A Friday poem from Susan the Wonderchild

Susan's friend, Erin Keenan, wrote the following on FB:

a more decent sort of critter
would stop and seize & shiver
dare never
to call this awful abode, with its trashful clutter
ho-
-me
a more decent sort of critter
the kind without the nervous jitter
would spend its sundays only half in slumber
would write a list, list each item with a number
cross the items off & have them dismembered, all but disremembered
before going back to slumber
in the shiny, sanitary (rarely solitary) bed in the clean abode
a more decent sort of critter

but not this one.

Susan wrote the following response:

A more decent sort of critter
would surely clean the shitter
address the laundry pile
and do it with a smile
the dishes would be cleaned
the bathroom floor degreamed
the cat box scooped with glee
the ceiling cobweb free

however, this is, oh my,
a critter who simply is not I
who lays all morning in a bed
visions of kickball in my head
Tomorrow, perhaps, I may be neat
Today, I'll kick balls with my feet.

A Friday poem from Susan the Wonderchild

Jeeze, I'm tired

I spent the day working on my garage. What we really needed were shelves, huge great enormous shelves that would help me get the piles of stuff off of the floor of the garage.  I went out to Lowe's and bought a couple of shelving units, knocked them together, then spent about as long getting them safely anchored to the walls. With the help of Susan the Wonderchild's b/f, we just put a lot of boxes up on the new shelves and have, in fact, cleared out a lot of stuff from the floor. 

At this point, I am going to slither off to a hot bathtub and soak the owies away, then come back up here and work on a contract. 

Jeeze, I'm tired

A day of cleaning and errands

The Babe's been cleaning up some of the cabinets and drawers in the kitchen (who KNEW we had so much space??!?!). I have gotten my office floor vacuumed--I'd forgotten my Persian carpet here was a dark red--and have spread tax paperwork all over it for sorting and sifting.

We paused mid-day and went shopping for a new side table to go with the new couch, which arrives tomorrow. The house is really clean and we're decluttering all kinds of things here and there. More stuff going out on the PayItForward lists.

A day of cleaning and errands

Wotta day!

I thought I'd be spending the day starting the process of reformatting a couple computers and adding a pair of 500Gb hard drives, but no, it didn't work out that way. But it has been a very nice day.

I slept in a little, got up, cleaned the kitchen, and made banana bread--I've been wanting to make banana bread for the neighbors and now that I'm done with a lot of little things, it was a perfect day for it. I met someone online in an unusual venue who turned out to be from the Snake River chapter of the STC who's pretty nice. Well, networking does happen in the oddest places.

The Babe and Susan went to see Susan's friends Jeff & Mariah, who're getting married in July and are having the Babe do the service. They did some planning about the ceremony and program. Meanwhile, I did a bunch of cleaning here in the office, so that there is now more floor visible than paper, and most of the remaining tax stuff is ready to be boxed up (yay!).

The Babe came back around 2:00 and asked if I wanted to go get more bedding plants. Yes, I did, and I was interested in using up a coupon for Decker's Nursery out in Junction City (they'd sent us two coupons, one for 3 six-packs of bedding plants and t'other for 20% off of everything we bought).

We drove through some rather pretty rural sections of Lane County and got there. Nice place!! We loaded up a cart in fairly short order with about 250 bedding plants. Sure, sure, it sounds like a lot, but it isn't really. In this case, it means one plant every six inches about 4-1/2 rows deep for maybe 15-18'. We could have gotten a whole lot more plants.

We drove home and the Babe started prepping the ground while I worked on the garage, something that I'd been thinking of. We plugged away for hours, with occasional breaks to talk to the neighbors across the street (Harry & Julia, a gastroenterologist and an ER physician, who're going to have a baby around September 9 we discovered) and on both sides of us (Inger & Brian, lovely people to have for neighbors, with four kids, and Tim & Angela, with two daughters, on the other side).

At the end of the day, we have:

• 250 new plants in the front of the house (marigolds, Mexican marigolds, petunias, impatiens, and something else that's escaping me at the moment)
• pictures of some of this (I finally recharged the digicam's batteries and I'll upload those soon so you can see how pretty it all is)
• a huge empty space where there'd hitherto been boxes in the garage
• a pile of stuff in the back of my car to go to St. Vinnie's for the tax write-off
• things to go upstairs to my office

I made potstickers for the two of us. It hurts to move with all this toting and lifting, so I'm now going to go downstairs, slither into a bathtub, then as bonelessly as possible slither into bed. We sing tomorrow and then vote on accepting the new minister at the Unitarian church, who we like.

Wotta day!

The vacuum cleaner story

I was thinking about how much paper I have stacked up for shredding now that the taxes are off to the appropriate agencies. (It's about two large boxes full, far too much for the little 4-6 pages at a time office shredder I have near my desk.) I was talking to someone at work about how I used to dispose of old papers by shoveling them into the wood stove and I was reminded of something I read some years ago that's a really good story. I haven't thought of this for quite a while and it bears repeating. (You can find the original of this story here.)

I hate to admit it, but this happened to me way back in 1980.

A few years after graduating from college, I returned to my folks home to retrieve a considerable number of storage boxes that I had left with them. These boxes were filled with books, course notes, old homework projects, etc that I had kept. I decided to weed through them and eliminate as much junk as I could.

Not having the heart to dump all that hard work into the garbage, I decided to grab a six-pack, settle down in front of the downstairs fire place and ceremoniously burn four years worth of college memorabilia. I managed to get through about five of the 15 or so boxes piled around me when I realized I could not possibly sort through each box page-by-page. In the interest of time, I decided to do a cursory scan of the contents to determine if anything 'jumped out' as worth saving. Well, box number six appeared to be loaded with Psychology and Logic 101 junk so I took the short cut and tossed the whole box on the funeral pyre before me.

I popped open beer number four and watched the box smolder. Raising the can, I gave one last salute to those two unmemorable courses as the box erupted into a roaring inferno.

The papers were consumed rapidly.

So were the ancient contents of the dresser drawer that I had hastily dropped into the bottom of that box when packing two years earlier. Dang, I had forgotten all about that stuff. The toothbrush and hairbrush went up rather well... also that packet of disposable plastic razors, dental floss and contact lens case and a bunch of junk I don't even remember. Of course, I didn't even know that stuff was going up in smoke as I sat there. Just chugged the beer and watched. It burned great... right down to that full can of deodorant that was in there with it all.

I had gotten about half the beer down when that deodorant can finally decided it had enough. What happened next I can only compare to the scene from "2001" where that Dave Bowman guy is falling through all those lights with that 'o shit' look on his face. I heard a BOOM so loud that my brain only registered it as a high-pitched squeal. The contents of the fireplace right down to the last ash were propelled out with such velocity that all I could see were a multitude of bright streaks emenating from a point about three feet in front of me (ala 2001). Big blue shock wave knocked me back.

Spill the beer? You bet. Caught me off guard? Hell yes. Felt like I jumped on a live grenade? Guess so. One second I was watching that inferno burn from the outside, the next second I was watching it from the inside.

The human brain reverts to 'primordial slime' mode when thrown into a situation like this. All higher-order functions vaporize. Guess it's all those endorphins and endomorphines hitting it at once. It took a couple of seconds to get the 'reasoning' capability of my brain back online. I jumped up, looked at my hands and feet, touched my face and realized that I was indeed intact. Holy Cow, I was completely untouched. Not even a soot mark on me. Although I might possibly qualify as a human cannon ball, there would be no Richard Pryor imitation tonight, folks.

I looked through the thick smoke toward the fireplace. What WAS a 6-inch deep accumulation of one winter's ashes was now squeaky clean. Blasted it right out. All those burning embers were now sitting on the deep-pile carpet behind me. ALL over the room.

I panicked.

I grabbed the little shovel from the fireplace set and scooped as fast as I could. As soon as I filled the shovel, I'd run to the fireplace, empty it and run back. Some embers were 30 feet down the hall. I guess I set the Guinness World Record for "Hot ember pickup with a little shovel" in those next few minutes. I did manage to avoid setting my folks house on fire, and the carpet only had one or two real serious melted spots on it. I DID find the deodorant can too- it had left the fireplace at some ungodly serious velocity, bounced off the wall at the far end of the room and come to rest directly behind where I was sitting. Dang thing was split wide open along the weld and peeled back almost flat. Burned black, too. Looked like re-entry junk.

After I got the Fire Marshal Bill stuff under control, I grabbed beer number five, popped the top and thought about how I was gonna get the remaining mess cleaned up. Close examination revealed that everything was coated with a heavy layer of very fine ash. Heck, a vacuum cleaner will get this stuff up no problem.

Gee, how lucky could I be? I didn't get decapitated, the house is still on its foundation, I got a GREAT story for the grandkids and the cleanup is gonna be a cinch. I grabbed my mom's upright out of the closet and started to work.

Ever have one of those split-seconds of consciousness when you realize you survived something really bad but you sense that it's not quite over yet? Well, I never have, but I wish I had felt that way at this point. Would have clued me in as to what was about to happen.

There I was, sucking up ashes with an upright vacuum. Too bad not all of them were cold. That upright vacuum swallowed ONE LITTLE ITTY BITTY HOT EMBER that was sitting there on the carpet. It flew right up inside it and sat on that big ol' pile of carpet lint way up in that bag. Heck, that bag hadn't been emptied in a long time. And all that air rushing in there made that little bitty hot ember REAL happy. Next thing I know, the side of that vacuum is glowing red hot. By the time I figured out what was happening, there was a two foot flame blowing out a volcanic vent in the side. It really looked and sounded sorta pretty, like a fighter jet on full afterburner. Diamond shock pattern and all (This is obviously a recurring theme in all of my writing).

Again, my brain reverted to primordial slime mode. All higher-order functions ceased and all I remember thinking was "T-h-r-o-w v-a-c-u-u-m".

I pitched it as hard as I could towards the open basement door, hoping it would make it to the patio outside. The distance was about 20 feet. In slow motion it looked like one of those old NASA films where the rocket goes psycho right off the launch pad. There it was, sailing brush end first with a nice slow roll...fire belching out the side. As the umbilical pulled out of the wall, the flame settled into a long trail of sparks. The vehicle had plenty of initial velocity and it looked like a good downrange trajectory... right up to the point it passed through the plate glass window to the right side of the door.

Yep, I swear this happened as written.

The vacuum cleaner story

Debriding the office

I've been working a ton lately, which generates mountains of paper. The desk has been getting increasingly buried and yesterday I spent a couple hours debriding. What a relief! I found a couple of royalty checks that I need to deposit (nothing big, but still), recycled a pile of stuff that was irrelevant or outdated, and assembled a large stack of shredding. I spent a little while shredding paper and had to dump the shredder basket a couple of times... and also had to wait at one point to finish the job: the shredder got so hot that the motor shut off and it took an hour for the shredder to cool down.

I've got a clean desk that I can see a great deal of the surface of and I have little diamonds of shredded paper all over the rug that I need to vacuum up. And the cleanliness makes life much more comfortable.

Debriding the office

Three weeks—my goodness!

The last few posts I made were three weeks ago. Sonomabitsu!
It has been a completely busy three weeks. Here's what I've been up to:
First and foremost, there've been taxes. Getting the taxes done is always a chore as a self-employed person, but they got done. It was later than I'd promised the Babe and I'm sorry about that. I'll try harder next year and we'll get them in earlier.
Next, the new house is zipping forward. The construction crews started framing near the end of March and have most of the frame completed at this point. It's the style of the home builder to build the outside of the house first and they then do the interior. It's a little unusual, I grant you, but they explained that they can work enclosed under a roof that way, which is no small thing here in the Pacific Northwest. We've made our final choices on all the options we get to choose--cherry floors and cabinets, brushed plumbing features, ivory berber carpet, among other things--and the inside is going to be painted in a light gold color (Benjamin Moore's "Popcorn Kernel") and a dark, rich blue ("Chicago Blues," ibid.) for the front hall and stair, you'll see a rich blue-and-gold contrast with lots of white trim. In fact, there'll be white wainscoting, molding, and trim, and the ceilings will be white.
We weren't able to get much change on the choices in tiling in the master bath: we could have light travertine or dark travertine. We don't care for travertine in most any form and it's on its way out architecturally ("Oh, that house is so 2006!") but the light travertine is truly the most neutral and it doesn't suck rocks completely. Oddly, the upstairs bathroom (which has a skylight) can be done in any of a dozen different tile colors and we were able to choose a nice mottled dirty-tan-and-gold color that will go nicely with Susan the Wonder Child's bamboo plants and the like.
Now, you gotta understand that just because we're having the house painted in these two colors (with the white ceilings, of course) by the builder, it doesn't mean that we're going to have these as the only two colors… or that our bedroom will be light yellow. It's just that we only get two colors for free; more would cost and our builder, great guy that he is, is very clear that he's doing tract homes rather than custom work, so we don't want to stress him out too much. We'll be doing some additional painting in a few places before we move in (light yellow is an easy color to paint over). The upstairs bathroom, for example, will probably be a green to complement the tile work. My office, while we've not decided, may well have a wall done in apricot and the others in some other color (shucks, or leave them light yellow; apricot and a light yellow and a rich wood floor could be very attractive).
To go along with the new house looking like it'll be done on schedule, we've been spending money on packing up large numbers of boxes into a storage pod, the first of which is now off in its storage unit with all the contents safely stowed away. In the course of things, we've been doing some sifting of things and coming up with HUGE ENORMOUS PILES of stuff to give to St. Vincent's or something. Susan the Wonder Child had four or five bags of miscellaneous clothes that she sloughed from her closet. We've found a lot of books that don't need to continue their journeys with us. I've been finding some reference books that can get dumped. The Babe dug into our rather unsightly stacks of sheets and towels and eliminated perhaps half a dozen sheet sets that were cotton/poly (most of which were mine, I admit it--I didn't know about the wonders of 100% cotton for a couple years and so I bought sheet sets that I liked for the prints without being aware that blended sheets feel rougher).
Some of this is really the house-merging that the Babe and I have never really had a chance to do. When we moved to Indiana, I packed up her house and my house, rather on a dead run, and we didn't see what our stuff looked like together and what we could eliminate. A lot of things never got unpacked in Indiana because we were never settled there and the Babe moved out to Eugene first and I got to pack up the house again. I was able to dump a lot of baseball cards that weren't worth what it would cost to move them from stash left by the Babe's late husband Larry (it's still the better part of a ton of baseball cards and some basketball cards and football cards and Star Trek cards and things like that; we'll be glad to sell them), but there was a lot of stuff that got moved simply because it was there. This move, however, I've been clear that I will not be the only person to be packing things up and toting. I've done that twice with the Babe and once years ago with Patricia and I think I've done my bit.
We have, however, found a wonderful person named Chris, who runs a company called HandyMa'am. She does housecleaning, organizing packing, and the like. We like her and she's been a gods-send to us. She's also reasonably inexpensive for the services she's giving us, so we're able to get everything done for not nearly so much money.
Part of cleaning the house to sell is arranging to sell it. We've talked to our realtor and we're going to list it in mid-May so she can show it Memorial Day weekend for the anticipated crowds of buyers and all... but there may be something fun before that. As I was packing up the storage pod (which arrived in a trailer), one of the neighbors across the street stopped by and asked about our moving plans. They know we're building a house and are moving, but it looked fairly imminent. Her parents are keen to move to Eugene and have in fact been driving up periodically from Lodi, CA, to look at houses and drop off another trailer load of stuff in storage. They even looked at the house we own when it was originally on the market. They're going to be up in Eugene on Sunday and they'll come look at the house. The idea of living across the street from their daughter, son-in-law, grandson, and soon to be granddaughter is enormously appealing to them. The advantage to us is that we could save a ton of realtor fees if this happens. If we'd solicited this, I'd feel sleazy not listing it, but they approached us. If this goes through, I'm sure we'll give our realtor a payment of some kind just because she's been great and her time's worth something.
One of the most pleasing pieces of news is that I've got a couple of contracts now, a small one and a big one. The small one is with Symantec, where I'll be putting together some training for a writing group on writing basics, information architecture basics, and some specifics on how they can write better, more effective knowledge base articles. Nice stuff and there could well be follow-on work for all I know. The BIG contract is with a company in Southern California that makes factory automation software. They need a lot of manuals worked on (I'm guessing 1500 pages for the first project) and they keep saying that they want a "long-term" relationship with me... where a one-year contract is not a "long-term" relationship. I'm working for a really great person and I'm going through the agency of one of my all-time favorite STC people, so I have high hopes for this. I'll be traveling to SoCal regularly for this, which is slightly pestiferous, but, heavens, I'll bear up somehow.
In fact, I'm drafting all of this blog entry in the John Wayne (Orange County) and San Francisco airports because I've been down in SoCal all this week doing training and finding out about the project I'll be working on. I did pretty well on the packing for the trip, although I think I can refine this some on the next trip down here: I forgot to bring sunglasses, for example, and I brought a couple computer accessories I just didn't need.
I'm using my brand new laptop to write this on. It's an HP Pavilion dv8000. I needed some kind of laptop for this trip because I just couldn't expect to borrow the Babe's for a week and leave her without a computer. I'm not entirely happy buying HP computers as a rule because they have such incredibly sucky service and you'd probably just as soon as hit yourself in the head with a rock rather than deal with their typical customer support folks.
(Just so everyone knows, I returned an HP desktop last year completely unopened because my experience trying to reach a customer support person to find out if they had a hardware manual for this computer was so obnoxious. As it ultimately turned out--and it took me the better part of an hour to get to someone who knew--they don't supply a hardware manual because they want me to phone them to find out how to do something. If they're willing to tell me, they'll step me through it. If they don't think I should be doing this, however, then they won't tell me and I must supposedly take my computer to an HP authorized service center. No, no, I replied, I bought this computer to own it, not to lease it. I returned it with a nasty letter and went out and bought a computer with the parts I specified from a local grey-market assembler. It's a much better box for about the same cost and, oddly enough, I have all the hardware manuals so I know how to fix it if something goes wrong. Or I can take it to the repair person of my choice.)
Suffice it to say, the idea of having to phone HP support for anything might be sufficient cause for me to avoid buying an HP computer every again. Nevertheless, this laptop actually looked good enough to risk it. It's got a 17" widescreen display that's incredibly crisp. I'm running at 1440x900 bits at 32-bit color, so that aquarium program you see on the computers in Office Despot (where I bought this one) is very realistic. The wide format also means that I have a real number pad on the keyboard, not to mention a keyboard that's real size and fairly easy to use. The display lights are also really pretty: the thing just looks pretty cool. So I'm happy with it. I bought the extended warranty on it from the folks at the Eugene Office Despot (who were incredibly helpful and knowledgeable, by the way) and they said that with the warranty, if anything goes wrong, then I can phone their service department and then they will put up with HP's crappy customer service. Hey, I'm willing to pay for that!
I'm going to put this down for the time being and go do something else on the computer. I'm really tired (being on the road for a week always does that to me). I'm really glad that I'll be home with the Babe, Susan the Wonder Child, and the cats this evening and I'll get to sleep in my own bed again at last.
(Addendum: it's Sunday morning, I got home without incident, and even got to bed at a vaguely civilized hour. My files are synchronized from the laptop and we're off to church to sing for both services this morning.)

Three weeks—my goodness!