I’ve been back in my makeshift studio recording season 4 of my podcast and I’ve had this one nagging problem that I haven’t been able to fix.

That’s not exactly true. The truth is, I haven’t been willing to take the time needed to fix it properly. It’s not a huge deal but it’s annoying as all get out.

Part of the reason for the delay in properly repairing was that I wanted to enlist Emmett’s help in troubleshooting and see if he could come up with a working solution.

If you look at the underside of my table, you’ll see a mess of cables. I wanted to make the table include everything without having multiple cords plugged into the limited outlets in my room. I ran one powers trip to the underside of the table. All the cables run through a hole and plug in underneath.

Basically, my Cloudlifter, mic and power cables are all contained and out of sight.

The problem is that the power strip kept falling down. I’ve tried all kinds of non-permanent adhesive to secure it and it ultimately always failed. There are 2 screw holes on the underside of the power strip for mounting but I’ve never been able to find screws that fit. The holes are a weird size and depth, making it sorta nonstandard.

Yesterday, I finally said fuck it, and tried these 2 screws I’ve been saving for this purpose but hadn’t tried. It’s a pain in the ass to tear everything down, only to find it won’t work.

Anyway, Emmett and I decided this was really the only way this was going to work. He’d given up and found more exciting things to involve himself in, so I was on my own.

I tore everything apart again, and turns out these screws fit. They were extra screws from a slide bolt I ordered for my closet door. It totally worked and as simple as this seems, it’s one more thing to check off my list. All I had to do was add a setscrew because if the powerstip was allowed to move forward at all, it would fall down.

Problem solved and I feel pretty good about this.

Resolving this has reminded me that if I have fixable problems that just need me to provide a bit of time, it’s worth doing so, because every solution is a victory. I often put stuff like this off because I feel like there are bigger problems to worry about. I’m going to make a concerted effort to tackle these smaller problems because they are solvable and become one less thing to worry about.