september 2021

9.1.21
Julie recently thought we were out of staples, so she ordered a multipack of five boxes of staples with a thousand staples in each box. And it turns out that we still had a nearly-full box that contained 900 staples still. So I think I can safely say that, even if we were to increase our usage of staples by an order of magnitude, we now have in our possession enough staples to last for the rest of our lives.


9.2.21
There hasn't been a ton of new music that I've been obsessed with recently, so I've gone back and started assigning ratings to all the songs that I don't have ratings for in my music library. The last time I did this, I had worked my way up to the early 80s, and after a few more days, I'm now approaching the mid-80s, which is where my real musical taste started to develop as a teenager.

Things should theoretically go faster after this point, because anything I'm encountering now is something that I should be pretty familiar with even if I never bothered to go back and formally rate the songs when I converted everything to digital files 15 years or so ago.

A couple of things I've discovered going through this process: first, if there are unrated songs on an album that otherwise has rated songs on it, then it's highly likely that I'm going to end up giving the unrated songs a 3 (out of 5), which is my rating for "fine, fits the style of the band, but nothing remarkable."

And second, it's remarkable how consistent my taste has stayed over the past few decades: there have been very few cases where I boosted something to a higher rating or dropped it to a lower rating, even though I'd like to think that my tastes have evolved somewhat over all those years, at least in terms of the new music I listen to and love.


9.3.21
A couple of weeks ago, the sink in our bathroom detached from the wall after Will stumbled and grabbed for it to steady himself, so we called a neighborhood handyman to install a new one for us (we went to Home Depot and got the replacement; we just needed him to install it).

He finished a couple of days ago, and at first everything seemed to be fine. But last night the cold water pressure was noticeably lower, and this morning it was barely a trickle. I'm not sure how this could get could messed up this quickly—the hoses, etc., were new, and it seems like if there was anything blocking them, it would have been immediately apparent.

So now we have to decide whether to let the handyman have another crack at it, or do what we probably should have done in the first place—pay a plumber slightly more to make sure it gets installed without any issues and with a warranty on the work. Nothing's ever simple.

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