I decided to pull the trigger on a Home Depot delivery yesterday, after loading the cart up with 15 cubic yards of raised bed soil, five 4×8′ headboard panels, and a couple of other smaller items, and then hovering over the “BUY” button. The idea is to lay in supplies for some projects for the next month or so, as it doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere soon.

The soil will replace all of the dirt I used last year, which, from what I understand, is probably infected with the pupae of those fucking caterpillars. The seedlings are coming along nicely, although they’re getting a little leggy for my liking—I’m going to have to refine my seed starting technique next year to get the light directly over top of the soil early on before they grow too tall. I figure it’ll be another week or so before it’s time to transplant them to larger pots and consider getting them outside, but I do think I’ll begin hardening them this coming week.

The beadboard will go up on the ceiling of the side porch over the (probably) asbestos ceiling tile; it’ll be a cheap way to clean up the look of that area and seal up the evil under a coat of paint.

I was a little annoyed at how H-D had organized the pickup; instead of setting things up outside the store, which would have made a ton of sense to keep us away from each other, they had us all queue up inside near each other by the Service Desk and then wheel our stuff out the entrance door (past other people walking in). Shortsighted and stupid. I was originally planning on having them deliver it, but that would have taken an extra week and a half, and I’m interested in getting started this Saturday.

In my Amazon cart is a cheap set of wire clippers for the brake lines on my road bike; I’ve been sitting on that project for a month or so until I understood what needed to be done. The big question was what to do about the brakes themselves, but in the spirit of keeping this project as cheap as possible, I’m keeping the original brakes and running new cables and guides. One question I haven’t found an answer for is why the levers don’t have a spring or a return mechanism—they aren’t spring-loaded so they don’t return to their original position, and I don’t know if the expectation is that they will use the spring on the brakes themselves or not.