meanderings

It's eleven days now since I fell on the ice, and my tailbone is still sore and achy.  I keep looking in the mirror and expecting to see the imprint of a Size 16 (Frost Giant) hobnailed boot.

Honestly, I'm still surprised that I didn't end up bruised.  But cymrullewes and I are complete opposites that way ... I scarcely bruise at all, she bruises at almost anything.  I accidentally hit myself with a two-by-four, say, and cymrullewes gets the bruise.  The last time I had a noticeable bruise, someone had just hit me with a station wagon.

Meanwhile, having sold the old Kenmore washer from the downstairs laundry room and redone the washer plumbing (see right), we got the spiffy front-loading Frigidaire washer moved downstairs last night and hooked it up in there.  It's on a tile floor directly on the slab now, instead of a second-story floor on wooden beams, so hopefully it won't periodically go dancing around the room.  (I'm guessing it went walkies when it managed to pump the floor at or close to its resonant frequency, and the downstairs laundry room floor should be WAY too stiff for it to pump.)

No, the pipes aren't really curved like that; it's an artifact of short range and a wide-angle lens.  Yes, those are proper quarter-turn ball valves at the bottom as stopcocks (the first thing I did was to rip off the cheap plastic valves from the existing pipes, clean off the ends of the pipes, and install proper stopcocks).  Yes, those are more quarter-turn ball valves at the top, for hooking up hosepipes at need.  And that doohickey in the middle is a proper washing-machine hook-up valve; a single 90°-throw lever controls hot and cold water together.  (If you think I don't like unnecessarily cranking on little handwheels when I could just snap over a short-throw lever, gee, you'd be right.  Imagine that.)

Now we need to sell the gas dryer from the upstairs laundry room, and the whole room will be clear for workshop use.  Next order of business is to put up the other gorilla rack so that I actually have enough storage space to get my tools etc organized, and clear up the clutter that's currently preventing me from being able to get anything major done.  Right now, I can't organize in there because there's simply nowhere to put anything while I organize it.

Then once that's done, I have two tables to refinish, one to repair and refinish, one to completely rebuild, five chairs to make new seats for, and one to look at and see if it's repairable.  We're going to have a serious surfeit of tables.

New Jersey

For those who haven't ever seen it, gilded_messiah's final speech for his Public Speaking class.

Native descent?

95% of Native Americans descended from 6 women.  (Link courtesy of glitch25.)

Well, day-umn, dude.  Those six chicks got around, nudge nudge, wink wink, knowwhutImean knowwhutImean?  :)

"And this is Sleeps With Anything.  She's the mother of our tribe ... and I'm not speaking figuratively here."

Yes, I know, I am intentionally taking this out of context.

SUP does the right thing

You may or not be aware of the recent flap over the abolition of the Basic account type, followed by the discovery over the weekend that LiveJournal has been censoring certain 'interests' on the public Popular Interests page.  The censored interests included bisexuality, girls, boys, depression, pain, and fanfic, among others.

Several protests, such as beckyzoole's 24-hour Content Strike, have been ongoing.  For my part, I — among numerous other people — filed feedback, pointing out that I've been in constant pain for the past nine years and am deeply offended that LiveJournal thinks the public should be protected from knowing that I periodically talk about it.

Early this afternoon, all the censored interests were restored.  I got a personal reply via email, with an apology.

That's better than Six Apart ever did.  I think SUP is learning from their mistakes faster and better than Six Apart did.  This bodes well.