Overthinking time.

The other night when I was having trouble getting to sleep, I think I realized that a lot of the noise in my bedroom was coming from the dehumidifier in the basement. When I got up I started thinking about how I was going to have it not come on in at night. I thought about using a clock-controlled switch of some sort, that ran a solid-state relay that I could get at the surplus electronics store. Then I started to think that the clock could be synchronized to one of the National Bureau of Standards clocks. Or maybe it could be computer controlled and I’d just use, say, an Ethernet connection to the intarwebs to turn it on and off because all my servers are synchronized already. Well, I finally just went and got one of those old-fashioned timers people once used to on and off the lights in the house when no one was home. $5.99 at Harbor Freight.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the slivers of soap I end up with. I started searching the intarwebs for soap making information and I think I finally just realized I was on my own but figured out I could chop up the soap and microwave it in some sort of form. There was a line at the barbershop, so I killed some time at Kitchen Kaboodle where one of the sales people suggested a silicon cupcake form, but they were out. And the cheese graters I thought about using to chop up the soap were all about $15. Fortunately the punk rock barber girl had the best idea: Dollar Tree. I still don’t have the form, but my cheese grater (or, actually, SOAP grater) only cost $1 and I have a container with a bunch of powdered soap.

And finally, I left early because I wanted to clean my gutters before the weather turned to the usual Oregon winterish fun, but my mom sent me on an errand. While I replace my wiper blades about twice a year, she hadn’t replaced them for five years. They didn’t do much to improve the view when it rained. So I ended up at the Toyota dealer, where I also asked about the Prius I ordered in February but hadn’t seen yet. Turns out they just got one in, but it was the wrong color. There’s a good chance that by the end of the weekend I’m going to have a blue Prius and, as of today, the gutters aren’t clean at all.