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maunderings of a meandering mind

Below are the 25 most recent journal entries.

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  2009.07.09  10.07
It's 2009, not 1959, right?

Pool boots kids who might 'change the complexion'.

Someone in Philadelphia completely failed to notice that the last 50 years happened.

(Hat-tip to [info]dpolicar.)

  
 


 
  2009.07.02  19.49
I can't think of a lot of worse failure modes

I know Microsoft has been selling into the embedded market for a few years now, so I have to wonder if deep down inside our new wall oven runs Windows.....

I picked up some ready-to-bake bread at the grocery store earlier, and just about exactly an hour ago stuck it in the oven. This being the second time we have used the brand new oven.*

About 20 minutes later, I sat down to eat dinner. Just as I was finishing, Chris walked by the oven and stopped and stared at it. I apologized for leaving the light on, and he said, "No - it's still on. I hear the fan."

"I know I hit the off button."

To make a long story short, all the off button appears to do currently is change the display to its normal, oven-off, state: showing only the clock. Without changing anything else: the fan keeps on going, and, more important, the oven keeps on heating.

After about 20 minutes, we rebooted it by turning off the breaker. When we restored power, the display came up with "please set the clock" - and the fan came back on, and the oven started heating again.

(If you're interested, it's a Whirlpool KEBS208SSS02. The kicker? When Chris was shopping, it came down to this and a GE. He went with this one because of some discussion online of a problem with the GE. What problem, you might ask? Turning the oven off didn't actually turn it off....)
* It's a double oven. so technically, this was the second time we've used the upper oven. The lower oven still has packing materials in it.



Mood: indescribable 		 
 


 
  2009.06.27  22.53
a lovely day

I had a lovely day today, which just closed on an especially lovely note.

This morning and part of the afternoon, Alyse and I volunteered at the National Braille Press, where we collated a book for their Children's Braille Book Club: Every month, they get a current children's book title from a print publisher. They remove the spine, interleave transparent pages of braille, containing both the book's text and descriptions of the illustrations, rebind it — producing a book that can be read together by both sighted and blind readers — and then sell for at most the cover price of the original print book.

(Let me just pause here to say what a fantastic idea this is. Not only for sighted parents of a blind child, but imagine: with this, a blind parent can read a picture book to his or her sighted child. Or a sighted and a blind child can sit together side-by-side and read the same book.)

It turns out that braille is difficult or impossible to machine-collate, because the machinery tends to crush the braille. Yes, the geek in my feels like this is a solvable problem, and the wheels are turning in my head even as I write this. But in the mean time, that's why Alyse and I and a dozen other volunteers spent about four hours collating today.

In the process, I discovered two absolutely delightful children's books: The one we were collating, Weslandia, a delightful fantasy about a nerdy kid who ends up creating an entire new world in his back yard. And another, which I found while browsing previous titles they'd done at lunch time, Is Your Mama a Llama?
"Is your mama a llama?" I asked my friend Dave.
"No she is not," is the anser Dave gave.
"She hangs by her fet and she lives in a cave.
I do not believe that's how llamas behave."




To top the day off, I just got off the phone with my sister, Marliene. Mars was a teenager when I was born — which means that when she was in school, no-one knew what learning disabilities were, and the smart, inventive young woman, with her imagination teeming with amazing stories — the big sister that I adored — was going off every morning to Hell in the form of high-school, to be mocked and made to feel stupid and to nearly fail to graduate. (Not that learning disabilities were her only problem Mars also has neurofibromatosis, which you may know as The Elephant-Man disease. As a small child, this produced a growth on her tongue, the removal of which left her with a life-long speech impediment. As a teenager, it produced a fist-sized growth on her shoulder. Yet she was then, and has been for my entire life, the warmest and most joyful person I have ever known.)

Fast-forward about thirty-five years, to the summer of 2004. Mars was working as a teaching assistant in a pre-school in the small Canadian town where she's now spent most of her life. Wishing she could do higher-level work; feeling well-qualified to do such work, but constrained by her lack of credentials. We're talking on the phone, and I tell her — honestly; because it's the truth — that she's the bravest person I've ever known. After explaining how my experience with cancer gave me a clearer understanging of what courage is (in a nutshell, that courage is not at all what most people — people who've never had to be brave — think it is: Rather, it is simply doing what you have to do, given the hand you've been dealt), I explained why she's the bravest person I know. And she accepted it.

Next thing I know, Marliene, who has avoided school like the plague for all those years and has barely ever in her life even touched a computer, has signed up for a certification program in early childhood development, which is administered remotely, and mostly via the Internet. She was terrified of failure. And she did it anyway.

She just called me to tell me she'd received her final grade in her final class — and it was an A+.

She has gotten all As or A-pluses in all of her classes. I could not be more proud.

  
 


 
  2009.06.26  09.48
About time.

In 1957, Dr. Frank Kameny, an astronomer with the US Army Map Service, was fired by the United States Civil Service Commission, on the grounds that the Government "does not hire homosexuals and will not permit their employment...."

Last week, the director of the Civil Service Commission's successor agency, the Office of Personnel Management, apologized.

(Hat-tip to [info]goldsquare for bringing this to my attention.)

  
 


 
  2009.06.26  09.39
meme

If there is one person, or more, on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.



Mood: busy 		 
 


 
  2009.06.18  18.18
Anyone want to help me hang some doors?

I guess I haven't updated you all on the ongoing remodeling saga for a while. Suffice it to say, it continues, slowly and (at least for the time being) somewhat less dustily.

Four weeks ago tomorrow, we took the doors down and took them to the shop. Where they were supposed to be for two weeks.

Fortunately, those two weeks coincided with some friends' vacation, so I was able to crash there rather than live with two housemates and no bathroom door for two weeks.

Two weeks go by. No doors arrive. Chris, the housemate who owns the house, goes back to California, where he works. Matthew and I make arrangements that allow for life without doors without major embarrassment.

Today — about an hour ago as I write this — the doors arrived back. Presenting me, I have now discovered, with a couple of problems:
  1. Many of the doors have, in the process of being finished, lost the notations we had put on their top and bottom ends as to where they go, so some experimenting is going to be necessary in order to hang them. Said experiments will be far more easily performed by four hands than two.
  2. If a door opens against a wall (that is, the doorway is in the corner of a room and the door opens inward, with the open door against the side wall), I cannot hang it single-handedly. I'm fine with a door that has a 180° swing. But with a door in a corner, i feel like I want to be on one side of the door to position it, and on the other side to drop the pins in. [Edit: I figured this out, and hung one such door. But it would be loads easier with some help.]
I would really like to get some of the doors hung before the weekend. And I really do not feel Matthew is a good person to help with this operation. So I'm hoping someone would like to come over for maybe 20 minutes today or tomorrow to help me hang a couple of doors....

Please comment if you can. Or just call me: 617 901 6954. Thanks!

  
 


 
  2009.06.16  23.33
As Sweet a Moment as I Have Ever Seen

I caught a bus today. The bus pulled up — not, of course, to the curb: it being the MBTA, the driver stopped a good four feet out. I stepped out to wait by the front corner while people left.

A little girl got off, her head coming perhaps midway up my thigh. She jumped down the long final step, probably half her height — and then she turned around, and with that serious expression children wear only when they're about important adult business, put out her hand.

I suddenly noticed that the next person coming down the steps was an elderly lady with a cane. A half-beat later, the bus driver, whose job is to notice these things in a timely manner, caught on and lowered the corner of the bus — with the old lady in the stairwell, gripping her cane and the railing for dear life.

I was trying to figure out how I could offer to help the lady without stepping on the little girl, when she reached out and, with the most delicate touch, took the girl's hand. Brought her cane down to the ground with her other hand, and without of course actually putting any weight on the child, gave the little girl what she so obviously considered the great privilege of helping her down.

After I got on the bus, I watched them as long as I could, walking down the sidewalk together, holding hands, as bound by love as any two people I have ever seen.


Until I was six, my mother's Uncle Jesse lived with us. An old man, badly bowed by arthritis, he walked, slowly and painfully, with an old wooden cane. He had infinite patience and endless stories for a little boy, and I loved him with total devotion. When he was feeling up to it, he would take a daily walk to the end of the road — perhaps a quarter mile, but for him, very difficult and very important. I would accompany him on those walks, holding his hand, listening to his stories, basking in his love.

I hadn't thought about it in thirty years or more, but my mom used to tell stories about how I would hold out my hand for Uncle Jesse to steady himself on when he stood. In that little girl today, as through a lens in time, I saw the little boy. I am honored to have been him.

  
 


 
  2009.06.12  19.29
Browser Tab Potpourri

It is once again time to go through my web browser's hundred or so open tabs and share the best of them with my friends.

For those who've always wondered: What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow:
Hashing out the classic question with Strouhal numbers and simplified flight waveforms.

After spending some time last month trying to develop alternate graphic presentations for kinematic ratios in winged flight, I decided to try to answer one of the timeless questions of science....


Read the full article.

Got this one from [info]siderea: Dancing Bach on the FAO Schwartz Keyboard:

This in turn led me down two fruitful (or at any rate, entertaining) tangents. First, the title, "Girls Rock" (which I thought might be the name of this duo) found me the trailer for a movie of that title — a documentary about a rock camp for adolescent girls. Which probably makes it sound like "yeah, whatever." But the trailer brought tears to my eyes, and I am going to find this movie and watch it.



More about Girls Rock: The Movie..
On a lighter and note, Googling to make sure I was correctly identifying the piece the two young women were dancing on the giant keyboard (I was; it's the Toccata and Fugue in D minor) led me to this wonderfully geeky animation of that same piece:





Mood: amused 		 
 


 
  2009.06.12  10.18
Not All Traditions Are Worth Keeping

I've forgotten who pointed me at this (though I remember there were at leas two). What if we really did have Traditional Marriage?





Mood: impressed 		 
 


 
  2009.06.11  12.54
For geeks who like to get dirt under their nails

If you're a nerd who grew up wrenching on cars — well, I expect you'll have the same reaction to this that I did:



(Yes, it's for real. Click on the image to go to the Haynes page on the book.)



Mood: amused 		 
 


 
  2009.06.04  22.52
Meet the new MacBook, same as the old MacBook....

My MacBook started acting up a couple months ago, in a particularly disturbing way: It would sometimes wake itself up when asleep. Including when it was closed and in my bag: Opening your padded laptop zipcase to pull out a laptop whose fan is going full blast — a laptop that is hot to the touch — is seriously wrong.

It was intermittent, and I really didn't have time to deal with it. OTOH, I knew its third birthday (and thus the expiration of my AppleCare) were coming up this month. Then Tuesday morning it did it again, lighting up its screen, making CD-eject noises, and running its fan on the breakfast table, ten minutes after I'd closed it. And when I went to log in to try to put it to sleep again, it locked up.

So I took it (in it's locked-up state, so they could do the reboot themselves and look for clues) to the shop (the shop being The Computer Loft in Allston, which as best I can tell is the last of what was always a rare breed: independent computer dealers with clue.) This afternoon they called me to say it was ready: they had replaced the main logic board, where a USB chip had gone wonky, under AppleCare. They had also noticed a small crack in its case (which I had noticed long ago and forgotten. This turns out to be a known defect in early MacBooks, so they also replaced that under AppleCare. On MacBooks, the keyboard and trackpad are integral to the top case. Which means that the part of the computer I actually touch, and consequently the part that shows physical wear, is now brand new. As is the main logic board.

So if you squint a little, I essentially I got a new MacBook today. For free.

I'm good with that.



Mood: pleased 		 
 


 
  2009.05.29  00.29
Bunny followup

For anyone who may have been concerned, the bunny seems to be fine. More in my replies to comments on the original post., if you're interested.

  
 


 
  2009.05.28  11.38
do you keep bunnies, or know someone who does?

I'm feeding Alyse's bunnies while she's in Turkey. Last time I did this, I knew to call Jason if I had any questions, but he's on the Turkey trip too. Alyse mentioned someone else who also has rabbits, but she forget to send me contact info, and while it was a name I've heard her mention before, it's not someone I know (nor do I recall the name). If you know who that might be, please either point them at this or let me know how to reach them. Thanks!

(I ask because one of them didn't finish his veggies yesterday, which I've never seen either of them do before. But my sample size is small, so I don't know whether to be concerned.)

  
 


 
  2009.05.24  23.46
Anyone know how to get into this fixture?

I'm housesitting this week while some friends are on vacation. This means, as I hoped it would when I volunteered, that I've been able to go off antihistamines and my breathing has almost returned to normal. Yay!

It also means that instead of my usual current assortment of renovation quandaries, I found myself presented this morning with an old-school old house maintenance problem: The light in the bathroom went out, and when I looked up, I realized I had no idea how to get into the fixture to replace the bulb. Before I dig up a step-ladder and start probing randomly, I thought I'd ask the collective wisdom of LJ: Has anyone seen a fixture like this before, and if so, do you know how to get into it?

( Picture behind the cut )

(Alternately, can anyone suggest a good LJ community to ask this sort of question in?)

Edit: Yes, I did notice the discoloration strongly suggestive that the fixture has been in service too long and/or with too bright a bulb. I don't intend to merely replace the bulb without investigating more. But knowing how to get into it before I start would be useful.



Mood: calm
Music: Bridge to Somewhere - American RadioWorks 		 
 


 
  2009.05.22  14.37
You say it's your birthday....

Oh, hey, it's my birthday.

Kind of snuck up on me this year, what with the moving in to the unfinished house.

And even if it hadn't snuck up on me, neither the place nor I are up for throwing a party right now.

So I'm going to cast forward a couple months and declare:

Saturday, July 25, 2009
Alex's Birthday (observed)



Details TBA, but it will probably take the form of brunch at my place, to be followed by ice cream.



Mood: cheerful
Music: Karl Popper - Melvyn Bragg 		 
 


 
  2009.05.17  16.22
Could someone lend me a dremel tool?

Just installed (both ends) and tested the first of our quad-gang network jacks. A pair of professional electricians (an electrician wouldn't do it alone: too much wasted time running back and forth) could have done it in ten minutes, max. It took me just this side of two hours.

Let's say with all the backing-and-forthing, a hypothetical pro doing the job alone would take half an hour. So I'm just over a quarter as efficient as a pro.

Half as efficient I could feel good about. A quarter — not so much.

I expect my efficiency with the punchdown and coax tools will improve significantly and quickly. But by far the biggest time-waster was carefully carving away the plaster skim coat from where it was partially covering the wiring box, while making sure not to damage the plaster past where it would be covered by the faceplate. A purpose for which a razor knife is The Wrong Tool.TM

I'm pretty sure a Dremel is the right tool. Would someone be willing to lend me theirs for a week or so? I'll buy a #562 bit for it and give it to you when I'm done.

  
 


 
  2009.05.17  08.41
Quiz Time!

Haven't done one of these in a while...

Your result for The Social Persona Test (What kind of man/woman are you?)...

Lord of the Misfits (QLAM)

Quirky Liberal Alpha Male

You are similar to The Fratt Boy, in that you often try to take care of peers you percieve as less successful, but with the added benefit that you actually understand those on the fringes. You are a good ally to have, but people might be hurt if they believe your universal good will is a sign of a close friendship. You are nice to everyone, but you know who your true friends are. In terms of dating, you want someone who shares your interests; other than that, anything goes.

You are more QUIRKY than NORMAL.

You are more LIBERAL than TRADITIONAL.

You are more DOMINANT than PASSIVE.

When picking a date, consider: The Rarity (QTAF), The Renaissance Faire Wench (QLAF), The Librarian (QTBF), or The Emo Girl (QLBF)

(Image from UNC Library Website)

Take The Social Persona Test (What kind of man/woman are you?) at HelloQuizzy





Mood: coughing
Music: The Peasants' Revolt - Melvyn Bragg 		 
 


 
  2009.05.15  08.33
We didn't start the 80s - they've been burnin' strong since we gave up Pong

Continuing too-many-open-tabs-cleanup-day (and with apologies for having forgotten where I got the link in the first place), I give you....





Mood: amused
Music: Relativism - Melvyn Bragg 		 
 


 
  2009.05.15  08.06
The littelest TIbbetts

For those of you who know Richard and Aletta but aren't in touch with them enough to have gotten the memo....The littlest Tibbetts. (Two-and-a-half weeks ago now. I saw the picture at the time but didn't think to forward it til I wa going through tabs and closing them just now.)



Music: Relativism - Melvyn Bragg 		 
 


 
  2009.05.13  23.41
progress

Tomorrow (touch wood) we should finally get hot water in the kitchen. It's been two days since the construction workers stopped using saws extensively in the house, which has cut the dust down some. (There's still a lot of dust around the place, but it's nowhere near as heavy in the air. My throat is scratchy as hell, but my eyes aren't as puffy and scratchy as they were.) Today they cleared out most of their tools, and moved the scrap pile in the basement into the construction dumpster (which goes away bright and early tomorrow morning). In the process, they found my watch, which is still accurate to the second, so no harm done there.

There's still a lot left to be done, but the house is starting the transition from construction-site-I'm-camping-out-in, to a house-where-we're-having-some-workers-in. I figure within a week we'll have crossed the nebulous boundary between those two. If all goes well tomorrow, I may start unpacking the kitchen as soon as Friday. (Currently I've unpacked only the food in the fridge, an electric skillet I bought just to get by in a stoveless kitchen, a toaster, a microwave, a measuring cup (to boil water in in the microwave), 1 cup, 1 glass, 1 plate, 1 bowl, and a small handful of silverware. It will be nice to unpack more.)

Also on the schedule for tomorrow is hooking up the washer and dryer. (It turns out current electrical code requires 4-prong outlets for dryers; our dryer had a 3-prong old-style cord. I bought a replacement cord, and discovered a severe lack of documentation for our dryer online, to the point where I was 99% sure how to proceed but unwilling to take the 1% risk that the dryer would catch fire. It was a matter of taking the dryer apart to trace a wire — or hope the electrician could just look at it and say authoritatively when he came by on Mon. Which he did. So I proceeded to change the cord Monday afternoon. A small comedy of errors ensued: The dryer's stock cord had spade lugs; the replacement, eyelets. The nuts in the dryer's terminal block were not captive. (Why would you remove the screws to connect spade lugs?) Can you guess where the nuts (yes, I lost more than one) fell? So I ended up taking the dryer apart anyway. But that's done now. I bought a vent kit for the dryer today, and (touching wood again) I'll be able to do laundry tomorrow. If not, I'll be decamping to a laundry tomorrow: I have one day's change of clothes left. Wish me luck.



Mood: exhausted
Music: Carolingian Renaissance - Melvyn Bragg 		 
 


 
  2009.05.08  15.31
Some days you can't win

So I'm sitting in the basement, trying to work on the network wiring because it's about the most constructive thing I can do while the construction workers are running around the place with Mike FM* going full blast all day.

I'm trying not to irritate the two places I've already cut my fingertips because my hands are soft and I don't handle 24-gauge solid copper every day. I'm coughing, my eyes are watering, and in spite of the antihistamines my nose is dripping from all the dust.

And then a bug flies into my face. I clap my hands, trying to kill it — and my watch flies off my wrist. Landing - noiselessly - somewhere among the construction debris.

The watch that I bought less than a week ago, having finally given up hope of getting anything out of the "lifetime warranty" on my previous watch.

Half an hour of looking through construction trash later, I"m taking a break to whine.


* A radio station whose "format" apparently consists of everything that has ever been in the top 40, as long as there's been a top 40, on random shuffle.



Mood: exhausted 		 
 


 
  2009.05.08  13.08
f-type help?

A couple months ago, when I thought we'd be moving much sooner, [info]jered lent me his coax tools and showed me how to use them. It's now two months later, and for the week I am one for seven on attempting to crimp f-type connectors.

If someone who knows how to do this would be willing to drop by and give me a refresher course, I would greatly appreciate it. Please phone me - 617 901 6954 - if you can help.



Mood: exhausted
Music: Marx - Melvyn Bragg 		 
 


 
  2009.05.07  06.11
bleep! bleep! bleep!

Well, I now know the new fire alarm system is loud enough to wake me up. Wake me up with a sort of oh-my-god-is-the-world-ending electric spasm of panic that I'm still feeling in my back ten minutes later.

No, the place isn't on fire.

By the time I had my pants on and had grabbed my shoes, phone, and laptop (all handy at my bedside - I was not wasting time in a fire alarm to hunt things down, just grabbing the important things in front of me), the alarm had stopped. I went through the house checking anyway, but nothing.

I can only assume the construction dust got to one of them, even though they're all covered in plastic to prevent that. (It's certainly getting to me, in spite of heavy application of antihistamines. My doctor thinks that's the reason my eye was unable to focus the other day. My dust allergy has been working overtime the past week, unsurprisingly.)

The thing that gets me is that it happened at 5:40 in the morning. I expect the dust is rather the opposite of stirred up right now. Which makes me worry that I'm in for more of the same. I heard a single alarm bleep! the other day, but it was just one, so mostly left me going where'd that come from? (Was it us? the neighbors? Not the alarm at all, but one of the construction workers' tools?) Having now heard a dozen or so more bleeps out of it, I'm sure it was the same. So am now going to try to go back to sleep while wondering when it will go off next.



Mood: exhausted 		 
 


 
  2009.05.05  10.01
annoying and a little scary

This post brought to you courtesy of my 7th grade typing teacher, who made me into an old-school touch typist.

Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I can't focus. I blink and clean my glasses and rinse my eyes*, all to little or no avail: I just have to live with a fuzzy world for a few hours til eventually I can focus again. I'm pretty sure this is caused by sleeping wrong and deforming my eye in my sleep - I think I may have even gotten a medical opinion to that effect some years ago (though long enough ago that I can't remember whether it was from Mass Eye & Ear or from Dr. Zephyr - I should probably check in with an actual opthomologist on it. (Note: I can't actually read what I'm typing, but I can tell that opthomologist is underlined in red. I suspect it's a case of the spellchecker being stupid, but feel free to correct me.)

I've now been up for four hours, which is a long time for this to last, and it's starting to get kind of upsetting. On top of that, I just spent a half-hour trying to assemble a "shop light" fluorescent light from Home Depot, only to conclude the buttheads didn't bother testing whether it was in fact possible to assemble it before foisting it on their customers. (The ... bulb sockets, for lack of a better term, are L-shaped plastic widgets, (imagine an L about 2cm deep by 3 tall by 1 wide) Near the base of the L, on the front and back, are two plastic spring tabs. The stem of the L is supposed to be inserted into a rectangular hole in the reflector; the tabs are clearly meant to hold it in place. Either the widgets are too small for the hole, or the hole is too large for the widgets - at any rate, the widget slips into and out of the hole without the tabs even being pressed upon. There is no way the light can be assembled this way.)

Where was I? I might be able to read this if I knew how to change font size in xjournal. Um. Anyway, my eyes aren't working, I'm annoyed by cheap-ass hardware, I'm s little scared by this eye thing, and I can't even web browse to see if I can find pre-assembled shop lights somewhere.

Hope your day's off to a better start than mine.

* except I can't really rinse my eyes this morning, because I don't know where the hell anything is post-move.

Addendum: Found the eye rinse: doesn't seem to have helped but my eye sure feels clean.

I should probably have mentioned that I only have one eye I can focus with in the first place; the other one's only good for peripheral vision. Not having a back-up, I tend to get really nervous when something goes wrong with the good one.

Turns out in FireFox I do remember how to change font size. Which lets me read LJ at what I'm guessing is like 24 point type.



Mood: nervous
Music: 90.9 WBUR FM - 		 
 


 
  2009.05.02  09.48
Anyone have a spare microwave oven? Or electric tea kettle?

So the kitchen now has a working refrigerator, which means I can return the dorm fridge [info]narya lent me, as soon as I can clean it. Which may be a few days: something sticky leaked in it, and in attempting to clean it, I discovered that we do not yet have hot water in the kitchen. There is also not yet a working stove, and Chris (who is back in California) told me on the phone yesterday that he has not yet even chosen a microwave.

I had an old but essentially serviceable 17-year-old microwave oven: its only problem was that its timer was broken. But when packing last summer, to move temporarily into an apartment with a built-in microwave and then ostensibly back into a remodeled house, also with a built-in microwave, I gave it to Goodwill.

In the normal course of events, I cook (or re-heat leftovers) all but two or three meals a week. (I was taught to cook by a mother who helped her mother put sufficient and nutritious meals for ten on the table three times a day throughout the depression. These days, I spend in a month on groceries about what I used to spend in a week on restaurants when I was working, and eat every bit as well.) Had I known two weeks ago that there would be something over five days between when I moved in and when the kitchen would become fully usable, I would have done a number of things differently. For one thing, I'd have depleted the stock of food in the fridge and freezer. (Instead, I kept them stocked at normal levels, on the assumption that I would just be moving it from one fully functional fridge to another.) More pertinent to the current problem, I would have started asking two weeks ago if anyone had a dorm fridge, microwave, hot-plate, and/or electric kettle I could borrow, which I would have been able to arrange to pick up at a mutually convenient time at some point during those two weeks.

Instead, I am asking whether any of you have a microwave oven sitting around, that I might be able to drop by and pick up today. I have leftovers in the fridge that really don't want to wait much longer.

Ditto if you have a disused electric tea kettle, though that's something I can far more easily get by without.

(There probably wouldn't be any point in my borrowing a hot-plate now: I bought an electric skillet last night: I'd been thinking of getting one for a while, to solve the grease-splatter problem (they tend to have glass lids), and figured at this point, even if the stove is usable as soon as Tuesday, it will nearly pay for itself in the take-out I would otherwise buy. (Faced with the prospect of yet more peanut-butter, I ended up getting take-out twice yesterday. Which was definitely not sustainable.) At any rate, I can now cook a variety of one-pan meals, so a hot-plate wouldn't do much for me.)

Thanks in advance!

  
 


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