When I don't post here in a while it either means I'm not building anything new or that I'm too busy to write about what I am doing. This time it's the later. Not that any of it's been exciting, but almost all of it involved using a saw, which totally counts.

Gwin, our eldest cat, has always kicked toys into the basement sump for the joy of watching humans pick them out later. Milo, on the other hand, likes running into the muddy sump and then running up stairs. To keep the cats and their toys out I built a little wooden frame to fit and covered it with chicken wire. It's ugly but functional.

This weekend was full of discoveries involving ivy and stucco and removing the former from the later. Summarizing them we have:

1. Don't. Keep them away from one another. If you have a stucco home and your neighbor plants ivy secretly poison it.
2. If there is ivy on your stucco, just leave it there. Removing it is not worth the pain.
3. If you do remove the ivy, remove it completely. If you pull it off and plan on getting the residual debris later, you're going to find it's dried to a state where it can no longer be pulled off in strands like it can be when green.
4. If you've let residual ivy dry to the point where it's brittle, plan on a day full of power washers, long handled brushes, and ladders. Try to drink a lot. Expect to repaint.

There's a purchase agreement in place for the condo, and it's time to organize the moving extravaganza. Saturday, June 17th at 11am moving helpers generous with their time will find everything pre-boxed, wrapped, stacked, and ready. Half the stuff will be going to Salvation Army down the street and half will be moving from 580 N 2nd St. #120 to 330 E 50th St. I'm renting a large truck (and possibly selling off a good fraction of the furniture in advance), so with luck we'll be on to the beer and lots of food portion of the afternoon after just one short trip.

After moving into the house I started a series of small home improvement tasks. Some of them have genuine safety reasons but many happened only because changing things demonstrates residence. Here's an incomplete list of things I've done:

• added a ceiling fan to the bedroom
• rewired the doorbell with modern wire so it doesn't ring everytime you walk past the dining room heat register
• added shelving, a phone jack and power outlets to create a server corner
• added appliance-grade outlets behind the stove and fridge (rather than the ungrounded lamp-grade extension cords running through holes in the floor they previously had)
• added a motion light to the break-in-ariffic back yard
• cleaned out the gutters (I knew there's a reason I got that condo)
• replaced the rotting wiring for the basement lighting

|https://ry4an.org/pictures/web/datacenter| |https://ry4an.org/pictures/web/motionlight|

After a lot of cleaning, painting, and decorating my condo is finally on the market. Thanks to Kate and Natz for all their help. We've priced it very aggressively in hopes of not having this process drag on, so if we're lucky we'll be bidding a fond farewell to MLS 3165642 soon.

If you ever came by and admired the place, tell your house hunting friends.

Last week Kate, Natz, and I painted a few more rooms, added handles to the cabinets, added some bookshelves, and did a lot of minor repairs around the condo in preparation for selling it. I also cut up the throw pillows and sewed some arm covers for the couch. They look as cheesy as arm covers always do, but they hide the cat damage.

I'm finally tackling all the little projects I always meant to do around the house in preparation for selling it. Today I installed some simple roller shades downstairs and built a fairly complex multi-panel window covering system thing in the bedroom using the ridiculously modular KVADRANT stuff.

I've never had serious problems with IKEA stuff before, and these weren't any worse than usual, but one really is constantly beset by low-level disappointment at the quality of the pieces, their fit and finish, and the meager guidance the instructions offer when working with IKEA stuff. Still it's cheap and looks nice, which is exactly what one wants when staging for a sale.

As mentioned previously I'm a tool of the media machine and am thus now playing poker. I don't like online play so I host local events here at the house. We're getting more and more people and I wanted something nicer on which to play than folding card tables. Louis Duhon, a friend, and I drew up some plans, bought a lot of materials, moved the cars out of his garage, and spent four days working on a "one day project".

A few weeks back I got a Roomba Robotic Vacuum (http://www.irobot.com/consumer/product_detail.cfm?prodid=9) as a wonderful gift. Shipped with it was the optional remote control. The Roomba is fully automatic, but it's programmed to pick up dirt not to chase the cat -- you need the remote for that.

However, long time readers (you poor bastards) will remember that I try to maintain a strictly one remote coffee table (https://ry4an.org/unblog/msg00022.html). That meant the Roomba had to go onto the Phillips Pronto TSU-2000 Universal Remote. I thought for sure I'd find a CCF file for it, but it looks like only the people with newer remotes are getting the Roomba. Fortunately someone in the RemoteCentral forms helped out with instructions on how to back-convert the remote configuration and after a few wasted hours I can now steer the vacuum from the couch. Apparently I became a yuppie when I wasn't looking.