Approximately Adam: Day Twenty-Two

August 11, 2004
Day Twenty-Two

I decided to start my journal entry tonight before I've gotten balls-to-the-wall tired. I just got back about twenty minutes ago from CVS, the second stop in my late night hunt for a glue stick. I wouldn't have gone out if I'd know that Price Chopper didn't carry them, but since I was out already I journeyed into Delmar to get one. It's amazing how different the public world is at one in the morning. At Price Chopper, nobody's in uniform and the employees yell back and forth to each other, their comments often punctuated by profanity. The roads are great, too; all the lights are on trips and since there's virtually nobody else on the roads all but one of them turned green for me as soon as I pulled up. The light by CVS, notoriously busy during the day, is a flashing yellow by night. There was a guy coming the other way and - so content was I with my current driving situation - I flashed him on and let him go. I hardly ever give someone a break, unless I think I'm going to get hit if I don't. CVS was also strange. They have all of their employees doing re-stocks, and the only open cash register had a sign which read "Please Ring Bell for Service" with a little silver bell like this one. At first I panicked; there were no glue sticks in the stationary section, only super glue. Instead it was stashed away with the markers in the poster board aisle. You'd think glue and poster board would be a natural fit in stationary, but there you go. The CVS employees were in uniform, and the protocol for such late night human exchanges fascinates me. Apparently when it's after mid-night but before sunrise you straddle your fences and open with "Good morning" and close with "Good night." The ride home was equally flawless; I didn't encounter another car until I got stuck at the one aforementioned light. Apparently the people who want to turn left at the intersection near my house are perpetually fucked; forced to endure an entire light cycle even if it takes two minutes (as it did tonight) for a car to come from an opposing direction. I turned off my lights as I pulled into the driveway and would have made it my room without disturbing anybody were in not for that damned sensor on the light over the garage.

My day time was at least as eventful. Feeling exceptionally ambitious today (and frustrated by the fact that I'd again run out of harddisk space and had several files too big to fit unto a CD), I decided to catalog all of the CDs full of random files I'd burned over the course of several full system wipes and a hard drive installation. I also burned a CD which included one of those "too big to fit on single CD" files in a highly compressed RAR form. The cataloging process in ongoing, but the Excel file I've started it on has 329 files listed spanning nine CDs. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

In order to store all of the catalogued CDs in one neat place, I started building a box at around three in the afternoon. I'd almost finished cutting the first end piece when Dad came home, told me I was using the wrong saw, proceeded to finish cutting the first end and cutting the second end completely in the course of about a minute, then proceeded to inform me that the wood I'd chosen was too thin to nail anything into and that we should start the whole damn thing over anyway. At least my measurements were still good, and an hour or so after supper we kicked into high gear and got the whole thing built, glued, and nailed together. Then we filled in all the cracks, dents, and holes with wood putty and left it to dry. Tomorrow we sand. It was fun, will result in a better final product, and made a positive bonding experience to boot.

The whole thing ties together, in fact. The case is designed to fit 80 of the thin CD cases with the spines facing up. In order to put labels on the thin CD cases, I cut and label thin strips of printer paper, rub the surface with the writing on it over a glue stick and use the point of a pair of surgeon's scissors to nudge it into place. The glue stick dries clear and the label is visible through the plastic. The problem was that I had previously killed my last glue stick labeling in such a fashion the spines of some SVCDs I'd made. With the whole house lacking in glue sticks, I set off against my mother's advisement and took a little drive...

^{posted by Adam at 02:19 |}

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