I have no joke, I just like saying
Jan. 12th, 2020 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
totientI had big plans for today: get up early in Melrose, pick up Julia at 10 in the Scion, head to Haverhill to take care of what seemed like probably ten task hours of work at Arisia's warehouse there, drop off some things there and maybe bring some others back to town, and then get into a bunch of Art Show weeds about layout.
It was after 10:00 already when I realized that I'd left some of those drop off items at the NESFA clubhouse, and also that Rachel was going to need the Scion, so instead I came home, dropped off the Scion and unloaded the few things I'd remembered to put in it, and made a Zipcar reservation. They had a Honda Odyssey available at noon. Score! Those things have a 1400 pound load capacity which is enough for an errand I'd been meaning to run for months now.
Arisia and NESFA share a lot of equipment including some Art Show equipment but each club has its own pipe and pegboard. Different layouts mean that the two shows use about the same amount of pegboard even though the Arisia show is a little smaller -- three quarters of a ton in each case. We each have some spare pegboard -- about another quarter ton -- to handle variability in the show size and damage. Arisia also has some color variability which we've been looking for an excuse to remedy. Recently (by which I mean in the last five years) Arisia has noticed enough wear and tear on the pegboard that, combined with the color issue, is enough reason to start thinking about where the next batch of pegboard was going to come from. NESFA's pegboard has also gotten worn -- more than ours, since it has been around longer -- but they have better color consistency so it still looks pretty OK.
Meanwhile Stu Hellinger was getting tired of paying for storage for the ton of pegboard and similar amount of pipe that had been used for Lunacon in New York, and so Arisia and NESFA jointly bought it and hauled it up to Boston. In the leadup to Arisia 2019 we went through it and Arisia's and sorted about 80% of all that into quartiles (that means we actually have five roughly equal piles including one unsorted pile). The top half we kept. The bottom quartile we marked for disposal. The third quartile turns out to be very color consistent and matches NESFA's pegboard, and it's in better shape than most of NESFA's pegboard, so a while ago I loaded it into the Scion and hauled it down there, where it has been sitting on a janky trashpicked pallet in kind of an annoying location in the back of their clubhouse. And pretty soon that location was going to stop being kind of annoying and start being really annoying. So I had promised I'd go through the NESFA pegboard, discard the worst 10% of it which would be enough to make room for the Lunacon pegboard on their nice pallets, tuck it all away nicely, and get rid of the janky pallet.
A week ago I emailed Boston Building Resources to ask if they were interested in a bunch of pegboard, and sent them some pics of the stuff we were getting rid of. They wrote back that they were, and I arranged that I'd be dropping it off, during their not especially generous business hours. I thought I'd need two trips and I really didn't have a plan for when either of those trips was going to be. But I knew that at least the NESFA trip was going to have to be soon.
Back to this morning: a Zipcar for more than about five hours costs the same as a 24 hour reservation. I knew I was going to need a car until at least 6, and an Odyssey costs the same to rent as any other car they had available. This particular one was available for a whole day so I booked it through tomorrow at noon. Dropping off the pegboard in the late morning will be totally fine traffic wise and with my work schedule. Suddenly I had a plan for getting all this ratty pegboard out of everyone's hair, and it wasn't even going to involve extra trips to Haverhill or even NESFA.
Having made the Zipcar reservation, I played some Ingress on the walk over and got there at 11:58. The 15-minutes-early trick only works if there's time between you and the previous reservation, so I had to wait two minutes to get in. Drove out to Bedford, drove to Haverhill, and got some lovely help loading 800 pounds of pegboard into the back of the Odyssey. Filled Julia in on a bunch of details of what needed to happen next for Art Show, and she also got some other folks to help her do it, so we were done by 5 even though it was after 1 by the time we started.
Meanwhile the layout turned out to be hardly weedy at all and Megan and Julia have it under control.
Dropped Julia off in Reading, ran back into town, ran a few other errands and had a bit of dinner, and then got back to NESFA just as the parking lot was starting to empty out from the NESFA meeting there. Backed in to the lot and got Raz to help me go through NESFA's ton of pegboard, sort it into piles, put the best 90% back on the nice pallets along with the Lunacon pile, and load the worst 200 pounds into the Odyssey.
So now I am home, and I have half a ton of pegboard in a Zipcar parked across the street.
And that sounds perfectly ridiculous if you don't know that there are Zipcars with the load capacity for that, and to spare.
It was after 10:00 already when I realized that I'd left some of those drop off items at the NESFA clubhouse, and also that Rachel was going to need the Scion, so instead I came home, dropped off the Scion and unloaded the few things I'd remembered to put in it, and made a Zipcar reservation. They had a Honda Odyssey available at noon. Score! Those things have a 1400 pound load capacity which is enough for an errand I'd been meaning to run for months now.
Arisia and NESFA share a lot of equipment including some Art Show equipment but each club has its own pipe and pegboard. Different layouts mean that the two shows use about the same amount of pegboard even though the Arisia show is a little smaller -- three quarters of a ton in each case. We each have some spare pegboard -- about another quarter ton -- to handle variability in the show size and damage. Arisia also has some color variability which we've been looking for an excuse to remedy. Recently (by which I mean in the last five years) Arisia has noticed enough wear and tear on the pegboard that, combined with the color issue, is enough reason to start thinking about where the next batch of pegboard was going to come from. NESFA's pegboard has also gotten worn -- more than ours, since it has been around longer -- but they have better color consistency so it still looks pretty OK.
Meanwhile Stu Hellinger was getting tired of paying for storage for the ton of pegboard and similar amount of pipe that had been used for Lunacon in New York, and so Arisia and NESFA jointly bought it and hauled it up to Boston. In the leadup to Arisia 2019 we went through it and Arisia's and sorted about 80% of all that into quartiles (that means we actually have five roughly equal piles including one unsorted pile). The top half we kept. The bottom quartile we marked for disposal. The third quartile turns out to be very color consistent and matches NESFA's pegboard, and it's in better shape than most of NESFA's pegboard, so a while ago I loaded it into the Scion and hauled it down there, where it has been sitting on a janky trashpicked pallet in kind of an annoying location in the back of their clubhouse. And pretty soon that location was going to stop being kind of annoying and start being really annoying. So I had promised I'd go through the NESFA pegboard, discard the worst 10% of it which would be enough to make room for the Lunacon pegboard on their nice pallets, tuck it all away nicely, and get rid of the janky pallet.
A week ago I emailed Boston Building Resources to ask if they were interested in a bunch of pegboard, and sent them some pics of the stuff we were getting rid of. They wrote back that they were, and I arranged that I'd be dropping it off, during their not especially generous business hours. I thought I'd need two trips and I really didn't have a plan for when either of those trips was going to be. But I knew that at least the NESFA trip was going to have to be soon.
Back to this morning: a Zipcar for more than about five hours costs the same as a 24 hour reservation. I knew I was going to need a car until at least 6, and an Odyssey costs the same to rent as any other car they had available. This particular one was available for a whole day so I booked it through tomorrow at noon. Dropping off the pegboard in the late morning will be totally fine traffic wise and with my work schedule. Suddenly I had a plan for getting all this ratty pegboard out of everyone's hair, and it wasn't even going to involve extra trips to Haverhill or even NESFA.
Having made the Zipcar reservation, I played some Ingress on the walk over and got there at 11:58. The 15-minutes-early trick only works if there's time between you and the previous reservation, so I had to wait two minutes to get in. Drove out to Bedford, drove to Haverhill, and got some lovely help loading 800 pounds of pegboard into the back of the Odyssey. Filled Julia in on a bunch of details of what needed to happen next for Art Show, and she also got some other folks to help her do it, so we were done by 5 even though it was after 1 by the time we started.
Meanwhile the layout turned out to be hardly weedy at all and Megan and Julia have it under control.
Dropped Julia off in Reading, ran back into town, ran a few other errands and had a bit of dinner, and then got back to NESFA just as the parking lot was starting to empty out from the NESFA meeting there. Backed in to the lot and got Raz to help me go through NESFA's ton of pegboard, sort it into piles, put the best 90% back on the nice pallets along with the Lunacon pile, and load the worst 200 pounds into the Odyssey.
So now I am home, and I have half a ton of pegboard in a Zipcar parked across the street.
And that sounds perfectly ridiculous if you don't know that there are Zipcars with the load capacity for that, and to spare.
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Date: 2020-01-13 02:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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