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bookshelf moved after sixteen years
Monday, August 12 2019
This evening as I was sitting at my computer in the laboratory, I found the cloying stench of cat piss too distracting for me to do any work. So I performed an olfactory site survey and determined that the problem was likely a piece of blue carpet fragment near the northwest corner of the space. Unfortunately, it was pinned down by a desk and a bookshelf that had stood on it without interruption for sixteen and a half years. That bookshelf was an especially immobile object, since not only was it full of books, but on top of it was my carefully-arranged collection of hand-sized pieces of test equipment, with everything from a stethoscope to tape measures to multimeters to a miniature oscilloscope. But something had to be done, so I began relocating everything from the bookshelf into a series of linear piles in elsewhere in the laboratory (which was already approaching peak clutter even before I did this). There were also some large pieces of broken glass leaning against the front of the bookshelf that I'd removed from the solar panel when I'd fixed it in May and then never gotten around to disposing of. I didn't end up having to remove all the books from the bookshelf; at some point it was light enough for me to lift one end and put it on a dolly to roll out of the way. Then I extracted that horrible blue carpet fragment and immediately painted the floor where it had been with glossy white paint. The fragrance in the laboratory was so improved that when I left it and went out into the teevee room, it smelled a bit gamey by comparison. That had never happened (and yes, apparently everything is relative).
Today Gretchen processed a bunch of tomatoes from the garden, which has rapidly ramped up its tomato production since we got back from the Baltic. She made some sort of stew with tomatoes, collard greens, and chick peas, and she also made her new favorite kind of pasta, some sort of whole-grain rice linguine that is better than that description would normally imply. Gretchen had the stew as a side dish, while she put pesto on the pasta. But I'm not a big fan of pesto, so I used the stew as a pasta sauce, though I beefed it up with some onion-fried chanterelle mushrooms (the ones I'd gathered yesterday) and tiny slices of carrot peppers. This significantly home-grown meal was both complicated and delicious.
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