cimorene

This weekend Brother ~~Windows~~ Metal¹ loaned us his second car, and we used it to do things. Thursday we did the grocery shopping at one of those large suburban shopping centers, and bought things not carried at the corner store or the posh food boutique at our favorite department store (such as oregano in bulk, strawberry-lime cider, peach-mango black tea and salt & vinegar potato chips). Then Friday we drove to

anglepoiselamp's apartment in the suburbs (after getting lost for about 45 minutes) and installed Kubuntu Karmic Koala on her spare partition, because she has been having Problems of Death with Windows 7 on her brand new desktop. Then yesterday we got up early and took all our dead electronics accumulated in the last six years to the closest electronics recycling station. These included:

i: ~The Dead Electronics List~

Gleeb the green-tinted 13" monitor from the 1990s, still chugging along, but greenly and with smaller than 800x600 resolution

Wax's last cathode-ray monitor, 17 19", dead since 2005

The giant television weighing more than I do which has been dead since 2005 when I dropped it on its face

~~We had to leave the broken LCD monitor in the basement because they charge you to take more than 3 monitors at a time~~

Four keyboards

Two modems

A toaster

A microwave

A bag containing three graphics cards, a sound card, three hard drives, a broken power source, and a number of other things

We meant to throw away another bag of cables, a broken clock, and a bag of dead electronics from anglepoiselamp that we collected night before last, but forgot to bring them with us, so they reside now in the basement

After returning from this expedition - before breakfast - we collected all the old clothes around the house. This amounted to:

ii: ~The Unwearable Clothes List~

Four Ikea-bag-sized paper bags occupying most of the wall of our bedroom, and

Seven or eight plastic trash bags filling most of the floor of our basement storage room,

Many clothes that have been too big for Wax since 2007, when she went on Effexor and went down from size 44? to size 38

About four pairs of high school/college jeans of mine, ie tight high-waisted (ie above the hip-bone) bell bottoms, completely devoid of stretch, that are now too short and which I haven't fit into since I went off the evil anorexia-causing Prozac in 2003

Enough fifteen-year-old clothes from when Wax was in high school, including oceans of hideous colored denim and striped chenille from the mid 90s, to fill 2 shelves in our closet before we cleaned it out 3 years ago

I didn't know that they took shoes as well, so our old shoes, dating back only to 2006 when we last threw away old shoes, are still filling a shelf in the hall closet: 3 pairs of dead sneakers, 2 pairs of hideous sandals, 1 pair purple satin formal sandals from the 90s, 1 pair hideous canvas and cork wedges

We drove across town searching in vain for a Goodwill drop box before it occurred to me to call

morningfine. She was our savior, and we went to scoop her up in the car, and she directed us to a parking lot near the hospital where we dumped all the old clothes before driving downtown to meet up with

satu who was briefly in town. Our adventures weren't over, however, because:

iii: ~The Parking Garage of Pure Evil~

We tried to park in the first non-empty parking garage we found downtown, and I forget what it's called - maybe City Center or something. The thing is, this parking garage is exposed to the open air, not underground, and the ramp leading to it is not roofed. This ramp was steep and covered in snow and ice and the first thing we saw was an electrician's van parked smack-dab at the top of it. When we turned up to the ramp to the upper level we found out why... we couldn't get up it. The car would chug up to the top, then right before the final hump that would lead to leveling out, the wheels would spin furiously.

Now, I grew up in Alabama, and I don't know much about driving on snow/ice except, basically:

Don't do it because you will probably die (absorbed from Alabamian culture), and

It is mysterious and a difficult and arcane art known to people from the rest of the country, although not so difficult that Alabamians aren't really stupid about it because the amount of snow we get there is not enough to actually impede driving (from my parents, who did not grow up in Alabama).

So when the wheels spun furiously and then the car started creaking, and Wax said "Oh shit," and it actually started to slide backwards down the ramp, I shrieked, because, obviously, I thought we were probably going to die. When the car slid sideways while sliding backwards down the ramp and into the wall of the ramp (well, it would have if not for the several feet of snow drifts there providing a bumper), I sort of started rocking and whimpering. My hardy, Finnish companions were very annoyed and kept making comments like "You're not helping!" but I could not rid myself of my terror until they finally gave up on getting up the ramp (after 2 tries) and we left the garage without parking, and went to Anttila's garage, which is entirely inside a building.

And then we had fun with our friends, came home, and reorganized the living room. The De-Clutteringening had made space for an additional computer (Six, the WinBorg XP box) as well as 6 out of 7 shelves of paperback fiction from the bedroom bookcase in the living room bookcases, after extraneous items were moved into the built-in cabinets in the hall closet which were previously completely full of junk. Also, you can now see the bedroom wall! \o/

1. Brother Windows and Brother Linux both work in computers and are both geeks. They acquired their names back when Brother Linux was running Slackware and Brother Windows was still running XP, but Brother Windows has since converted his home system to Linux Mint (An Ubuntu Gnome-based distro) and has even surreptitiously installed Mint in VirtualBox on his work machine, running with his second monitor, and now uses it all day and the Windows machine not at all. He should probably, at this point, be renamed. I could call them Brother BB and Brother Triplets? Or perhaps I'll go with Brother Metal and Brother ThinkGeek (Brother ~~Windows~~ Metal is also a geek, but his geekery is more to do with movies and pop culture. Threadless is the t-shirt store of his dreams, whereas Brother ~~Linux~~ ThinkGeek could happily move into the ThinkGeek store, I think, if he were willing to move places without his wife, whose ideal location is rainbow-colored and sparkly, like the interior of your friendly local Indian homegoods store). Brother ~~Windows~~ Metal, or

mece66, is a BNF in the black & death metal fandom on Twitter, so this is his defining feature. Brother ~~Linux~~ ThinkGeek is more about nature photography and/or esoteric gadgets.