Tag Archives: TIC

Today I choose to tackle the first part of the garage (TIC00047d)

The PolyBlog
September 7 2020

The reorg project has been in full swing for some time, and part of the challenge is the mish-mash of items that are stored in multiple places:

  • Tools like small hammers or screwdrivers in the garage, in the first-floor alcove near the front door, in the basement where I have my desks now, and in the office upstairs;
  • Books in the bedroom, office, basement, Jacob’s bedroom, and even the guest room;
  • My clothes in the bedroom, closet, guest room, and front hall closet;
  • Housewares / camping items in the laundry room storage, main basement, alcove, garage, and basement;
  • Astronomy stuff in the alcove, basement and garage;
  • Sports stuff in the basement and garage;
  • Power tools mainly in the garage, but a couple of smaller items in various parts of the house;
  • Movies in the bedroom, basement, laundry room storage, and first floor;
  • Electrical stuff in the main basement, laundry room storage, and garage;
  • Video game stuff in the laundry room storage, main basement, and first floor;
  • Photo books in the office and bedroom;
  • Games in the office, bedroom, family room, living room, main basement, garage and laundry room storage; and, of course,
  • Papers in almost every place.

In most cases, that mish-mash made some sense on a case-by-case basis. But since I want to do some purging, it’s kind of hard to purge a collection of screwdrivers, for example, if they’re in three different locations. I pretty much have to put everything close to its final resting place before I can do a proper organized purge.

I have frequently called it a domino problem. For example, organizing some of the housewares and camping stuff is a bit painful when it is in at least two different locations, and moving it from one to the other requires me to move a bunch of other stuff out of the way to make room, which in turn means making room somewhere else for THAT set of items. Dominoes.

But paralysis by domino is a poor excuse / rationale for not being organized. And quite frankly, I don’t have the luxury of some of it anymore, not if I’m going to get my office working and organized properly.

I’ve already made a GIANT dent in the office and basement, Andrea has done a lot of stuff in the family room and toys from the basement to the office storage area, and we’re pretty close to being able to say things are all grouped somewhere. Like, “Okay, this is ALL the audio-visual stuff in the house all in one place, what am I keeping and what am I purging?”. It’s still not going to be easy on some of it to decide to get rid as much as I hope to purge, but regardless, if I’m going to finish by the end of September, there are two giant areas left untouched. I need to dig into them just to figure out what’s there even, beyond the general idea I have already. I still have the first-floor alcove and the garage.

Today, Andrea and I tackled the garage. Most of it was going through about 25 small shoebox-sized plastic tubs that had everything from screwdrivers to drillbits, from Allen keys to tape, and from screws to brackets for shelving. Some of it went GREAT. It was easy to see where things went, easy to group them, easy to dispose of some stuff.

Other areas were not so great. Like, for instance, a bunch of things I have for curtain rods. Which I would LOVE to get rid off, but Andrea and I have at least four or five places in the house where we want to change the existing window coverings. So it seems premature to purge curtain rod holders before we know what we’re doing for those locations.

I also haven’t quite figured out what I’m doing with multiple sets of sockets and wrenches that are all jumbled together. Most are labelled well; some are not labelled at all or worn away. I’m tempted to keep the newest and/or best quality set, and ditch the rest. I have this vision of two small tool bags, one in the garage and one in the house, both relatively identical with a good set of each size of screwdriver, for instance.

But as I said, I need all the sets together in one place to then start dividing them up properly. Today was phase 1 of the garage, and we went through two large shelves of small items. It took about two hours and wiped me out. While it didn’t empty large areas of the garage, it was the major parts that take time since we had to open each little box, sort through it, decide what to keep or purge, and even for the purging, seeing if it was something that Andrea could give away on the local “free” Facebook recycling groups or if it was just garbage. Or even if it was garbage, was it e-waste or chemical or recyclable or just plain garbage? A thousand little decisions and it’s exhausting. The electrical work is going to be worse as most of that will be just me going through it, today I had Andrea helping me decide.

The funny thing is it likely looks worse after we were done with lots of piles of things all over the garage on tables here and there.

Phase 2, which I’ll do sometime in the next two weeks, is also going to be a bit brutal. A lot of “big” things to decide if we’re keeping or not. Tarps that we found useful for x or y purpose, but do we need all of them? Some toys of Jacob’s in the garage … do we keep toys for going to the beach to build sandcastles? Which we haven’t used in 5 years probably? Are we keeping all the balls we have looking forward to maybe having a pool next year to play with them in? Or do we purge them now?

And a giant set of questions for me around what I’m doing with my astro gear. I have an option to build a small enclosed parking area in the garage to put a rolling wagon in that would let me haul all my gear to the backyard relatively easily. But if I take that option, I would keep some nails and screws, plus a bunch of wood, AND I’d have to get rid of the workbench. Or I can try to fit it in where there’s a wardrobe now, maybe even using some of the wood from the wardrobe to build the cover. Or do I scrap the covered idea, and then I can get rid of the fasteners AND the extra wood that is there. I am definitely not going to be building any more shelves, and so I have a bunch of shelving that can be purged. Unless, as I said, I build that astro box. Sigh.

25 days left in September, so it will be crunch time.

And these are not the only things left to do, just some big areas on the list that have to get going so I don’t end up having to repeat purging steps.

Today I choose to tackle the first phase of the garage work, with two other phases to go. We (Andrea and I) made good progress, but there’s still a lot to do.

What choices are you making today?

Today I choose to design a new layout (TIC00045d)

The PolyBlog
September 5 2020

I was feeling a bit off earlier this morning, and took it easy on my food intake for the day. Even managed a nap in there for self-care. But after watching two episodes of Bear Grylls’ Eco-Challenge show tonight for relaxation, I was feeling a bit better for the day, and decided to double-down on a layout issue.

I mentioned previously that I’m getting organized for a large project related to music reviews, although it is more about getting myself better organized so that I can peck away at it a bit here and a bit there. I have a few projects like that under way, and each one requires a bit of planning to get it going.

For the musical review one, I never really liked a format I was using, a big “ugly” table, albeit with an option to make it sortable. I did a bunch of searching yesterday for the right tool, found an option, discarded it, and decided tonight to rethink the design.

What I really needed was my raw data file. I thought I knew where I had saved it but when I went to the folder, I could find only 1944. No 1943 data. Looked all through my folders, a couple of other places, backups even, nada. I started to think I had maybe moved some files at some point, and deleted a folder without making sure it was empty. Nope, I was more efficient than that. I had apparently merged my 1943 data into a larger Excel file so it was all in one place. Which meant when I opened the oddly-named file and found 1944, I thought that was the end of it. Not noticing that 1943 was just another tab. Doh!

I played with some setups, and then into the old web file I went. Only to have it crash on me again. WTH? I thought it had been a design flaw, but now I felt it was something else. A coding problem somewhere in the file. One of my multiple plugins had converted it over at some point in the past, and well, it glitched. I don’t know how or where, but it did.

So I created a fresh new file, copied the original text to a notepad file in order to delete any weird codes, pasted it into the new file, and voila! All fixed. Sigh. Which means I probably COULD have left it in the old format and just used a different / fresh file for that too.

Which now means I have to go back and decide if I want to revamp the design the new way or go back to the old.

I solved it, then I unsolved it, then I solved it again, and now I can do it either way. Has anyone else’s head exploded yet?

Today I choose to design a new layout. I just don’t know which one I’m going to use.

Which choices are you making today?

Today I choose to search for the right tool (TIC00044d)

The PolyBlog
September 4 2020

I have a dream, except my dream is a lot smaller than racial equality. My dream today is simply that I can create a nice table on my WordPress site that doesn’t go crazy.

So let’s start with the nature of the problem. I have a post, about the top hits of 1943. It’s part of a long-term project I am working on that will eventually have me review all the Billboard hits from 1943 up to the present. Fun, right? Okay, maybe not, but I find some of it pretty interesting. I did the first year as a test, 1943, and while Billboard’s list wasn’t exactly up and running yet, I ended up with a combination of several lists and 117 songs to review. I reviewed them, I sorted them, I put them in a table.

A table that is 5 columns wide and more than 100 rows long.

It’s simple, it organizes the data, it’s boring. I would LIKE to be able to intersperse some comments here and there. Actually, I’d rather it looked like a playlist that people could click on, but that seems doubtful at the moment (Apple is not my friend). Regardless, it is a LONG table. And I have four options to display the data:

  1. Use the default TABLE block that comes with WordPress. I can use that block, but it isn’t the best to work with, and styling is a problem at times.
  2. Use an Advanced Table block but it REALLY doesn’t seem to like the new editor much. It might be a conflict with something, but I can’t tell what or why.
  3. Use TablePress. This is a really powerful tool for making great-looking tables, but it comes at a cost — the table is not actually IN the page, it is generated by a database and all the data is stored in the database first. It’s easy to populate, I have the data in Excel already, but I’d prefer NOT to put it in a table that is generated. I would much rather a flat table that I can edit and add comments throughout. You can’t do those kinds of edits or tweaks if the data is just generated.
  4. Ditch the table and use a list format. I could do this easily enough, since I have it in an Excel Table, I can easily reformat the same data into a nice “line of text” such as “##. Singer name – Song (Company)” and just paste it into a set of bullets. Anywhere I want to edit the table/list, I just add a couple of hard returns to break the list and type away.

None of those options are what I want. So I posted a Q on a FB group that has some good designers in it, and one guy got “immediately” what I was looking to do. He even noticed there was a problem with the page which might have something to do with why it wasn’t loading completely correctly, and I’ve fixed that part at least. But the table? Neither of us have a working solution.

Yet. But he is also willing to help look for an answer.

I found a great tool tonight that has some really nice “blocks” in it for doing different things in WordPress. I’ve reviewed 10 block collections previously, found some I really liked, and some that I absolutely LOVE from Stackable. So when I saw there was a great little collection called CoBlocks that had a LOT of blocks in it, a decent number of installs, and some positive reviews, AND it has something that looks like a “pricing table” where you could list a variety of information items, it sounded great. So I went down the rabbit hole of testing the set of blocks (Reviewing CoBlocks for WordPress). Alas, no joy in Mudville.

I’m also going to try GetWid (a collection of blocks that also sounds promising) and Ninja Tables (it also looks like it generates the tables the way TablePress does, but perhaps not, hard to tell yet).

There’s a simple way to do this, I know there is. I just have to get there without having to fight with the block codes I have. As I said, I have a dream…

Today I choose to search for the right tool for the job.

What choices are you making?

Today I choose to purge (TIC00043d)

The PolyBlog
September 2 2020

As I’ve already posted, I’m in the middle of reorganizing my living space. I’m not in full-scale Marie Kondo mode, nor would I ever follow her insipid advice, but I am going through a lot of stuff with a view to finally getting rid of it.

It feels a bit weird though. Much of it is not “unintentional” clutter, but rather something I intended to do and decided today that as a relative priority, I’m just not going to get to it anytime soon. Take for example some decluttering I was doing in my back laundry room to get to some shelves, which once revealed, are filled with a mix of books and papers that I had set aside for some projects.

For example, I have a very large project in mind for when I retire that deals with government, performance measurement, evaluation, etc. And over the last ten years, I’ve accumulated some docs that I will use when I go to write the book that comes out of that project. Some of it I have electronically, most of it I don’t. I’m keeping those docs, but they can be on the back shelves for the next five years no problem.

By contrast, though, I came across some magazines I had for travel destinations. I know what my long-term travel destinations already are, and if / when I get to do them again, I won’t rely on out-of-date profiles. So those were easy to purge.

I had also previously hung on to some science stuff related to physics and near-astronomy topics, but not quite astronomy. Since my interests have narrowed, the broader stuff doesn’t hold my interest anymore. So it’s easy to jettison it now.

But the one that is probably the least organized and the most annoying are some recipes. I had a bunch of recipes that I clipped for certain purposes, some tried, some not. But the bottom-line is that I have more recipes than I will ever cook in my lifetime, and if I need more, there’s this little invention called the internet that has millions more waiting for me to click and search for them. So those too went the way of the dodo today.

I still have a REALLY long way to go, but it felt good to take a break for half an hour and just go through a shelf or two and simply WEED. Once I’m done weeding, I can put all the performance project stuff together on a single bookcase, ready for my eventual retirement project. I’ll even have other room left over too when I’m done purging all my books, but that’s going to take longer too, now that the Library has stopped accepting any donations to their big sales due to COVID. I think I’m going to start boxing them up anyway as I finish with them and have them “ready to go” for when the Library eventually starts accepting again. The only other viable alternative is regrettably the landfill. (No, please don’t say, “Oh, try blah and blah” unless you yourself have confirmed in the last month that they are taking things. I have tried those places, all of them, pre-COVID, and nobody takes books anymore, even though dozens of people will say, “Of course, you can give them to blah”.)

I have 29 days left in my organizing project for the house and I feel generally “good” about where I am in the process, but I have to keep at it.

Today I choose to purge and declutter.

What choices are you making today?

Today I choose to play a game (TIC00042d)

The PolyBlog
September 1 2020

That doesn’t sound like a very exciting topic, does it? So I played a game? So what? How is that a decision that warrants a blog post about making choices?

It seems weak, to be candid, even to me. But here’s the thing. Andrea and I worked all day, and Jacob was pretty much on his own for most of it. I was even tied up over lunch, so mostly ate snack stuff. To be honest, I ate like crap today. But I digress.

Anyway, after supper, we were looking down the barrel of about 2 hours before the cub would head to bed, and we are in the middle of watching Eco-Challenge Fiji with Bear Grylls (we had watched the first two episodes so far). And we watched American Ninja Warrior last night.

Which is something we tend to do. We watch a show together…when I was J’s age, I was watching TV shows probably every night with my brother or parents. I read a lot, but we didn’t break out games very often, more on weekends or holidays. Or I’d be out with friends. Remember that? Going out to play? Sigh.

But the only one who really watches anything on his own is me. I watch a lot of shows in the basement, including a lot of current TV. It’s my thing, to watch and review every September when the premieres start, which ain’t really happening much this year, btw.

Yet Andrea rarely watches anything on her own and Jacob never does, unless it is YouTube videos about gaming. I’ve been trying to hook him on some TV series, but nothing has really grabbed his interest yet. Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Fraggle Rock, The Flash, Star Trek: The Next Generation, etc. A bunch of different types of shows. I still have A-Team, Macgyver, Airwolf, Night Rider, The Six Million Dollar Man, Charlie’s Angels, etc. He likes mysteries so I’m trying to see if he would like some of the old stuff that was cleaner / more censored and had a weekly mystery, all wrapped up in 44 minutes. Murder She Wrote, The Murdoch Mysteries, a few others are possibilities too.

Of course, though, I feel a little silly pushing him towards the boob tube, but it’s better than isolating himself in YouTube videos.

So we could have just watched a couple episodes of the Eco-Challenge. He loves American Ninja Warrior, Titan Games, Amazing Race Canada, etc. But I also don’t want him binging that one out and being “done”.

And tonight I thought, “Okay, maybe one episode, but perhaps we can start with playing a game as the three of us first.”

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t that unusual. We have games sitting on our kitchen table at one end because we play regularly throughout the week. Moonshot Euchre has been in our rotation for quite a few months now, partly because it is a game all three of us can play almost equally. Jacob takes more risks, Andrea plays more conservatively at times, I take stupid risks. 🙂 But we all generally win at different times. Andrea hasn’t won many lately, just luck of the draw, but it averages out over time. Sometimes we have other games sitting there too.

But tonight I thought we should make an effort to play a game before heading to watch a show. Just more interactive, more talking, more “us” than vegging. Andrea and Jacob had already been interacting earlier, before supper, it isn’t his only social thing, but it was about the only socializing I did with him. We’re struggling, or at least I am, to balance my work schedule with taking breaks during the day to spend time with him. And his previous routine of having at least one class a day with OutSchool dropped off because he was supposed to be back at school and we didn’t schedule anything new. Now it looks like the 18th before he’ll be back at school, depending on what happens with some labour-related lawsuits by teachers.

Tonight I choose to play a game with my family before sitting down to watch TV together as a family.

What choices are you making?