3:14 in a stairwell

Monday, July 4 at 3:14, I was in a stairwell. It's a transitional space in a lot of different ways.

Of course, a stairwell is not the kind of place somebody just hangs around for the sake of being in a stairwell, so in one sense what it meant was that I was in-between walking from my home and heading into the math office.

And the math office itself was a transition spot; it's where I'd stored some boxes between moving out of the administration building into my new office in the College Houses.

And time-wise, the reason I was heading into the math office was also a transition: to finish up one project (chair invitations!) and start a new one (fixing a rolling cart).

The chair invitation is for a party that a math friend and I are throwing for myself because I'm now an endowed chair. My friend who's planning with this with me strongly encouraged me to read The Art of Gathering, and this book really made us both think hard about ways to make this party a lot of fun. We're going to have rules for the guests, including but they have to sing the "chair song" before we cut the cake – and of course I have now written a chair song for us all to sing.

Repairing this cart was another whole fun activity in itself. A few years ago, while my husband and I were on our evening usual evening post-dinner stroll, we passed by two rolling market carts. The red one had a really warped wheel and looked like it was on its last legs (or last wheel, so to speak), but the black one looked like it was in great shape. We took them both home. 

paper-clip cotter pin: works for me!

Looks are deceiving: the red one with the wobbly wheel has worked just great, whereas the black one keeps having Issues. One of those issues was relatively easy to fix: the wheel fell off because of a missing cotter pin. So Fix Number One was to grab a paper clip--a sturdy one that I think of as too ugly to actually use on papers I care about – and use that and a pair of pliers to make a new cotter pin. 

The other fix was a weirder one to try to figure out. When we open the cart, it didn't want to stay in one position, but the basket kept sliding back-and-forth along the wheels. I finally looked at the red basket to see how that one managed to stay so rigid, and it turns out that there are two metal swing arms that the red one has that the black one didn't. 

Hanger-becomes-swing-arm

So I went and rescued a hanger out of my scrap metal bucket. It's the kind that you get from the dry cleaners for pants, where the metal that doesn't make a whole triangle, but rather the base is a round cardboard tube, and the metal part just grips those two ends of the tube. Once the cardboard tube folds, the hanger is worthless. That's what happened to this one. Well, it was worthless as a hanger, but it was just about perfect for becoming two little metal arms market basket! A bolt cutter, two pairs of pliers, and a little bit of squinting and grunting, and I had a working market basket for hauling things back-and-forth, all for free.

Prewash the Dog approves.