i'm going to be slowly moving the remaining ceramic bowls and plates mostly out of the cupboard altogether and to under the sink, with the exception of the 8" plates, which i use mostly for cutting things.
- the 10" plates will get shifted to being used for holding glass bowls, and won't get eaten on directly
- the ceramic bowls will be moved to under the sink and used to hold things like doritos, although that is not something i do that often anymore. i haven't generally bothered putting the chips in a bowl in quite a while. i want to get a few very big metal bowls while i'm at it, as i let standing water sit in my old metal bowl for too long in the last place. i've also decided to get some plastic cups after all, just to be complete, which i'm being extreme about. i'm getting everything now.
i don't think i mentioned the cast iron pans. i think i did mention the extra two blenders.
it's also taken me a few days to get to the point in the coffee table book where i can move to building or installing the first skipped item, which is all of those stackable cubes i want to use as bookshelves. in fact, i have cleared enough space in here that i can start setting up the shelving more generally, which will open up a ton of space in here as it will clear out the centre of the room and get this pile of 20 or so boxes of books and cds off the floor.
i've also planned out a few more floating shelves in the kitchen. there ended up being four extra wall shelves in the bathroom (for now, all very small) and there are currently five extra shelves in the kitchen, with five more to come, and potential plans for a few more after that. i like this approach of just popping shelves on the wall with these cheap pegs without having to screw or nail anything into walls that should not be nailed or screwed into. the double and mostly even matching shelving (except one) on every possible open space in this kitchen maximizes what can be done with the space (which is big for a small kitchen. any bigger at all, and it might no longer be small, anymore.) and does a lot to make it look like a fancier kitchen than it is. this is the bottom half of what was a turn of the last century mansion; i know it's really, really old because there's still a chimney vent for the coal down here. it wouldn't take that much effort to make this place really nice.
i'm getting there.
regarding the laptops, i'm getting annoyed enough with the crashing old chromebook in the kitchen that i'm planning on replacing it with the one i'm typing on, but it's going to be a process. i need to make sure that i can't just swap the ram first. if i can fix it by swapping the ram, that's a better choice, although there are some annoyances, such as the inability to play bandcamp audio. that said, if i can stop it from crashing, i may still consider swapping out the os on it. i need to test the ram, which is replaceable in this thing because it's really a laptop with a chrome os chip. it might be easy. it's too bad the front panel is busted, really. but i've been over this a few times - this is why i stopped buying laptops, and i'm going to get to that. laptops will break. i don't have the money to waste. i'd rather buy $100 chromebooks that are expected to break or expire, anyways.
there is still going to be a zoom device in there as well and i'm trying to figure out how to do this. i want to get a videophone with an external monitor out. this will delegate the processor work to a dedicated videophone device but still give me a bigger screen. ideally, i should also be able to plug a usb key into the videophone for use with the zoom platform.
zoom actually is shifting to hardware, but they are moving to a corporate licensing model and this is leaving me in a hole. i could in theory buy a 20 year old cisco video phone on ebay for $100 and it should work perfectly fine, so long as zoom lets me connect, which it looks like they won't. i need to buy a license, intended for corporate use. that doesn't make sense to me. zoom's insistence on pushing a proprietary hardware product is becoming a problem and i want to drop this on them. they need to change how they're approaching this.
right now, they are leaving users like me in a bind. as mentioned, i can neither afford to keep up with laptop hardware nor buy proprietary zoom licenses. i do not currently have a computer i can use to run zoom on; i need to buy something, and i'd rather get a videophone if i'm doing it. the videophone shouldn't lose support like an operating system well, which is a major selling point for a low income nerd like myself. i know i can set one of these things up (i have a voip office phone with two lines that is connected to voip.ms that takes incoming and outcoming calls and works just like a landline) and i know it can and should work but, right now, zoom doesn't want to let me without charging me an exorbitant fee. it will tell me the desktop version is free, but it won't let me run it, either, because it claims my computer isn't fast enough (a claim which is, in truth, dubious to clearly false).
access to zoom no longer a luxury in canada. zoom is increasingly exclusively used by courts, tribunals and other administrative bodies in canada, who are increasingly abandoning the court room altogether. still, in 2026, years after the pandemic has been over, the court house in windsor is still dead empty. if i was running for mayor in windsor, i may want to suggest converting the empty court house into a homeless shelter. it does not look like the courts are returning to normal any time soon, in ontario. ontarians need to adjust, which means they need access to this proprietary platform, without buying a fucking license. that means everybody, even poor people like me that don't buy new computers every six months and cannot keep up with zoom's onerous minimum requirements, which are unjustified.
i can call the court, but i've learned the hard way that that places you at a disadvantage. judges want to see you because they don't read your court documents and don't correctly apply the law, they judge you on your appearance and apply a variety of race and gender prejudices on you in the process. that's reality, and we can't avoid the necessity of the legal system, which governs aspects of our lives like housing in ways that we have no choice but to interact with. ontarians need a way to connect to zoom via video, moving forward. zoom needs to make this easier, not harder, or it might find it starts losing clients that can't deal with the user requirements and just want to connect to go to court because they have to.
first, i want to finish cleaning behind the couch so i can finally put the coffee table down. then, i need to clear out the space where i'm moving all my bookshelves into to clean, so i can move the shelves in. when that's done, i can get to cutting some of the wood for the kitchen, finally.
there will be a scattering of items coming in as that's happening, as well.