Clearing Space for a New Recliner

It’s been a busy weekend.

I ordered a recliner chair about a month ago, and it’s scheduled to be delivered Tuesday (tomorrow). With my growing age and uncertain future, I’ve decided to prioritize luxury and comfort, so I spoiled myself with a good recliner with adjustable headrest and lumbar support. This is the first recliner I’ve ever owned.

However I needed to clear out a path for the delivery people to get from the back door to the living room, and I also needed to clear out the space for the chair.

The biggest obstacle was a sofa sitting right where I wanted to put the chair. This is a sofa that’s been pretty much trashed by dogs and cats over the last 10 years. I never use it. In recent years it’s primarly been the nest of my cat, who sleeps on it and uses it as her favorite scratching post.

Over the weekend, I moved this sofa out of the house and into the garage, where it will sit until I can figure out how to actually throw it away. (The current plan is to rent one of those roll-off dumpsters sometime later in the summer.)

In order to accomplish moving the sofa, I ordered a couple of furniture dollies, and generally cleared away a huge portion of living room clutter. With the dollies, I was able to roll the sofa through the living room and kitchen to the back door, where I could then muscle it down the back stairs and over to the garage.

It sounds like a huge undertaking but it actually wasn’t that hard, thanks to my prodigious use of physics and leverage to my advantage. There were only a couple of times I had to use brute force, and while the sofa is big and awkward, it’s not prohibitively heavy.

Other than that, I spent a bunch of time running scripts to generate transcriptions of old videos. I have a medium-term goal of creating an LLM I can use to query all of my blog posts and videos, and these transcriptions will be part of that data set.

I use AssemblyAI for transcribing my videos these days. It works quite well. If there’s one area where AI is definitely going to put humans out of work, it’s in the area of transcriptionist. AI is pretty much bang on every time. Except for proper names. :)