Category: Life

Say you think the United States Department of Education, younger than I am and I’mnotthatolddammit, is worth reconsideration as a Federal level institution and drain of Chinese bond purchaser dollars makes me an EXTREMIST?

But, somehow, you think it’s worthwhile that those same dollars go to fund grants that do SUCH IMPORTANT WORK as billboards:

Click for fully funded Federal glory

You know what? I call defending the United States Department of Education Office of Innovation and Improvement Ready to Learn Grant billboards that replace privately funded “Don’t Suck Out That Growth In Your Uterus” billboards EXTREMIST.

I mean, seriously. We’re spending Chinese dollars and bringing wrack upon our economy to innovatively put up billboards telling parents to read to their children? Palin have mercy.

I didn’t see a Sesame Television Workshop official license notice on this particular gift from grandmother:

Although it does explain why the last couple episodes of Sesame Street have been brought to us by the numbers 00 and 21.

So we’ve been in Nogglestead, our new house in the Springfield area, for just over a year now, and I’ve finally gotten the garage mostly unpacked. Hey, I even finally rolled up the tarp I put over the outdoor tools I brought from Old Trees when we moved (I had left it unrolled and spread out to dry, and eventually it got put into the shed spread so that it could dry very well over the last year).

As I’ve been unpacking, I actually have room and shelves and light to spread the gear out and organize it. No longer–well, not for much longer–will I have bunches of unorganized junk boxes with miscellaneous tools, screws, and components in them. As I organize, I keep finding things like this:

I have no idea what that is for.

No doubt it came from some some-assembly-required piece I’ve put together in the last decade, perhaps an optional bit that I didn’t employ but wanted to have on hand in 10 years if I changed my mind. It’s about 4 inches long, sort of screwlike, with a slot screw and hex nut top for easy insertion and tightening. I have no idea what that goes to.

Some people, when confronted with something like this, might throw it out. Not me. I might need that in 2020 for that thing.

I’ll just make a big box for doohickeys.

This is Geoffrey Grasshopper:

My children were thrilled to see Geoffrey climbing up the window screen in the dining room where earlier they had seen a praying mantis do the same thing. Geoffrey, however, to their added delight, was inside. They thought he was a cricket, though, thanks to multiple readings of Mouse Soup.

He crawled to the top of the window, as depicted, and hung out for a day. As the Father, I had to take some action.

There is no grass in the house for Geoffrey to eat. Therefore, if left in the house, he would starve to death slowly in front of my children’s eyes. If it were summer, this would pose no problem, as I’d toss him outside and let him live his life as a grasshopper. But now the nights were dipping to freezing, and Geoffrey would probably not last the night.

To live longer, but suffering, or to die quickly but as a grasshopper. This was the dilemma that Geoffrey faced, although he did not know it. I would make the decision, I would determine the manner of Geoffrey’s death.

I know, you’re saying that it’s just a damn bug and I’m making too much of it. You don’t understand: My boys had seen this bug. I would have to explain the decision to them in moral and practical terms.

It is only a bug, so killing it is not exactly a mortal sin, but I’m trying to teach my children to respect life, even bugs (if possible, although flies, fruit flies, and anything in the house is fair game because…. well, I haven’t articulated that very well). Although dogs are nice and alive, it’s okay to kill them if they threaten your life, for example. But this grasshopper (or the bugs in the house) don’t really threaten your life directly….

This children thing is very complicated. And I’m supposed to be some kind of moral philosopher who can explain these things.

So I chose to turn Geoffrey out of doors. I drew some rationalization from a different telling of Aesop’s Fable #3 that ended with the moral “Half a meal in freedom is better than a whole meal in chains.” A day of living like a grasshopper is better than several days of living like a starving insect out of its element.

So I captured him in my hands and my wife held the door while I tossed him out onto the deck in the afternoon sunshine. He landed, dazed, and one of our outdoor cats pounced on him and ate him.

Well, not really that last part, as two of our outdoor cats started out as indoor cats and have lost even their bug-hunting prowess. Geoffrey must have hopped off as he’s gone from the spot now and has probably passed away from the autumn evening temperatures.

As a father of two who must know right from wrong in all circumstances, I bear the burden of Godhood to insects pretty heavily. The big moral things are easy. The minutiae can be tricky when it has to exemplify larger lessons.

If I were a child, I think this bit of playground equipment would give me nightmares:

Click for full size

Ladies and gentlemen, the mutated pig snout climbing wall. Step on the blue, misshapen porkers to ascend to the heights.

Even Pitfall Harry would go back to school for accounting if confronted with this.

America is undergoing a fundamental transformation, and frankly, I’m eager for it to finish because I’m tired of the confusion I have sometimes during the transition. It’s the second time the very basic nature of American life has changed this way since I can remember the 1970s and the alteration of basic behavior then. But even then, there was not confusion nor antics during the transition.

In the 1970s, restrooms transitioned from the continuous loop of damp towel paradigm to either air dryers or paper towel dispensers. Throughout this change, instructions or basics made it simple for people with wet hands to receive drying media. But in the early 21st century, the transition from tactilely operated drying mechanisms to automatic machinery is making things difficult for America, and by “America,” I mean me and my ability to project.

Because who hasn’t stood in the bathroom with dripping paws and just for a minute hasn’t confronted a strange machine that doesn’t make clear whether it requires one to operate a lever that the designers who have generously designed to look like a naturally occurring contour of the machine or it requires the user to trigger an electronic eye that the designers have generously hidden in a naturally occurring contour of the machine.

Frankly, I feel like Scotty in Star Trek IV when confronted with a 20th century computer. And I hate it when the men’s room door opens on me waving my hands and saying in a particularly poor Scottish accent, “Hello, towel dispenser….”

I will be glad when the towel dispenser transition concludes and we can have relative peace and certainty with our public restroom facilities. Relative peace, of course, because no doubt they will eventually cue off of our implanted chips to deliver the minimum amount of towel that we will use without attempting to trigger it again and to play our favorite dry tone. At least until the great water crises of the 21st century eliminate water-based handwashing entirely and replace it with nothing but alcohol-based sanitizer dispensers.

Now that I’m the Daddy, I can put my own damn art on the refrigerator:

Because let’s face it, the four-year-old and the two-year-old only have relatively rudimentary skills in construction paper pseudomosaic at this time. And that’s relative to my skill, which is rudimentary to most second graders.

And that thing in the foreground is not a windmill, curse your eyes! It’s a flower.

We had some pretty fierce storms here in the Springfield area last week, and at one point the wind and rain lashed at the west side of our house. We have a walkout basement, and some water dripped in over the door. The next morning, I went out to inspect the door to see how the water was coming in. The door frame is inset from the brick exterior, and the mortar connecting the bricks to the lintel had broken down.

So I did what I was supposed to do: I grabbed a hammer, chisel, and wire brush and chipped out the broken mortar. I brushed the loose stuff out, sanded and painted the lintel, and then thought about the mortar. I found eighty pound bags of it at the hardware store, but that seemed a little excessive, so I used this caulk gun mortar patch to draw and shape a nice bead of caulk all the way across.

Still, at some point as I was tapping away, spraying mortar dust all over my tender little beading hands, I wondered How do I know how to do this?.

My background isn’t in the building trades. My other houses were asbestos shingle (later vinyl siding) and vinyl siding. My sainted mother never did anything like this when I was around. When I lived with my father, who had worked in the building trades and probably knew how to do this, I was a smart ass college kid with no time for that. And face it, my recent readings in Kipling, Epictetus, and handicrafts didn’t cover it.

But there I was.

Maybe I read it in one of the do-it-yourself magazines I took some years ago. Maybe I did see my father do it somewhere. Or maybe well water just has free-floating radical testosterone in it that naturally gives a man the ability to work with his hands.

It always impresses my wife when I do something handy around the house, making a small improvement or repair. Sometimes, though, it impresses even me.

Wow, bicentennial quarters sure are getting thin in regular circulation, aren’t they?

For those of you who don’t remember, back in 1976, the United States quarter, the twenty-five cent piece (one quarter of a dollar, you see), deviated from the standard Washington profile/eagle design to recognize the nation’s 200th birthday. On the reverse side, where the eagle would have appeared, you see a drumming Uncle Sam. That was kind of a big deal, since before the state quarters started showing up in 1999, the quarter had the same design for many people’s lifetimes.

You used to find them every so often in the wild, at least you did in much of my lifetime. For 32 years, I’d see them often enough to not think anything of it. However, I guess I haven’t seen one in quite a while.

I found one on my dresser this morning after dumping the contents of my pocket last night. Just for a moment, I thought to put it aside for my mother as I’d done for years, saving bicentennial quarters, Susan B. Anthony dollars, and Sacagawea dollars so she could put them in coffee cans and glass jars for the sheer hoarding joy of it (you can guess where I get it from then).

My mother passed away a year and a half ago, so I guess I haven’t seen a bicentennial since then. So I paused for a moment and thought about her. I wonder if I’ll not have those little moments, those little remembrances as time passes, especially as the incidental artifacts of our shared experiences and minor traditions disappear from the world.

And I’ve taken this quarter from the dresser and don’t know what I’ll do with it. Maybe start a jar, although a small one, of them.

One of the complaints I had about the house in Old Trees is that each room had only a single- or two-bulb fixture high upon the twelve foot ceilings to serve to illuminate the rooms within it. When the sun went down, the brown/tan/beige walls soaked that light up and the home became dark and draining.

Nogglestead is a tad different. And, fortunately, in a way I can complain about: the thing has too many light bulbs in its fixtures, and its fixtures use a plethora of different bulb styles. Maybe two plethora. Maybe a full myriad of plethora. Additionally, each fixture uses instead of one or two 100 watt bulbs, sometimes a dozen or more 40 watt bulbs. It’s bright, all right, and that buzzing you hear isn’t from fluorescence. It’s from the electric meter spinning.

Observe.

This is the front porch fixture:

This fixture has three small-base candle flame candles. Not only that, but to replace them, you have to undo the decorative nut on the bottom, remove the small decorative cover, undo the nut that holds the glass and whatnot up, remove most of the fixture except for the sockets, and then replace the bulbs. I don’t bother if only one is out. I wait for them to all go dark before I do. And I’ve replaced the set twice in the 11 months I’ve lived here.

This is the foyer fixture just inside the front door:

These are 40 watt small base clear bulbs. Six of them.

This is the parlor. It’s a formal dining room, but we don’t dine formally, so it has a piano in it and an elaborate formal dining room fixture.

That’s eight of the same 40 watt small base clear bulbs.

This is the kitchen:

There are six fixtures in here that I’ve not opened yet. Would it be too much to ask that they’re standard medium base light bulbs under there? Over the sink, there’s a recessed fixture that wants a flood light, but I’ve put in a 60-watt medium base incandescent.

The living room has a ceiling fan:

I know, by now you’re thinking it’s not so bad. The ceiling fixture has six more of the 40 watt small base clear bulbs. Oh, but look more closely: it also has a downward facing small spotlight in the center that I have yet to successfully replace. Since the top (or bottom) of the bulb is flush with the edge of its socket, I can’t get a good grip on it to replace it. Currently, it has a new bulb in it, but it’s not lit, so I did something wrong.

Now, onto elsewhere. This is one of the bedrooms in the house. The house relies on medium base floods recessed in the ceiling in a number of rooms, including the offices downstairs, two of the bedrooms upstairs, and the main living area downstairs. I’ve had to replace the ones in the den downstairs a couple of times each (I’ve had these troubles with recessed floodlights before in Old Trees as well). Eventually, I can get away with using medium base regular bulbs. Sometime soon I’ll do that instead of paying for the floodlights.

In the master suite, we have another ceiling fan. This one uses medium base frosted flame bulbs. It’s the only thing in the house that does so:

All of the bathrooms use medium base clear frosted bulbs. At least they share something with other rooms.

These vanities are in addition to overhead lights, of course.

The garage and the storage areas within the house have simple sockets for your standard light bulb:

However, in all of these cases (the garage, the laundry alcove, the walk-in closet, the storeroom, and the utility room), the previous owner put CFL bulbs in. Note that all of these fixtures do not have glass bulbs over them. In each of these cases, you’re one errant ladder from a hazmat situation. Also, all of these areas are the ones you’re prone to flip the light on for a couple seconds and turn it off. This is bad for the life expectancy of the CFL. I’m moving them out of the house as fast as I can.

These two fixtures outside the garage are perfect for the light-polluting CFL bulbs. Sadly, I have only two of these external fixtures and something like four or five of them remaining in my house.

So, if you’re keeping track, my house has a lot of light fixtures:

Number	Type:
3	Small base flame candles
12	Standard medium base
17	Recessed medium base for floodlights
14	Medium base globes clear
28	Small base globes
5	Medium base external floods
1	Small interior flood

That’s seven different types of light bulbs I need to have on hand to keep this house illuminated, and a whole pile of them on at any one time. I’d lie to you if I told you I’d rather have the lighting scheme of the old home in the new one, but jeez, Louise. I wonder where I’ll be in 2 years when incandescent light bulbs start becoming illegal by writ of Their Majesty, The Royal Congress.

Also, apologies in advance for any future brownouts I cause all by myself.

As some of you know, I got a new dryer recently. This particular unit seems to be imbued with some humidity-sensing technology since its dial no longer has just a dumb timer, but different settings based on, well, how much you serve Mother Gaia, apparently.

Now, I’m no expert on nuance, so in my black-and-white world, dry is an absolute value. Therefore, the dial that offers me more dry or less dry is probably offering me either dry or damp. Sandwiched between the two poles on the spectrum, the dial offers me the energy preferred option.

Energy preferred? Why not come right out and say it: This is what Mother Gaia wants me to choose. This is how damp and clingy the Earth wants me to wear my clothes. Its acolyte the dryer would like my clothing to retain moisture so that, when I walk around wearing these moisture-enriched clothes, I add evaporation to the water cycle and make the plants grow pretty flowers and vegetables I should not despoil for decoration or consumption purposes.

I mean, come on, why not just have a separate section of the dial for drying your hemp clothes while you’re at it?

Sadly, there are people who wash their clothes with Green cleaning products and then use the less-dry option on the dryer because that’s what they must do to avert global cataclysm. The people who want to avert a global cataclysm but don’t want to deal with the bother of line-drying their clothes, I mean. And they’re walking around in moist, dirty clothes, hoping to be blessed by Mother Gaia with actual dandelions sprouting in their knit sweaters and with lots of helpful bacteria breeding upon their unmentionables.

Meanwhile, I’m always selecting More Dry because of my raging hydrophobia.

This is just like the time I photocopied an entire book because the professor put all copies in the Marquette University Memorial Library on reserve, which would have meant I could borrow it in two hour blocs in the library itself, requiring a large number of two hour round trip bus rides to cut into my short evenings. No, I had a large number built into the prepaid photocopy card, and I used them. I’d probably do it again because I’m just as bad as any peer-to-peer guy when it comes to flouting the law.

Which is why I am reposting, in its entirety, this copyrighted work in its entirety:

Remember that any time you want to use the phrase “Print Paper = OK”, you need to credit it to Autogas and perhaps pay them a royalty, or you’re a thief.

I got tired of these old games just cluttering the shelves in my desk, so I decided to mount them on the wall:

Click for full size

I put some adhesive-backed Velcro on the back of the games and the loop side of the Velcro on the wall (with a couple of staples to help the adhesive). Now, when I want to play, I can just reach up and grab one for a dose of 1980 electronic blip goodness, and when I’m not playing, they display rather nicely.

We’ve had the RCA dryer before we were a we; my beautiful wife bought a Radio Corporation of America (!) dryer when she was my beautiful girlfriend in Columbia. It moved with her to St. Louis, it moved in with us in Sycamore Hills, it moved with use to Casinoport, it moved with us to Old Trees, and then it moved with us to Nogglestead. It had travelled very well and has voted for Democrats in five different Congressional Districts.

But a couple weeks ago, it started making metal-on-metal noises when running. We had to replace our three-year-old washer (bought new when we moved into Old Trees) when it’s agitator passed from this life to the next. A repairman who came to check its pulse said that modern washers and dryers have a lifespan of about seven years. So when the dryer started making noise, I warned that we were going to have to spend money on it before long.

A couple times in the recent past, I’ve opened the dryer to find it full of dry clothes and the timer set to the start time. Sometimes, we loaded the dryer and saved its run for naptime or children’s bedtime to introduce some white noise while they slept. We’ve been doing this since Old Trees, when the dryer lie between their bedrooms and the rest of the house. We hoped the white noise woud mak the noises we made elsewhere. At any rate, I found the dryer had not run and assumed I had failed to start it.

However, one day, I started it at naptime, and it stopped post-haste. I tried it again, and it started again and stopped. I wondered what could cause it. A clogged dryer vent? I went to the south side of the house, where a vent opens right next to our air conditioner (I’d joked with the home inspector, “May the best appliance win!” because warm air blowing out on a running air conditioner makes the air cooling less efficient, but the joke is less funny when you explain it even if the explanation lies in the same set of parentheses as the joke itself). I went out and opened the vent to take a look in, and the vent cover, one of the little louvred vinyl jobs, opened on a 2 inch PVC pipe. That’s odd, I thought.

And then something dark appeared out of my nowhere and hit my knuckle, causing a great disturbance in my pain-free morning. What was that, I wondered? Biting horsefly? Spider? The rest of the hive of wasps that had been hiving in my air conditioner’s casing came out to answer my challenge. So as my middle finger swelled (all the easier to see when displayed, bonus!), I got a can of waspicide and went the whole Anakin on them (I killed them. I killed them all. They’re dead, every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children, too. They’re like animals, and I slaughtered them like animals. I HATE THEM!). After which time, using the dryer-starting talents of my wife, I deduced that the vent was blocked since no air was coming out of it when she turned it on.

I paced a bit and determined that since we were going to get a new dryer anyway, we should just go and get one that afternoon for delivery the next day. I cannot even dramatically recreate my thinking for you; I was not utterly convinced that the vent was the cause. So we dropped $600 as though we were still DINKs (I even bought the extended warranty given how well our last washer did).

The next morning, the appliance guys came along, put the new one in, and loaded the old one in their truck. I realize I have enough land these days to expose plenty of appliances and derelict automobiles to the elements, but I’m starting slowly to easily acclimate my suburban and sophisticated spouse to the practice. After the appliance guys hooked it up (yeah, I let them do it. One fewer man point for me), I started it and let it run for a couple minutes. The appliance guys left, and I started in on the drifts of laundry that had accumulated in the two days.

When a load finished and was wetted for the drying, I turned on the new dryer and…. it stopped.

Dammit, I thought, it is the vent.

So I checked the vent from the interior. It looked like standard ducting and wasn’t really coated with much lint even though it was a couple of ninety degree turns coming out of the laundry alcove. I went to the utility room in the basement and tried to find the duct that carried the venting from the dryer alcove to the exterior and didn’t see it. What I did see, on the other hand, is that the built-in vacuum was right where the dryer duct should come out and…. Oh. That would explain it.

So I didn’t know where the dryer vent came out and I was at a loss for action. After some thoughtful pacing, I called a company that could clean out dryer vents. That should fix it for me.

Fortunately, the dryer vent company spokesman worked me into his schedule at the same time as my wife was loading the children up to go meet her mother for lunch for my wife’s birthday. The dryer vent guy located the vent in the sill board immediately underneath my deck. So it’s been blowing hot, wet air on the underside of my deck for the entirety of the deck’s existence. Awesome.

My wife finished her child loading and left. The dryer vent guy tapped on the back door with a mournful look on his face. “I can’t clean your vent,” he announced. “It’s not metal ducting, it’s plastic that’s deteriorated. I can show you if you want.”

I looked. It was plastic venting hose stretched under the finished ceiling in my den. Breaking down.

Swell. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen plastic where metal should be on really important functions in the dream home.

The dryer vent guy, who works for an HVAC company, said they could probably tear out 20′ of my ceiling and replace the ducting for $300-500. Of course, they’re not carpenters, so they wouldn’t replace the ceiling or match its paint, natch.

I said, you know, I can just get an interior vent.

You know, those have drawbacks. Humidity and it’s very dirty, he said.

We lived with one of those in Old Trees for three years since that particular rehabber didn’t bother to vent it at all, much like he didn’t bother to install any phone jacks or even hook the telephone line onto the correct interior set of plugs at the exterior phone box ($125 for AT&T to come, diagnose, unplug, and plug in correctly in a manner of 10 minutes). He also charged me $50 for coming out, climbing a ladder, and pointing a flashlight into my dryer vent.

And took fifteen minutes to write up the invoice. I’d thought I could make it to the restaurant to eat with the family, so I called and discovered they weren’t there yet. I was planning to join them, I told the restaurant, could my party call me when they arrived? So I changed clothes and whatnot and realized that I could only get to the restaurant 30 minutes after they sat down, probably, and they hadn’t called, so I assumed they didn’t get the message after all.

So I raced into Republic to buy an interior vent and raced home to beat them back. I did, and I beat the rain, which is good because the old pick-up’s windshield wipers manage to miss the portion of the windshield directly in line of sight for the driver. I put the interior vent on easily–lots of experience with them, you know–and turned the dryer on. I wandered off and….

The dryer stopped, of course.

I was through pacing at this point. I was onto gibbering.

And then my wife called from the restaurant. Of course they’d gotten the first part of the message but not the second. Still, an hour later, they had ordered and had eaten. My beautiful wife ordered something for me, too, and brought it home. Which is good, because at that point I could not have verbally communicated to a server that I needed a glass of water.

The next stop: calling an electrician. The next morning, one arrived and examined the outlet. Then he examined the outlet more closely. Apparently, a loose connection within it was causing it to lose power when it warmed up or when the dryer vibrated it apart. Either way, $100 and a new outlet later, and the dryer works.

Actually, that makes it sound so simple. The actual arithmetic is: One wasp sting and swollen finger, $600 for a new dryer, $50 for a $500 dryer vent replacement, $14 for an interior vent, 20 minutes cleaning up after the interior vent blew lint all over for a couple minutes, $100 and a new outlet, 1500 words on the blog and lots of long retellings with hand gestures, and new innumerable fears about what other dangerous and hidden shortcuts were taken in the course of building this house later, and I can dry laundry now.