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removing any remaining staples
Sunday, March 31 2019
After taking the dogs for their morning walk (which I ended prematurely by cutting north off the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and over to the Stick Trail). The day started warm but soon turned rainy and increasingly cold, so I was forced to do indoor projects. I had trouble focusing, but eventually I began one of Gretchen's many indoor renovations, one involving the stairs to the second floor. We've had the same ugly green carpet on those steps since moving into the house back in 2002. That green carpet used to continue out onto the open plain of the living room, but it was ripped up and replaced with hardwood floor weeks after we moved in. On the stairs, though, it remained as a refugia for the cooties of the previous occupants. I'd suggested tearing it up and replacing it with something else, but Gretchen had been always been worried about the replacement providing enough traction for whatever our oldest dog at the time happened to be. Now that we don't have an old dog, though, Gretchen was willing to take radical measures. The old carpet would be torn up, the wooden steps underneath painted, and special pads would be attached to the treads with double-sided adhesive tape. Today my focus was just on getting rid of the old carpet. With a little force, I was able to rip it all out. After then removing the pad (which was fragile and easily tore into pieces), I had the biggest job of all: removing any remaining staples. Over the course of several hours (during which I worked intermittantly), I was able to remove all the staples that had once held the padding. But the toughest staples had once held the carpet itself, and managed to hold on even as the carpet was torn out from around them.
Another chore I did was migrating the SSD on Gretchen's desktop computer (Badger). The old one was had been 128 GB in size and was now about half full. The new drive is 1 TB in size and will thus be only about 1/16th full. I've also ordered bigger DDR3 memory boards so it can go from 4GB of RAM to 16GB of RAM. This is all in response to continual complaints from Gretchen that her computer is "too slow." Like me, Gretchen likes to leave lots of Google Chrome tabs open, and I think this habit leads to problems when one only has 4GB of memory.
After the rain stopped in the late afternoon, I found some time to go out on a firewood salvaging foray down the Stick Trail. I returned yet again to the fallen skeletonized double oak on the edge of the escarpment 300 or so feet southeast of where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile. Since there is essentially no room left in the living room for firewood, I added this salvaged wood to the woodshed's nascent fourth tranche.
In the late morning, I'd made myself some bean glurp (which included green beans as one of the several kinds of conventional non-string beans). I mostly used this to make burritos throughout the day, to which I added increasingly-wilted arugula.
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