RVing

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Making Hay

I can’t believe I haven’t posted in a week. It feels like today is last Monday. I went out Monday afternoon to get some electrical supplies for the rig, and came home to a pile of transcription that hasn’t let up. I still have another nine or ten hours of work to do today (and it’ already 2:30 PM). The last week has been typing, an attempt to sleep, typing, working my day job, typing, an attempt to sleep, typing, working my day job, typing… well, you get the picture.

During my sanity breaks, I’m making a list of what absolutely needs to be done in the rig before I move back in and how I can break that stuff down into short segment of times. I know I can’t rely on having whole days available to me in the next month, so I need to start using up those precious little hours between my day job and my evening work, at least when the weather is good. This weekend would have been too cold to work in the rig anyway.

On the list:

STUDY

-add a 120V outlet and a 12V outlet  (all materials have been purchased)

-paint the non-matching woodwork in the study the same colour as the wardrobe doors and kitchen cabinets

-apply two more coats of green

DRESSING ROOM

-finish the trim

-remove the cloth dresser and replace it with a storage ottoman (probably not going to happen right now)

FRONT ROOM

-do two more coats of yellow

-run an extension cord or wiring permanently from the inverter to the study

The electrical work is all top priority. This will be my first time facing boondocking with the need to have my full computer set up, with my kazillion peripherals, not just my laptop, so I need easy and secure access to my inverter.

That’s all I have time to post. Hopefully, I’ll have something interesting in the next couple of days. 🙂

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Repriming the Study

This is what my study looked like last night. *sniff, sniff*

I don’t like white! I miss my green! Waaaaaaaaaah!!!!!

But don’t cry for me, blogosphere! I put on coat of this lovely shade this morning:

This fresh green is much closer to the vision I had for the rig, that it would be light and feminine even though I do prefer darker colours. I will have a better idea after the first coat dries of whether or not I love it, but I definitely like it and am not having any regrets!

I bought a full gallon of paint, remembering that a quart barely got a coat on last time, but this must be better paint because I’ve hardly made a dent. No matter, I think it’ll take four coats to really give good coverage over the old paint. It’s great painting weather and I’ll be able to put the second coat on tonight.

Once the green is on, I will still have a bit more painting to do… I also desperately need to get over my fear of screwing up electrical work so I can a) move my 120V outlet to a more sensible location and b) move my inverter into the study.

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The Week That Vanished

Is it really Friday again?! I know it’s rent collection week, but still, it’s been busy! The transcription hasn’t let up either, which is a Good Thing.

For lunch today, I decided that since I haven’t had sushi in weeks, I’ve been (and will be for the foreseeable future) too busy to go out for dinner, and it’s been a manic week I had earned a treat. So I called Dono this morning to place a pick-up order for lunch. I wish I had thought to do this before! I normally pay about $30 (plus tip) for a sushi dinner out and I got more food for lunch today for $19 (no need to leave a tip) than I do for a dinner. I had them make me up a bento box with an assortment of things and was really pleased with what was chosen for me, which including a type of sashimi I’ve never had or seen before (possibly mackerel). I had thought that for $13, I’d get a light lunch, so I added two pieces of nigiri (octopus and eel) to round out the meal, but I didn’t need to, not with the soup, salad, tempura (all included with the lunch special!), five huge pieces of sashimi, two other nigiri, and a gigantic shrimp tempura roll (the only disappointment (and a mild one at that) since that’s a bit too heavy/western for my palate).

This evening, I continued working on the study. Oh? Earlier this week, I took an evening and emptied the study of everything but the desk and the filing cabinet. I have been really unhappy with the paint job in that room so I decided to take advantage of the fact that I’m out of the rig to redo it and get it right. Tonight, I sanded down the walls and gave the whole room a good scrub. I’ll prime tomorrow and hopefully get a coat of paint done on Sunday. I haven’t picked out a new colour yet and am torn. I love the current colour, but it’s a bit dark. It’s just that it’s so hard to get the right shade of light green. I’ll see what options the home store has compared to the green in the curtains and decide then. I’ve also decided to relocate the wall cabinet for what will have to be the last time as I am down to the last possible place to put it! I hope that I’ve finally found a home for it where it will be usable.

Once the study is back together, it’ll be time to start thinking about slowly moving back home!

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Arrival of My Tupperware Order

I’ve had some requests to show off the Tupperware order that I placed in December. My order was delivered today:

Two collapsible bowls:

I’ve been wanting these for ages, but wouldn’t settle for non-Tupperware. Love the colours! They are super stiff right now, but should limber up. My only complaint is that they are not suitable for the microwave. I don’t use the microwave that much, but it seems silly to have to transfer the food to a microwave safe bowl. Still, I know these will get a lot of use. This past week, I sadly saw my lettuce get spongier and spongier as the days went by. I bet that storage in airtight containers like these would have made the lettuce stay nice a few days longer. I also like that these bowls are pretty much spill proof, so I will be able to store liquids in them.

Three little containers:

The shape of these has changed, but the size is the same. Again, love the colours! These will be the perfect size to store the other half of a can of something.

Finally, a silicone spatula:

I’ve tried spatulas in a number of price points and they all end up breaking down on me. This one was pricey, but should last a lifetime. I really dislike the colour, though.

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Less Fun Than Having My Wisdom Teeth Pulled

What. A. Weekend.

My computer was behaving normally on Friday evening, but yesterday morning it started to freeze, requiring a hard reboot. It really felt like it got abducted by Microsoft fiends overnight as that’s how my last Windows machine behaved daily. After a couple of those hard reboots it refuse to boot again. Uh oh.

I decided after spending some time on the ‘support’ forums that I never want to go back there again. People get a perverse pleasure out of suggesting a worst-case scenario. Anyway, it took a good part of the day for me to figure out how to run some hardware diagnostics and determine that my hard drive ($$) and logic board ($$$$$) are fine. I actually learned more about troubleshooting Macs yesterday than I have in the eight years since I made the switch! And I am very impressed by all the tools available. I could never have hoped to troubleshoot a Windows machine to this degree.

By late evening, I was seriously backed up on transcription and needed the issue resolved. Since the trouble appeared to be software related, I decided to just wipe my hard drive and reinstall OSX. I’m sure there could have been a more techie solution, but this was easy and I was confident that a clean install would fix the problem.

Once I had a fresh copy of OS X set up, I restored my old system using my last Time Machine backup. That took the night and I woke up to a happy computer as though I hadn’t lost a whole day with it. If I had known how to run the hardware diagnostics, I could have had the system restored and running again by lunch. Oh, well, live and learn.

The moral of this story is that you should back up your computer often!!! Time Machine backs up automatically every hour, with the last one being just before I went to bed on Friday. Since I wasn’t able to do anything yesterday morning, I didn’t lose anything, making the decision to wipe the drive an easy one.

I’d like to invite my Mac-using readers to hold down CMD-V the next time they boot up. That will bring them to Verbose Mode, which means that instead of seeing a splash screen, you will see what’s actually happen to your system to bring it to life. Very interesting!

This incident just made me fall in love with Macs all over again and shows me just how far I’ve come with them. I had some major issues with my first Mac that were 100% attributed to my being used to using them. Eight years later, I can debug issues myself. Even with that long of using Windows, I wouldn’t have dreamed of that level of proficiency with the system.