busybee fluffy rambles

I managed to actually get a lot of stuff done today, and I’m feeling quite tired, but in a good way.

• Assembled three of my acoustic panels for the studio (and then ran out of adhesive, oops)
• Assembled my new fire pit ring (still need the brick surrounds and probably some gravel for the bottom)
• Set up a photo shoot for album cover art (pending the completion of the acoustic panels and some general tidying up of the studio space)
• Got caught up on a week’s worth of dirty dishes (oops)
• Made some more tiny tweaks to the album track ordering, and got a couple folks signed up for the listening beta (but I could still use more!)
• Glazed my two pots
• Also somehow managed to get some piano practice in, too???

I figure it’s been a little while since my last random-updates update thing, so here’s what’s going on in my life. Because I guess some folks like knowing this stuff? Weird. Anyway.

My new roof is finally getting installed. It sure is loud and poundy. Supposedly this is a two-day project so theoretically they are around halfway done. Unlike most home renovation stuff I can’t easily take photos showing the progress. Oh well.

Also after trying to work on some music in my newly-rearranged basement I was finding that having the computer desk in the center of the back “wall” with keyboard way off to the left looked cool but it made actually working on music a major drag, since I couldn’t just turn and start recording, I’d have to get up and take a few steps over, and that made my workflow really frustrating. So since I couldn’t work on music today anyway (because noise) I reoriented stuff to be a bit more like how it used to be, with the desk on the left and the keyboard to the right of it, and now it’s way more comfortable to work on things.

Over the last week I’ve been getting a solar generation system installed on my roof. Today it finally became operational.

The system itself was designed and installed by Sun Path Electric, which were amazing to work with. I’d gone through the bid process with a few companies (including a fairly shady one that was advertising on YouTube) and Sun Path definitely gave me the best configuration and price, as well as the highest confidence in their ability to execute correctly.

My week off from work felt great. But I’m still having difficulty actually focusing at work. I have a bunch of paths of exploration to examine but none of them feel, y'know, right right now.

Meanwhile, my house continues to be a bit more work than I expected. On the plus side, I’ve successfully murdered my lawn and vastly improved my garden and started up my nice meadow. On the minus side, my heating bill is through the roof (literally) and I’ve been getting bids for finally improving the house insulation. So far I’ve had three bids which went thusly:

Today I got my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Whew. I’m expecting the next few days to really suck with side-effects so I stocked up on a bunch of easy-to-make food. My dining room is still a bit of a disaster though, and right now it’s even worse because I took delivery of my new TV console today and the box is like… in the dining room. And a bunch of other boxes and stuff are on the table. Oops.

I am pretty much done unpacking my kitchen. I’m now trying to figure out where the heck my Sodastream goes, because it doesn’t quite fit under the upper cabinets. On the plus side I finally have my coffee stuff including my Flair, and my kitchen’s been complete enough for me to start cooking again. Last night I made a rather nice steak, and tonight I’m making chili.

Every day I put another progressively larger dent into the big pile of boxes. My bedroom is actually in pretty good shape now, my kitchen is getting somewhere reasonable (although I’m having trouble figuring out where to put my hand towels and such), and my living room and basement are… well, still disasters. I’m also still unable to find a bunch of stuff that seems like it should have been in some of the boxes I’ve opened. I really wish movers were better at packing things in a systematic way, or at least making sure that multiple parts of a thing stay together.

Oh gosh the last few days have been a thing.

But hey, I’m moved in. I don’t have (proper) Internet yet, but that’s coming in tomorrow.

In the meantime, I needed to set up my new Roomba, and it can only do its full setup¹ via a phone app, which requires an Internet connection and local wifi to work. Fortunately, I found my router, and I have my desktop computer set up, and macOS makes it easy to share an Internet connection from one interface to another…

… so I enabled my phone’s hotspot, connected my desktop’s wifi to the phone, shared my desktop’s wifi to ethernet, plugged the ethernet into the uplink port on my router, and then connected my phone back to the router.

Somehow it all works! It’s going through like three layers of NAT and the phone ends up doing double-duty in the most roundabout stop-hitting-yourself way, but now my Roomba is set to wake everyone up at 9 AM, probably scaring the crap out of my cats who have never seen a Roomba in their lives.