Copious Free Time

.
The wind from the feeble Ike remnant split the top of the tree out front. One of the sub-trunks, high up, is staying on from a couple inches of bark plus force of habit. Yes, I mow carefully around that area, keeping my ears open for any sound like wood cracking. It's right by the woodpecker nest up there, though whether that has anything to do with it or not, I don't know. The fact that the woodpecker chose a big hollow part of the tree might just make it 'related' but not 'caused by.'

Then water started showing up under the kitchen sink. The plumber will be back to fix that in a couple of days -- it seems the previous folks never really attached the sink properly. It's been staying put with Gravity Brand Adhesive, and water drips right down under the uncaulked edges. And yesterday the phone had stopped working.

So much for everything falling apart.

In other news, I've gotten the records halfway arranged. I got them all up on the shelves so that they are shelves of records and not just shelves of boxes which could (and in some cases did) contain anything. Now I'm trying to get them back into the sort of order where I could find things, which means undoing everything the movers did to undo the order I had them in before. There are records all over the place just now.

The records include the Mickey Mouse Club LPs my sisters and I used to listen to as kids. I got those ripped to mp3 when we were in Massachusetts. That's a good thing, as I still don't have the turntable set up here yet. When I build more shelves, I think I'll work out some sort of accomodation for the turntable and get back to ripping LPs and 45s, at least. One of my sisters just finished a visit with another, and I uploaded the files of the MMC material so they could enjoy it together. Unlike my earlier MMC files, these aren't from the re-released LPs, but are from original, circa-pre-1960 days, with references to TV projects and such (like "Andy Burnett" and "Perri," the Little Girl Squirrel -- Jimmie Dodd sings, "If I could catch her, I'd give her a hug!"). The link goes dead after seven days without anybody downloading, but a couple of friends downloaded it on Sunday, so it should be good for a couple more days, in case anybody's interested in some scratchy Americana. Twist your Mouseka-Dial right here.

On a related topic, I heard from somebody connected with a Disney family museum, asking me about the PM scans from my flickr set on animation-related stuff. I wrote back, explaining how I'd photocopied the originals from the bound copies of the 1940s tabloid at the Swem library at the College of William and Mary, just before they moved the material to an off-site storage facility, then scanned them. I should have mentioned that I cleaned them up, too. I told her what their options were, ranging from using my high-resolution pix (which, being from monochrome photocopies, lacked the second spot colors of the original printing) to asking the library about color copies. She said they'd see first if the ones I had posted were sufficient for their use. I haven't heard back yet, but it was kind of nice being asked.

My Martian Lander limerick is in print now, in Neo-Opsis. My contributor copy came yesterday. Woo hoo! I'm a contributor!

Let's see. Tree, plumber, phone, Mouse, museum, limerick, records all over the floor. Sarah's back from school, and getting ready to play with Mikey and Zach. I might take a nap. I think that about covers it.
.