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prism-shaped spaces
Thursday, April 29 2021
[REDACTED]
The day was warm and pleasant, as days often are in late April. Both Gretchen and Powerful went off to separate places for dinner, leaving me alone by myself at the house for a time, where I ate sandwiches made of bagels, vegan cheese, tomato, lettuce, and high-end mustard, exactly as I used to do back when it was just me and Gretchen living in this house and she would go have dinner with one of her friends. The coronavirus and Powerful had largely crushed that pattern, but now that we're all vaccinated, we can act like the coronavirus is no longer much of a threat.
Despite my return to drinking alcohol, I'd been avoiding drinking on Thursdays. But with Gretchen and Powerful out of the house for some number of hours, it seemed to make sense that I should take advantage of the empty house and drink alone. And so I did.
The laboratory is over the garage and is shaped like prism, with a floor, two triangle-shaped vertical walls at the north and south end, and two rectangular ceiling-walls that slope at a 45 degree angle from the roof ridge to the floor. Producing storage space in a room with this shape requires the design of custom shelving that reaches up to wherever the ceiling is. A shelf near the center of the laboratory can be quite high, but then there will be a prism-shaped space behind it that requires special shelving to make efficient use of it. Our old friend Deborah gave me a nice six-foot-tall steel shelving unit. In the prism-shaped void behind it, I made a set of custom shelves designed to compelely utilize it all, accessible from either side. Similarly, there has long been a prism-shaped void behind the dining room table Ray and Nancy gave me more than 18 years ago and which sits near the center of the east ceiling-wall. Part of that space is occupied by the wheeled storage solutions I could roll into it, but a smaller prism-shaped void remained unused over that. Today I tried to make use of that space by creating a shelf on the back of the table. I used some stout threaded supports, the kind used to put bicycles on a wall, to hold a strip of plywood stiffened by a two by two. But those supports weren't as stiff as I'd hoped, and when I loaded up the shelf with a bunch of old keyboards (many of them mechanical IBM AT keyboards I don't want to throw away), it began to sag. Clearly I would need something better to make effective use of that prism-shaped space.
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