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good idea's at Joshua's
Saturday, December 29 2018
This morning after Saturday morning coffee, I used the bandsaw to cut odd-sized pieces of wood to fill in the low depressions in the floor of the space over which the kitchen's refrigerator would end up. There was a transition between the tile I'd installed back in 2003 and the older linoleum, which dated to when the house was built in the mid-1990s. When Gretchen and I tried to roll the refrigerator into its new home, we found that the sides were too narrow given the non-levelness of the floor, and I needed to make a shim out of eighth-inch masonite to raise up the refrigerator's east side.
I then focused on the new oven. Its new home already had a cubby prepared. My job was to rout cable back to the kitchen's old 240 oven outlet near its northeast corner. That part wasn't hard; there was a good inch and half space behind the drawers acting as a defacto chase. The troubles began after Gretchen and I rolled the new oven into the kitchen. Though it weighed a couple hundred pounds, it wasn't difficult to gradually raise it to the correct height, positioning in on various combinations of old milk crates and four by four blocks along the way. But when I tried to wrestle it into position inside its cubby, its east end kept refusing to back all the way into the space. Evidently the cable was in the way. So I kept trying to get the cable out of the way, either by hooking it and pulling it forward or raising it with a narrow stick. After a half dozen tries, I'd just about given up, figuring the routing of the cable had to be changed. But then the oven mysteriously slipped correctly into position, where it will hopefully stay for many years into the future.
This evening Eva wanted to do dinner with Gretchen. Somehow this turned into a dinner for both of our couples. Normally such dinners happen at the Garden in Woodstock, but Gretchen knows how sick I get of eating there. So all afternoon a chain of communications happened about where dinner would be. It couldn't be pizza, since Sandor and Eva had had way too much of that recently. In the end we all agreed on Joshua's, that semi-middle-eastern place not far from the center of Woodstock, a place I haven't been to for several years. I like the atmosphere there, particularly at this time of year when the sycamore out front is covered with festive white seasonal lightbulbs. Up in the second floor after dark, that's all you see out the windows.
I ordered a manhattan (the drink) and a hot pot (a fancy ramen bowl that comes with a humus plate and a salad and now costs $25). Dinner conversation was unusually rich in good ideas, mostly from Sandor for me. These included the heat pump (called a "split") that Sandor uses to dehumidify, heat, and air-condition his parent's basement apartment. He said that its dehumidification function was essential to making that space habitable, given the problems of condensation. Since we have a similar problem in our basement, it made me seriously consider installing such a system in our house, particularly for the master guestroom and Gretchen's library (where two separate units could share a wall and a single outside unit). Another good idea was Plex, a media center app for making sense of large digital video collections. Gretchen hates the interface used by Kodi, our existing media center operating system. Perhaps Plex would make her happier. My idea (for myself, since I haven't even seen it yet) and Sandor was Making It, a reality show where teams make various things out of baskets of supplies. It is similar to reality show cooking contests, though the products aren't edible.
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