What For?

I've come back from vacation to work. The house is almost (but not quite) sold. I need the money. But I'm not doing anything useful or purposeful in my job. As a matter of fact, my job is not what I signed up for, and even if it was, I'd still be having an existential crisis.

I work to maintain a status quo that is misguided at best. My job is to aid and assist in creating more landfill and waste. I make it possible for people to buy large amounts of stuff that they fill their homes with, and consequently have to throw away packaging, the previous thing that the new thing replaced, and ultimately, the thing itself, which must then be replaced later with new versions of the previous thing.

On top of this, the decisions I make are ignored by folks higher up, since they don't jibe with maintaining a different status quo, the nature of which I can't go into without getting myself fired, and solving the problem. Suffice to say that, when presented with a better mousetrap, my bosses are only looking at the brand, and cook the results of the test to reflect their views. So much fun doing R&D when the conclusion is foregone (which we should have known).

Toilet paper will always be a best-seller.

As a codicil to the previous statement, my stomach is currently running circles around my spine, and I can't keep food down. Something must be wrong. I can't keep doing this, and I'm not sure what I should do.

Scraping Away The Pain(t)

Never hiring another handyman again without first going to Angie'sList. This guy took all week to paint three spaces and a bunch of molding. We also paid for him to uncaulk and re-caulk the tub; he did the former and told us that we could do the latter as soon as the space was completely clean. Never caulked a thing before in my life, and this caulk that I bought is NASTY. I had no idea that nothing cleans it up, except maybe gasoline.

Anyway, I made it look alright, but I'm not terribly happy with the results, and I wish I'd used something else (assuming anything else exists to do this sort of work).

But the painterman. After chiding us about our ridiculous precautions of taping the drop cloths to the floor in our living room and kitchen (which came out great, and spotlessly clean), he paints all of his spaces with no drop cloth at all, leaving us dried paint on our linoleum kitchen floor, on the sealed tile in the laundry room, and on the unsealed stone floor of the bathroom. We spent half Saturday just cleaning up after him. I became suspicious of his experience with spray-painting when I found the box for his spray painter in my back yard, just-opened.

Growl.

However, except for a couple of details, the house is ready to go on the market. Stagers are coming today to throw in furniture. I will be going back to replace a window in the attic (already got the piece of cut glass), and shaving off the bottom of one door that has always been a little tight. Seal the front deck and I'm DONE! Pictures by the end of the week and on the market before Monday. Yowch.

Now we just need to clean up the space we've moved to.

Owwwwwww....

Painting hurts. All of me is slightly achy and my walk looks like something out of Night of the Living Dead - and not in a good way.


So, we've painted the kitchen and the living room and we're awaiting our handyman (who is a stickler for "smooth" paint) to finish the bathroom, laundry room, fridge alcove and bedroom. My basement looks HUGE, now that I've moved most of it out. If I could figure out how to distribute what I have more evenly, perhaps there would have been more room.


Computer says "no".


I have managed to throw out eight bags of trash from my basement, more than any other space in the house (actually, more than the whole rest of the house). Part of that has to do with finally being done making the floor correct in the bedroom. I didn't exactly overbuy - it's kind of like the bun/hotdog packaging joke: "Why do they sell hot dogs in groups of six and hot dog buns in groups of eight?" Well, why do you have to buy 21 sq. ft of laminate flooring and 32 sq. ft of laminate floor padding?


I threw away four pieces of board and a bundle of padding scraps the size of a St. Bernard dog.


And then there are the paint cans, which I've been told I must get rid of (even though I inherited half of them from the previous owner). Latex paint is not HazMat. However, it must be dry before it can be tossed.

Do you know how long it takes for latex paint to dry just by taking the lid off? Or (as my handyman suggested) spread a bunch of cardboard out over your lawn and pour it all out. Wait for it to dry, then pack all the paint-covered cardboard into trash bags and voila! With my luck, there will be a leak in the cardboard, and I'll end up with a variety-swirl-pattern lawn. Or it will rain, and it won't matter that there's cardboard, the whole lawn will be redecorated in new, vibrant color!

And finally (in the trash department), Apple ADB cables, SCSI, extra three-prong power supply cables (they multiply, don't they), floppy disks, books about Pagemaker, software that only runs on OS 9. I finally gave away my old Mac IIci (after removing the hard drive) and my old Apple 12" RGB monitor, which probably originally cost someone a thou. I also got rid of my 19" CRT monitor, which originally cost me over $1500. Getting all misty-eyed...

Anyway, we're almost completely out. I will be changing my e-mail soon, so that I can cancel cable in the house. My last act will be stickering all of the reusable plastic tubs that we've bought to move stuff in to indicate which tubs are light, which are heavy, and which will give the lifter a hernia. RG stays away from those. And then move them all out of the basement of this house into the basement of our temporary domicile, a lovely cottage with a view of the Sound and the Needle.

And then, relax...

(actually, HouseHunting!)

The TV Machine

More and more TV shows are capturing my brain, and fortunately, they're on DVD, so I can (instead of defining a moment wherein I must devote an hour of my day not only to programming but the detestable commercials that come all too often) waste an entire weekend watching one show from beginning of season to end.

That doesn't sound good, does it?

These shows are, in no particular order, Deadliest Catch (crab fishermen in the "Vast Bering Sea"with ice and death!), Burn Notice (ex-spies, Miami Babes, and Bruce Campbell!), and The Wire (for all you Homicide fans, same original writer, David Simon - drugs, cops, cop humor). Last year was the year of Monk and House, this eyar we've moved on to darker fare.

With Deadliest Catch, you'd think it would get dull watching guys do endless repetetive work in a crappy environment, and crustaceans desperately trying to escape their really delicious fate. But these guys are real characters, two or three ex-cons, so far one arrest, and greenhorns, who you'd think would have the humility to realize that what they're about to embark upon is hellish hard work, peopled with testosterone-fueled crazy people, who think nothing of chopping the new guy down to fishbait for simply trying to be one of the boys. When the fishing is bad, you feel the pain coming from every downcast face, knowing that they're risking their lives for a catch that might not be worth the effort. When the fishing is good, the joy comes off the screen in waves. When a boat goes down, or a man goes overboard, these men act as soldiers in war - nothing is too good for a fallen comrade.

Burn Notice is a different animal altogether. The basic premise is that Michael is a spy who has been "burned" i.e., cut off from the mothership, and left to his own devices in, of all places, Miami. This is where his mother & brother live, his ex-girlfriend (a gun-runner and explosives expert with an overactive trigger-finger), and his old pal Sam (Bruce Campbell, in what must be one of the most fun roles of his career). So Michael uses his talents to help people he comes across (to keep himself alive - all of his bank accounts are frozen when he's burned), with occasional help from the ex, from Sam, and from his mother (a cigarette-raspy Sharon Gless). There is a bit of MacGyver-esque stuff that you can learn (like destroying a car engine by melting through it with a coffee-can load of thermite, or attaching the antenna of your cellphone to an ethernet cable to use the Internet as your antenna), and overall the performances are solid. Lots of pretty girls to look at, too.

And the Wire. What can I say about this show, except that in one scene in Episode Five, two detectives work their way through a crime scene, and not a word passes between them except variations of the F-word. 

For. Ten. Minutes. 

You have to wonder what the actors thought of those pages. They like to start each episode off with some sort of joke, and the most memorable one so far is also in Episode Five. Two guys trying to get a desk through a door, and the darn thing won't budge. More guys join in. No progress. The LT shows up, looks at them like, "what a bunch of idiots," and puts his muscle to the task. Still no progress. Everyone gives up. Finally, the guy who was trying to get it through the door in the first place says, "It must have gotten jammed up when I was trying to bring it in." One of the guys who was on the other side of the door says, "IN?" 

Classic...

Dread of Mice

One of our cats caught a mouse the other day. It was (apologies to The Princess Bride) mostly dead. RambunctiousGrl FREAKED OUT. In her world, mice are indicative of a feelthy household. And while we are kinda feelthy (the occasional stack of dishes in the sink and too damn many books everywhere), I don't consider mouse visitations (especially in the singular) to be anything other than a stroke of luck for the kittehs. We have indoor kittehs who never get to experience the thrill of hunting their food (except of course, when persuading RG or myself that it's TIME FOR EFFING BREAKFAST GET UP GETUP GETUP GETUP).

Kitteh staff understand breakfast time. This daylight savings nonsense is actually more irritating, not for the lost sleep, but for the fact that cats take a very long time to adjust.

I took the comatose mousie outside and buried him under a patch of loose sod. I'm putting a humane trap in the basement to see if I can catch any more. And we're on a hole-hunt, hoping to patch up whatever ingress the little buggers might find in the future.

And the movie's almost done.  Really.

The Life-Changing Nothing

There is a neat website, Making Light, that repurposes or originates their own content, and I was led to it by another interesting website, bOINGbOING.net. The article that led me to Making Light is by a fellow named Peter Kleisler. I really hope his American Cargo Cult gets wider dissemination, because it takes an excellent look at the American Way of Not Thinking Too Much, and articulates it all really well, and in nice, short, punchy sentences that I can use for my own ends.

But that's not what I'm writing about today. Making Light also had a story about how a small thing can change your life. The story is about a guy (speaking to a high school audience), how he killed his best friend while driving drunk. And that when he got back to school, he was pretty much shunned by everyone. At a point where he was thinking of ending it all, one of his fellow students casually offered him a stick of gum. "The gum," he said, "saved my life."

So Making Light suggested a topic: how did something small change your life? For me, it was a movie. I was living with two guys, paying a tiny rent to stay in a small bedroom while I worked my way from $4.10/hour all the way up to $4.35/hour as a gas station attendant.  I was twenty-five years old, no prospects, not much education (on paper), and neither ambition nor any sort of belief in myself. I wasn't suicidal so much as terrified. I wouldn't have had the courage to pull the trigger, any more than I had the courage to go out and do something with myself.

The Cotati Cinema ran two screens and charged a $1. Which, even in the mid-eighties, was a bargain. On my two days off (in the middle of the week), I went to see Runaway Train, with John Voight and Eric Roberts as escaped convicts (in Alaska) who get themselves locked in the back end of a four-engine stack, whose conductor has a heart attack after opening the throttle up. The engines basically go off on their own, and the two convicts are stuck trying to figure out what to do, and how to get off without being recaptured. Rebecca deMornay does a decidedly non-sexy turn as Sara, the Hostler Helper, and she's the only one on the train with any knowledge of how they work. The movie is preachy in many ways, but I hadn't heard any of these sermons before.

Manny (John Voight): Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger.

And

Sara: Hold me. I don't want to die alone. 
Manny: We all die alone. 

I don't know why, but a lot of this stuff that Manny spouted during the movie really inspired me to re-think my own capabilities. To look at myself, not from my father's perspective, but from no perspective in particular. To come out from under the layer of filters I was living in.

I paid my fare to see that film four times in the next week.

Unenthusiastic Exclamations of Delight!

So, today, I read in Ironic Times (required reading of the staff at The Situation) that the word "meh" has entered the dictionary. (and yet my spellchecker still annoys me)

So glad you asked.

This is apparently a word used to describe a lack of interest or enthusiasm for a thing or task.

Yes, folks - the English language has evolved yet again. We've moved from "whatever" to "meh." Not that I mind, it's certainly easier to say: 

"We need to do laundry." "Meh." 

"Bush is still in office." "Meh."

But it does speak of deeper meanings. The word "w00t!" made it in, and I happen to think that's a good thing. Made-up words are finding their way into the actual lexicon of English. Unlike the French, who decided some time ago that not only was creating new words beyond their capacity, but that using other people's words for them ("television," "sexy," etc.) was also bad.

The French don't "watch TV," they "look at the box with lights," or something like that, I guess. At least the Germans (not what one would think of as a country known for it's flexibility of thinking) came up with a cool name for TV: Fernsehen, or far-seeing.

And while we're willing to come up with new names for things we already had names for, we still don't adapt well to change, unless it's something everyone has either done, or seen on das Fernsehen.

Oh, well.

Or in other words, meh...