost anchor in the rain-softened soil.
In the laboratory there is a six-foot-tall shelving unit and the top edge of its back is pressed against the sloping wall-ceiling that makes so much of the space hard to utilize. Recently, though, I had an idea to fill the prism-shaped space behind this unit with another homemade shelving unit, one having three tall shelves suitable for storing large awkward boxes. The shelves would have to be different lengths because of the sloping wall-ceiling, but an effective set of shelves would be produce a lot of storage space. So today when I drove into town mostly to buy drywall paste, mold-resistant paint, and wood glue, I also bought six two by fours to serve as the framework for the shelves. Unlike other, simpler shelving units, this one was going to require a free-standing carpentry skeleton onto which the shelves themselves would rest.
When I got home, Sarah the Vegan had just arrived with takeout Chinese food from the Little Bear in Bearsville (where she is house/dog sitting for our friend Susan the memoirist). We ate in the dining room, mostly talking about a friendship Sarah has with a successful gentleman whom she doesn't find attractive (he, on the other hand, seems intent on taking the relationship to its logical extreme). What to do? She wants to be friends with the guy, but she doesn't want to lead him on. I suggested that she say she already has a boyfriend. But a better strategy might be to feign existential lesbianism.
Since the new floors went in, I've been puttering around, fixing a few little finishing details, some of which have gone unfinished for nine years. The first of these was to rip out some of the freshly-installed trim in the bedroom closet so I could put in the pipe-protecting soffit (I did most of this while the power was still out this afternoon.) This evening while Gretchen and Sarah were hanging out, I fashioned an elaborate little cover for a 90 degree turn in the hydronic pipe in a place in the bedroom normally hidden by a dresser. I made the cover out of wood and a piece of an old CD drive chassis (that's being a very usable gauge of sheet metal).
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