Nailed

Baseboards and labor: $1500.00
Nails: $1.60
Two small nails in copper radiator pipe: $0
Replacing new floors, one wall, insulation, removing mold, reinstalling radiator and baseboard: Priceless

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The Book that is on the CD

Someone invited me to join Goodreads.com, so I did. Judging by the name, you're not supposed to talk about books you didn't like. In any case, I gave up reading for blogging, but during my commute I've begun listening to books on CD(s). So far, The Abstinence Teacher and Pattern Recognition. Both good. I've got the new one from that Kite Whisperer guy cued up, and something else I forget. The trick is, get a librarian to marry you -- FREE BOOKS (for, you know, a week).

So that the books that are on the CD(s) don't get stale, and to reclaim some of that creative time I lost when I switched from training to driving, I think I'm going to bring a voice recorder for blog entries. I'll spare you my dramatic readings, though, and transcribe myself.

Is there a NaBloPoMo award for most boringest post?


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The Permeability of the No-TV Rule

We don't watch TV* here.


*That's what I tell everyone. In reality, we watch far less TV than the average folks, but I'm still surprised at how often the TV is on. Much of what we do watch is on DVD, after the fact. Take, for instance, Heroes. We're watching the first season now.

Now I know a lot of you bloggers write about the shows that the kids are watching today -- that America's Next Top Runway, and the Lost Restaurant, and the Real Estate Magnate's Apprentice (where the guy keeps chopping up the loft spaces into condos and they keep multiplying and supply seems to outpace demand...shudder). But it can't hold a candle to the simple pleasures of interacting with your family, enjoying a wholesome meal in one another's company, performing the day's mundane but meaningful tasks, reading a story, playing patty-cake. Am I right? I mean, I'm not sure, because I'm usually plugged in to the Internet, checking the sitemeter stats, but from what I hear, TV rots your brain.

Anyway, what's my point? Heroes is pretty cool so far. And I'm really starting to develop some respect for that lovable scamp Caillou.



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Now THAT's a Sunday!

It's during the yard work that we spot the water dripping down the outside of the foundation. I get out the ladder and clean all the gutters, then head down into the crawlspace under the parlor (that sounds pretentious, but "parlor/laundry room" sounds stupid) -- a place I've never actually ventured before.

It's clean and concrete-floored and the floor joists above are insulated -- this is the new part of the cellar. However, since it's at least partly below ground, I'd donned my spelunking gear: a backwards baseball cap (underground is the only acceptable locale for that particular fashion statement), safety goggles, dust mask, paint pants, work gloves, boots. You know, in case I come across a spider.

I crawl like a worm over to the corner, where sure enough there's some water dripping down the inside of the foundation. The insulation above seems pendulous, and ripples ominously when I poke it. My wife brings down a bucket and heaves it to me. I cut a hole in the insulation and let it drain. It drains. And drains. I run out to the store, have dinner, build a car from a kit, paint the Sistine Chapel, come back. It's still draining.

Using my homeowner's skilz, I deduce that there is some water up in there. It's apparently leaked down either 1) the inside of the walls or 2) the outside of the walls. If there's a third option -- perhaps the walls were actually made of water and they're melting? maybe the Borrowers left the tub running? -- I don't know what it is.

Worse, I don't know what the source of the water is, even after cutting away the insulation. I rule out the washing machine, because it's not wet anywhere near it and the water would be on top of the floor, which it's not. It's either a leaking radiator pipe or my first thought -- that the gutters had overflowed. I can't satisfactorily select either, which makes me seize up...which expert to call?

So I'm just lying there on the floor of the crawl space, nice and cool, listening to the burble of the water trickling into my bucket, remembering Richard Carlson and wondering what the hell I've done with that god damned book, when my wife sticks her head back in and asks "what's the story with the dead mouse?"

"Which one's that?" I moan, thinking about just what a Sunday conversation this is going to be.

"The one in the dining room. Did you kill it?"

"What are you asking me? Does it have a story?"

"It's under your shoe."

"My..."

"Your shoe. The ones you were wearing this morning."

"To the diner?" we both say. "Yes," she answers us.

"Is it, like, guts and everything?"

"I don't know," she says. "It's sorta squished. You must have stepped on it..."

She's of the opinion that the mouse is my job -- not because she's squeamish (not about mice, anyway), but because I'd apparently been the stepper. Reluctantly, I leave the pleasant woodland sound of the water filling my bucket, crawl forth from my little sanctuary under the parlor/laundry room and hoist my chemical-resistant corpus upstairs.

It's dead, but it's not a mouse. It's a mole. Possibly the unluckiest mole that ever lived. He must have popped himself outside -- "Back in a sec, hon, just gonna grab a worm...need anything?" and got trod upon, then sorta got stuck in the arch of my Skecher. Fortunately protected from any animal contact by my nature-proof clothing, I pick it up and bring it outside. Some crows are loitering in the backyard. I toss it to them and go back in to consult smarter homeowners than me about the water.

Ahh, Sunday, you never fail to deliver. Still, I'd rather be the human with the unwanted damp crawlspace than the mole who'll never go back to his.


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Cult-Like Programs I've Embraced, Part V: Don't Sweat the Small Stuff (and It's All Small Stuff)

In my old office I had a corner filled with black and white pictures of Men of Character. Arranged so that my head was positioned in the center of the group, when viewed from the door, were portraits of Hunter Thompson, Johnny Cash, Allen Ginsberg, my kid, and a tiny shot of a guy with a Big Toothy Grin and a slightly too-intense, almost forced, look of sheer ecstasy on his face. That last was Richard Carlson, author of Don't Sweat the Small Stuff (and It's All Small Stuff).

And here we go, go ahead, roll your eyes -- beliiieeeeeeve me, you're not rolling your eyes any more than I did when I walked into the downstairs part of Shakespeare & Co. back in '02-'03(?), followed the alphabet to the right shelf, thumbed past all the ultra-specialized Don't Sweat volumes, and settled on the classic. My own eyes had rolled so far up into my head that scoff-atometers a block away in the Derision Lab at Hunter College began sneering and saying "Puh-leeeze" and they weren't even turned on.

Weighing down one shoulder, as I walked to the cash register with that slim, brown, vaguely victorian-looking volume, were Stewart Smalley, Oprah Winfrey, someone saying "You go, girl!" and lots of kitty-cats and doilies. On the other shoulder was a feral wolverine of anxiety staring at my Adam's apple and licking its chops.

I decided to go with the Emo geeks on the other shoulder, and paid for the book.

My self-help reading is not that extensive. And I've never bought one of those for-dummies books. (Aside: I heard a funny George Carlin joke the other day on the radio. To paraphrase: "How come people buy self-help books, but they're written by someone else? That's not self-help. That's help.") But I was in the midst of a confluence of existential crises and I wanted a list of things to do that would make me feel better. If this was delivered in a somewhat smarmy, tooth-achingly earnest style, with lots of exclamation points punctuating dozens of little revelations, all the better.

Whew, I thought on the subway later. Just what I was hoping for! I read the thing deliberately over the next week.

Here's the power of Don't Sweat. You're every day running full-tilt into some particular problem, feeling, situation, or cycle. Over and over. There's no way out of it. It's driving you to [insert addictive behavior here]. I mean, dude, you're freaking out. So you pick up this book, and you flip through looking for the part that says "Here's how to stop having your particular problem," but there is no such chapter. It doesn't do that. Nor is it all vague like "Dude? Why'nt you just relax?" Instead Dr. Carlson lays out a series of 100 exercises, some physical, some mental, some procedural (for lack of a better term) that don't have anything to do with your problem. Shit! you think. Wrong book! But you've bought it, so you read it, and you find one of the little techniques that will inconvenience you the least, and you try it.

And then next day you're walking to work from the subway and you're overcome with the usual rage and remembering some event from junior high and nothing has changed. So that afternoon at lunch you read some more and you find another technique that sounds doable and has nothing to do with your problem and that night you try that one. And so on. One day you realize you haven't thought about that particular problem in a couple of days. Even though you've been in the same situation, with the same people, facing the same challenges, and your junior high past hasn't changed either. Somehow the edge -- the anxiety-producing, rage-building, time-consuming, goal-diverting edge -- has been dulled.

It worked for me. I needed a way to attack my problems laterally, because years of smashing face-on into stuff had proven counterproductive. As with any of the cult-like programs I've embraced, feeling better by reading this book required a certain drinking of a certain amount of Kool-Aid. It required believing that such a book could help, which belief in turn led to a certain commitment to practicing Dr. Carlson's recommendations, which do, in fact, work.

And a year or two later, that's why his face ended up on my wall. When he died unexpectedly -- young, from a heart attack, on a plane from San Francisco to New York -- it was a little confusing. Because of his age (45) and his apparent calm. The obvious gag -- that maybe he died from the ironic buildup of pent-up steam -- had no allure for me. I can only assume that he felt like a success when it was his time to go. And even if, as my cynicism sometimes suggests, he was a marketing genius first and a quasi-buddhist do-gooder second, at least his marketing efforts went toward something useful. RIP, Richard Carlson.

That ended heavy. Tomorrow, yardwork!


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The Internet Tells Me It's Patellar Tendinitis

My knee aches. You know how I often write about the many hills to be run in this area? How steep they are? How many ups we do on a weekend morning? Well, they all go back down eventually, and that can be hell on one's knees. Couple that with races on two consecutive weekends and a little more mileage than usual, and you can develop tenderness and a little inflammation of the patellar tendon, which connects the kneecap to the, umm, fribula. The one in front there. The shin, yeah.

It only hurts when I keep it bent for a long time -- for instance, during an hour-long drive or sitting at a desk for eight hours. Fortunately I only do each of those things once a day (well, twice, the driving). For my lay readers, I have prepared a diagram that will illustrate the condition.



Don't be alarmed: this is a fairly common syndrome and I expect a full recovery. Although your concern is appreciated. (PS: I'm still running, because it only hurts after.)

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Reading This? Thank Blame a Librarian.

It might be that I don't know enough about the history and philosophy of libraries to hold forth on the topic, but I do know a committed, civic-minded, performance-driven librarian whose budget just passed yesterday, and who does a lot of personal good for the town where she works. And while I mostly didn't like the crotchety old ladies who ran MY library growing up, you'd've had to pry me out of there with a, like, a Twinkie or something if you wanted me to stop reading or shuffling my feet along the carpet and then touching the abstract bronze to get a shock. If I'd had a librarian who resembled this one, I might've been a lot better-read and a lot thinner (because, I guess the joke here is that someone was always prying me out of the library with Twinkies, I don't know).

So also there's Nancy Pearl...is she a phenomenon of Seattle, or does she make Seattle? Does it matter? Could I make a more obvious and done-to-death librarian-outsider reference? Anyway, from what I hear about the ALA conferences, Ms. Pearl comes out on stage through a burst of dry-ice smoke in a rhinestone-covered suit wearing a giant pair of cat's-eye glasses and the hall goes freaking nuts, and there's a reason for that and it's books.

But not just books. Most librarians have something a little off about them -- and I know how many of you there are out there, and that one or more of you might be reading this, and I want to be on record that "a little off" is JUST FINE WITH ME, but really, admit it -- and it's that slight touch of the mystic, a little witch-doctorishness that comes with knowing how to know...and I suspect that people either respect that or fear it.

And that fear might be the only reason that every library budget in the country doesn't pass with flying colors, the only reason that governments aren't building ever bigger, better public libraries, with huge windows and quiet rooms, auditoriums and exceptional collections, brand-new best-sellers gleaming in their ranks, tried and true classics lovingly stored alphabetically, the runic Dewey Decimal system ranging far and wide over human inquiry, placing all thought on an equal footing. Fear because knowledge is scary. You know why? I have to go back to Spidey, here, but with great power comes great responsibility. Once you know something -- say, about Darfur, global warming, evolution, the Tuskeegee study or where your own sewage goes when you flush, you can't un-know it. And even if you don't do something -- change your behavior, donate to a cause, enlist, quit your job, stop flushing so much -- you feel that nagging sense that you should be doing something. That nagging is discomforting. We like comfort. And that's why libraries inspire fear.

I guess they should. But in the meantime, you can also use them to escape, and that's just as important. So go ye forth, and get ye to your local public library, and kiss the industrial carpet, shake hands with the reference librarian, scream "thank you!" as loud as they'll let you (hint: not very) and take out a book. You'll be glad you did.


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