dreamshark, posts by tag: stuff - LiveJournal

 Taking advantage of the spring cleaning urge by tackling my closets, looking for stuff to donate to Goodwill. I managed to fill a couple of medium sized boxes with decent donatable clothing and two grocery bags with rags and throwaways. According to The Internet, larger thrift stores don't mind getting rags - they actually have avenues to recycle them that ordinary folk have no access to. At least ever since the old Rag Stock went hipster upscale and stopped taking donations of rags. Anybody else remember when it was called The Rag Factory? 

I also unearthed a surprising number of perfectly wearable, surprisingly nice looking pieces of clothing that had just gotten log-jammed in the back. Now I'm in the middle of a project to add pockets to as many skirts and dresses as possible, which is also a nice way to use up scraps of fabric. Know what makes really good pockets?  Old pillow cases and sheets. 

At Richard's suggestion I expanded my throwaway projects outside and got rid of the 4 tires that some asshole had dumped behind our garage. Man, is it a lot of work to dispose of tires!!! In keeping with its general policy of offering superb garbage and recycling services, Minneapolis does have a way to do this for free, but it's a multi-step, time-consuming process. It's actually harder to get rid of tires than hazardous waste. If anybody ever discovers a cheap, easy way to recycle rubber, the planet will breathe a sigh of relief. 

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So, we went to the North Shore and ended up spending a lot of time sorting rocks on the beaches looking for agates. We found some that MIGHT be agates, but even if they aren't they have lots of interesting colors and patterns. Dug out our old rock tumbler (a 1970's model with obscure origins - probably found at a yard sale years ago). It seemed to work, so we invested in some new coarse grit. After 5 days it was still working, so I ordered some medium grit from Amazon. The next day the motor started making the kinds of noises cars make when they are thinking of throwing a rod, and intermittently stopping and starting. Oh oh. I think it's toast, and certainly not worth fixing. But new ones are expensive. Does anybody have an old one gathering dust in basement or attic that they would be willing to part with? 

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 I called the Mpls Solid Waste number and after a couple of runs around a voice mail loop got someone who told me to just put it out with the garbage labeled "solid waste."  Yay for Minneapolis and their stellar waste collection services!!  

So Richard and Thorin rolled it up and tied it with a couple of ropes and then all three of us heaved it out the back window. Yow! As Lydy warned, that thing is freaking HEAVY. The guys seem to think that they can wrestle it to the alley without me, so I'm letting them work on it. 

Meanwhile, the wooden water bed platform has some drying out to do. Turns out it was leaking in more places than we realized and there is a lot of wet wood. Fortunately, the platform seems to be made of extremely good quality plywood and shows no sign of splitting or rotting. I hope there's a new liner in that waterbed mattress box, as the old one was pretty much done for and is rolled up along with the mattress.

ETA: I knew that was too easy. When I opened up the box with the new waterbed it did NOT contain a liner. I double-checked the invoice, and it definitely listed a liner as part of the purchase. Called the store. Apparently a miscommunication of some sort - he seemed to think that I had decided to get the "value package" without the liner after he had already typed up the invoice or some such thing. That wasn't my understanding. And I didn't feel like another 50 mile round-trip drive to pick up the liner. So he agreed to "send it down on the truck," which would get it here tomorrow. But then he called back and said the truck had left already so it won't arrive until Thursday. *sigh*  So two more nights in the guest room. At least that will give the plywood time to dry out thoroughly. This entry was originally posted at https://dreamshark.dreamwidth.org/…. Please comment there using OpenID.

 So far so good. Following tips from seekerval (LJ only) and lydy , we trekked to the far NW suburb of Anoka and purchased a replacement waterbed mattress. There was, guess what, construction on Hwy 169, but other than that it was a pretty easy trip. But by the time we got home it seemed too late to start a major project so we both slept in alternative locations for yet another night. Today we stripped the old waterbed, ran a hose through the window, and started draining it. I vaguely remember last time we did this trying to pour water from a pitcher into the end of the hose to get the air out (WTF?). This time we turned the hose on long enough to fill it with water. Duh. What were we thinking? Anyway, working fine so far - hose is currently watering the highly invasive buckthorn hedge.  This entry was originally posted at https://dreamshark.dreamwidth.org/…. Please comment there using OpenID.

 I don't know how old our current  waterbed is, but I'm pretty sure it's over 30 years. We bought it either when we moved from Toonerville to Dream Park or when we swapped bedrooms with the kids, so 1985 or 1988. So if it is finally worn out, it's hard to grumble about the quality. There have been small leaks over the years, but fairly easily mended without having to drain the bed. But now those old repairs seem to be springing new leaks and our attempts to fix them with more glue and patches just isn't working. It's barely possible that the third attempt today will hold water, but I have little hope. So now what? Can you even buy waterbeds any more? 

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 I am working on Dave's estate. The two items of value that I have promised to sell for the family are his condo (corner of Nicollet and Lake) and his car. We're still working on the paperwork to probate the estate, so the vehicle will probably not be available for purchase until sometime after New Years. However, if you are thinking of buying a nice used car sometime in the next couple of months, keep this one in mind.

I have no intention of spending a lot of time on this - I hate selling things on Craigslist. If I can't sell it easily to someone I know I am just going to sell it to a dealer for whatever they will offer. So if you are willing and able to pay at least as much as that, you can have it. The ballpark value seems to be somewhere between $10K and $16K, based on a quick Internet check. This entry was originally posted at https://dreamshark.dreamwidth.org/…. Please comment there using OpenID.

Leaving on our first road trip of the year TOMORROW (driving to Oregon!). The van is all cleaned out, the oil changed, the magic van seats reconfigured, and I'm well on the way to being packed. But I am inconsolable because I can't find my National Parks Passport Book! Last year I traversed South Dakota (twice!) and got stamps for everything from the Badlands to Devil's Tower. This time we're going through North Dakota for a change, and I won't be able to get my book stamped for the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.  Waaahhh!  

What really makes me a poster child for First World Problems is the astonishing number of places that passport might have been, but wasn't. Is it in this box labeled Travel? This bag of Laura Ingalls Wilder souvenir booklets? This file drawer full of maps? This pile with the Roadside America books? This other pile on the little table by the stairs? One of the pockets of my bike luggage?  Maybe it's with that favorite scarf I haven't seen since Minicon. I did unpack after we came home from Minicon, didn't I?

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Thanks so much to quility and Terry (not on DW/LJ?) for their help with my degenerating phone charging cases. Terry kindly brought along an impressive box of soldering equipment to last Friday's game party and swapped the new battery from the defective case into the old case with the dead or dying battery. When I slipped my phone into the rehabilitated case the phone took a charge. Yay!  That's the first step.

The next question - would the case recharge when plugged into a USB cable? Early attempts were not successful - the light on the charging button just kept blinking red for hours. Having nothing else to lose, I got aggressive -- grinding my finger down on the charging button, bending the case in various ways. My hope was that I was somehow improving the connection between internal components.

Unlikely as it may seem, this seemed to work. After a brief interval of steady red light, the LED went back to blinking red. But the next morning it was green! Unexpectedly, the poor old case had started charging again. Still remains to be seen if it will take a charge a second time, but right now it is charging up my phone. Thanks, Terry! This entry was originally posted at http://dreamshark.dreamwidth.org/4…. Please comment there using OpenID.

I have a broken iPhone charging case with a good battery in it, and an identical (but not broken) case with a worn out battery. I took both cases apart, hoping I could swap the practically new battery into the old case. Unfortunately, the battery doesn't just plug in: it needs two itsy-bitsy little wires to be soldered. It looks like something that would take about 5 minutes for someone who has a soldering iron handy and knows how to do it properly, but that's not me. Any volunteers?

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Working on cleaning the attic (which I still think I'm going to renovate before the end of the year). Started by getting rid of my lifetime supply of vintage computers, which Thorin kindly hauled downstairs for me and stashed in the van. I then drove them over to FreeGeek Twin Cities, over in the industrial end of Seward Neighborhood. I strongly recommend this option if you have old electronics, cameras, cables, chargers, and even small appliances to get rid of. I think I gave them 6 computers, and put the 7th (an iMac with embedded CRT) out in the alley for the City of Minneapolis to take care of. FreeGeek charges $5 for CRTs, but the city takes them for free.

While I was over there I also made a purchase - a sturdy old Hitachi receiver/amplifier/tuner, which I connected to my computer to drive the speakers that have been hanging on my walls since the last old amp died. I think it sounds better than the mid-range powered computer speakers I was using.