MeghanIsMe

I just installed this pots and pans rack in the kitchen today and am pleased with myself!





We have a fairly small kitchen with little storage space. I recently weeded out some redundant stuff and organized the cabinets, but it was still tight. Now we can put all of the pots, pans, and lids on the rack for easy access, and we have a now-empty cabinet to move things off of the counter to!

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Especialy for For cmcmck and other people who care about hi-fi stereo, here's the story of my lastest find. I was at Goodwill the other day (Are you surprised?) and made another good hi-fi score. Not as good as I first thought though. It's a Kenwood GE 7030 equalizer; one that uses buttons and a control knob instead of physical sliders that get dirty. Beyond that, the front panel indicated that it was not just a graphic equalizer, but a parametric one. A parametric equalizer provides the ability to change the center frequency of each adjustment band in small increments. It also provides control of the bandwidth of the adjustments. Together, that fine control allows for very precise tuning of a system's frequency response characteristics. Though I felt a little guilty about buying it, I still leaped at the chance for $15.

Once I got it home and downloaded a manual, I learned that that word doesn't mean what they think it means. Rather than allowing control of the center frequencies, 'parametric' mode in this context seems to mean broad adjustments (almost the opposite of what it's supposed to mean), and 'graphic' mode allows finer adjustments. I was disappointed. That aside, I'm going to use it anyway. It has excellent harmonic distortion and signal to noise levels; this was Kenwood's top of the line model in the early '90s. It also has a 27-band frequency analyzer (though only 14 bands are individually adjustable) that will be really pretty to watch. Fake parametric mode aside, it was a good buy. They seem to be going for $100 to $200 on Ebay. I found just the front control knob from a defunct unit on there for a dollar less than I paid for the whole thing!

Oh, another random audio-type of thing. At yet another thrift store, I picked up a couple of LPs by a company called Hae Shan records. They caught my attention because they were bright translucent red. I Googled them on my phone and learned that it was a label in Taiwan "of doubtful legality" that primarily served US servicemen stationed overseas. The records are scratched up and likely unplayable, but they're so pretty that, for 99 cents, I bought them just to hang them in a window or something. I also picked up a record whose label was just a blank red circle. There might be some text that got labeled over, or that is really badly faded, but I can't make it out. The grooves all look exactly the same to my untrained eye, and I think it might just be a test record or something. I'll give it a spin and see what's on it. Should be interesting!

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I met with my psychiatrist today for a quick follow up from my first appointment a month ago. We talked about how I'm doing (pretty well) and about how I'm feeling on two tablets of Wellbutrin per day instead of one. I told him that I'm doing well enough that, in therapy, I'm finally going into deeper work instead of continual symptom management and putting out fires. (I still want to write about that. Soon.) We'll get together again in a few months for another check in.

I've barely been at my computer this past week. Most of my time has been spent working on various projects in Danae's condo. Having solidly defined tasks that I can fully grasp and accomplish is a fundamental contrast to my experience in New York, and is making me deeply happy. I feel safe, and just as importantly, valuable and competent here.

I'm doing so much stuff! I found pegs and put more shelves in the living room shelving unit, then unpacked and alphabetized all of my media, and then Danae's, putting them in their own places. In the entryway, I took all the boxes of tile, cans of paint and recycling to their respective places, then hung a big heavy mirror in the entryway and set up my cheval mirror there too. It's looking really nice! In the bathroom I replaced the showerhead with my Waterpik wand; the low-flow setting helps make our little water heater last through the whole shower by reducing to a trickle while lathering or conditioning. That's made everyone living here really happy. Danae ordered a wall mount for the 32" flat screen we picked up at a thrift store years ago; it's been sitting on top of the low TV bench with a box of tile in front of it to keep it in place. I installed the wall mount, then disassembled the two TV benches to remove their back panels so I could put A/V equipment inside the bench's cubbys and run wires to them. After planning discussions with Danae, her roommate Nathen and I drove out to Ikea to buy several hundred dollars worth of closet organizer parts, and a few other odds and ends. One of those odds and ends was a suspension rail for one of the TV bench units; I got on a stepladder, attached the rail to the wall, and with Danae's help, mounted the bench unit above the TV, level with the media shelves to its right. We took it down and put it up a few times, playing with the configuration of drawers and shelves in it, and finally decided on the look we want. Then I moved all my CDs into it; it looks really nice! And I can wall-hang furniture now and use wall anchors now! First times for me on both counts. Today, I emptied everything out of one of the two closets in the bedroom so I could install the closet organizing stuff. To do so, I had to remove the existing shelf and support brackets, but doing so left large patches of unpainted space and several holes in the plaster facade of the wall. So instead of installing mounting rails, I did another first; plaster patching. It's certainly not the best job ever, but I got better as I went. Tomorrow will be sanding and priming, though a large hole may need more patching goop.

And that's been my life. That plus doing the household grocery shopping, walking to the local hardware store several times and driving to a more distant one once for drill batteries. Driving Danae to school and back, offering opinions on her papers, feeling appreciated and loved, enjoying fun, safe social contact with she and Nathan, and having wonderful conversations. Conversations such as the following one.

I was up on a stepladder in the living room, measuring and marking the suspension rail position. Danae was talking about her current writing on the topic of the public sphere as conceived by Habermas, and some of philosophers he drew on in forming that conception. I noted that some of these ideas, about who constitutes the public sphere and how it operates were pretty damned elitist, and that I took exception to the idea that uneducated people do not engage in rational debate; that it is somehow an ability limited to the bourgeois. We talked about how Habermas' ideas are really more complex than that, and how the people he was referencing were situated in a very different time and place. Having read Lisa Fraser this past semester, I'm kind of skeptical about many aspects of the public sphere; for me, it could represent this nebulous group formed of whatever is outside of the particular counterpublic one is thinking of. At some point after that, the conversation took a turn like this:

"Are you feeling oppressed by the bourgeois?" Danae asked.

"Well, I'm up here on a ladder, shirtless, installing furniture for you, the bourgeois. I'm clearly the proletariat."

She smiled at me. "Does it make you feel better that the proletariat fucked the bourgeois this morning?"

I paused. "....yes. Yes it does."

I love her a lot.

So I continue to be hermity. I'm in my warm safe cave, where I am loved and appreciated and feel competent and productive. I want to start engaging with more of the real world soon. But perhaps not quite yet. For now, I have closet systems to install and and bedroom to organize! And beyond that, Danae has some social plans for us that will start getting me back into the big wide real. I'll write more about that later on.