flip flop ... flip flop
Looks like JFK isn't the only one who changes his mind.
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Looks like JFK isn't the only one who changes his mind.
I'd like to rewire my living room in the next couple of months is to rewire it for surround sound. I have a 5.1 system set up, but all the speakers are in the same location. In our old house I'd run wires up and down walls, but I don't want to do that here, especially after all the time Bonnie and I will have invested getting pretty colors and drapes up on the walls.
Can anyone with any experience at snaking wires tell me if I'm going to get in over my head here? Am I better off just hiring a professional electrician to do this? It seemed rather expensive the last time I had an estimate done, and I'm presuming that this stuff isn't rocket science.
Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood certainly put out some memorable pop music in their day. Unfortunately, that day was almost 30 years ago. In the intervening years, Fleetwood Mac has been regurgitated over and over again by adult contemporary pop stations enough that, I bet if you turn your stereo down all the way, you can still hear it playing.
So, as you insist on blasting "Rhiannon" loud enough to make it echo down the street and into my living room, here's some advice: Not all of us enjoy the caterwauling of Stevie Fucking Nicks as much as you do. Buy an iPod, for god's sake, we're in the 21st century. If that's too much to ask, do you think you could pick up a bloody CD Walkman at Wal-Mart, for Christ's sake?
That's what I do when I cut my lawn -- notice the little white earbuds? That way, I don't have to offend you with my personal favorites for yardwork: "A Nigga Witta Gun" by Dr. Dre, "Cake and Sodomy" by Marilyn Manson or "Hey Fuck You" by the Beastie Boys.
Unless you hear me singing along, in which case, well, I think the Beasties said it best.
In this day of processed food, getting kids to eat healthily is quite difficult. I admit that we've made life harder for ourselves by relying too much on snacks that have relatively low nutritional value, too. But it's frankly more convenient and less expensive to stock the house with chocolate-dipped granola bars and "fruit" snacks than it is to stock the fridge with fresh produce and make sure it's all used before it goes bad.
Then every so often a plan comes together.
A couple of weeks ago I read a report on the recent rise of yogurt's popularity in the United States. Mention was made of drinkable yogurt, which apparently has been popular in Europe for years but is only now gaining traction in the US.
A comment in the report reminded me of something that I'd forgotten: The transformation of milk to yogurt is done with the introduction of a bacterium that converts lactose, the milk-sugar that Bob and Bonnie both have a marked intolerance to, to lactic acid. As a result, people who are lactose intolerant don't have a problem with yogurt like they do with milk and some cheeses. Bob and Bonnie both use soy milk in cereal, but Bob won't drink it alone. So I'm always looking for ways to help Bob get more calcium into his diet, especially since he'll turn his nose up at most of the calcum-rich vegetables I try to make.
On a lark I picked up a few of those yogurt smoothie drinks that are gaining popularity, and it turns out the boy loves them. In fact, his brother and sister clamored for them too.
But at well over a dollar for the premium 10 ounce drinks, yogurt smoothies are pretty damn expensive, though you can often find coupons for them in the Sunday paper. That's pricey enough that I've been playing with the idea of making my own yogurt smoothies using plain yogurt and fresh fruit. Turns out the idea's a winner with everyone in the house.
To make smoothies for everyone, I'll typically take about 16 ounces of yogurt and mix it with enough fresh fruit to fill the blender to its fill line -- so far, I've tried peaches and bananas together, as well as strawberries and blueberries. I've got some raspberries and blackberries waiting in the freezer too. I usually throw a couple of tablespoons of wheat germ in it and sometimes a bit of molasses if it's too tart, then blend it. Often times, depending on the liquid content of the fruit, that's enough -- but if it's too thick, I'll put in some fruit juice or some ice cubes and water to loosen it up.
Everyone's remarked on the difference in taste between my homemade smoothies and the store-bought ones. Although James isn't totally sold on them yet -- he's got a powerful sweet tooth -- Bob and Emme both recognize that Dannon, Yoplait and the other companies offering these things really amp the taste of their yogurt smoothies with sweeteners.
With our interior painting efforts well underway, Bonnie and I have begun to research furniture. We're still a ways away from actually buying new furniture, but it's fun to shop around, as long as the kidlets aren't involved. They spend too much time hooting, hollering and jumping up and down on expensive sofas and in the vicinity of expensive and fragile objets d'art for Bonnie or me to be anything but on edge when they're with us. So today we pawned all three of them off on Grandma for a few hours and went to a few stores to see what we liked.
I expect that in the next six or eight months, our living room will go through a pretty significant transformation. Right now we're dealing with second-hand furniture we bought with the house that's basically falling apart. We've gone through two full sets of second-hand furniture since our kids were born, and I've had it with that route. So I'm prepared to spend money on stuff that I like, provided I can find everything I'm looking for.
Now, Bonnie and I disagree on one fundamental thing: What we should do with a center table. Bonnie wants a coffee table with drawers in which to store remotes and other things that would ordinarily get piled on the table; I want an ottoman that stores stuff inside. I don't really like or want tables. Bonnie's ready to concede this point to me, but it turns out that there's a real dearth of hideaway ottomans at present. Apparently they were trendy once but are no longer. Fashion, thou art a fickle mistress.
We've been to a few stores, but a leather place that was the second stop on our list was pretty much all I needed to see. Turns out this furniture maker from Norway called Ekornes has everything I'm looking for. Leather and wood, gorgeous Scandanavian design, and this really trick tray table that attaches to their recliner that I can use for a laptop computer. They have a three-panel sofa with three separate recliners built in. An a matching double ottoman that opens up inside for massive amounts of storage -- enough to stick James in, along with a table insert that lays over it. A total home run.
Now I just have to sell one of the children to afford it or become a drug dealer: It's about $5,200 for all the stuff that I'd like. Turns out that I have expensive taste, who knew? So, Bonnie and I are now looking for cheap knockoffs that might do the trick.
So I haven't been posting much this week. On Sunday and Monday I was in Montreal for a quick business trip, and I've been on "vacation" the rest of the time. In this case, I didn't actually go anywhere fun -- I just stuck around the house and took care of errands, though we did use Thursday to go into Boston to the Museum of Science, which is in the midst of hosting a "Lord of the Rings" special effects exhibition.
The rest of the month is going to be a blur. My boss takes off for a week of vacation next week, then the week following is Apple Expo in Paris -- I'm not going (just as well), but I will be covering the event as I usually do. Apple Expo is one of my least favorite events to cover because of the time difference: There is, if I remember correctly, there's a six-hour difference between Paris and Boston. And at shows like Apple Expo, announcements are being made during the morning of the first day of the show -- when it's still the middle of the night on the East Coast.
James is doing remarkably well following his broken arm from last week. We switched orthopods after we discovered the guy who set his fracture isn't on our medical plan, but the fellow who checked James out yesterday tells us that the bone was set beautifully and that everything is going well. Four year olds mend their bones incredibly fast -- James is expected to stay in his cast for only four weeks. We'll have to go back weekly to make sure everything is okay, but with any luck, he'll make a full recovery.
I don't usually cotton to superstition, but yesterday was a decidedly unlucky Friday the 13th for us. The kids have been at camp all week -- a Girl Scouts camp, actually, but they had a boy's unit and a unit for preschoolers, so both James and Bob were able to go as well. Bonnie's a troop leader, so she had an opportunity to work with older girls than the Brownies she's usually stuck with -- teenagers, in fact.
So it's the last day of camp, and the last couple of hours. James is running down a trail when he trips over a stump and goes head first into the ground. He puts his arm up to protect himself, and ends up slamming hard into the ground. Hard enough that his head acted like a mallet, creating oblique fractures across his ulna and radius, the two major bones in the forearm. James looked like he had grown an extra elbow in between his wrist and his real elbow.
The camp nurse immediately rounded up Bonnie and called an ambulance; it took them a while to show up, because apparently the EMT's didn't know where the camp was. Eventually they got there, stabilized him and got him off to nearby Jordan Hospital.
I picked up the kids, and by the time we caught up with Bonnie and James, the orthopod -- a white-haired guy with 30 years of experience, exactly the sort of doctor you want setting your child's broken bones -- was all set to set the arm and put him in a cast. James was dopey from three hits of morphine and still really uncomfortable (who wouldn't be with an extra elbow where one doesn't belong?), but very brave -- better behaved than another adult who needed to have a bone set that night, according to one of the ER nurses.
It only took about twenty minutes to set the bones and get the cast on, but it was another half hour or so before James was coherent enough to talk with. At first he didn't want to move, but it didn't take too much coaxing to get him out of the hospital bed and into a wheelchair. Bob and Emme were anxious to help, too, which made it a bit easier.
So we got home after 9PM, driving through driving downpours on the way home -- the first significant rainfall we'd seen that week, which, I guess in retrospect, was good in light of the camping activities. James went straight to bed and so did everyone else.
Today, you'd barely know that anything had happened, outside of the big blue cast on James' arm. He's as mobile as ever -- a bit TOO mobile. But a followup X-ray taken at Jordan again this morning showed that the bones are set perfectly -- you can't see any seam or break at all, and James hasn't asked for Tylenol at all, or complained of discomfort, which totally amazes me.
Those who know us well may remember that Bob got a hairline fracture on distal end of his humerus when he was a toddler, from jumping off the sofa and onto the living room floor. It seems that breaking one's arms is some bizarre rite of passage for the Cohen boys. Hopefully only the Cohen boys. And hopefully only once.
(via MeFi)
That's essentially EFF co-founder, Libertarian pundit and occasional Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow's rationale behind voting for Kerry this year. It comes in an interview at Reason that's worth checking out.
"I have grave misgivings about John Kerry, but I certainly don
Preface this story with a factoid: I detest the sound of people chewing. Open-mouth chewers are the worst, but really, show some decorum. It doesn't take that much effort to close your lips and chew relatively quietly. I'll even cut you a break if you're munching on something extra-crunchy like peanut brittle.
Having said that, there's this television ad that, well, gets my teeth grinding every time I see it for a cereal called Raisin Bran Crunch. The ad shows this doe-eyed young man in an office cubicle bovinely masticating a bowl of Raisin Bran Crunch just as his boss comes to shitcan him.
The boss begins a stuttering speech explaining to the young gentleman that he's been let go, but the young lad is oblivious to his situation. The intense sound of his molars grinding against this apparently indestructible breakfast food drowns out all other noise in the workplace. He blankly stares at his boss, chewing absently like a ruminant regurgitating its cud.
Then, the moment comes that sends the hair on the back of my neck standing on end -- well, it would if I didn't take a razor to it every morning. The camera switches to Fired-Boy's Eye View as he serenely gazes at his supervisor, dazed by the hypnotic glow of the office lights. Queue the sound of his zombie-like crunching and smacking, now filling the speakers of my home entertainment system in glorious 5.1 surround.
It makes me want to run shrieking to the kitchen drawer to grab a fork so I can plunge it repeatedly into this simpering imbecile's eye sockets.
And by the way, Kelloggs: At this point, I'd rather eat the raw, festering runny innards of that gas-bloated raccoon roadkill I saw this morning for breakfast than touch your damnable product ever again.
There, I feel much better now. Thank you.
Today's lesson in irony comes from a reader who e-mailed me this morning to let me know he'd found a "grammer" error in an article.
And no, in case you're wondering, there wasn't one.
The Falmouth Road Race is an annual event that draws runners from all around the world. Each year we help out by volunteering as representatives of our kids' preschool. They receive some sort of honorarium for the help, which is great, because the preschool is a co-op and parents are supposed to do whatever they can to help out and make ends meet.
Anyway, today (Sunday) was that day. We got down there about fifteen minutes before the race started and cleaned up the main road where all the runners assemble at the starting line. We and our kids were armed with gloves and trash bags, and grabbed every piece to litter strewn on the side of the road.
Some of what the runners toss aside is quite remarkable. Amidst endless water bottles and energy drink containers, wrappers of energy bars and other assorted detritus, we found a few sweaters, sweatshirts and t-shirts that runners had balled up and tossed the second the starting shot was sounded.
This year was an easy cleanup -- the race started at 10 and we were on our way home by 11. Woods Hole in Falmouth is where the race starts -- one of our favorite spots anywhere on Cape Cod, and one that we bring just about anyone who pays us a visit. The weather was gorgeous, too. It's sunny and in the 70s with a light, pleasant breeze. A perfect day to be outside, cheering and clapping for the thousands of runners that make up the Falmouth Road Race.
I'm feeling awfully pleased with myself just now. I replaced the faucet in our upstairs bathroom.
I can take apart a computer and put it back together again with absolutely no qualms, but get me to a Home Depot and I'm a duddering idiot. I'm certainly no home handyman; I'd just as soon pay a professional. That way I have someone else to blame if the job gets screwed up.
Shortly after we moved in we got a plumber out to change the faucet in the kids' bathroom downstairs. It was a brass fixture that looked horrible and was falling apart; probably original equipment that came with the house, which was built in the late 1980's. The fixture in the upstairs bathroom has been serviceable until earlier this year, when the plastic handles -- those wretched-looking ones that are supposed to approximate faceted crystal or glass -- literally dissolved, breaking into pieces. It's a cheap no-name fixture, so I bought replacements that approximated the originals, but they never worked right.
Earlier this week I discovered that the faucet itself was leaking profusely, causing a backflow of water down the back of the pipe and into the cabinet underneath. Bonnie lost some cosmetics and assorted toiletries to the watery carnage, but it could have been much worse, obviously. I turned the shutoffs underneath the sink to prevent a flood. Bonnie and I finally made it to Home Depot today.
Last Christmas I got a gift card to Home Depot. It had been given to me for a specific purpose -- an outdoor container to hold my trash cans, to prevent the damnable raccoons from spreading garbage all over my porch, as they do this time of year. Alas, the unit I had my heart set on was well outside the limit of the card, so I decided to save up and come back at a later date. But necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, and I soon found myself in need of sundries best bought at hardware stores, so I've whittled the card down bit by bit in the intervening months. I still had a sizeable amount left on the card, however, and used it up this afternoon.
We priced out some faucets and discovered that, as usual, our tastes greatly exceeded our budget. The faucets we wanted were in some cases two or three times the price as the one we ultimately decided on. Interestingly, outside of an unusual finish or an embellishment or two, we really couldn't figure out what made the more expensive units worth the money.
Glacier Bay is a budget-priced brand that Home Depot seems to sell a lot of, and they had a serviceable model we liked, complete with french-style handles to give our new bathroom fixture a bit of character. It was inexpensive enough that we picked up a few other parts and items that we needed.
I'd intended to replace the faucet tomorrow -- I'm big on procrastinating. But curiosity got the better of me, and I cracked open the box and started poring through the instructions over Big Brother 5 tonight. It didn't look too bad, so I started the installation after Big Brother wrapped up at 10. I figured if worse came to worst I could just stop and start again tomorrow. But as it turns out, I was done in time for the news, with no leaks!
Wow, no posts since Monday. Jim's on the road again which means a busier-than-usual week for me. I've also been making plans to take a quick two-day business trip to Montreal in a week and a half, which means I have to find or replace my birth certificate (not a big deal, just a hassle) and, preferably, get a passport. I've long wanted one, so this is the excuse I needed. Unfortunately that's a logistical hassle as I book the trip, get my itinerary and have to make an appointment at the passport office in Boston so I can travel.
In other news, Bonnie and I are finally making headway on some long-planned but never acted upon interior decorating. We've lived in our house now for three years, and have gradually gotten sicker and sicker of the annoyingly neutral beige color every wall in this house has been painted. We've long wanted a more vibrant, lush palette for the walls, and we've finally found a series of paint colors from Sherwin Williams that we're really happy with.
Bonnie has some spare time before she takes the kids to camp next week, so she and I have been repainting our downstairs hallway with this gorgeous, lush color called Plummy. It's basically as it sounds -- a brilliant, rich and deep purple color that pops right off the wall. The downstairs hallway connects Emmeline's room, the downstairs bathroom, and family room to the kitchen -- one common wall has doorways to the family room and basement, and an archway into the living room. At this point, all three walls of the hallway -- and the adjoining wall of the kitchen -- have been painted Plummy, and it spreads so well I don't think we'll need a second coat.
We plan to keep the baseboard trim, the doorways and the doors white, because it's a nice contrast. Emmeline says she likes it because purple looks nice next to pink, the color of her room. Bonnie and I have already picked out really gorgeous, rich golden yellow and red tones for the living room and upstairs hallway respectively. I have to buy them in the next couple of days even though we won't be painting until my vacation later this month because the paint store is having a sale that ends this weekend.
Figuring out what we'll do with the family room comes next. It's a tough area, because it's a converted bedroom that's had a door taken out and a closet removed to open it on two walls. Bonnie and I would both like to do a green color in there -- something to make it *look* like a den, if you will -- but the colors we've heretofore looked at have been a bit too dark for our taste.
We'll also need to do something to complement Plummy in the kitchen. Bonnie and I are bouncing around some ideas, but I'm dreading them. The kitchen has a ton of moulding and cabinetry that will make it the most technically challenging to paint. There's also this hideous painted wallcovering that's got to come out that's almost like a splashguard behind the counters, and I'm not sure what's underneath.
Window treatments in the living room are also on the list of things to buy. We're still using bare, cheap, vinyl mini blinds in there, one of which desperately needs to be replaced. Once we've got the colors up in the living room and upstairs hallway, which is partly visible from the living room, we can make our final decision on how to proceed there, but we saw some really interesting, affordable options during a recent outing to Target.
Anyway, it's nice to finally get moving with this. Don't know what's taken us so long.
Bob's already got a reputation for being a little Sith master for wandering around the house with the hood up on his black sweatshirt, but lately the boy has taken to humming the Imperial Theme from Star Wars when he's in his room or walking around the house. It's quite unsettling, especially since there's nothing ironic about it -- it's just a tune that gets stuck in his head. Often.
Yesterday (Sunday) was his birthday party -- almost a dozen and a half kids showed up. Bob has many friends who have brothers or sisters, which is why the headcount was so high -- one family has four boys, another one has four kids, so the party filled up fast and got loud quickly. Everyone who said they would come did, only two people who were invited weren't able to make it.
The kids had a great time, near as I can tell. They feasted on watermelon and pineapple and chips and dip and salsa; drank root beer and grape soda and Hawaiian Punch; ate burgers and hot dogs; then had cake and ice cream. They played in the yard for a good hour or so before the showers that had been threatening all day finally came, but it was light enough that some people went outside occassionally.
After the feasting was over we got to opening presents, and Bob got some great loot -- Magic the Gathering card decks and a new soccer ball and a Mega Man video game and Risk and other stuff. He gave back, too -- each kid walked away with a goody bag with a foam airplane, water pistols and assorted candy, along with a small handheld video game.
All in all it was a great day, and I'm happy that he enjoyed himself and the other kids did too.