Miscellany
Progress has been slow in rearranging and cleaning out my room, but it should pick up now that the holiday shopping season and whatnot is over. I have so much stuff I don't want to get rid of, so much crap I do want to get rid of mixed in with it, and of course the place is very dirty on top of everything else. I'm sorting through the massive collection of old magazines and catalogs for the few things I want to keep, but I still have piles and piles of 3-ring binders full of old homework and art going back to middle school in some cases. Not ready to part with all those old drawings just yet. Then there are all those old clothes I need to sort through, and either toss in the trash or wash and donate. Probably have to get rid of my old dresser somehow. There's a sturdy old rocking chair with generous cushions (perfect for making forts out of) that has lots of sentimental value but not much room for it to occupy in the house. I'm reluctant to give that one up, and it might need reupholstering anyway.
I'm still at a loss as to how I'll rearrange things in the end, especially the placement of my bed and television. I'll probably have to use some extension cords and power bars to preserve access to all the wall outlets, and I might have to patch up the walls in a few places where years of adolescent living have pocked and poked it. I'll have to get rid of some of the old tables I ad-hoc installed to hold all my stuff, probably need some shelf units and maybe a large bin or locker of some kind. I'd like to leave room for an art desk and chair, place to use as a laptop station, figure out where to put my big ol' stereo system... in the end I probably won't free up as much new space as I thought.
So I got mom an MP3 player, but because of issues I'm having to rip her CDs with my laptop and cram them into Flash drives to transfer them back to the desktop. Almost done! I had to smoosh some into a lower quality format until I figured out how to enable encoding at a higher rate. Hopefully the half I ripped as 128 kb/s MP3s won't sound bad, compared to the 150-192 kb/s VBR MP3s I'm using for the rest. I'm also ripping the CDs in FLAC format so that we can burn some back-up copies to disk later. It's a good thing I have a few thumbdrives and SD cards laying around.
I have a bad habit of not making my car loan payments on time. Instead of making automatic payments with my Credit Union, I wanted to make the payments myself for about a year in hopes of beefing up my credit rating, but a few times I've been several days late (though never to the point of incurring a late fee). I hope that isn't reflecting badly on my credit. Anyhow, last time I went to the bank, I also picked up some coin rolls so I could tackle the jars of change in my room. Last night, I counted out 1,083 standard pennies, plus two Lincoln/Wheat Ear pennies and two Canadian pennies. All in all I reclaimed nearly $32 in change, and now I can start the jars over again.
Storing the rolled coins will be interesting, though I've found that an empty Altoid tin will -just- fit three rolls of pennies inside. Hmmm.
I'm still at a loss as to how I'll rearrange things in the end, especially the placement of my bed and television. I'll probably have to use some extension cords and power bars to preserve access to all the wall outlets, and I might have to patch up the walls in a few places where years of adolescent living have pocked and poked it. I'll have to get rid of some of the old tables I ad-hoc installed to hold all my stuff, probably need some shelf units and maybe a large bin or locker of some kind. I'd like to leave room for an art desk and chair, place to use as a laptop station, figure out where to put my big ol' stereo system... in the end I probably won't free up as much new space as I thought.
So I got mom an MP3 player, but because of issues I'm having to rip her CDs with my laptop and cram them into Flash drives to transfer them back to the desktop. Almost done! I had to smoosh some into a lower quality format until I figured out how to enable encoding at a higher rate. Hopefully the half I ripped as 128 kb/s MP3s won't sound bad, compared to the 150-192 kb/s VBR MP3s I'm using for the rest. I'm also ripping the CDs in FLAC format so that we can burn some back-up copies to disk later. It's a good thing I have a few thumbdrives and SD cards laying around.
I have a bad habit of not making my car loan payments on time. Instead of making automatic payments with my Credit Union, I wanted to make the payments myself for about a year in hopes of beefing up my credit rating, but a few times I've been several days late (though never to the point of incurring a late fee). I hope that isn't reflecting badly on my credit. Anyhow, last time I went to the bank, I also picked up some coin rolls so I could tackle the jars of change in my room. Last night, I counted out 1,083 standard pennies, plus two Lincoln/Wheat Ear pennies and two Canadian pennies. All in all I reclaimed nearly $32 in change, and now I can start the jars over again.
Storing the rolled coins will be interesting, though I've found that an empty Altoid tin will -just- fit three rolls of pennies inside. Hmmm.