Oh Look, It's Snowing Again!

It's a little after daybreak and snowing here, again. Yesterday, I cleaned up what was left here from the previous storm but haven't made it into the city to clean up on Mooney Ave. Interestingly, because the day was clear, the sidewalk and driveway were absorbing enough solar energy that, despite the cold temperatures, a lot of the snow and ice was actually melting.

Now, this morning, there's a light snow falling again and it's sticking on the car and driveway and sidewalk. Not enough that the contract plow service has been back to do the driveway but enough that I'll have to shovel again to make sure that I stay ahead of it.

The portion of the driveway between where my car is parked and the road had been plowed the previous night, which means that at least three-plus inches had fallen and it was quite moisture-laden and heavy. It also tends to drift quite badly between my house and the neighbor's, due to a sort of wind tunnel effect, so there was quite a bit on the part of it that I had to shovel. Because of that, I gave myself the evening off from my daily fitness routine.

In a short while, I'm gonna do my morning meds, get a quick breakfast and then dress, before running out to Lowe's or Home Depot. I actually got a little ahead on my target box project due, I think, to the new heater in the basement, and I've decided to put a set of folding handles on the side of it to make it easier to move around and/or transport. After the second coat of paint was applied to the front, I was able to go ahead and install the leveling feet, stand the unit up, and put the first coat on the back, so that got me a little ahead of where I expected to be.

Anyway, progress is being made and the day is brightening a bit, but the snow is still falling and I'd better get moving because, more than anything else, I want to get out there and shovel that snow. You know I'm kidding, right? OMG, that's the way I talk to the grandkids when we both know that I'm handing out my usual line of BS, lol.

Hope everyone has a good--meaning not-snowy--day...

LPK
Dreamwidth
3.16.2018

The Seven-Eighths Club

This morning I woke up at the ungodly hour of 5 AM, was feeling some excitement about the projects I'd planned for the day, and decided to stay up. Then, predictably, a little before noon, I decided that I REALLY needed to take a nap. Which I did.

When I awoke, an hour or so later, it was from this really weird dream in which a little girl, with whom I'd been talking about music, told me that she was now a member of the Seven-Eighths Club.

Apparently, she had been learning to read music--much like my granddaughter Sophia has been--and had been having a terrible time reading and performing music that was written in 7/8 time.

So I immediately launched into one of those professorial explanations of mine as to what 7/8 time is, saying that this time signature simply means that there are seven beats to a measure with an eighth note getting one beat.

Of course, this sort of explanation--especially to a kid who has probably heard it at least 7 or 8 million times but is dealing with some manner of emotional, not intellectual, block--is totally useless.

But not to worry. The child then proceeds to explain that she has a teacher, fortunately more in tune (see what I did there?) with her students than I would've been, who enrolled her in something called The Seven-Eighths Club.

And while she didn't go into much detail about it, I assumed that this club was made up of students who had the same phobia as this little girl did with respect to music written in the 7/8 time signature. And apparently, by commiserating with her fellow sufferers, she had found friendship, consolation, and relief from this most debilitating of musical melodies. Er, maladies.

It was at that point that I woke up and the first thing I thought of, in trying to understand the odd connection which  I sensed between this dream and my waking life, was where in the world would this poor child have encountered a 7/8 time signature?

Surely, at 10 or 11 years of age, she wasn't being asked to perform the music of, say, Harry Partch whose protégé Danlee Mitchell had been my music theory teacher in college. Because 6/8 is a common time signature for, say, a waltz while 7/8 exists only in those remote reaches of the musical cosmos inhabited by driven (or deranged) geniuses like, well, the aforementioned Harry freakin' Partch.

Then, as I was sitting on the side of the bed, debating between two equally-persuasive modes of re-entering my day-- either struggling to my feet and successfully walking a few steps across the room to my chest of drawers or struggling to my feet and immediately falling on my face--it came to me.

I would simply give in to the conspiring and persuasive forces of vertigo and gravity and fall on my face. No, no, wait, that wasn't it.

Just before I had decided to surrender my consciousness to what I assumed would be this restful interlude, I had been working on my current project in the basement. Specifically, I was installing a piece of hardware called a gate handle or storage bin handle, depending on where you look it up. (Lowe's calls it one, Home Depot calls it the other.)

Anyway, I was installing one on either side of my refurbished target box on a line 24" off the floor so that the screws, when they fully penetrated the side of the box, would embed in the end of the shelf mounted inside of it.

So I drilled the necessary holes and mounted the one on the left side without a problem. But when I looked at the right side, it appeared that my line at 24" was slightly off the centerline of the shelf edge. So I got out my tape and quickly determined that my line needed to be at 23-3/8" inches from the bottom edge of the unit.

Then, milliseconds before I made the fatally-flawed pencil line and drilled the horrifically-disfiguring holes, in the side of my newly-painted masterpiece, I thought, wait, that's not right, it's twenty-three and SEVEN-EIGHTHS.

See where I'm going with this? And aren't you now wishing you could somehow recover that time, those precious moments of your life, that you've wasted reading this?

Well, YOU CAN'T! As Hillary once famously proclaimed, "There are no 'do-overs!'" I don't remember what the context was, when she said it, but I do believe that THERE'S a woman who would know.

In any case, I'm quite certain that this is the first time, in my nearly 74 years, that I've ever made sense of a dream. And I have to admit that, at first, I was kind of excited about it. You know, this sort of personal landmark, reached at long last.

Then, as the lunch that I'd been eating as I typed this began to settle and other similarly-compelling realities of life began to intrude on this exploration of that mysterious boundary between the conscious and subconscious mind, I began to feel like everyone else who's been reading this.

What a freakin' waste of time, lol...

LPK
Dreamwidth
3.16.2018

Finished!

So I've finally finished my target box refurbishing project with the final coat of paint applied to the back of the unit. Right now, it's sitting on a furniture dolly waiting to dry. After that, I'll wheel it over to the corner of the basement where it'll be set up and levelled to that area of the floor.

I'm glad to have it done, definitely glad that I decided to salvage it even after I found it intentionally damaged through the thoughtless behavior of the one I'll just call "my wayward son."

While it's still basically a "quick 'n' dirty" project made of salvaged materials, it's a decent-looking, functional design that also bears a lot of more positive history including, I've been happy to hear, the father-daughter bonding that occurred back in the day when we shared the experience of air rifle training and recreational marksmanship.

Anyway, it's ready and now I'm ready for my next project which will be a built-from-scratch marksman's bench. Which is something we've never had, but can now use as we aim for a more advanced level in our sport.

To begin with, I'll be looking at various home-built designs and figuring out how to incorporate the best features of several of them into something that'll work on our small, indoor range.

It should be fun, as these projects tend to be and, as a friend of mine recently said of her developing interest in the visual arts, it'll "keep me off the streets..."

LPK
Dreamwidth
3.16.2018