I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me

First, the obvious:

People have a lot less privacy than they think, which includes me, I know, but because I’m on the performing side of being myself and not in the audience. But I took a peek into a few cyberwindows last night and couldn’t believe what I found out about this couple that I don’t know, who live thousands of miles away from me, and who I am 80 percent sure are headed for a breakup by the end of this year. (It’ll be her doing.)

I’ve written before how amazed I am by the stuff people post about themselves and their families online, and how they have this unrealistic expectation of privacy. True, fish swim in schools for safety, and for all that I’ve looked up about this couple (I’m calling them “Misty” and “Arliss”) there are ten thousand more who were spare my penetrating gaze. Perhaps it’s fate. Perhaps it’s just the luck of the draw. Mostly they are very lucky that I’m such a nice person, who won’t be interfering with their relationship or dropping by their house or his place of work to say hi. I’ll just watch from afar how Misty estranges herself further and further from Arliss and wait for their tiny nook of a charming house to hit the market. (That is, I will do all this until Mad Men Season 3 comes on air. For all that I’ve got a real couple to speculate about, they can’t beat Pete and Peggy.)

So this blog gets a fair amount of attention from a discussion board called Liberating Minds, and I’ve posted here about them and I’ve posted in discussions over there. We are all friendly. They are very nice. I stumbled across them when I was caught up in my Freedomain Radio drama, and most of what I’ve posted at “LiMi” has to do with their reactions to and comments about what goes on over at “FDR.” I periodically cruise the forums at FDR to see what they are talking about, and one particular thread caught my eye, and I followed it a few days. What’s nice about the FDR forums is that you can browse without logging in, and you can see all the members’ profiles, as well as a history of their posts (this feature is common on lots of discussion boards). She’s a newer member–joined this year–and I am always curious about the people that sign up, so I read her profile and skimmed her comments in previous threads. It’s pretty easy to do; you get several sentences of each comment like the preview pane in email. You aren’t clicking through on each one. Plus, curiosity is highly valued by the FDR crowd, so I didn’t think anyone would mind. They post all this in the public threads and should expect scrutiny.

Turns out Misty has a boyfriend, Arliss, and she’s been sort of hesitant to fully divulge the extent of her involvement in FDR, or she was several weeks ago. They’ve had at least one argument about it, after a visit that the two of them made to meet in person some of the FDR regulars. (One of the things at FDR is that you can’t really be friends or maintain family relationships with anyone who doesn’t agree completely with the party line, which is pure anarchy and pure atheism and the belief that families are basically abusive prisons for children. But that’s old stuff. You can read all about that at LiMi or in my old FDR posts.) Misty has also lately revealed that she is just not experiencing the honesty and intimacy in her relationships that she never knew she had the right to have (before being a member at FDR). Poor Arliss! He’s on the fast track to oppressive villain, and it’s a track I could draw from memory, with my eyes shut. I know the signs. I could probably provide you transcripts, in advance, of an argument they’ll have on a topic of your choice. I click through to Misty’s website next, which basically gives her home address and provides a little bio of herself and Arliss, with pictures. I look up the location of the house next, which takes me to some other message board where Misty (who posts under the same name and uses the same picture for her avatar) is talking about how she’ll be moving to this house, and how Arliss is training to be a driving instructor because it’s the kind of job he can likely do anywhere, instead of having to worry about working in his specialized field in a remote, rural area.

From Misty’s personal website you get to her Twitter account. There’s lots going on at her Twitter account. She exchanges lots of comments with people from FDR about threads at FDR (lots of gossip about people who post in those threads but are not hooked up to them on Twitter), and she’s starting to exchange the heavy-handed, black-and-white, anti-statist comments with people I presume are her friends in real life. Beckoning to me from the Followers list, however, is an Arliss. An Arliss with a surname. It’s not very difficult to do a search on his name and find not only where he works (or used to work) and his email (with a picture!), but now I know that he was an indifferent student in high school, how many of his exams he passed, where he did undergrad work, where he did graduate work, and how he ended up in the field he’s in. I’ve also learned that he’s just passed the test he needed to start training for driving instruction. I guess I thought he was further along in the process than that.

Such fun. I could totally email him and let him know the kind of things that go on at FDR. I’m sure he’s confused and I’m sure he’s not having a great summer–his first summer at such an adorable little house. He ought to be drinking mojitos and watching his gardens, but he’s probably up late at the kitchen table, yelling at 2:00 AM about agricultural subsidies and his mother, after a conversation about dish soap took a political turn. I could email him and let him know that no matter what Misty is saying, Arliss isn’t the crazy one. I could suggest a few podcasts for him to listen to that would give him some perspective on why his life has been turned upside down. A shame, really. If you believe what Misty has put on her website (which she hasn’t updated since joining FDR), they used to have a lot of life values in common. I mostly wonder now whose money bought the house (it was probably hers, although with his previous work–the corporate stuff–he could have had a nice bundle saved), and who will actually do the moving out. But I won’t. Perhaps, someday, he’ll be doing his own FDR research online to figure out what went wrong and he’ll find me and we’ll talk.

People are so predictable. I’m sure I’m just as predictable, but because I can’t see myself like some other idle housewife with a high speed Internet connection and a laptop can, I will assume that I am mysterious and anonymous and no one online is watching me. But why, why, why are people still living this out loud online? And why, why, why can’t people see that no matter what good FDR may be doing to their inner lives, it’s royally screwing up their outer ones? I’m sure Arliss will be angry and upset when they finally break up (unless Misty has a sudden change of heart, which happens to many newish members–they’ll bust onto the scene fully committed and cutting ties with friends and family, and then just as suddenly drop off the boards), but I’m not going to say he won’t be better off without this crap in his life. Misty isn’t crap, I’m sure she’s not, but FDR is crap and it requires the full attention of its members. There’s no room for outsiders. I hope Arliss can get his old job back.

And I never knew how easy it was to stalk people on Twitter, too! It might be better than stalking them on Facebook. You certainly get more conversation. Facebook is all about the snarky remark and embarrassing photo. Now I’m never getting a Twitter account. You want to stalk me? You have to do it the hard way, and I sleep on the second floor.

But, Dude. Which part of “public forum” don’t you understand? And now I’ve got some very important Twitter reading to do.

EDITED TO ADD: Well, Misty and I were tapped into something! As I was writing about her, she was updating her blog! It’s all about FDR, though. She and Arliss have been separated for a while, so they probably have not been arguing about the dish soap. See how quickly a few facts can ruin a perfectly good theory!

The Monsters of Templeton

By Lauren Groff

Fair to middling. That’s how I rate this book. I guess that gives it 2 1/2 stars on Amazon’s scale of 5. We read it for book club, and we haven’t met yet so I don’t know what everyone else thinks, but it was my second choice. I don’t gripe about reading books that are my second choice as a rule, so this review of the book is not sour grapes. It’s just full of alright already. Yeah, yeah. Alright already. I’m just not sure what this story was for.

Nutshell Review (because I don’t feel like spending a lot of time analyzing the story) with SPOILERS. Got that? SPOILERS: A PhD student wants to know who her father is, and her mother–who knows–won’t just tell her, which is dumb (because why bring it up at all for Jesus’s sake [it's actually for a religious reason she brings it up, not me being clever with some kind of blasphemous, exasperated turn of phrase] if you are still going to play head games with your child?), and at the same time the main character student is debating whether she should have an abortion after an ill-concluded affair with a married college professor. Willie, the student, is a brat and a jerk, and spends a lot of time looking through historical and family documents to get the answer, which she finds only when a ghost shows her the single hidden letter that reveals all. There is also a sea monster of the Loch Ness variety in the book, but it’s dead. If you enjoy reading stories about crabby people reading old documents because key information is being deliberately withheld from them on flimsy pretense and then discovering the answers only through supernatural intervention that only acts in any meaningful way at the precise moment when the crabby people need that exact form of help, then you will like this book.

The most interesting part of the book to me, in retrospect, is the Author’s Foreword. I am not joking. In the foreword, the author explains her personal connection to James Fenimore Cooper, and states her intention for writing the book in this format and her hope for what readers will learn. She talks about using novels (lies) to get at the truth about lives and people and places, and hopes that we will understand better the real town of Cooperston after reading about the fictional town of Templeton, where the action takes place. The author obviously relates specifically to the main character–perhaps not as a grad student or professional archaeologist, but definitely as a person with long family ties to the town and its founder. The book aims to teach us what it is like to live in the present day as people attached to so much history, and how one finds identity in the past as much as one forges identity in the present. The book is full of photographs and family trees, and (fictional) primary source documents, like letters and journal excerpts, and characters from Fenimore Cooper’s literary legacy, as well as other authors who served as inspiration for Groff, and attempts to create a picture of how families are built on recurring themes as well as recurring chromosomes, and how former transgressions and nobilities affect the lives of their descendants. Does the book accomplish it? I don’t think it does.

I’m not sure why. Part of it is the really contrived and basically stupid reason that Willie is having to look through all this material in the first place. Her mother, who is presented as an earnest person and a champion of others, is messing with her head. That’s it. That’s the only reason. The reader (I mean me) gets so hung up on the fact that this goose chase exists only to make a book that you don’t care who the father is, and you don’t care who the ancestors are. Also, all she has to do is read and read and read until she gets to the answer, so there’s not a lot of puzzling to do. It’s just busywork. All busywork. (Sully was another character that behaved in a random and arbitrary way out of the blue in order to advance the plot. It was jarring to learn that he left Clarissa for a goddess with a splinter, especially after the conversation he had with Willie on the telephone. But that was a good excuse to get Clarissa to Templeton!)

Another reason is that the book is an explicit tribute to James Fenimore Cooper, but all the names have been changed, and you have to keep wondering if this is an exact biography with different names or if any creative license has been taken with lore and family history, and it’s a distraction. James Fenimore Cooper is far more interesting than the main character, and when you leave his not-story to come back to the pointless “truth” of Willie’s experience, you are mad. Another reason is that the literary tributes to characters and other authors are too numerous. Turns out that Uncas and Cora have a baby! Turns out that Charlotte Temple is running around New England! Turns out that Scarlett O’Hara isn’t the only young widow stewing under the weight of heavy mourning! Turns out that Feminore Cooper didn’t like Susanna Rowson! Turns out sometimes people related to famous people who have love affairs with slaves try to deny the relationships! I started skipping those interludes that delved into these silly psychological musings about characters, especially The Buds, who suffered from groupthink. The letters between Cinnamon and Charlotte were interesting, and I liked Sarah’s mental breakdown (despite its echoes of Cunningham’s The Hours), and I thought the mother had a rich history I would have liked to learn more of, but overall there just wasn’t enough story. And there was absolutely no reason to have firestarters and ghosts in the book if they didn’t do anything or symbolize anything. The sea monster in the lake was supposed to represent the family and its ugly secrets, I think, and how beautiful it is to discover secrets and how sad it is to lose them, but it was badly used, too. The technical details about the sea monster at the end belonged in a different book. Maybe it was supposed to represent that Willie is ultimately an academic, but it was just strange. If you are going to employ a creature like the sea monster, it should have really been the ostensible center of the story, with Willie’s discoveries and investigations the ostensible B plot. You know, we watch the monster be revealed and exposed but the truth is really about uncovering the human past, that kind of thing. Bookends and a title do not a metaphor make. Also, if the monsters were supposed to be the horrible people in her family, there really weren’t any. Everyone was just trying to get by, with varying degrees of humanity and success.

I also don’t like the phantom pregnancy angle, but not because it was a bad idea. I think resolving the pregnancy storyline in that way could have supported the idea of lineage and inheritance and what it all means (and if it means nothing), but it was sort of dropped in as like some kind of abortion question cop-out. It was a missed opportunity to explore what it means to have descendants, and what we owe to our children versus to ourselves, and if Willie was going to be the end of the line, and the contrast between Sol having children he never knew about and Willie not having a child she thought she was having. I also liked the way she referred to the not-baby as a “lump,” because it made me think of lumps of clay, and how people can be molded but only to the limitations of their material make-up, and stuff like that. And then there was the sea monster with the unborn baby, and the self-fertilization stuff, and the baby that was swimming in the sea without a family, and the meth-head lost daughter who swam to the light, and so many beautiful moments that could have presented so many wonderful truths about families and individuals. But all we get is Willie, Willie, Willie, who got 1500 on her SAT, was homecoming queen, is the only person ever–apparently–to leave the town and make something of herself (which is tries to fail at) or to read Fenimore Cooper, and we learn an awful lot of truth about how self-absorbed big fish in little ponds can be.

It all makes me want to reread Possession by A. S. Byatt again, which I remember as a terribly thrilling and romantic book about grad students frantically searching for information about dead authors. I even liked the movie (especially that business with the letter and the little girl at the end). To echo what some reviewer on Amazon said about Monsters, it would probably also make a great movie. I think I would definitely go see that movie. I don’t know who I’d want in the lead role, though. But you know that actress who played Charlie on Ugly Betty and showed up as the germophobe teacher in Glee? I’d cast her as Charlotte Temple. I like her.

Jayma Mays

The Right Scale of Values–A Debut Album by The Abdalian Housing Society

So it’s another Facebook game. I hate seeing these things in the wild, but this one was a pretty funny one. I wasn’t even supposed to know about it, but one of my SGU Facebook Friends was tagged in a note by someone I don’t know and whose profile I can’t see (but whose note, oddly enough, I can access via my Friend’s name), and I ended up on that page. Here are the rules:

1) Open a random page in Wikipedia. The first Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band. (Alternatively, if the first article you hit is short, hit “Random Article” two more times.)

2) Get a random quote. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3) Find your album art. The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4) Use a photo editing program to put it all together.

Voila! A debut recording artist is me!

I wasn’t going to do it at all, except that I never heard of these random page finders and was curious about what could come up. The picture sold me on the concept. It’s hilarious. I’d love to see what other people put together. I’m sure there’s a way to post links in the comments section, or I could post pictures here.

Learn more!

The Abdalian Housing Society

The secret to a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.
–Norman Thomas, American Socialist Politician, 1884-1968

This is the album art that inspired me:

There’s some awfully interesting stuff online. Way more interesting than chores.

Babylon 5–Season 2, Episode 17: Knives

If you are starting to wonder whether I have anything better to do than sit at my laptop and watch television and then blog about said television all day, the answer is no. No, I do not. I am loving my kitchen remodel, but it’s keeping me stuck at home (stuck is perhaps too negative a term), on hand to let people in and out and answer questions, but too distracted to do work for money. I balanced my checkbook already, and removing the hotlinks that I put in this blog before I learned that it was rude to have them gets pretty boring pretty fast. Why not write? I enjoy writing, and I definitely like watching B5, and even though the aforementioned episode was a little slow, the half of if that advanced the story arc was very good.

I’m just going to skip over all the Sheridan hallucination stuff and pretend it didn’t happen. It turned out to be a go-nowhere situation that maybe served the purpose of reminding viewers that there was that time slip/warp thing with Sector 14 that involved the Babylon 4 station, and really nothing else. OK, the vision of watching the Icarus ship explode reminded us that Sheridan’s wife died because of that monster on that planet, so that will probably come up again soon, too. It actually annoyed me when Sheridan started having those visions and those headaches, because I thought we were in for another round of morals and lessons by Kosh the Vorlon, but that wasn’t it. I can’t decide if a go-nowhere resolution (it was an alien in his brain that left no traces and did no damage!) is less annoying than a repeat of psychic training would have been. Remember that episode of Lost with Hurley finding the van? It was an adorable little episode when you were watching it the first time, but the second time, when you are reviewing that season before the next season started it, and you already knew that it would go nowhere, you just don’t want to bother. That’s what I am feeling right now, but only about the Sheridan stuff. Because this was Londo’s episode, and I wish we could have seen more of him, without padding.

Londo! I can’t make up my mind about him, which is a testament to the character or the actor, or the writers, or all of it. I hate him, I think–especially because of these flashes of conscience we see. I know he appreciates Vir, and I’m glad Vir is confident enough now to openly speak to Londo about his behavior, and to wantonly judge and implore and generally try to interfere with his plans, and it says a lot about Londo that he lets Vir keep harping on these points. But why Londo has just given himself up to Fate, or The Machine, or Greed, or whatever it is that he feels hopelessly entangled by, when it is so clear now that his choices are not requirements and war is not inevitable, is a mystery that bears watching.

If there was any doubt in my mind that perhaps the Narn were unreliable narrators and perhaps manipulating the sentiments of all observers to cast the Centauri as villains, it’s gone. The appearance of Londo’s friend Urza demonstrates that the ruling class of the Centauri is not a monolithic, arrogant, hostile crowd hell-bent on empire and galactic domination. Considering that Urza really had no knowledge of Londo’s involvement in this palace coup, I believe that when he says no one really wants another war he means most Centauri really don’t want another war. Vir is no longer just some lone opponent of evil–he is the desperate mouthpiece of a planet trying to get through to the one person who can halt this chain of events. I’m pondering whether that makes Vir more or less heroic; it makes him less of a victim, in a way, and less of an angel figure, and it makes the whole situation seem much, much more tragic somehow. Good is being trampled by evil, but also the will of an entire people is being trampled by the intrigues of a few.

The fight to the death as a strategy to put Londo in a position to help his friend was genuinely suspenseful. I knew Londo wouldn’t die, but I didn’t know how it would actually resolve. I liked watching the people in the background of the party, too, because I like what goes on with the extras in this show for some reason. And the Centauri men’s hairstyle fascinates me; all the bald women’s heads are strangely beautiful, too. We didn’t really need to learn about that particular tradition of Centauri House Dueling, and I can’t imagine how it would come up again, but it shows that Londo is aware of subtlety, and obligation, and the bonds of friendship, and has a sense of pride, and it makes it even more perplexing that he’s being so stubborn about this war thing. I am probably more interested in him right now than anything else on the show. Well, him and G’Kar. Of course, this mystery will likely be directly tied to the mystery of what lurks in the shadows and the hinterlands, and the evil thing that ate up the late Mrs. Sheridan’s science ship, so it’s a package deal. I can dig. So even if the Londo story didn’t really advance the story arc either, it was still worth it to see him as a character and it invested me even more in this story. I keep remembering now that he’s the guy who narrated the pilot/movie that starts off the whole show, and that means he’s around at the end of it all to tell the sad, sorry tale. Or inspiring, heroic tale. That makes him narratively the most important character of the story. We’d call him Ishmael if he didn’t already have a name.

I’ll have to think about how PsiCorp factors into all this. Earth Government feels like just a puppet of the PsiCorps, so I can throw them out of my calculations. PsiCorps, Centauri schemers, evil beyond comprehension, the persecuted Narn, and the Minbari/Vorlon freedom fighting alliance all add up to a space station placed precisely at the epicenter of disaster.

I have high hopes for the rest of Season 2; it’s got some very good titles coming up. And because I doubt that Hulu will scrounge up season 3 just in time for me to watch it (although that’s what happened with my Buffy viewing), it looks like I’ve got some reserving to do at the library. The county branch has everything on DVD. Thank you, taxpayers of San Diego!

Blogging Harper’s Island (Because Someone Has To)–Episode 11: Splash

Let’s just get the graveyard out of the way, OK? Here are your names and your epitaphs:

Goodbye, Nikki! I'm sorry that neither your character nor your character's death served any purpose.

Goodbye, Shane! I'll miss your attitude, but you did put up a good fight. I really thought he'd cut your arm off, though.

Goodbye, Cal! I really thought you'd do the whole pirate movie hero thing. I am very sad for you, but mostly for myself.

Goodbye, Chloe! It was very romantic, but you could totally have gotten away. Cal told you to run. You let him down.

I guess I ought to remark on the passing of the deputy, whose body was found in the church. He is the fifth dead body of the episode. There. Graveyard planted.

I am not sure if I really liked this episode or not. On the one hand, it had Leoben from Battlestar Galactica in it, a character I absolutely loved played by an actor who owned the role (Callum Keith Rennie). Despite appearances, I don’t really watch that much TV, and I don’t see that actor that often, so it was a treat to watch this episode looking even for glimpses of him. It kept my attention until the end. It got by me last episode that it was this actor, so I was totally surprised to see his name in the opening credits. On the other hand, it was an episode where people were wandering around–which I find boring–and it was an episode that shot to hell my “elegant theory” (the mysterycanuck said it was elegant!) about how maybe Wakefield wasn’t the murderer and how maybe he was tracking down some son who actually was. My predictions about shows are never right, so I never expect validation, but I never particularly like seeing them proven wrong, either. So that was a drawback. And it was disgustingly violent. I mean, wow, gross, ick violent. I thought a lot of the people early on died in pretty grisly ways, but some of them were sort of interesting (I realize that sounds just terrible to say), and the camera didn’t just focus and focus and focus on it. This stabbing business was over the top. I don’t know why we had to see all of that. It was sort of a major departure from the methods of the other killings (creative, staged, private), which added to the sense that it was out of place, and it really requires an explanation now that we haven’t gotten yet. That Wakefield used to love a woman like Chloe is not sufficient.

Speaking of which, these tunnels are interesting to know about, but I refuse to believe anyone could enter and exit them quietly, especially with a captive when everyone else is standing IN THE SAME ROOM. Chloe could not be dragged out of that church into a tunnel without anyone noticing. No gag is that efficient, and she was standing in the middle of a bunch of wooden pews, and those things make noise when you try to move between them. Secret kidnapping just not happening. Cal coming to find Chloe was very romantic, and their escape and him buying her time to get away and all that, but the time it took for her to stand there and watch Wakefield kill Cal, and for her to have a conversation with Wakefield would have been plenty of time for her to get around that fence and run away. Cal was a beautiful, wonderful boy, but she had no business throwing herself away after him… especially in a scene that was such a rip-off of The Last of the Mohicans, when Alice dropped herself off a cliff. I can get how suicide might be empowering in some situations, but this isn’t one of them. This is lazy writing. Call me a cynic, but I would have made a go of it. I might have slipped in my haste (although the rushing water was far enough away that the spray would not have made the pipe slick) and fallen anyway, but just giving up when she was already started and Wakefield was already so far away was a bad decision.

And I’m just tired of Abby, who I never liked, and I am tired of Madison acting like a simpleton (although I am very happy people are telling the truth to her now–nothing makes crazy like lying to a kid who senses what’s really going on). I guess I never minded Shae, and I am impressed with how Trish has stepped up to the plate, and I guess I’m supposed to think that Jimmy is the new bad guy (although surely Abby’s dad would have some insight into that and not sacrifice himself so that Abby could live long and prosper with Jimmy by her side), and I don’t understand how all these rugged, rustic locals who until the wedding party arrived probably hunted a fair piece are missing all these shots. (Henry, I’m looking at you. Abby, too.)

To wrap up on a lighter note, I appreciated the dynamic between Danny and Sully. Sully confessing his dark secrets and pretending to be “less guarded” now is sort of a cliche, but I found Danny’s reverence for his fear and turning to religious comfort in his dark hour was an interesting choice. It’s probably the most reasonable thing anyone did all episode. Small touches like those go a long way towards authentic characterization in better shows, and it’s nice that Generic Friend got something real to do.

I will watch the rest of this series and get it out of my system, hoping now that Trish catches on to how Henry’s really helping Abby fight her battles instead of helping Trish. A breakup at the end would please me. I probably ought to figure out how many episodes are left, too. One, two, whatever.

I am still a big fan of the short summer series concept, however. Hopefully this show will serve as some sort of trailblazer, and not matter in the end if it wasn’t very good. If it teaches the viewing audience and writer teams what the format can do, then better shows can follow, and I will be grateful.

The Kitchen Remodel–Days 13 & 14 (As Reviewed on Day 15)

So I’ve had some time to reflect on my Day 13 experiences, which really bled into Day 14–a heady day–and into the wee hours of Day 15, although that was me being up late and doing touch-ups rather than laboring for 48 hours.

We have a sink. A sink! I can stand in the kitchen and get water now, instead of knocking small items off of the installed counter through the big hole in the middle of it.

It took a really, really long time to install, I thought (five hours), but I’m not the professional able to judge such matters. There was a trip to the hardware store for an airgap and an airgap cover (the old and probably cruddy one got tossed with the old sink before anyone even thought about it or noticed until now), and some hoses with different width attachments, and maybe that added some time. There was a garbage disposal to install, and a dishwasher to mess with, and a water filter to mount, and other stuff like that, and the guy is a handyman versus a specialized plumber, so it all added up. I have to admit getting antsy; we put off lunch a long time, and it made the trip to the grocery store more tiring afterward.

But the water turned off and on (albeit at a much lower flow), and the guy left the caulk behind for me to put on the next day, and I just wanted this very nice person to just get out of the house already, and we called it a day. A good day, with a round of washing up and drying after, which was almost a dream with the extra space on the countertop (knocking off that breakfast bar added so much square footage) and some paper plates and plastic forks for the evening meal.

That night after washing dishes, however, I decided that the much lower water pressure out of the faucet was intolerable. The sink guy had pointed it out to me, and we both watched it trickle with dismay, but then I came up with a story about how the neighbor behind us had put in a new regulator for the water pressure. We took a field trip to the window to stare at the neighbor’s new regulator…

…and concluded that it was just too bad for me, that somehow the new faucet was amplifying an old problem. That was all fine and good when you were just watching the water fall into the sink, but actually trying to fill the new, deep sink with sudsy water to wash things was intolerable. I turned to Google (the solution to, and cause of, many of my problems) for answers.

People had long and sad tales about how all the water manufacturers were evilly complying with this idea that faucets ought to be water-conserving, and that if you installed new faucets you were going to have to trick them out to restore your old flow rates, or else unscrew the tip of the faucet (the aerator) and clean out the gravel and debris that might have gotten caught with the changing of fixtures and water knocking loose build-up in the pipes and hoses. My aerator was clean. Next stop, dismantling the faucet to look for those tricksy pieces that block water flow on purpose. Husband and I got the handle off and some rings and spacers, and were thwarted by this cylinder thing that was too wide to grip with our pliers and made of plastic anyway and so too wasy to damage the threads of should we have attempted to force the issue.

We’d noticed earlier that the hand sprayer water flow seemed perfectly normal, which was the exact opposite of a problem that a few people online had reported–the sprayer not getting enough water. The piece that diverted the water from faucet to sprayer was accessible without removing that one piece, so we pulled it out. It was a little round plug thing, with holes at the north and south and solid walls at the east and west. (Don’t spend a lot of time visualizing it.) Husband started to recover some memory about how maybe he’d already messed around with the faucet and how maybe he’d pulled that piece in and out and put it in wrong (it’s a circle that just sits in place, so I don’t know how it could have gone in wrong; I’m not being sarcastic), but he turned it ninety degrees whatever way so that the holes were pointing either up instead of sideways or something, and I guess this diverter piece had been blocking or trapping water that was supposed to go to the faucet and it works fine now. If this is an example of low-flow water conservation, I am perfectly happy with it. And I am so relieved we found this little piece before we wrecked some other piece looking in vain for the elusive hippy-water-blocker.

The next day I did my own private futzing around beneath the sink. The plumber had mounted but not hooked up our water filter partly because the hoses needed different connectors and partly because we had an old, no-longer-filtering filter that made no sense to hook up. Because it was naptime and I could make no trips to the hardware store, I reexamined the connectors, and discovered that if I removed this one adapter that made a hose connector female instead of male, I could use them. Yay! I installed the hoses and tightened the connections with a wrench and all was well. I found new filters online for a third of the price that they sell them at Lowe’s, which was nice, and placed the order. Hard work, that.

It wasn’t until after dinner that I decided to tackle the caulking project, and it was not the most successful project I’ve ever undertaken. It was messy, and ugly, and I experimented with a lot of tools (including a rusty razor blade) before I decided that applying it in small stretches with my finger and cleaning the edges immediately with a baby wash cloth was the best technique. Ha, ha, yeah, yeah all of you that already knew that this was the best way to apply caulk and joke’s on me for reinventing the wheel. I scraped up a lot of caulk, and wore a lot of caulk, but I got it to look normal enough so that I wouldn’t start crying in the morning when I saw it. Husband didn’t notice that the caulk was on at first (which means it was sufficiently clean and tidy to blend in), and after I pointed it out he said he’d add another coat, which would make it seem more even and would better seal the job. I have frosted many cakes twice, and nearly cried when I saw the first layer of icing and then gloated when I saw the second one, so this is probably just another version of that, but it can be very demoralizing. I passed the time pleasantly enough, however, watching two or three great episodes of Party Down (the investor one, the senior singles party one, and the porn awards one), and one kinda terrible episode of Buffy Season 4 (the sex one where the tree grows inside the frat house). OK, really terrible.

I also consumed an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s Creme Brulee ice cream. I was fishing through the pint looking for the brown sugar bits and ended up with ice cream on my spoon as well, and before I knew it, It was gone. It was yummy. I feel pretty bad about it; other people live in my house who might have wanted to have some of that ice cream. But going to the store to replace the pint and then eating just enough out of it to make it look like I only had those spoonfuls I’d eaten in public seems like too much effort. I need to save my effort for the rest of the week, when the tile floor installation projects really turns our house upside down.

The Kitchen Remodel–Day 11

Today was a hamster wheel kind of day. No progress was made on the infrastructure of the kitchen, but I sure spent a lot of time there scrambling hither and thither from cardboard box to cabinet box. Everything still looks like a hideous mess, yet when I open the cupboards my old, old crap has shiny new homes. I got a little sick off the fumes from the adhesive holding the countertop in place, but only when I was futzing around inside the corner base cabinet putting the pots on the lazy susan.

Puff helped.

Puff has never been so high up in the kitchen in her life. Access to the cupboard above the broom closet is the top of the refrigerator, and Puff was never able to get to the top of the refrigerator because the adjacent counter held the microwave and the toaster oven. Well, that counter is free now! It’s what she’s always wanted, I suppose. Sadly for Puff, she lacks the opposable thumbs required to open the door, and she’ll be confined to the top of the refrigerator. Don’t feel too bad for her. She’s got a pretty good view from that angle, and she’ll hear every last word of the old person gossip in the alley that I miss.

I listened to some good podcasts today and time just flew, plus I had a nice burrito break for lunch. (The guac on the chips was a little too creamy for my taste, but I don’t think they cut it with sour cream. I think it was just too smooth.) The day was entirely devoid of drama, save for my confusion about the Rationell drawer storage system. Yeah, yeah, I saw the samples all set up at the store… yeah, yeah, I had a kitchen helper explaining drawer inserts to me… Still, I was totally confused by the deep versions and the shallow versions. I thought maybe there were different kinds depending on drawer widths, which makes no sense in theory but when you are faced with these pieces that are all the same color and almost but not quite interchangeable and you’ve got these stupid instructions drawn without words but plenty of smiling, pointing bubble people. In the end, after cursing the Rationell line’s name and vowing to come online later and write a scathing review of this product, I’m really happy with them. I ended up using an insert for the 15 inch drawer on an 18 inch drawer, so there are a few gaps at the side, but the silverware doesn’t mind, and it’s a heck of a lot better than the Rubbermaid inserts I had. Not that I’m slamming Rubbermaid–those two inserts have served me faithfully–but our flatware is sort of oversized and never really fit into that well. This is a much better solution, and I don’t have a picture of it, but I’m pretty sure even my most remote Gentle Reader knows what a fork looks like.

However, even the most sophisticated Gentle Reader may not be able to visualize how beautiful a drawer full of Tupperware knock-offs can be when the lids are so neatly stacked at the front:

The real triumph of the day, however, is the junk drawer. Once I realized that this Rationell system, properly applied, could be Teh Awesome, I discovered I had a perfect fit for the ubiquitous junk drawer. I’d gotten quite savvy about fishing through a drawer jumbled with loose razorblades, poorly capped cans of solvent, loose keys, and that little wooden statue of a tropical bird I’ve been meaning to fix in search of the small screwdriver I need to replace my laptop keyboard. But never again! I’ve organized junk drawers before, but they fall into chaos so quickly, but Rationell has made that a thing of the past!

Even if the little screwdriver wanted to roll over to see what the can of Goof Off was up to, or the pipe cleaners wanted to twine their naughty selves around the Jacuzzi key, they can’t. Rationell put the kabbash on that. No more awkward entanglements! I’m pretty happy about this junk drawer right now. I’m not saying that it’s the best part of the new kitchen, but I’m looking at that picture and I’m seeing that little screwdriver and I’m seeing all those carefully sequestered twist-ties and it’s bliss. Bliss, I say.

Bliss.

Also, there’s cat fur all over my drinking glasses. I hope there’s a workaround for that.

The Kitchen Remodel–Days 9 & 10

What a couple of days! I can’t even get my head around it, so much has happened. So much has happened today, in fact, that I can’t even remember what happened yesterday. Luckily, I have pictures. Let’s travel ourselves some memory lane.

Ah.

You may not remember, but all those individual pieces of Adel Medium Brown came to my house securely wrapped in its own individual packaging. All of them. There was an awful lot of cardboard stacked up in my house. I managed to sucker my very tired mother into taking my children away for the day so I could just clean out the cupboards and start putting stuff back in. I had this idea that I’d clear out the dining room so I could put the table back and then have a surface for unpacking. I started with the boxes. It took all afternoon. All afternoon, people. I totally lost track of time. Next think I knew people were calling me up asking me what I was thinking of for dinner, and I hadn’t even started vacuuming yet. I’d been shoving crap down the half-flight of stairs to the living room, and then down the full flight of stairs to the garage, and then cramming it all into my car.

I would have brought it to the recycling place at the dump, but it closes at the highly inconvenient time of 4:30. Then I remembered a conversation I’d had with the cabinet installers about the bin outside of IKEA they have for people who need to unpack their purchases in order to fit them into their tiny cars. So I schlepped it back, found a great spot right in front of the bin–the completely empty bin!– and started unloading. That’s where the adorable happened.

There was a couple there buying a dining room table and a couch and trying to take it all home in some kinda small SUV/Outback contraption. They’d gotten the couch in and tied it down pretty well, and then out comes the dining room table on a trolley, already out of its box. So started a game of advanced three-dimensional Tetris. Meanwhile, I’m just schlepping and schlepping and then serendipitously I pulled a box out of my car that was the exact size and shape that they could use in their car to protect the upholstery of their couch from the sharp edges of the table. Out comes a box, in goes the box. It was like that old commercial for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, but way more interesting because I got to play the hero.

Of course, I had no robot.

So it was a lot of fun communing with this couple, but what was so cute was that when the car was packed, they were so happy that they kissed like it was their wedding day. The story I am writing about them in my head is that they are decorating purposefully the first house or apartment that they shared together, because both pieces of furniture were the same color, and thus proof of interior design.

Day 10–today–I figured I’d sucker a different grandparent into watching the kids while I actually start to clean out and then refill the cabinets. It worked! We all headed over after Super Readers ended; we made one side trip to the post office where I paid eight dollars to mail a jigsaw puzzle that cost two dollars and Filly fell asleep in the car. She went straight to bed, and Fella found some toys to play with, so I actually had adult help. We were vacuuming and patching the protective paper on the floor with my Shop Vac and some extra paper, when I get a phone call from the countertop and floor people. They want to come over and put the counters and backsplash in today. Well, hell to the yaw! Except that they hadn’t put the panel on the end of the peninsula yet, so I had to call the cabinet installers and see if that’s something they could do beneath a counter. Turns out yes. Work commenced in an hour.

The same three guys showed up to do the countertop install as the tile install, which surprised me a little. There was a tense moment when they placed all the pieces down on the too-thin roughtop and the drawers wouldn’t open, but the head guy (a Scott Baio lookalike) kept telling me that it was taken care of and it was. I couldn’t believe the size of the adhesive; it looked like shaving cream and provided enough lift for full clearance. (Just like I was told it would.) Even more amazing was watching them glue together the one seam. It practically vanished, and it’s not something that looks like it would ever be unnoticeable (or even level) when the two slabs are sitting next to each other.

The counters make the cabinets look great. And the yellow paint terrible. I think we are bringing in the dining room greener color, which is Behr Fossil Butte if you remember. And then before I could even drink another can of soda, the backsplash was up. There’s no grout, but the main wall is done. They couldn’t tile the opposite wall yet because the backsplash has to butt up against the appliance garage, which won’t be installed until probably Wednesday despite the fact that the tile people really, really, really want to do the work now.

Here’s a terrible close-up of the backsplash tile, against a very grubby yellow paint that will be cleaned up.

It’s 6 x 6 inches, and bigger than I realized they would be (even though I saw them in the store), but I like it. They are also less red than I remembered them being, which is probably a good thing. There’s mostly rust/terra cotta running through it, with a neutral that matches the countertop (”Jerusalem Sands” by Caesarstone, which has some flecks of red). We picked this all out with samples of the dining room floor, the floor tiles, the backsplash tile, the countertop, and the cabinet wood in the same room. I am currently remembering the floor tiles as grayish, but that sounds ridiculous. I can’t wait to see them again!

A very entertaining three hours later, I had a BFF on the way with beer and a kitchen that looked like a kitchen.

And then a Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust pizza and two Longboard beers later (just about another three hours), I had a kitchen that looked like this:

Yep. Things are back to normal at my house.

Podcast Roundup–The Naked Scientists and Naked Archaeology

I haven’t done one of these in a very long while. Too long, I’m afraid. I don’t feel like I support my favorite podcasts nearly enough, and at least when I was writing about them before people were clicking through. Long story short, I am well overdue. I did absolutely nothing on the kitchen today; I was away from the house so I can’t report on my tomato garden today; I have seen no new episodes of any television show to write about; I am stalled on my book so I have no book review. So, like Michelangelo, I am chiseling away everything away that isn’t podcast.

The following pair are both products of the BBC radio arm, or division, or branch, or whatever it’s called. I download them from iTunes, and I probably learned about them as iTunes recommendations from some other science podcast I’ve subscribed to.

The Naked Scientists
The Naked Scientists is a weekly production that posts Mondays, usually, but airs live on Sundays at 10:00 AM Second Life Time, otherwise known as Pacific. It is a panel production, and most episodes have a theme, although the news reports at the beginning and the listener questions at the end can be on any topic. They run about an hour.

Pause: I am totally distracted by fireworks. It’s time for the nightly show at Sea World, but I am miles and miles away from the ocean, albeit on a hill above the riverbed. Sound could come right up the valley, I suppose. It’s pretty loud. Not window shaking loud, but I wasn’t expecting to hear it. It’s making me nostalgic for when I lived right at the beach and could even see the fireworks, and could set a clock by them during the summertime.

The panel is composed of several men and women, who all speak very naturally and who have personal interests that you almost never hear about until some part of a story crosses paths with some piece of information that he or she has picked up during his or her own work. One’s a doctor; one’s into marine life; one is a member of a band. They don’t talk about their personal histories–it’s a show that stays very much on topic–but their personalities come right through the broadcast and makes it a very enjoyable program. The show starts with them taking turns presenting news stories that seem to me to be just the most interesting things they’ve found in the past week. After a handful of those, they move into the longer stories that comprise the theme: transportation, bioengineering, and climate represent a few that I have stocked up on my podcast waiting to get to (yeah, I’m behind). The stories include interviews with (or at least recordings of interviews from) the scientists working on the projects they report on. What’s nice is that you get people from all over the (mostly the English-speaking) world; it’s not strictly local topics. There are so many accents on this show I honestly don’t even notice them anymore.

Halfway through the main stories segment is a break for “Kitchen Science,” which is a laboratory follow-along demonstration that listeners are encouraged to try at home. The materials are almost always something you’d have on hand. They set up an experiment, ask the audience to make predictions, and return to the kitchen lab later. It’s my least favorite part of the show, but probably because I don’t listen at my house, or with kids. It’s not something I’m going to try, especially if I don’t know what kind of mess it will make in advance. (Like what happens if you cover an inflated balloon with a hill of flour and then pop the balloon? It’s hard enough for me to clean the kitchen without five pounds of flour all over everything. That’s not a risk I am willing to take.) The good part of this segment is that the instructions are pretty easy to visualize, and the explanations easy to understand. I wish it wasn’t in the show–I’d personally rather hear another science story–but I’m not a big do-er, and I’m not a teacher, and I really am not on the market for science activities right now. All this could change in two years, and if I suddenly need to run a different Kitchen Science experiment each week, well, the website has them all archived, as audio and as transcripts.

The last part of the show–Listener Questions–used to frustrate me until I started listening to the episodes in sequence. They play a voicemail of a listener with a question, and then end the show. In the next episode, they replay the question, and an answer from some audience-member topic expert who calls in. Then they play the question for the following week. I don’t know why I used to get so confused, but it’s now my favorite part of the show. People think of very interesting things to ask, and somewhere in the vast audience of 6,000,000 people, the person who has the perfect answer phones it in. I like hearing where all the people are from, and all the different specific fields of expertise that there are, as much as I like getting the new information. It’s definitely a hook for the next episode, so it keeps you listening. Of course, for the purpose of full disclosure I should let you know that on iTunes you can subscribe just to the question of the week and circumvent the whole rest of the show, but that’s the cheater’s solution.

The Naked Scientists have a very rich website that is easy to navigate, seems to contain audio and transcripts of most of the interview segments, has a lot of history, and a pretty active participant forum. I am not a member of the forum, for no particular reason. Actually, because I am already a member of two other forums, and find myself repeating the same things over and over again. What with this blog, and Facebook, and actual friends, I don’t need to be socializing in quintiplicate. I’d never be able to keep my stories straight.

Naked Archaeology
Naked Archaeology is a splinter podcast hosted by one of the Naked Scientist regulars. She is the only host on the show, and it sticks to its topic, with longer stories and interviews; there’s no news segment or questions segment, although there is a piece called “Backyard Archaeology,” which is very local to Cambridge (for obvious reasons). This is a relatively new program, I think, and it doesn’t flow as well as the main show, but that’s because there’s just the one host and not a panel. I have come to the conclusion that a panel podcast is easier to do and easier to listen to. The changing voices of a panel really help me focus, especially when I am doing another task while listening. But that is entirely my issue and other people may disagree.

I do like this show, and I love the information. I am not trying to dissuade anyone from listening. It is an excellent program and the host is not awkward at all. The episodes run from twenty-five to thirty minutes and come out monthly, about halfway through the month. The show has a page on the Naked Scientist main website, and you can listen to the archives there (or via iTunes or whatever), but they don’t seem to have transcripts. Maybe those are forthcoming. Like I said, it’s a very new show.

The Kitchen Remodel–Days 5, 6, & 7

Yeah, it’s been a few days, but all the excitement has been below the surface. Day 5 we spent in the mountains; day 6 I spent on the phone and waiting around the house for the cabinet guy who didn’t come, and day 7–today–watching more magic happen.

The drama of the weekend was about the countertop. I was all Zen the other day as the square footage added up (at $67 a sqft), and I was going with it. And then… and then! we were picking out the tile at the tile place and at the very last minute the tile guy asks what we did for counters and said he could get us the same thing for $45 a square foot installed. I almost burst into tears, except that would have been silly and I was still sort of trying to be Zen, and I was also ready to go home. Turns out it was not too late to call off the original order–less a $150 charge for the template making time–and by Monday night we had everything all set up with the second company. By this morning, we had a new template making guy at my house. Even better, he left after installing the rough tops! There is plywood screwed onto my open-top cabinets, which I wasn’t expecting until the day they put the actual countertops on. This is very good news–I’ll qualify that in a minute–because it means that now I can start putting things back into the cupboards and they won’t get all dusty and gross if some unexpected further construction occurred that would rain debris down on the drawers and shelves. It will make such a difference in my house if I can pull all those boxes out of the other rooms and restore the dishes and pans (and food!) to their places.

The qualifier: It’s a lot more fun to play around on the computer and text message people and futz in the garden than to unpack dusty boxes and cut shelf paper. No, that’s not it. I would totally dig cutting up shelf paper and reorganizing the kitchen if I could do it without my entourage. I have some good podcasts lined up on the iPod that would last me all day!

See? Even with plywood it looks almost like a real kitchen! We are making progress, people!

There was a little bit of confusion about the breakfast ledge, but all was resolved. After the counter guy left we had time for a quick trip to Jack in the Box, where I had their chicken teriyaki bowl with a side of an egg roll and was quite surprised by its flavor. (The teriyaki was a little too sweet, but the chicken was moist and the egg roll was fantastic. But that has nothing to do with my house.)

The cabinet guy showed up next and spent quite a bit of time wrapping up the tiny odds and ends, like toe kicks, door and drawer handles, and hinge dampers. The appliance garage is waiting on the countertops, and the last of the paneling will get put in when they come back for the appliance garage, and there are no dramatic changes, but handles do complete a look!

I am very lucky, it turns out, that the cabinet guy came immediately after the counters guy. The counters guy installed 5/8 inch rough top, but the way the drawers fit into the base cabinets it should have been 3/4 inch. That was very good to know. He also pointed out that the last panel was going to add 5/8 inch to the width of the “peninsula” (the wall on which the breakfast ledge will hang). That means that the rough top will have to be built up a little before the counters go on–no biggie–and that the template is 5/8 inch too short. They hadn’t started work on it yet because I don’t think the slabs are at the fabricators yet, but I’m not totally certain that my little picture is enough to guarantee that they won’t cut it too short.

I know it’s perfectly clear what they have to do. My concern is that the changes on paper are not going to make it to the saw or the laser or whatever kind of tool is used to cut the slab. The template is such a tangible, emphatic thing. An emailed jpg–even if printed out–is flimsy and weak in comparison. We may live in the Information Age, but the sword is mightier than the pen in Home Improvement Land.

I am looking forward to a day off tomorrow, when there is no reason to go to my house except to pick the tomato that spent all day ripening before my eyes (it’s a shame is has blossom end rot, but we’ll eat it anyway) and to pet the kitties. Fella and Filly are tired of being cooped up upstairs, and I am tired of being cooped up upstairs, and we all want fresh food and fresh air and will probably go to some park, where I will listen to all the good podcasts I’ve been saving up on my iPod instead of saving them for the unpacking day. The biggest decision I’ll have to make tomorrow is whether we want to stay at my mother’s house once she’s come home from her vacation. We’ve had the run of the place and it’s been clean and decorated and sunny and she has way better stuff than us–like a functioning kitchen. On the other hand, we’ll be kicked out of the bedroom and have to sleep on the air mattress in the loft. That may not be such a terrible thing (did I mention that she has a functioning kitchen, with a sink?), but it’s not the same as having the run of the place. Of course, if I can get a grandparent to watch the kids for a day, I could do some serious work at the house. Vacuuming has never sounded like so much fun.