mek.highcroft.com

More Home Improvement

Ever since Heidi and I were married in 2000, we've been working to keep our "stuff" under control. I have this terrible habit of not getting rid of things and I have boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff all over the house. I try to go through my stuff at some regular interval and it usually results in a couple large garbage cans filled with trash. I'm hoping that 2006 is the year I accomplish a number of things, but this year I really want to cut down the clutter.

Perhaps I am alone in the battle, but I don't think so. Companies all over America are selling "organization tools" to help us control our stuff. Bins and bags and closet management and trunks and specialized furniture and... It goes on and on. I've got file cabinets filled with important paperwork, software floppy disks and CDs, computer parts, and other stuff. I've got boxes of photographs, negatives, slides and artwork. I've got posters and plaques. I've got books and books and more books. I've got school papers I wrote in 5th grade in the same box as a handful of "Mork and Mindy," "Close Encounters," and "Garbage Pail Kids" trading cards. It seems there is almost no end to the stuff I keep.

We've bought bins to help control the overflow. We've got bins filled with clothes, bins filled with linens, bins filled with books, and bins filled with computer parts. The good thing is that we will not need any new bins for quite some time. The bad thing is that I never bought stock in Rubbermaid.

So, my initial reason for starting this entry was to announce that we've turned the closet in the living room into a game and toy closet for our stuff and for a lot of the kid's toys that we keep in the main part of the house. Total time to measure, cut, plumb, level, and install the new shelves? 4 years. No wait. About 1 hour. Heidi asked me to do this soon after we moved in and I don't have any excuse for not getting to it sooner.

We've also turned the hallway closet back into a linen closet. Since we moved in, this closet has been used as a linen closet, pantry (before the kitchen remodeling project), a closet for my clothes, and now, it's been put back to a linen closet. We finally have a space on the main level of the house for towels sheets and all that stuff. Again, it's just one of those things that needed to be done that just was not done. Total time to fix it? 30 minutes.

So in one evening, I got two projects out of the way. Simple, easy, and fun. I don't have an answer as to why this was not done long ago. I am, however, still in the middle of three other home improvement projects:

• Tile backsplash in the kitchen
• Update the stairwell from the breezeway to the basement
• Finish the old storage room as an office and study space

None of these projects should be as drawn out as they have been, but with so many things going on our lives, it's hard to get them done quickly. I hope that they will all be done before Valentine's Day 2006.

So, with the help and support of my beautiful wife, I hope to get these projects finished and take a break from the home improvement for a while. Oh wait, I still have to stain the sliding glass door. And put the trim up on that door. And patch the siding outside. Well, at least the roofers will get that job done without my physical labor. I'll work to cut down on the clutter this year AND work to cut down on the number of active home improvement projects. Both should help me have more time to spend doing what's really important: spending time with my family.

Goodbye Cookie

During my several years as a resident of the City of Wayzata, both living with my parents and on my own, the Klapprich family in town was well known for it's contributions to the community. I had the pleasure of working with several of the Klapprich's as a member of the Wayzata Fire Department.

Last night I learned that David Klapprich, known to his friends and family as Cookie, passed away this week.

Cookie was lively and energetic. His good humor and friendly demeanor made him easy to like, easy to work with, and a great example of the joys to be found in living and working in a small town. I remember all the fire calls we responded to where he was driving the truck I was riding in, the training he gave me on the basic maintenance of the trucks and equipment, how not to make a fool of myself in front of all the kids on fire prevention day, and, of course, Cookie ejnoyed the requisite practical joking that goes along with being a fireman.

But Cookie was much more than just a fireman, just an employee of the city. When I was with the Fire Department, I considered Cookie to be a friend. I have not been in touch with Cookie or the Klapprich family for a few years and Cookie's visitation and funeral this week will be the first time I will see many of them. It will be the first time I see many of the men I worked with at the Fire Department.

But as we gather to grieve the loss of a humble hero, I am comforted by the idea that Cookie has left a lasting legacy in the city of Wayzata: his humble spirit, his humor, and an example of an everyday hero.

Goodbye, Cookie.

Thanks!

It seems as though I am nearly the last person in America to get a portable digital music player, but it's been worth the wait! Mom and dad, thanks for the incredible gift! I've spent some time over the last few weeks ripping music from a few hundred CDs. I'm poised to get all the music off the hundreds of cassette tapes, too, as soon as I have some time to devote to sawpping cassettes and trimming tracks in Adobe Audition. I'm looking forward to having my whole music library accessible from the big red computer currently known as Clifford.

Since the CDs were ripped as MP3s, I can play them on pretty much any music player, but iTunes is the only way I know of to get the music onto the iPod. Amazingly, it only took about 45 minutes to transfer the 2700 songs I wanted to the iPod. And to think that the iPod can store more than three times that number (it's a 30GB iPod) is simply amazing.

After receiving the iPod, I decided to look around for CD ripping services. It's not that I couldn't rip my own, but I was simply curious about how many businesses were offering a "send them in, we'll rip them to MP3 and write them to a hard drive or DVD for you" type service. There are several and many of them seem to be alike in cost and available services.

One of the local companies here in the Twin Cities is RipShark. After a bit of digging, I found that the company was started by a gentleman with whom I used to work. The reviews on his site are good and it appears he has started yet another successful company. The market for ripping CDs to MP3 format will certainly blossom as more and more high-volume digital music players find their way to the market. I believe that as the cell phone continues to converge with the PDA and other digital devices like the music player, remote control, and RFID for consumer transactions, RipShark will continue to do well.

As for me, I've got to get started on converting all those years of cassette mixes from analog to digital and cleaning them up for preservation. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to listen to music I enjoyed years ago, and looking forward even more to converting the music purchased by my family to a format we'll all be able to enjoy.

I'm also excited that my car stereo has an auxiliary sound input which allows me to connect the iPod directly to the car stereo. No more fumbling with CDs! Oh, if only I'd had an iPod for all those 1300 mile trips to and from the east coast!

MixMooToo

Ah, remember the days when you introduced your friends to music by making MIX tapes and bringing them to school or parties or whatever? Well, in the era of online file sharing issues and lawsuits that make people cringe in fright, we still want to share our musical tastes with our friends.

So, a few of us trade a CD now and then to get others familiarized with the tunes, both new and old, from artists we like. It's MixMooToo. I don't know why, but it's great fun and I'm anticipating the arrival of interesting and eclectic mixes in 2006.

If you've listened to NPRs World Cafe Words and Music from WXPN Podcast, you know there is a world of music out there we just are not often exposed to. It's time to broadened our horizons a bit, right?

Right.

On with the show...