So, the stay-at-home / shelter-in-place / passive-aggressive-stop-going-the-fuck-out order is now in place. People were asked nicely to not congregate and to keep space to avoid spreading COVID-19, and in the PNW some did, some didn’t.
Thanks to the some-didn’t, we’re now under a more aggressive, but still less than many Asian countries approach of ‘stop spreading this shit’ by requiring people to stay at home. Of course, unlike much of Europe the US has effectively no social safety net*. Now there are some rather hastily created worker protections appearing, dragging the US’s social system into something less awful. But of course, idiot boy wants to end social distancing because the economy is tanking.
The fact that ending social distancing will lead to a mass-casualty-catastrophe, to the US probably being forcibly isolated by most of the rest of the world, and to the economy in the US tanking all the same as half the work force go off sick with COVID-19, the other half hiding because they don’t want to get it, so they won’t be out buying anything doesn’t seem to factor in. But that would involve thinking, something which our current president seems pretty keen to avoid.
Having an sociopathic idiot racist in charge of the US when there wasn’t a massive crisis (other than the ones he generated) seemed bad enough, but having someone who doesn’t understand primary school mathematics trying to understand exponential growth and complex things like “flattening the curve”. Fuck. All we can do is try and protect ourselves and hope that there’s no easy way for Mango Mussolini to override our state’s stay-at-home order. It’s weird to be on the left and championing state’s rights!
Anyhow, Kathryn is now at home working, which is the major change. And I’m trying to get stuff delivered rather than me rocking up to home depot. Interestingly, the lumber processor who’s making our trim wood is considered an essential service, so they’re still open. So we’ll be getting some trim delivered next week. Which should mean that we can start trimming the doorways to the bedrooms and a few other places. We’ve also ordered (some of) our (interior) doors. They’re special order, though, so we’re looking at over a month until they’re delivered.
Which is handy because we’ll have to run down to Oregon to get them.
On Friday I knocked up a credenza**, or perhaps a media stand. The theory with this was that it could be cut from a single sheet of plywood, which it clearly can, because that’s what I did. The more complex bit of the theory was that I could prototype it, then if we liked it we could send off the design to Edensaw, or some other CNC mill place, they could cut it from nicer ply, and we could have a nicer version.
Unfortunately, my design calls for square cut outs, which are easy to do on a CNC cutter, and more tricky to do in the back garden without digging out the files. I hoped to get away with it, but the wedges don’t fit well enough, so the solution we came up with was to order some dowels. Which… will be here eventually.
….until then, we’ve propped up the media stand with the media that will one day occupy it.
Ironically, our house is finally getting near to a point where we’d be willing to have guests visit…
Annyhow. We have also been putting up picture rails, slowly, so have pictures hanging. Which is not the quickest process, but definitely is rewarding and makes it feel even more home-y.
We’ve also been working on installing our kitchen task lighting. They’re both in now and have actually been much more used than I expected. Not just when prepping food in the evenings, but also in the mornings, they cast a much softer light which is very pleasant and much more managable to wake up to.
We’re still working on our lounge wall lights. The laser cutter has definitely made it much more easily feasible for us to ‘print’ the bits we need, but I want to make a couple of minor tweaks to the design before the final print run for them all.
And, yesterday we finally cut the wood for our built in bookshelves that live in the bedrooms and sneakily steal some attic space. One of them is glued and assembled, and just needs a little sanding off of some excess glue, an application of some oilwax and then when it’s dry it can go in. The other one is all cut and ready to assemble, but it got late, and today it’s rained all day. Assembling that is definitely an outside-or-garage job, and since the garage remains packed to the gunnels with stuff, it’s an outside job.
It mayn’t look like much, but it’s exciting to finally see the attic spaces becoming closed off from the rest of the house. Currently they’re just closed off with boxes. I’m also happy because we took the time to run some channels for glass in there, so we should be able to drop some sliding glass doors in, which should keep the dust out.
Today I put the door jamb in on our office, which means all the big door jambs are done, and also having done the main attic one, that means that the only jamb I can currently attack is the small attic one. All the others have to wait for the doors to be in.
We have the wood for both attic doors, and on my shopping list for delivery are the hinges for them, and the magnets so they can close. So… it continues to progress, despite the weather not being in our favour for outside stuff.
Oh, but! Outside.
We have filled one of the raised beds I knocked up last week, and put a bunch of starts in there. The other bed is still…uh, somewhat less soily than might be ideal. It’s always cool to know that we’re growing stuff we’ll eat.
We’ve also ordered some more seeds for things that we’d not got around to ordering yet, and popped some tomato and cabbage seeds in to get them going :)
* This reveals a staggering lack of knowledge, but I’ve no idea how most Asian countries handle their social safety net.
** Despite having no servants to taste our food and confirm a lack of poisons for us.
