With the day off --- if I didn't have the day off, it's too late to worry about it now --- I thought the best uses might be to maybe get a haircut, since I'm filling in for my mother teaching this Wednesday and next and I do look a wee bit shaggy, and to see about clearing more stuff out of my storage locker. I called the barber shop after getting up, only to be ... hung up on, in that weird sort-of pickup that feels awkward no matter what goes along with it. I tried again, and got a couple rings that then stopped with no obvious cause. So I went to do my WiiFit weigh-in, and then call, and got my barber and established he'd be around. He meant to work a half-day, but if I got there in the 45 minutes he thinks it takes me to get there, although it's a half-hour longer when you count my shower and how long it actually takes to drive there, but then he always thinks I get there just on time, too, so that's well for him.
Although last time I went he felt I should shave my beard off entirely, we settled today just on trimming it down, the way he usually does going in to summer. That is, close, but not gone. That's going to feel a bit chilly particularly with the forecast for temperatures dropping below the 50 degrees Fahrenheit mark later in the week, but I'll probably find some way to adjust, likely by shivering. My barber's ``half day'' of work kept getting longer, but at just about the right pace, of one person coming in as he was finishing up the previous customer.
Meanwhile I think that I've run out of stocks of old clothing I don't wear and don't fit in anymore in my storage locker, although there are quite a few boxes I haven't got around to yet. I'm finding way more plastic scale models than I would have bet on, which take up a lot of space but are easy to move around so it's hard to say whether to be bothered by these or not. Also I've found some real treasures: the second edition of Doug Cooper and Michael Clancy's Oh! Pascal, and a folder from Bell Labs from the day in high school when I was first introduced, along with a field trip of bright science-and-engineering magnet program students, to Unix. We rapidly discovered the talk command, turning the intended class into a session of their trying to turn off ways to message each other, and our finding ways to bypass that. We don't think they held that class again. It's a bit of a trip finding all this old stuff.
Trivia: The Erie Canal abolished tolls in 1882, when it was still serving over 20 million people. Source: Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, Peter L Bernstein.
Currently Reading: Psychohistorical Crisis, Donald Kingsbury.