Busy-ness

As I’m sure most people are this time of year, Becky and I have been busy. Becky has had most of the responsibilities for taking care of the Christmas play at church this year, so she’s been covered up with that. She has also been doing all of the shopping and everything else that goes along with this Christmas season.

For me, it really started the weekend of December 5. At work, we did a server room redesign. We pulled all of the network cabling from under the floor and put brand new cabling overhead. We added a second switch and made the two redundant. We ran two cables from each server – one to each of the switches. During that process, we were able to clean up our server racks quite a bit. There is still a little work to be done in that area, but it won’t take much.

Oh. That lasted 2 days – Saturday and Sunday.

With the company I work for being cheaper by the day, they won’t let me keep any overtime. I put in 25 hours over the weekend, so I only had to work 15 through the rest of the week before I reached my maximum of 40 hours. So I used all that time off from work to help where I could with the new fellowship hall we’re working on at church.

Most of the early part of the week was spent putting some finishing touches on some of the floor tile and trimming around it. Then we started moving everything off the floor so it could be cleaned and prepared for carpet. I really can’t remember what all else we did. It’s becoming a blur.

I do know that later in the week, we tried to clean the concrete floor by hand with mops. That worked really unwell. That floor had everything from paint to sheetrock mud to tile grout to sawdust and whatever else you could imagine being on a concrete floor during a construction project. We got our hands on this big nifty power tool that cleans concrete for you. You just have to steer it. It has a pad on the front of it that spins, much like a floor buffer. It dispenses water on that pad to help it break up whatever is on the floor. On the back of the machine, it has a squeegee with a vacuum on it to get all that dirty water off the floor. A couple times over the floor with that, and it was almost clean enough to eat off of.

On Saturday we began laying carpet. We got it in slightly over 3′ square tiles. This was for a couple of reasons – one being that it was said that it was generally easier to lay that than regular carpet on rolls. I’d never done either, so I’ll take their word for it. The second, and most important, reason was that if something was spilled on the carpet, the affected tile(s) could be pulled out and cleaned, or replaced if need be. The glue that is used is more of a no-slip contact material so that carpet can be easily pulled out and put back. Pretty nifty stuff.

Carpet was finished yesterday, and the gas fireplace was finally installed by the gas company.

I forgot to mention that the Christmas play is supposed to be in the fellowship hall this year. So my focus yesterday after work was to get the sound system working.

I had two ceiling speakers to install in the kitchen area. That wasn’t too much of a task. The wiring was already there – I just had to connect it and put the speakers in place. Piece of cake. After that, I had to connect these weird European (but supposedly popular) Neutrik Speakon connectors to the wiring I had in place. It was pretty simple once I figured out how the stupid things worked. I finished that job, locked them in place on the sound board, plugged in a mic, and . . . nothing. Great. What did I do wrong? Turns out the cable I had on the mic was bad. We got another mic, and the pastor and I tried a few buttons and switches on the board and sound magically came out of the main 4 speakers mounted on the walls in the main dining area. Awesome. I messed with the board a little more and tweaked a few settings here and there, and things worked great.

My focus this evening is to get the kitchen ceiling speakers wired in with the rest of the system. It shouldn’t be too much of a task. After that, I’ll be working on a couple of small stages for the play. I also need to learn a simple song on the piano for some of the younger kids to sing during the play.

I think that’s everything. That’s all I have written in my to-do list anyway. The whole thing is very enjoyable, but I’ll honestly be relieved when all of this hectic hurry up mode is over with.