Baby Steps

Trying to get back to writing on a regular basis. What I'm not going to do is make my first blog after such a long break about something deep and meaningful or thought-provoking. I'm just going to write for the sake of writing.

I have two reasons for this: 1) I have kind of missed doing this and I want to see if I can pick it up and keep it up (that's kind of two reasons) and 2) one of the things my 3rd years have to do this year is start a blog here at blogger.com and write in it twice a week. Now, if I can't get this together, how can I expect them to?

So, what am I going to write about today? Table plug sockets and appliance plugs. I actually had to look up what a table plug socket was called because, before today, I always called them extension cords. Apparently that's just a cord that extends one appliance plug, not one that gives you many places to plug in appliances. Afin, this is what has been keeping me busy this afternoon.

I have finally, after living in this apartment for nearly five years, organized the wide variety of cables and plugs behind my entertainment system. And by entertainment system I mean my TV stand. I had been living in a highly unorganized state, augmented by the fact that the wall socket where I had plugged in my previous table plug socket had ceased to work a few days ago. In other words, it had made some slightly scary crackling noises and then everything getting power from that corner stopped working. The most disastrous part of that was that my modem was sucking power from that particular socket and it took me a full half hour to figure out that I wasn't getting any internet because there was no power coming out of that socket anymore. Twenty minutes of that time was spent freaking out, to be honest. All my friends live in the internet and I panic when it doesn't work as I think it should. (My laptop sucks power from a different socket, in case you were wondering why I didn't notice that my laptop wasn't working)

So, I had to find another power source and that is on the other side of the living room, where my phone and a light are plugged in. I actually connected three table plug sockets to each other, end to end, to span the distance to the other socket and keep all of my appliances going. All but the DVD player and VCR because I only had table plug sockets with four outlets. Hey, sometimes sacrifices have to be made. In any case, the internet (and TV and phone as the digi box was also in the doomed corner and my phone connection is through the modem, although I hadn't noticed they weren't working) was back. And I was happy.

My living room, however, didn't look quite as happy as there was a very long, very unattractive snake of extention cord/table plug socket combination stretching straight through it and over all the furniture in its way. Something that was barely noticeable if you had your head tucked down far enough behind the laptop. It was still there, though.

Yesterday I decided it was time to tidy that up and I bought a two pack of table plug sockets with six plug-ins. They aren't sold individually, it seems. I didn't get around to actually using them until today, though, as I happen to be very good at procrastinating. And the internet worked again, as I mentioned, so there was plenty to keep me un-busy in the meantime.

Busy I did get, however and furniture was moved and swears were uttered. Once I got to plugging in my appliances into the new table plug socket with six plug ins I couldn't help but notice that my five appliances and one light in that corner had created a very large mess of cords that were all braided together like .. well, a braid, actually. So I spent a large amount of time (and some more swears) untangling the whole lot so that there was some order in the chaos behind my TV stand. Which is when I noticed that, even when untangled, they still looked pretty messy all on top of each other like that and I decided to get some twisty ties and bunch together the superfluous cord. Then I figured, while I was at it, I may as well label the cords so that you could easily identify which appliance they were attached to. So I spent another fifteen minutes trying to find my Dymo Tag 2000 so that I could print out some labels.

When I was finished with all of that I attached all the cords to plugs and the plugs to sockets and hit the little red POWER button on my brand new table plug socket. Voilà! It all worked and I had a very tidy area behind my TV stand ... which you can't really see because the TV stand is kind of blocking it all.

Incidentally, while moving all the furniture I discovered that one of the cats had thrown up under a chair and while tidying up all of the extra cords and plugs afterwards I discovered that I already had a table plug socket with six plug ins in the bottom drawer of a cupboard. So now I have three table plug sockets with six plug ins where I thought I had none and I don't even need two of them ... namely the two I bought yesterday.

Bit of a fiasco but I do now have all of my appliances plugged in at the same time instead of having to play musical plugs every time I wanted to use either the DVD or the VCR (and I always wanted to use the appliance that wasn't plugged in, of course) and my internet still works.

Giant leaps, in the grander scheme of things. xx