Tikkabik

On Labor Day weekend we first noticed an alarming problem -- water on the inside wall of the foundation, coming out from around the house drain, or the pipe that carries waste water to the septic system.

This is not the sort of water you want in your basement. Not that you'd ordinarily want any water in your basement. But the outflow of toilets, bathtubs and sinks, especially.

Since we moved in I've had misgivings about that pipe. The area around the pipe had been patched at least once before, and it was a combination of hastily applied cement and foam insulation -- the kind that expands and hardens when it hits the air.

Anyway, it went quickly from just a damp spot on the wall to actual dripping -- enough that I needed to stick a bucket underneath the Y pipe at the house drain location in order to prevent it from pooling up on the floor (and behind the washing machine).

Last week and after a failed attempt with someone else, we were finally able to get a plumber to properly diagnose the problem: There was a long fissure in the PVC pipe that went from the house drain to the septic tank, which sits underground in our back yard. That pipe would be have to be replaced. As it turns out, the cost of the repair was relatively minor, but it was a major inconvenience to get to.

This is because some asshat who owned the house before us decided that it would be a grand idea to build a deck on the back of the house that rests atop the drain pipe. Now don't get me wrong, I like the deck. It wraps around from the driveway side of the house along about two thirds of the back of the house, and it was a selling point for me when we first took a tour. A nice, wide, long deck that's even been outfitted with low-wattage lighting along its perimeter.

Normally, those pipes last forever. This one didn't, and the plumber who replaced it explained that the septic tank itself had settled since its installation -- not surprising, as the ground underneath the house is nothing but sand (Cape Cod is just a giant sandbar). That changed the grade running from the house drain to the septic tank almost three quarters of an inch, and that was enough, over time, to cause that pipe to crack.

The plumber said the old pipe was a mess -- water had been seeping into the foundation for a while, apparently. It probably had first started whenever that half-assed patch was done, and had just been pooling up inside and outside the foundation since then.

So anyway, in order to actually get to the pipe, we had to have a guy come out, tear up about five feet of deck material, cut through three or four joists, then excavate a five foot square trench to expose the pipe.

It was shitty work, and I'm sorry we had to use this guy to do it. But better him than me.

Anyway, something to file away for my NEXT house -- make sure there's nothing blocking the house drain.

Posted by flargh at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Left to her own devices, my daughter Emmeline can play quietly by herself for hours, and sometimes does. Most of the time she'll draw or illustrate, color, do crafts like beadwork, and every once in a while she'll play with dolls or stuffed animals.

More often she'll play with her brothers, and that sometimes doesn't go well -- each of my kids has their own idea on how they want to spend their leisure time, and each of them wants to lead the activity. Too many cooks in the kitchen, as it were.

Emme is, by many measures, a girly girl -- she likes to wear dresses, loves the color pink, is obsessed with cute furry creatures (especially cats and kittens) and has a gargantuan assortment of pretty dolls and cute stuffed animals. But I think partly because she's wedged in between two boys, she's not exceptionally girly on a social level. So I always think it's interesting when her best friend, Vicky, comes over to play.

Growing up, I never much cared for dolls, and had a limited interest in action figures. Every so often my friends and I would play with action figures, but usually after a few minutes we'd get bored and move on to something else. Whether it was playing Star Wars or Army or throwing a ball around or riding a bike, it usually involved some other kind of kinetic activity. Having said that, I wasn't exceptionally (or really even marginally) athletic, but I went along for the ride because that's what the other boys in the neighborhood with whom I played wanted to do, and ultimately, their companionship was usually more important than the activity itself.

Vicky and Emme will spend hours in Emme's room (or Emme in hers, when the playdates happen at her house), playing with dolls. And they develop these elaborate fantasies involving the dolls -- Vicky is often the leader, coming up with stories about the dolls going to work or going to school, having adventures, intertwining stuff completely out of their own imagination and often padding it with scenarios or characters from TV shows, manga, anime or stuff straight out of the newspapers.

It's often entertaining to watch, or to listen to. My favorite incident involved the one time where they couldn't find a boy doll to serve as the groom for the wedding they had staged. Emme just brushed it off and said, "Well, I guess we'll just have a gay wedding then."

It's funny, but it's also reassuring to hear that my kids are integrating basic societal changes like that in their play time -- even stuff that would have been inconceivable when I was their age.

Anyway, I've never been a big fan of shoujo -- that brand of anime or manga aimed at girls -- because it often seems like a lot of character development and dramatic situations, but little more (and I like my anime laden with sex and/or violence, just like my movies and TV shows). Likewise, I've never been a big fan of soap operas (though I admit I do find Fox's soapy prime-time drama "The O.C." a guilty pleasure). So while Bonnie spends a lot of time watching shoujo anime, I don't for the most part. Just don't like it that much. But if it's got mecha, vampires or samurai, I'm all over it.

At the risk of making a sexist generalization, when I listen to the girls play, I can certainly understand why so many girls and women enjoy such fare. Clearly, it's a pattern of play and creativity they've cycled over and over again since childhood, and is familiar, comfortable and reassuring territory.

Posted by flargh at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

To sit on my ass and do absolutely nothing. This weather is unapologetically, completely fall -- sunny and crisp, in the 60s, blue skies. You can taste the change of seasons in the air, and there are some leaves that are already coming off the trees. Absolutely glorious.

Posted by flargh at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm thinking about having this tattooed on me someplace, because I like the sound of it so much.

Don't Get Stuck On Stupid.

Posted by flargh at 08:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been having a lot of sleeping problems lately. I'm often up until 3 AM or later.

I can't put my finger on the precise reason. I think there are a number of contributing factors.

The first one is our bed -- it's older than our kids are, and desperately needs to be replaced. It just isn't a comfortable surface to sleep on.

The second is stress. Without going into particulars, there are a lot of external forces at work in my life right now which don't make relaxation particularly easy.

The third is the kids. From the time they get home from school -- and this was exacerbated when they were at home for summer vacation -- there's a constant din of noise and activity. From 8:00 PM and on it quiets down. So it's nice to enjoy the silence. But it takes a while to unwind.

The net result is that I'm getting to sleep late, though I'm still waking up at 6:45AM or so to make sure the kids get ready for school.

Posted by flargh at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

... to drink bad coffee. That's what Corey says, and I believe him.

Of course, that all depends on how you define bad coffee.

For the major of my life, I have awakened each day to at least one cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee. It is a veritable institution in the northeast, seemingly more ubiquitous than the Catholic church or ATMs.

I have tried many other kinds of coffee, including countless kinds of gourmet coffee. Flavored coffee. The kind of coffee you buy by the metric ton at BJ's. Starbucks. The Coffee Connection. Peet's.

I always come back to Dunkin' Donuts. I buy it by the pound and make it by the pot, and my day just isn't right unless I get me some.

For years I had a "regular." The definition of "regular" varies from region to region, but here in Mass. -- proud home of Dunkin' Donuts -- a "regular" is defined as "lightened by cream and sweetened with at least two, if not more, heaping tablespoons of granulated sugar."

This is a very, very easy way to get hooked on coffee when you're a teenager. And if you're lucky, the sugar remains a bit undissolved on the bottom, a coffee-flavored apertif.

I've been diabetic for several years, so my "regular" turned into a "milk, no sugar." Which is how I make it at home.

Now, some people think Dunkin' Donuts is absolute swill (Corey does). They're probably right. I completely recognize that it's not the most sophisticated coffee out there -- you can spend a lot more, and if you have a more discriminating palate than I, you probably notice the difference. I don't.

But I know a cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee when I taste it. It sounds odd, but it tastes like home.

Posted by flargh at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I have really, really bad toaster oven karma, I've decided.

It's not like we toast things or bake things in toaster ovens all the time, but we do use them frequently -- not only for the occasional bagel and english muffin, but to make the kids some chicken nuggets for lunch, or to reheat some leftovers, or what have you. They're useful appliances.

But it seems no matter which model I buy and no matter how much I spend, I can get barely a year out of these things before they crap out.

Such is the case with our Black and Decker model, which we picked up on sale at Bed, Bath and Beyond about a year ago. It was a pretty nice design -- a rounded front that allowed you to put in four to six pieces of bread, plenty of room for toasting or baking or reheating. Sensible controls. It didn't cost too much -- less than $40, I think (we had a coupon, too).

I first noticed it was having a problem toasting a few weeks ago -- it seems whatever timing circuit activated the coils for toasting had been shot, so while you could crank it up to toast, it wouldn't actually heat (though the timer would count down and go ding). You could, however, turn on the bake setting and the toaster would heat up just fine -- so that's what I did.

Some time this week the entire apparatus gave up the ghost, though. Now it isn't heating up at all, no matter how much I beg, cajole, threaten and shake it.

*sigh.*

Any recommendations?

Posted by flargh at 08:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Waving goodbye,
originally uploaded by flargh.

Posted by flargh at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

NBC's Williams: Journalists' gloves off

NBC's Brian Williams says the lasting legacy of Hurricane Katrina for journalists may be the end of an unusual four-year period of deference to people in power.

One can only hope he's right.

Posted by flargh at 03:01 PM | Permalink

I've written before about how retarded our "paperboy" is. Of course, he's not a paperboy -- he's some guy who gets up at the crack of ass every morning to deliver papers to a fairly large geographical area in his car. To that end, I salute his work ethic. I just wish he wasn't a complete idiot.

He occasionally forgets to give us a paper and has given us incomplete papers before. I request credits from the Globe most times that it happens.

This morning we got a paper. Not our paper, mind you -- I subscribe to the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe. Today we got the Sunday Cape Cod Times.

Maybe he should just be appointed the head of FEMA.

Posted by flargh at 12:10 PM | Permalink

There's a cat show happening near us this weekend, so I took the kids yesterday. It was held in the gym of a local school.

It was interesting. There were a few vendors there selling cat toys and supplies, but most of the people who had set up shop were cat breeders who were there to have their animals judged. There were a large number of breeders there who specalized in bengals, himalyans and persians, and our favorites, maine coons.

Bob's decided he loves scottish folds -- they're round-headed, big-eyed cats with folded-down ears. Very cute, if a bit eerie looking.

The maine coons we saw were magnificent creatures. Bonnie and I were astounded by their size, however, and we're pretty familiar with the breed. Full-grown maine coons can easily tip the scales at 20 pounds without an ounce of fat on them -- definitely at the high end of the scale for domestic cats. The domestic cat equivalent of the newfoundland or the great dane.

They're hardy farm cats from Maine -- semi-longhaired cats with beautiful features, and coats that come in just about every conceivable variation except the seal-point (white with black tips) you see on Siamese and Persians. The "traditional" maine coon has a brown mackerel tabby coat, and that's what our current cat and our previous cat had.

We have a maine coon, and he's a very big cat -- between 16 and 17 pounds. I admit he's pudgy; at his fighting weight he'd be more like 14 pounds. That's still big as far as cats go, but compared to some of these champion maine coons, Max looks puny. There was one monster named Walrus who was 11 months old and was already 18 pounds -- he'll easily be well over 20 pounds when he stops growing. And he had at least five or six inches on Max's length, too. Watching people pick him up and carry him around was comical -- he was the size of a toddler. Being a maine coon, though, he was incredibly gentle and quiet.

We talked with one breeder who was showing off kittens sired by a male who weighed 24 pounds.

Posted by flargh at 11:13 AM | Permalink

Report rates Boston most expensive city

A report that will be released on Friday shows that Boston outpaces San Francisco, New York and virtually every other metropolitan area in the United States:

The report found that last year, a family of four living in the Boston area needed $64,656 to cover its basic needs. This was $6,000 more than in New York City, and about $7,000 more than in San Francisco. Living expenses, which include healthcare, child care, and other basic needs, were $44,000 or less in Austin, Texas; Chicago; Miami; and Raleigh, N.C.

Posted by flargh at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One thing that's pretty clear from yesterday's Apple special event -- the ROKR was the weak link in the chain.

Some people are certainly bitching up a storm about iTunes 5, and how it doesn't merit a major upgrade and how they've ruined the interface -- there are critics everywhere, whatever. I kinda like it.

But while folks are, for the most part, impressed with the iPod nano, the ROKR has left them cold. Part of it is the uninspired industrial design. A lot of it is the limit of 100 songs (apparently DRM enforced, surely more fodder for cryptopunks who already hate Apple). But a lot of it has to do with the just plain ass interface that the phone uses to access its songs. It's iPod-like, but really only in respect to its use of hierarchical menus to navigate directories -- there's no Click Wheel, none of the pleasantries iPod users have grown to expect.

It's pretty par for course for phones, though. Just in general, phones are awful devics that are often counterintuitive, contradictory and just plain poorly designed. It doesn't matter whether you're using a cell phone or a land line phone -- chances are that its interface sucks, and that it's about as easy to program as a VCR.

Why?

Posted by flargh at 07:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So I'm really unimpressed with Cingular's new Motorola ROKR phone. It's the first phone to feature a version of iTunes built into it.

The first problem I have with it is the general look -- it looks like the first Nokia cell phone I ever had, a decade ago. An ugly brick, only smaller. I like flip phones. Maybe it's the Trekkie in me.

Secondly, the capacity: 100 songs? I already have a 512MB iPod shuffle. Why do I need the same capacity in a cell phone? If I got a Treo 650, I could squeeze more than that onto it using the SD card slot.

Third: It's Cingular. I ran screaming from ATT Wireless first chance I got, and didn't look back. Their coverage in my area just isn't that good, no matter what their "four bars" TV ads say.

Nope, just not enough of a draw for me to switch.

Verizon's supposed to get a CDMA version of the RAZR before too long, just because the RAZR's so damn sexy looking. That'd be nice. So would the Motoq, their answer to the Blackberry -- that' more a function over form thing, tho.

The basic problem here is that iTunes in and of itself isn't that big a draw for me for my phone -- I'm infinitely more interested in a "smartphone" that will let me answer e-mails, text message and so on without having to pound a stupid number pad than I am in a phone that lets me play music, even if the phone works with the DRM system my vendor prefers.

Posted by flargh at 04:44 PM | Permalink

That's my pet peeve of the day.

"Comprise" means "To include."

It's not a synonym for "compose," though it's often used as such. I often read that things "are comprised of" individual parts or components, and that's wrong.

Saying "is comprised of" is like saying "is included of."

So stop it.

That is all.

Posted by flargh at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Robert and Emmeline's first day of school was pretty uneventful, thank goodness.

The biggest trauma for us is making Bonnie and me wake up early to make sure the kids are ready. Bob's an early riser, so if you remind him enough, he will get ready. Emmeline, though, isn't so great in the mornings -- she'll sleep late if you let her. Fortunately, yesterday and today both of them were ready in plenty of time.

Since it's the first couple of days of school we're still trying to get the routine down for the bus. According to the schedule posted in the paper, the bus isn't supposed to be by until 7:30, but it was more like 7:26 today. Not a huge deal, since both kids were ready early, but I'm glad we're not doing the usual waiting-til-the-last-minute stuff that we found ourselves doing towards the end of last year.

James, meanwhile, starts on Friday, during an open house, only for an hour, then will go for his first regular day of full-day, five-day-a-week kindergarten beginning on Monday. His bus is almost an hour later than the other two -- the different elementary schools keep different schedules. So starting next week a fairly big chunk of our morning routine will be getting the kids ready for school and out the door.

Posted by flargh at 08:26 AM | Permalink

Poll results published by ABC News look at how Americans have reacted politically to the Katrina disaster. Questions range from how respondents felt about gas prices to whether they were personally affected by Katrina; who they felt was responsible for the slow response and so on.

Much of it falls along political or socioeconomic boundaries, no surprise there, to be sure. Republicans felt that Bush was doing a good job for the most part, most Democrats felt he was doing a lousy job. Non-whites disproportionately suspected that National Guard response was slow because so many of them are deployed in Iraq. One point crossed political boundaries, though: The majority of Democrats and Republicans alike though that petroleum companies and gas station owners were taking advantage of the situation by hiking up gas prices.

All I can say is that if Exxon Mobil and the other major manufacturers report another quarter of record profits, there should be blood in the streets.

The poll's given me some cause for soul-searching, because I definitely don't like Bush's response to Katrina. I don't like Bush to begin with, and never have, so that'll be no surprise to anyone who knows me. But I have to admit that a lot of it comes down to style over substance.

He was days late getting to the region, and only seemed to come reluctantly from his month-long vacation.

When he finally did, he did little more than hug a few people, pat some folks on the back and shake a few bureaucrats' hands to tell them what a great job he thinks they're doing.

That fucking smirk makes me want to scream.

He flip-flopped, to borrow a term, alternately praising and condemning government response to the disaster.

You know, in times of national crisis, you get an immediate, intuitive sense if the guy who's supposed to be running the show is well-informed about what's going on and has a handle on the situation, and at least knows where to direct his attention. I get the distinct feeling watching him that Bush is totally over his head; that he's being fed conflicting information; that he doesn't know who to believe.

In the private sector, I've seen lousy CEOs get fired for a lot less. I just wish it were that easy.

Posted by flargh at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Labor Day Weekend. The end of summer for the kids, who go back to school on Tuesday. We went to a party yesterday, they spent most of their time in the host's pool. Today Emmeline goes over to her friend Vicki's house for one last sleepover before the school year starts, and James is running around enjoying the picture-perfect weather. Bob is stuck in his room, writing "story maps" for books he's read over the summer -- work that his mother has warned him he's had due for the first week of school since summer vacation started in June, but in typical fashion, he's procrastinated, and now he's suffering for it.

Posted by flargh at 12:35 PM | Permalink

Sunny and in the 70s, low humidity. I just wish these invisible goblins who keep scratching my eyes and shoving sharp needles up my nose would stop.

Posted by flargh at 11:25 AM | Permalink

So this morning the kids and we took a tour of the Cape Cod Potato Chip factory in Hyannis, Mass. They offer self-guided walking tours of the factory during normal business hours.

Having grown up with Lay's and Pringles, the first time I tasted Cape Cod chips was something of a revelation: They're kettle-cooked, which gives them a very dense and crisp texture -- it's an old-fashioned technique, and Cape Cod's success has given the big competitors at Frito-Lay and so on cause to come out with their own kettle cooked variety. Maybe it's just local chauvanism, but I like to stick with Cape Cod chips when I can find them.

The tour is done down one side of the factory, behind walls of reinforced glass so as not to disturb the factory itself. They have information panels at various points to offer you details about what you're seeing, though it's pretty self-explanatory.

Pretty neat stuff -- conveyer belts, big kettle cookers venting steam into the ceiling, huge tumblers salting the chips, and relatively few people inside -- mainly there for quality control, bagging, stirring the kettle fryers and a few other things.

They also make their own cheese popcorn, and I learned on the tour that it's a one-man operation. And interesting trivia point: It takes four pounds of potatoes to make a single pound of chips. And the chips that don't pass their quality control measures end up getting recycled as animal feed. Lucky livestock. They can bag upwards of 80,000 bags of chips per day.

The kids and I think it would be really fun to shrink ourselves down to the size of a chip and ride the conveyer belt that takes them from the fry kettle onward, to dry, to be salted and then to be bagged. That'd be fun until someone tried to eat us, we decided.

At the end of the tour they have a gift shop where they sell plenty of logoed stuff, as well as exotic flavors of chips we hadn't yet tried (I love their new Jalape

Posted by flargh at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

And while Hurricane Katrina victims were mourning their dead, Bush was picking the presidential gee-tar. Yee-haw!

The wry "Why change horsemen mid-Apocalypse" slogan I saw during the Presidential campaign in 2004 seems less and less like sarcastic commentary and more and more like prophecy every day.

Posted by flargh at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

1 gallon of 1 percent Garelick Farms milk at CVS:

$3.05

1 gallon of regular unleaded gasoline at the Waquoit Cumberland Farms in Falmouth, Mass.:

$3.26

It's now officially cheaper to buy milk than gasoline.

Posted by flargh at 06:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)