2 blogs in one week?! I know…but there’s only a few:
1.
Yesterday, I spent most of the morning and afternoon working on setting
up a computer for someone new in our department. The computer I was
removing was an old, white Compaq that advertised new Windows98 on the
front, and to my surprise, sitting next to it, wedged between the tower
and a school health binder, was a skinny 80s boom box complete with
cassette player, in pink. With a broken handle and a tape of ocean
sounds, it was the coolest pink radio, I believe, ever created. So I
quickly jotted a note on the chalk board, pleading with the new
occupant to allow me to take it off their hands. So later that
afternoon, while the clock was nearing 4:00, a knock came on the door,
and there it was, the pink radio, for me, and for free.
The sad thing about it though, is that there are a few quirks, a few faults with the radio:
There is only one volume–loud and annoying. The handle of the radio
looks like it took a nasty fall at one point, and I think the volume
control became a casualty.
2. Due to the
afromentioned fall, the bass/treble knob seems to have been stuck at
low treble, high bass. But, I can handle that–it will make it easier
to listen to my old school rap and give it justice.
3.
The “play” mechanism of the cassette deck seems to be having some
revolution issues. The cassette can Fastforward (>>); it can
rewind (<<), and does a pretty good job at both. However, when
trying to play my testing cassette of ocean sounds, it seems that one
of the pots spins at half time while the other is trying to do his job,
causing everything to sort of pulsate and slowing walking across the
player heads, to where it forces the radio to sounds similar to a
demon-possessed cat.
So my next project is this: to take
the radio apart and fix it, so I can play my assorted mix tapes from
high school or convert it into some kind of fish tank/planter/or
storage box. Because it’s awesome, and it was free, and there is no
sense in throwing it out.
2. I do a
lot of walking, I think, for someone who works on a computer, but I
rather enjoy it. I have to walk across campus a lot for the post
office, library, go to the tech people, etc. But most of the time,
it’s just to the other side of the building and down a few flights.
And on the second floor, there are all the nursing school “sim” rooms,
which have always seemed mysterious to me. But today, I got to see
inside the largest room, just between the 1919 and 1920 classes of Ball
Memorial Hospital.
It was a large room that looked like a
hospital, with beds lining the walls, with trays full of instruments,
etc. And lying in each bed was a full size “model’ of a man, but the
fact that it they were not real dudes was not realized to me until
after I turned, gasped, and stopped in the middle of the hall. Yeah,
full-sized man dummies lying in hospital beds just down the hall from
my office.
I have never loved Science more than I do right now…
Well, I think that’s all for now. I’m spending the night at my place tonight, while I unpack all my kitchen stuff and clean.