Shortlog - a log of everyday things

2011-05-29

Today was quite a busy day.

I suppose it started out last night, when I put my sheets in the washer, got distracted, and failed to move them to the dryer. Bit of an unpleasant surprise when I meant to turn in for the night and my sheets were still wet. I put them in the dryer, curled up in my blanket on the floor, and wound up crashing until 6am, at which point I woke up, removed my sheets from the dryer and made my bed, got in my freshly-made bed, and failed to fall back asleep for the next two hours. I did hear a veritable symphony of birdcalls though.

I finally got the C# libfreenect wrappers working this morning (I think I had to install a bunch of 32-bit compatibility libraries), so I pushed those changes out.

Around 10am, Robby and his former housemate and I went to U-Haul to rent a truck to move Robby's remaining stuff from his former residence to the Brohaus. I then started crawling the Craigslist "free stuff" listings for nearby items of interest. It turns out that someone had made a posting about a week ago regarding an upright piano. I emailed the lady, and it turned out that the piano was still there. We needed breakfast still, and I had just gotten an SMS from Jono, who was visiting assorted family members in Palo Alto, so I invited him to join us. We picked him up and had breakfast at Hobee's. I had huevos rancheros, and some spectacular blueberry coffee cake.

After breakfast, we dropped Jono at the Caltrain station and picked up the U-Haul truck from where we had parked it in Palo Alto and set off to obtain the piano. It was not terribly far, but it was terribly heavy. It's a good thing there were three other guys at the place we were picking the piano up from in addition to our three, because it took some serious effort to get the thing out the door and down the stairs. It took Robby and James and I an additional dose of sincere effort to get the piano up the ramp into the truck.

Then we realized that we had no way to tie the piano down in the moving truck, but we'd sooner find out how bad a thing that was than have to unload the piano, pick up some gear, and reload it. The next 15 or so minutes were some of the slowest, most frightened driving I've been party to in quite some time. At every stop sign, the piano would roll around in the back, slamming into the walls loudly as we slowed or accelerated. And Palo Alto has lots and lots of speed bumps and stop signs. Let's not forget that you don't want to have to make unprotected left turns. We managed to plot a route that had only one left turn, and that was at a stoplight. After we finally arrived at the Brohaus, we opened the back to survey the damage. The baseboard had fallen off the piano, but the rest was (somewhat surprisingly) intact. We wheeled that sucker into the garage, because the three of us lacked sufficient manpower to lift it up the steps at the front entryway. Needless to say, the piano needs tuning.

After the piano adventure, we waited around at the Brohaus for a while, hoping that the parking situation at the other house would improve. I took a nap (which I felt quite entitled to, after last night's sheets error). Chuan stopped by, accompanied by his friends Jason, Brad, and Jackie. With seven people, we were able to move the piano properly indoors.

We sat outside in the backyard for a while, chatting. Around 5:20pm or so, we decided that Robby and James and I would go back and pack lots of stuff from the old house and meet Chuan and friends at The Counter for delicious burgers at 7. Packing was mostly uneventful, although Robby's desk had to be removed from the building through the window, since it wouldn't fit through the doorway and if we disassembled it, the wood would splinter and not be fit for reassembly.

We finished packing stuff right around 7, drove the truck back to Brohaus, and picked up Michael (who had just gotten back from SF) for our trip to The Counter, which was merry and delicious. Grilled pineapple is excellent on burgers.

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