This is a link to the official Baltimore City COVID-19 tracker; so far Baltimore City accounts for 10% of all Maryland deaths from the virus. As a designer and visual communicator, there are many things I would fix in this visualization, but overall it’s good information.
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.
I saw this Scout on Instagram a week ago, and I really like the look of it. The indoor lighting is a little funky, but I dig the combination of a dark green paint job, traditional 1972 grille (with a silver surround), a white travel top, and blacked out steelies with narrow tires. This is a really traditional look, which is something I’d like to get Peer Pressure back to someday.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Finn decided that Nox needed to be walked over the weekend. It’s easier to take his picture when he’s at chest height than when he’s skulking through the front bushes.
A note to the Morning Mothers Hiking Group, who I see every day on my walk with Hazel: I see the five of you walking close to each other at the top end of the trolley trail, so it does absolutely no good to form into Quarantine Mode, drift apart, and pull the collar of your expensive hiking shirt up over your nose as you pass me by. Each one of your shiny families is a disease vector, and I’m positive your bratty kids are running around the neighborhood together hastening the spread of the virus from family to family. Protecting yourself from my germs won’t do you a bit of good.
We were blessed with temperatures in the 60-70˚ range this weekend, so I spent as much time outside as I possibly could. And over the last week, the tulip tree in our front yard has gone from beautiful neighborhood landmark to unsightly embarrassing litterbug. Pretty much all the pink petals are down and browning on the lawn, so I had Finley come out and help me rake and haul it all to the mulch pile behind the greenhouse. When that was done I mowed the front and back lawns and made the place look a bit better. Next I used moss killer on the roof of the garage to clear off the north and east faces, which have been turning greener and greener each year.
With limited mobility and summer coming, Jen has been thinking about cleaning up the west side of front porch for a while now to reclaim the dead space there. It’s been a dumping ground for anything we have that doesn’t fit in the garage or is too big to haul into the basement: all of our air conditioners, tables, chairs, cornhole boards, a treadmill I never used, assorted boxes and bags of goodwill donations, etc. She has a vision to turn it into a summer sitting porch, and now that the dining room windows have been replaced, there’s no reason not to keep the windows open to get more circulation in the house.
So we started hauling stuff out of there Sunday afternoon, starting with the treadmill, which will get dropped at the dump when it reopens. I moved a bunch of other stuff out to the garage, but we haven’t figured out what to do with the air conditioners yet. I’d like to keep them out of the windows for as long as possible so that we an enjoy the spring air until it gets blazing hot, so they may get stacked in the dining room while we paint.
The basic plan is to empty the room, remove the crown molding, and paint the walls properly—I hit everything with a quick roll of Kilz about 10 years ago just to brighten things up, but it was never meant to look perfect—and cover the acoustic tile on the ceiling with beadboard paneling. Then I can reinstall the crown molding to clean up the edges. We’re also going to demo the dividing wall to the right of the front door to open things up, and cover the hole with some spare drywall. Once everything has a fresh coat of white paint, we’ll tear up the shitty green carpet and replace that with floor tiles.
Meanwhile, in the basement, our tomato seedlings are beginning to sprout their first true leaves, which is an excellent sign. I finally got smart and moved the grow bulbs down to 4″ away from the plants, and they’re much happier now. I’ve got a lot of seedlings to choose from so we won’t have to buy any from the store, but I do have to order bags of soil and have it delivered along with some other building supplies for the porch. I meant to start cleaning out the greenhouse yesterday, but ran out of time.
Jesus, I’m old. Lost Souls, the first album by Doves, is 20 years old this year. Rise and Sea Song are absolutely two of the best tracks of 2000, bar none, and that was a decent year for music (if you knew where to look).
My last expedition out into the world before total COVID lockdown was to go pick up two pieces of trim for the bathroom. I ordered two lengths of wood that I could cut down for custom kick plates under the sink and cabinets, because the pieces that originally came with our order were about 1″ too short. I had to shim the cabinets up a fair amount to get them to be level to the walls and the floor. Today I got cracking on getting them cut down, fitted, and installed. Both of the cabinet pieces went in pretty easily, and the sink section took some trimming before it went in completely.
Then I was able to cut and install the rest of the finish trim around those pieces. The only piece left to sort out is the edge of the sink in the lower right corner of the photo above.
While the paint and caulk was drying there I rolled another coat on the ceiling and touched up the walls. Then I hauled the miter saw and the compressor back down into the basement and scrubbed the tile with a mop.
Without all the junk in the middle of the floor, it looks so much bigger and cleaner. The closet is still a question mark, and the left sink drain is still being a leaky bitch, so there’s some things left to tackle. But I think one more day in there will get the rest of the big stuff sorted out, and then we can figure out what to do for mirrors and lighting over the sinks. And how to get it here…
I’ve been working pretty much nonstop on stuff for work, going on late into the night, so I decided to take a little mental health time during the day when the sun was out to go get my hands dirty on the Scout. I have a long punchlist of stuff that I want to get accomplished, but today I had to choose some stuff I could accomplish in a few hours, which left mainly cosmetic improvements. The first thing I did was to adjust the parking brake, which has been weak ever since we did the rear brakes. This is a pretty simple matter of loosening two bolts attached to a wire running to each rear brake drum, tightening the wire, and then retightening the second bolt. After tightening, I tested it and it felt good.
Next, I wanted to clean up the janky speaker wires I installed ten years ago when I swapped the original stereo for the new one. When I put it in, Finn was a baby and I had the duration of a nap to get any project done, so I hurriedly carved metal out of the dash, quickly ran wires from the holes hacked in the tub up to the transmission tunnel, and ran them out of the transfer case boot up into the dash. They’ve been there ever since. This was a pretty simple fix, but took some time, as I had to disassemble part of the dash, disconnect the stereo, and re-route the wires through an existing hole in the firewall. But once I was done, it cleaned the dashboard up really well.
While I had that apart, I put some new LED bulbs in two of the light sockets in the speedometer, which has been dead for several years. Getting to all five of these bulbs is a royal pain in the ass, because the only really good way to get the speedo out is to disconnect the hardline and unplug the speedo unit, which is dangerous, because the 50-year-old pins on the back of the units are notoriously brittle. So I fought with the lousy angle and the tangle of wires and the tiny bulb sockets and got two of the LED units in place. Then I buttoned up the dash and left a complete rewire and rebulb for a future day.
Then I tested the parking brake, and…it’s still weak. Two out of three isn’t bad.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I read this morning that Adam Schlesinger, the founder and songwriter of the band Fountains of Wayne, died from complications of coronavirus on Wednesday. I was never a giant fan of FoW—Stacy’s Mom was a pretty good tune—but I was a huge fan of another band he co-founded called Ivy, whose album Long Distance has been one of my favorites since I stumbled across it ten years ago. He was, by all accounts, an extremely busy and prolific writer with multiple projects, so Ivy’s output was sporadic; their last album was released in 2011. In any case, this is shitty news.