Sunday, August 25, 2013

A whole lot of nothin' going on

According to the plan for the day, I should have started cleaning about three hours ago. I'd be done by now.

Instead, I've run through three of the Dr. Who/David Tennant Christmas specials (wishful thinking when it is eighty-nine degrees with rising humidity). But all is not lost. By choosing to watch the episodes on the upstairs desktop computer, I managed to get a few nagging projects done.

My old oscillating stand fan lasted through eight years of very hard use, at the old flat that had no a/c. It's as if it arrived at the condo, took a whiff of the air conditioning, and just gratefully gave up on life. So back at the end of spring I bought a replacement, took the box up to the loft...and let it sit.

Yeah, I finally put it together. It's quietly moving air around the loft as I type. In the winter, it retreats to the bedroom, to pull the super-heated air out of the bedroom into the rest of the upstairs (the HVAC register in the bedroom is a short, six foot run from the heating/cooling unit - nice when it keeps the bedroom on the cold side in the summer, not so nice when the bedroom reaches eighty degrees in mid winter).

The loft has no overhead lighting (only the kitchen, dining room and foyer do), making things rather murky beyond the reach of the small desk lamp. Just before Christmas I picked up a nice floor lamp for a reasonable price. I didn't quite get around to putting it together until late in my two week vacation.

The stupid pipes would not screw together in a straight line. You know how it is with floor lamps: the pole comes in two or three sections that twist together. None of the three would line up correctly. On top of that, the entire lamp was packed in very dry styrofoam - the kind that crumbles if you even think of looking at it.

After an hour or more of wrangling, I gave up and undid what little I'd gotten together, stuffed it back in the box and started vacuuming up balls of styrofoam (a process that continued for another five months; I hate that stuff). I vowed to return the cursed thing.

Naturally, I couldn't find the receipt. So the repacked box sat, with more foam slowly drifting out of it, at the top of the stairs, waiting for me to decide whether to donate it to a more patient person than me (preferably someone with the capability of heating and straightening metal), or trash it.

On a lark, I gave the assembly one more try today. The pipes still wanted to list like a sailor after a week's shore leave, but with a bit of banging with a screwdriver handle and more downward pressure, everything seated itself correctly. Hurrah! The lamp itself is focused up, toward the top of the fourteen foot ceiling. Nice, indirect, warm light.

That still didn't take me to the end of the specials, so I cleaned out the two regular drawers in the file cabinet, and the cubbies in the computer hutch.

I can't put it off cleaning the rest of the upstairs much longer. Besides, I dragged the good vacuum upstairs in the hopes it would capture the last elusive bits of styrofoam. May as well use it.

This isn't quite the way I envisioned the day going, but at least it's going.


No comments: