Works in Progress

I have been doing a lot of things but have not finished them. Instead of waiting another week or two until they are resolved and provide finished posts, I will say a few words now about what I am doing. You can think of each paragraph as the first act of a different and unfinished play.

The inside of my parent's house was painted last week. In preparation for this, all the stuff had to be taken off the walls and the furniture moved. After the painting was done we had a great opportunity to evaluate and rethink where things should go and what the best way to arrange everything is. For example, my Grandpa made some great wood toys. However, they were on top of the cupboard where they are hard to notice. I moved them to a more conspicuous place where they can be viewed up close and appreciated. All the blinds and shades have been put back up, but some furniture and pictures still need to be arranged.

I am setting up a computer with a Unix-like system. I have saved a couple of old computers from being trashed and am using some parts from one to fix the other. So far I have moved a CPU fan, hard drive, and RAM stick from one machine to the other. I went to Fry's to buy some cables for a KVM switch. A KVM switch is a device that lets multiple computers share one keyboard, monitor, and mouse. When I plugged everything into the computer and pressed the on button nothing happened. I could not find the problem, but I circumvented it and now have a computer up and running. The next step is to install a new operating system I have never used.

As furniture was being moved for painting, I decided to refinish the coffee table. A few years ago a live plant was placed on the table by our neighbor and water leaked onto the table and left a big spot. I started the restoration by removing the old finish, sanding the top, and applying a new stain. Most of the table looked good, but there were two dark lines where the stain soaked in more than the rest. Since I was unhappy, I sanded the table down and restained it using a foam brush. That was a disaster; the brush strokes were visible. After treating a quarter of the table I stopped and removed the stain. When I started my third staining application I ditched the foam brush and went back to using a normal paintbrush. It turned out worse than ever. The table looked terrible and the stain made a mess everywhere. As of now the table is sanded again and ready for my fourth attempt at staining it.

When I graduated I was gifted an album that said "Graduation 2008." For the last two years I have been meaning to select 100 pictures from senior year and get them printed out and put in that album. I went through all the pictures from my camera (and the pictures I took with Derek's camera while mine was broke). When picking pictures I aimed for a good assortment. I selected pictures from different events, included a variety of different people, and made sure I was not in too many of them. There were a lot of good pictures and I enjoyed looking through all of them. Even after I limited myself to pictures from my last semester I had 114 pictures for a 100 slot album. After more rounds of reductions, prints were ordered and they have arrived here by mail. Now they need to be placed in the album.

In a couple of weeks everything should be set and you can stop by my house to see the finished products. Until then, things are scattered about as work continues.