Portable wall, 5
Last night after work I had a meeting regarding the huge upcoming Thanksgiving race. While I was there I picked up the latest addition to the running club’s equipment collection, a portable logo’d backdrop. When I got home I enlisted Cindy to help me set it up.
In it’s bag, the wall folds down to a nice rectangle that is no bigger than a bag of golf clubs. However when fully expanded, amazing engineering lets the wall become a 12 feet wide by 8 feet tall portable billboard. Setting up the frame is pretty labor intensive, with 24 separate connectors that need to be snapped into place. The logos are printed on fabric which gave me nightmares of the wall becoming a sail with even light amounts of wind. Auxiliary weights are going to be needed to make sure it doesn’t go anywhere.
The wall did look cool though. It’s intention is to use it and the newly crafted 1st, 2nd, 3rd podiums for race awards ceremonies to provide some quality picture taking opportunities for runners and to make division winners feel an extra bit of pride in their accomplishments.
Taking down the wall was difficult. Releasing the connectors required a lot of finger torque which sometimes had to be combined with frame compression. With 24 connectors to release, Cindy and my hands were hurting by the end of it. I think the wall and podiums will be a nice addition to our race experience but we will need to find some additional labor to set them up and tear them down. Keeping the stuff clean will be another challenging goal. Most of the rest of the night was spent doing other race related work as I have a 10K to time on Saturday morning.
Yesterday Cindy transferred her phone service over from her Galaxy S4 to my old Iphone 5 which will be a placeholder until her contract allows her to upgrade to a 6 in several months. Although Cindy liked several aspects of her Galaxy it was a pain in the ass in other regards. She was a longtime Iphone/Mac user prior to getting the Galaxy so going back to the Iphone was like a warm blanket. With IOS 8.1 there are a lot of new things she didn’t have before so there is a slight learning curve involved but since a lot of the changes are simply adding features the Galaxy already had, it isn’t a big deal.
After timing the race this weekend Cindy and I hopefully will settle in for a nice weekend that will include some work, some exercise, some movie viewing, and even a trip to Rural King!