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don't buy bulky materials for projects you'll build 'some day'
Tuesday, September 12 2023
I drove out to the abandoned bluestone quarry again this afternoon to get more rocks for various cabin projects, some of which I might not have yet even imagined. It's pretty common to find spiders or ants under rocks as I'm taking them (I always apologize, and if there are too many I leave the rock, though my disturbance of their home must be a terrible setback for them). But on this salvaging mission I found that nearly every rock had at least one large cricket lodged beneath it.
It's been hard to develop the necessary motivation to work on the garage cleaning project, which is focused for now on the large platform-like shelf on the garage's east wall. I eventually managed to get everything off it and then clean it, which was important because some small mammalian critter had been living up there, shitty little pellets, and gnawing on acorns. I even found a semi-mummified mouse corpse.
When working on such things, I find it's best if I don't make it into a purely cleaning and organizing task. If I allow myself to get distracted, say, building shelving or doing the detail work of salvaging some long-forgotten piece of junk that I've uncovered in the process, this can provide the motivation to do the less interesting work of cleaning an organizing. But even that work has at least satisfying results, which then snowballs as I gradually become addicted to producing such results. By the end, I'm usually a little disappointed there's no more work left to do.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here. I worked on the garage in two sprints, one in the late afternoon and another in the evening (until a little after Gretchen returned from her Tuesday prison classes). At the time I was taking careful measurements for a set of wooden brackets I'll be installing above the large platform-like shelf. I want something to hold all the long (ten to sixteen foot) lumber that I've had to store on the floor (as a floor; actually walk on it). I bought all that lumber years and years ago for some project that I've forgotten. I think it was to build an elaborate insulated lid for the greenhouse's lower windows that would automatically cover them at night and then open in the day to gather more passive solar radiation. Since I will probably never build such a thing, I should find some use for that lumber and try, in the future, to only buy bulky materials for things I am definitely about to build. The price of having to stumble over that lumber for years was probably not worth even the value of the thing I intended to build had I actually built it.
I was a little surprised to find that I could already download the Barbie movie from Bittorrent. I mostly did so so that I could watch the trippy sequence where Ken sings his song, the one written by Mark Ronson. After having watched most of it, I'm not sure how exactly I feel about the movie. It's not quite as good as the hype had led me to believe, but it might well end up in the canon with other movies that switch between magical lands and ordinary reality, such as Alice in Wonderland, the Wizard of Oz, and the Matrix. Interestingly, though, in Barbie, Barbieland seemed to have been modeled on Los Angeles, complete with a its own Venice and Hollywood hills (which also includes a sort of Mt. Rushmore).
The large platform-like shelf on the garage's east wall after I cleaned it. Note the brackets near the ceiling for very long lightweight materials such as pipe and surplus clapboards.
Click to enlarge.
A semi-mummified mouse found on the large shelf.
Click to enlarge.
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