Thursday Thirteen V48

I've been spending the last day or so doing more clearance from the garage. I can see the floor again now. There's a few observations about some of the stuff.

1) There's been some furniture there which we have been unsuccessful to even give away. That's not to say that we didn't successfully donate a few items including a bed, two wardrobes, two tables, a set of four chairs and some other bits and pieces. It even included a disassembled kit which someone wanted to rebuild.

2) The miscellaneous hand basins and similar have all gone. They were not re-usable in any case.

3) A few tools looked to be over ambitious and have resided as 'investments' rather than practical items. They have now quietly disappeared (OK except the electric plane and the dangerous flame blasting paint stripper)


4) Records and increasingly books are going digital. The vinyls are still hanging in there because of the artwork of some of the covers. Probably 75% of them are now available digitally. My most tricky acquisition was Retribution by Clark Hutchinson. There's a CD copy around but it's just not as clean as the original album. The cassette tapes I found are now all goners.

5) I realise that the various anthology books I've acquired at different times are not all that sensible. They are too big to read. My Kafka, Huxley, Orwell and Lawrence mega books have not been read although the individual stories have as separate paperbacks.

6) Despite the plaintive cries from the book publishers, I can't help thinking that more book reading will go digital over the next few years. My own recent experience of this has been much better than I expected.

7) After spending some time in L.A., where I had access to a vinyl record player, I'm sorely tempted to restore one of the decks I've found and have a small filtered selection of about 10 vinyls for casual playing.
 
8) I can't believe how much spare cabling of many types I unearthed. It was mainly for PS/2 style connections of keyboards, parallel printer cables and serial connections. None of these connections even exist on modern technology so they are really defunct now.

9) I have a large pile of Hard drive disks varying from 100GB upwards. Most have shown signs of unreliability, so I can't really use them, but I also can't dispose of them because of what they may contain. I shall have to look further into this. I realise my minimum unit of non laptop disk is now 1Terabyte, which only a few years ago would seem somewhat excessive.

10) I think I have spotted several species of spider during the clearance work. I saw plenty of pholcus phalangioides (they are the clear coloured spindly ones) a few segestria senoculata (they live in the holes that have been drilled in the brickwork) some pardosa amentata (they are the wolfy ones that run about without webs) and some enormous tegenaria duellica (they are the big spring suspension spiders that suddenly appear on walls at night). I expect there are a few more as sometimes I felt like I was in that scene from Indiana Jones. There's at least one of each type in the picture below.
 
11) There were a few previously packed crates that now Have No Meaning or Logic. I was able to dispose of them without really examining the contents.

12) I have decided that keeping boxes from purchases is not very sensible unless one wishes them to eventually be placed in a museum. As an example, the 25 inch Black Trinitron box from another era had just been filled with old broken watering cans and small segments of hose pipe. Apart from a rodent nest made from old chewed bus tickets in one corner, it didn't seem to have served any useful purpose.

13) An important stage has now been passed in the clearance project. The floor is now visible in a circle and its possible to Walk Around and Look Across the space. Testing it on others though is less convincing. They still look bemused at the amount of stuff and mutter things along the lines of "you should have shown me what it was like before."

There. Thirteen. It must be Thursday.