basements – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

We are still doing shit around here.

Got up at six. By 9:00 I was downstairs wrecking these shelves. They were in the way. I forgot to take a Before picture but I imagine you can imagine.

Then the electrician showed up. The electrician installed all new LED lighting in the basement and tore out a bunch of ballasts that were starting to fail and, in one case, melt. It is astonishing how much friendlier the basement looks now:

(Our basement goblin isn’t completely moved out, so some of that stuff is hers.)

I should find an older picture of the basement with the old lights. My God.

We took my wife’s old desk apart and threw it out:

I built (and by “built,” I mean “put together according to the instructions”) my wife her new desk:

Cable management is coming, I promise. It’s making me twitch too. That desk is adjustable, a sitting/standing desk, which is absolutely ideal for my wife because she’s only 5’ tall. See that little panel on the right there, that you use to adjust it?

Those are the icons for “adjust to standing height” and “adjust to seating height.”

The current state of the dumpster. They’re coming to collect it tomorrow, I’m not exactly sure when:

Oh, we also threw away another old shitty end table and my old desk from when I was a kid, which we were using in the garage. I’m fully expecting the guy to complain that the desk is an inch too high for the bin and to have to cut it in half at the last minute.

Not pictured: I threw away all of my CDs— several hundred of them– which have been sitting on a shelf in the basement for fifteen years. I strongly suspect a lot of them won’t even work any longer and there isn’t a single device in the house that even plays CDs any longer other than some similarly-ancient electronics in the basement that are getting taken to e-waste tomorrow or Friday. I only discovered one CD that I didn’t have an MP3 copy of— a recording by the jazz musician ex-husband of a friend who is no longer alive— and I decided that I didn’t need to go to the trouble to find a way to rip it.

Other tasks today: I beat the bedroom 90% into submission; most things are where they are going to live now, and my leather chair and ottoman have been moved into the library, which is now a little more crowded than I like, but all three of us can sit in there at the same time now. I also reinstalled the rack for the wall shelving that we had to remove when we tore the wall down. And, somehow, more vacuuming. Apparently at some point we ran an extremely busy pet grooming business for like a year, never cleaned up any of the fur, and never noticed until this week. Also I went to the comic shop. It’s Wednesday, after all.

In other news, I am about 120 pages from the end of the 1,232 page book I’m reading, and I’m going to either finish it tonight or die. Not sure which.

Tomorrow: one last frenzy of throwing things away until they take away the dumpster, put together the new cabinet for the garage, a little bit of touch-up painting in the bedroom, install the last bits of baseboard in the bedroom, clean clean clean, organize the garage as much as we can stand, a little more work in the basement, and go visit a showroom for the next bathroom project.

Yeah. There’s another fucking bathroom project. I’ll tell you later.

You may recall I’m working on getting a classroom set up, what with how I haven’t shut up about it for days. What I haven’t mentioned is that I’ve had a couple of Indiana University flags hanging up in virtually every classroom I’ve ever had that had the wall space for them, and I have been tearing the house apart over the last several days trying to figure out where the hell I put them after I closed down my last classroom. There was no way I would ever have thrown them away, and I realized this afternoon that there were certain other objects missing as well– most notably, my collection of Hulk toys, mostly gifts from students– that I similarly would never have gotten rid of.

They had to be in the basement. They had to be. There were other boxes of school shit down there; why wouldn’t the flags be down there somewhere? But both my wife and I had already gone through the basement. Independently. And found nothing.

Our basement is a fucking mess, y’all.

Now, in this picture, you need to ignore the fact that one of the flags in question is on top of the pile, but note that that cardboard box is open. And the reason the flag is on top of the pile of stuff there but with nothing underneath it dislodged is that the motherfucking thing was in plain goddamn sight the entire time, on top of everything in that cardboard box. And yet, somehow, two adults who were looking for red flags didn’t see it.

Trash bags full of undonated baby clothes removed, we see … part of a roll of paper towels, for some reason, part of a car seat, and … wait, what’s that?

If anyone has advice on how to get wrinkles out of a polyester flag, they’d be appreciated. And look! Underneath the flag!

My Hulk toys. My Hulk mugs. My binary clock. My Easy Button. My Skull of An Unnamed Former Student. All the shit that I knew goddamn well I didn’t throw away.

For once, something– a minor something, mind you, but something— has gone right.