Not idle

I've been working away at a number of projects already this year:

Reallocating bedroom space. With a family that is still growing, adjustments in living spaces need to happen from time to time. I swapped functions between two rooms, and it took about a day to get everything moved and set back up.

Setting up a functional computer in my space. We were down to one internet-capable computer, which is in my husband's office, and if I am in there, the children tend to come in, in a wave right behind me. Then they knock over all his tippy piles that he had carefully sorted out, the last time he was trying to organize it all. So I am trying to get a working setup in my own space. I pulled out my old handed-down desktop computer, which I thought was on the verge of dying, and gave it a try. It wasn't making ominous grinding noises anymore, so then I tried updating the OS (Ubuntu). This worked, but the graphics card is so old that we had to do some tweaking to get Unity to stop doing 30-second fade-ins and fade-outs for every window. My husband worked some further command-line magic to set me up with xfce as a desktop environment. There is still some work to do, as my browser of choice is crashing frequently. I also have to decide whether to live with the slow graphics, buy a new used graphics card and put it in, or buy a new used computer, such as a rebuild from the local FreeGeek chapter.  The last two options would cost about the same, $20 to $30.

Reinforcing the table under the computer. Old computers and monitors are heavy, and my table was just a half-inch thick piece of plywood with legs. I figured out how to use the scrap wood and screws we had to strengthen the plywood from underneath, both lengthways and crossways, and to brace the legs better.

Waxing the kitchen floor. This was actually the most laborious project, because first I had to get the floor clean, and I wasn't using the capital-C Chemicals to strip the floor this time.