Nor’easter
It’s a little early in the season for big nor’easters. Typically, we get them in March. I’m wondering if this is a gift from the groundhog, who, not seeing his shadow on Groundhog Day, predicted an early spring.
The city is shut down for what, 15 or 20 years ago, would have been considered just an ordinary snow storm. Nothing special. Since the advent of CNN and The Weather Channel, now anything more than a dusting is A Big Event that demands a panicked reaction from the government and the masses.
There are four inches on the ground this morning. Schools are closed throughout the region. The Daily Fishwrapper reports runs on grocery stores yesterday. Apparently, there’s no longer a banana to be found in the entire county.
I find this very weird. In other parts of the country, panicked people stock up on milk, bread, canned goods, bottled water and flashlight batteries. Here, it’s bananas. I cannot explain it.
Of course, I’m sitting on a cache of apples and pre-price increase oranges. In fact, an orange or two for breakfast sounds just dandy. I’ll be right back…
No TNUA
Yesterday’s high was in the single-digits. And, after a couple days’ respite, it was windy again. Coupled with the impending storm and the danger posed by crazed shoppers driving around stripping stores of tropical fruit, I stayed home from TNUA last night.
Last week I began for really feel it, that I’m not getting enough riding in. I’m losing tone, power and endurance in all my riding muscles. I’ve logged only 49.41 miles in nine rides to date in February, which also means I’ve missed five days of riding all together. This, after 228.75 miles in January and over 300 in December.
Oh well. I put the time to good use.
Preparations
I started Monday on the rearrange the apartment project. I’m taking my time and cleaning and sorting as I go along. Along the way I rediscovered why I don’t do heavy cleaning when I can’t open the windows.
Enough of the dust and dander lurking behind furniture and along the baseboards gets launched into the air that now, going on three days, it’s like I have hayfever going on. I’m going through Kleenex at a rate similar to when I have a cold. With windows open, it would just blow away. Instead, I’m literally waiting for the dust to settle.
It’s my own damned fault. I’ve skipped heavy cleaning for two years, so there’s plenty of accumulated dust, dander (and hair) behind everything. When I’m done though, I’ll have most of the heavy cleaning done. Come springtime, I’ll just have to do the kitchen. I just don’t feel like climbing up on the counters or pulling the appliances out right now.
On the subject of appliances, I definitely have to get rid of the freezer, and soon. The speakers and storage cart with the stereo barely fit in their alloted space with the freezer. There’s not enough space to hook up the speakers, so for the time being, my only audio is the PC and my CD/MP3 Walkman.
The sound card in my PC is one of the early Audigy cards that has both buggy firmware and buggy drivers. Playing anything is always a dicey proposition. I can never do real work and listen to anything on it. And as much as I love my CD/MP3 Walkman, I can only tolerate the headphones for a couple of hours at a whack. And there’s the headphone cord to deal with too.
There are other compromises, some small, some large, some temporary, others permanent. Many of these compromises are the reason why I had the desk across the room in the first place.
I knew the front door was drafty. I didn’t know exactly how drafty until I started sitting here. Also, instead of being right next to a radiator, I’m at the furthest point from any radiator in the apartment.
This is the only wall in the whole apartment without power. I’ve run one plain extension cord and one surge suppressor power strip around the corner to the bedroom closet. There’s an outlet in the closet for the burglar alarm, which is also housed there.
There’s going to be cable running across the floor in front of the front door. I have my choice, CATV wire, or Ethernet. The cable modem needs to be connected to the router/hub for the rest of the LAN. For now it’s Ethernet running by the door.
I’d like to get the cable modem over to the desk, though, so that I can plug it in to the UPS. No, it’s not so I can sit here and surf if the power goes out. It’s because I use Vonage VoIP for my phone service. The phone, LAN and cable modem must be powered-up for my to be able to place or take a call.
Other front door issues are that there’s only 22 inches’ clearance between the corner of the desk and the corner of the end table. The deskside trashcan doesn’t fit deskside. Instead, it’s next to the endtable, and right in front of you bidding welcome when I open the front door. Then again, it will be more convenient for junk mail.
Of course, there’s only the molding’s-width clearance between the front door and Heckle and Jeckle (my twin servers), who are now stacked instead of side-by-side. While their backsides are visible from the door, so is the side of their cases that opens for access to the guts. So that part’s a bit more convenient. I want to upgrade their hard-drives sometime this year. In this configuration, I won’t have to move them to do it.
Hmmm… Since the door isn’t bugged and the hutch on the desk blocks the motion sensor’s view of the door, if one kept a low profile and didn’t intrude more than a foot into the place, one could conceivably, steal both Heckle and Jeckle without setting off the burglar alarm. Of course, the more likely scenario is that, since the bikes will be visible from the kitchen door, some crackhead would bust in through there.
And speaking of crackheads, the way the desk is crammed into a corner by the door is exactly the way it was when I was crackhead, living on Upton Park. That didn’t occur to me until the first time I sat down here. This seems familiar, I thought. Let’s hope not too familiar.
Meanwhile, the other side of the room is vacant, save for the recycle bin, Tired Cow and Bike. The kitchen was designed before accommodations for recycle bins were required. It’s been in the living room next the deskside trashcan since I moved-in. It will have to stay somewhere proximal to the kitchen.
Tired Cow should go into the dumpster, but I just can’t part with it yet. It’ll go into the basement instead. Unless you know of anyone who wants a 180MHz Pentium-I running Windows NT4 with 128 MB of RAM and three hard drives totaling a whopping 5GB.
