pods of cavemen & cavewomen

Saturday morning as I write.

Keaton is sitting next to me at the dining room table eating a bowl of Fruit Loops. I’m drinking coffee, black, third cup so far, and writing. The National‘s new record is on, loud. Sharaun’s taking her parents back to the airport for their return trip to Florida. Her dad came down with some bug the day before they had to leave, slept on the couch all day and didn’t eat a thing. Felt bad for him having to travel cross-country that way; I’ve been there before and traveling while you’re sick is the pits.

Saturdays go like this. Keaton has dance class at 10am so we get up and get ready and take her there and sometimes stay and watch. The remainder of the day is usually filled with discretionary stuff, as should be weekends. Today’s discretionary activity, as far as I’ve been made aware, involves an evening soirée at the house of some friends, in honor of another expecting mom who’s expecting about a month before we are. It’s a strange “colliding circle” of friends that runs just a bit outside our day-to-day clique. Maybe that’s why I love hanging out with them so much; we’re all a perfect-fit but maybe just too large to exist as one friend-unit. I mean, how can you invite twenty people over? You’d be taking over any restaurant. No, there’s some self-limiting pack aspect of tight friends. You get much above five or six couples/families and things will split into packs. Human nature maybe. We’re still just pods of cavemen and cavewomen, cliquing up in little family-units.

So anyway when we get a chance to collide with this group we do and we enjoy it, I especially.

Other than that I think today I’ll work on fixing my flat bike tire and fixing up the TV shelf work I did in the front room. I still need to put a second coat of paint over the drywall work I did. See, it’s a “floating” shelf; meaning it has no visible supports and appears to just “stick out” from the wall – defying physics. As the shelf itself is made from solid hardwood and will be holding all the A/V gear for the living room – the support system that allows it to float needs to be sturdy; capable of bearing the weight. But how to make a “floating” shelf strong like this?

Well, in my case I cut the drywall and fixed flanged pipe “nipples” onto the studs with lag screws. With the wall re-finished flush around them, you get four little threaded receptacles spaced along the studs. Into these you screw four lengths of 3/4″ steel pipe, and onto these pipes you hang and fix the shelf. Finally, with the shelf really being a hollow box, all the wiring between the TV and A/V gear goes behind the wall and inside the shelf and things look mysteriously clean and unattached. I’ll post pictures when it’s done, because I want to.

Goodnight.