Saturday, April 02, 2005

A productive Saturday

Today was an unusually busy Saturday for me. I spent most of the afternoon assembling Liz's new desk for our home office. It's a three-piece Ikea table with a metal frame and about two dozen screws and bolts holding it together. I got a painful blister on my right palm before I figured out that my weightlifting gloves would be effective protection for the screwdriver I was using. I had to put it together upside down and then flip it over when I was done. Since I was alone at home all day (Liz went out to a movie and dinner with some friends) I initially thought I'd have to wait until she got home to flip the desk. But when I was done, I couldn't stand the thought of that desk sitting upside down all day and possibly all night, not while our living room was filled with all the junk I had to move out of the office while I was working. So I managed to flip it and heave it into place myself, after which I grunted enthusiastically and played a little air guitar along with The Who's Quadrophenia (my musical accompaniment for this physical exertion).

Next, I prepared my old Dell computer for my friend Rob, who is still using the computer I bought in 1998 and sold to him in 2001. Last night I wiped the hard drive, and this afternoon I reinstalled Windows XP, Microsoft Office, anti-virus and firewall software, and updated some drivers. It's nearly ready for shipping -- I just have a few more programs to install tomorrow. Normally I'd procrastinate on something like this, since Rob isn't anxiously waiting for the PC. But we still have leftover boxes in the office from when we moved in, and with the new desk taking up so much room in the office, there isn't enough space for my old computer or the box I'm going to use for shipping.

I still have some other Ikea filing cabinets to assemble, but I can't do that until we clear out the boxes, so it looks like we've got our work cut out for us next week. Some of those boxes have junk in them from Georgetown, packed away for nearly ten years and hauled from one apartment to another. If we haven't needed anything in there in the two years since we moved, I can't imagine we need to keep it any longer. For now, Liz and I each have suitable workspaces in the office, and that's something we've both wanted for many years. This apartment is just about the way we always imagined it would be.

I also made some sausage sandwiches with fried onions and peppers for dinner. I took a break from the Final Four games to watch the latest Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoons I recorded last Saturday. If only the movies had as much action. The end of the cartoon series leads right into the opening of Revenge of the Sith, so now I'm even more excited about that movie. That Anakin Skywalker guy is getting himself into serious trouble.

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