As noted earlier, we took advantage of mostly decent weather on Saturday to trim all of the branches off each of the shrubs flanking our front door. I spent about two hours digging out as much of the root structure as possible, but due to hard-packed clay 3″ below surface, I couldn’t get the first one to budge. I took some breaks to haul two loads of brush off to the dump and got a third load into the back of the Scout before calling it a day, but we still have ugly stumps to deal with. The plan is to rent a jackhammer next weekend and try to dig them out with brute force.

Sunday was cold, wet, and gray, so we made ourselves a hearty breakfast of eggs and bacon, packed ourselves into the car, and drove to IKEA. There we found a shelving unit the perfect size for tucking into the wall between the back door and chimney, and bought eight wicker bins to go inside. The afternoon and evening were spent moving furniture to make way for a new arrangement; there’s a big shelf in the living room filled with toys and some long-hibernating books (stuff I’d forgotten I even had) across from the couch. The library table is now up against a wall with the carpenter’s chest tucked underneath. The den has a big empty wall waiting for some kind of decoration, and the new shelf holds a good portion of Finn’s toys with all the A/V equipment on top.

A conversation with my neighbor confirmed my suspicion that we’ll need a new head unit that will accept multiple inputs and upconvert all of them over one HDMI cable to the TV. I’m also going to have to bite the bullet and replace my speakers, a pair of Baby Advents that I bought before shipping off to college; the foam of the woofers has dried and degraded to dust in places. Either way, I’d like to get some unobtrusive surround speakers with a subwoofer and hide as much as possible instead of staring at two big cabinets on the floor.

Unpacking, I uncovered two dogeared books from my past that made me smile. The first is Building Speaker Enclosures, published by Radio Shack sometime in the middle 80’s. I bought this before college, and sourced all of the speaker components in the days before the internet, which dictated several trips to Canal Street in NYC to visit car audio outlets for 8ohm woofers, crossovers, and other electronic components. (Lugging two 15″ woofers through the subway and home on the Metro North was quite an experience.) Much of my current tool collection was started when I brought the materials down to my apartment and assembled the boxes on the dining room table. The speakers are still sitting in the basement, water-stained and yellowing, waiting for me to buy new birch plywood and cut clean new boxes to transplant the electronics into. Tucked into the pages are the handwritten notes and calculations I used to design and build the boxes, scrawled on the backs of scrap paper and envelopes.

The second book was stored in the carpenter’s chest under all our A/V equipment. It’s a blue sketchbook with a picture of Elvis duct-taped to the cover, and it’s a record of a trip to Graceland my buddy Pat and I took in March of 1992. We made it to Elvis’ house, then continued westward as far as Paris, Texas before swinging north and heading for home, for a total of 3,346 miles. It’s a rambling diary written by two guys stuck in a compact pickup truck for seven days, and as any diary should, my writing makes me cringe. Pat’s writing is funny and direct. The pictures we took are taped in and annotated as best we could, including stops at Manassas, the Waffle House, the St. Louis Arch, a land-locked submarine, and the Flying Tigers Museum. It contains some of the only documentation I have of that pickup and time period. I’m going to put it up on my shelf in a place of honor.