About a week ago, Joared of Along the Way posted REDHEAD AGING NATURALLY UP DATE . For her information, I sent her this selfie (below).
[The above photo shows Joared the color of this redhead's hair at age 81.]
[For comparison, the next photo is at age 41.]
Few times in my life have I admitted that there was something within my household that I could not move from room-to-room to place it where I wanted it. Even during those years in which I've been happily married, I preferred to do such handling, alone - even, sometimes, to the extent of moving tall bookcases from downstairs to up or upstairs to down. I thought that Archimedes embodied the right principle that, in essence, a person could accomplish darned nearly any physical tasking. Sometimes that meant removing drawers from a large chest-of-drawers (a highboy that I bought in Albuquerque), tying the handles of the doors together, and gently tipping the chest about its shorter horizontal axis, end-over-end to get it where I wanted it. Only within the past five years have I made a concession to aging by "allowing" Hunky Husband to "help" me in moving heavy items, such as his 65-pound printer, downstairs. His job was to stabilize the printer on my back as I sat on the stairs and scooted down to the basement level one step at a time. I'm sure that we used that methodology, also, the last time I took a 6-foot-tall bookcase to the basement. Then there is Bogie.
For those who may not know, Bogie is HH's and my younger daughter - a blogger, and the one responsible for my taking up blogging over 15 years ago. About five years ago, she bought a different house. That house has provided her with something on which to lavish her "spare" time and money. It isn't the first house on which she has worked, but it has been the first house on which she has done everything herself. (To follow her trials and tribulations, one may go to her House Work postings.) In skimming through those postings, the reader will find that not only has Bogie done the heavy lifting, by herself; but, she has learned how to do all sorts of things in fixing up the house to please herself. However, yesterday she wrote of moving things around and recommended a product that has made doing so much easier for her. In Progress!, she recommends Magic Sliders®.
Like Bogie, I have no relationship with the Magic Sliders® folks and they don't know that my blog exists; but, I have used various of their products for at least 10-20 years and I agree with her that they are super! That said, I not only have them on hand and in use; but, about five or six years ago, from my late sister-in-law's catalogue (I don't recall the company's name), I ordered a set that is called ezmoves®. The set includes a pry bar and eight large (3"x5") sliders, as pictured, below. With this set I have "easily" moved a heavy chest-of-drawers, a smaller chest of drawers and vanity table, and a stock cabinet that HH's father had given us, years ago, when he closed a drugstore. (The chest is so tall that I have to tiptoe to see into the top two drawers and it is made of dense wood.)
I don't know whether it is fortunate or unfortunate for her but Bogie has inherited a passion for independence from me. We just must do things our own way and for ourselves! She does great work!
It took me a few years to retrain myself to leave one space following a period when inputting to a computer rather than two as we did in the old days when typing. At least one study shows that it, indeed, makes a difference to the reader.
Excerpt #1 - of interest to writers everywhere:
April 28th, 2018
....
“The most recent edition of the American Psychological Association (APA) Manual states that two spaces should follow the punctuation at the end of a sentence. This is in contrast to the one-space requirement from previous editions. However, to date, there has been no empirical support for either convention. In the current study, participants performed (1) a typing task to assess spacing usage and (2) an eye-tracking experiment to assess the effect that punctuation spacing has on reading performance. Although comprehension was not affected by punctuation spacing, the eye movement record suggested that initial processing of the text was facilitated when periods were followed by two spaces, supporting the change made to the APA Manual.”
Elegant Friend and I were marveling, as we beheld a smoker the other day, that people continue to develop the vile habit.
Excerpt #2 - of interest to smokers and those who behold them:
April 27th, 2018
A number of countries have passed laws which require cigarette manufacturers to show ‘denormalising’ images on their packaging. To take things a step further, why not make the cigarettes themselves more unappealing? This was the question tackled by a joint Australian – New Zealand research team in 2015.
A set of potentially unpleasant cigarette designs were experimentally tested – of which the most effectively off-putting was found to be this one :
“The stick featuring the ‘minutes of life lost’ graphic was markedly less appealing and less likely to be chosen than all other sticks tested. “
Friday and Saturday, while Hunky Husband was in Junction City KS teaching some advanced courses in disaster response, I scurried about, accomplishing things that I don't tackle when HH is at home. One such project was hanging a rather heavy mirror in my bedroom. The mirror had previously hung over the back of the bar in our previous home, in a "landscape orientation". In my bedroom, it was to hang in a "portrait orientation". That change meant that I needed to install a new hanging wire.
Fortunately, the mirror had originated as one of the two mirrors that hung over our two double dressers in our shared bedroom of that house; thus, the factory-installed support fittings had been installed to accommodate either orientation (on our dressers, no wires were used, but brackets and posts had attached the mirrors to the dressers.) I used "heavy duty" braided wire, strung through the hanging fittings such that the wire formed a continuous loop. Cutting either end of the wire to leave an excess inch, I wound the ends, around the wire to provide "locking" of the ends together, by friction. I did think about the sufficiency of friction to bear the load, but decided it would suffice.
Excerpt #3 - of interest to heavy picture/mirror hangers, or anyone who wears clothing made from fibers:
April 24th, 2018
....
In his celebrated Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, Galileo identified a fascinating puzzle in the mechanics of ropes…. From a modern perspective, we would say that the mechanical integrity of ropes derives from frictional contacts between fibers, and Galileo’s rope problem is but one exemplar of a host of related frictional phenomena in fiber assemblies, of which perhaps the canonical case is the ‘staple’ yarn.
The problem of how staple yarns transmit tension is addressed within abstract models in which the Amontons–Coulomb friction laws yield a linear programing (LP) problem for the tensions in the fiber elements. We find there is a percolation transition such that above the percolation threshold the transmitted tension is in principle unbounded. We determine that the mean slack in the LP constraints is a suitable order parameter to characterize this supercritical state. We argue the mechanism is generic, and in practical terms, it corresponds to a switch from a ductile to a brittle failure mode accompanied by a significant increase in mechanical strength.
Stu (of Eunoia) commented about the previous posting, including an observation by his better half SWMBO that while the video showed a two-hole punch configuration being used for target sheets, we in the USA actually use a three-hole punch configuration. Well...to say that we use a three-hole punch configuration for binding our loose papers together is a bit of an overstatement: Although the three-hole configuration is, by far, the most-used, we use several configurations.
Unfortunately, I no longer use a two-hole configuration, myself, so I have given away my two-hole punch; but, here is a photo of one that I stole (the photo, not the punch) off of eBaby or Amazon.
Officemate Heavy Duty 2-Hole Punch, Padded Handle, Black, 50-Sheet Capacity (90082)
Not only are two-hole punch configurations used in fastening papers within a soft-cover file folder, but heavier duty uses abound (photo, below, of one).
What I, personally, use these days
Within 10 feet of where I sit at this computer, I gathered up four punches (photo, below) that I use, regularly. They comprise two one-hole punches, one three-hole punch, and one seven-hole punch. I trust that you can see enough to tell the configuration of each item. I'm not sure what Hunky Husband hides in his office; but, he does have an electric-driven three-hole punch that will accept about 30 sheets of paper at one time.
The punches are used to help me keep various papers in various binders. One (photo, below) of the several shelves full of binders is also within 10 feet of my current position.
Most of my three-ring binders fall into one of two types (photos, below): 1) D-ring or 2) O-ring.
There is another configuration - again, that I no longer use - used for two- and three-hole punched papers. It is a post and sleeve configuration where the front and back of the binder are not joined other than when the three (or two) sleeves of one part are slipped over the three (or two) posts of the other part (or vice versa). This configuration is used with industrial-weight binders for reference materials such as aircraft maintenance manuals. The photo, below, was stolen from Bindertek. It shows a binder that is open to 90-degrees.
3 Ring Heavy Duty 98086 Archival Binder - Our Highest Capacity Binder Holds 1250 Sheets
Below are photos of a couple of the other binders that I use. I've used a seven-ring binder since the late 1980s and have about 15-20 of them in the house. The six-ring binder was my father's and is kept for sentimental reasons. I've never owned a six-hole punch, but use the one-hole punches to put the holes where I want them.
That's the trivia for the day. The treatment has been far from exhaustive but gives an idea of how diverse are our options when it comes to keeping loose papers together.
P.S. It just occurred to me that, in high school, we all used the two-hole/two-ring configuration.
P.P.S. At the Little Airplane Company, we used a drill-press to make holes in 100-200 pages at a time. We could set up to give us the hole configuration desired.
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