Ha ha ha - ow!

The nation's finest news source hits on yet another painful truth.

The WC

The air around here has been thick with the dust of cedar shakes being scraped for restaining, and heady with the scent of trim being repainted. For the last two months... Yesterday, there was also the buzz of saws cutting rotted wood and rusted metal from the flat roof of our laundry room, which had been added onto the house some time in the last 50 or so years and apparently never maintained.

Not to worry: StraightMan and I hired someone else to work on it. They seem actually to know what they are doing. When they are here, but that is another story...

Even as I write this post, StraightMan is in the kitchen, replacing the kitchen faucet. Last winter, our furnace quit, our pipes froze, leaving thankfully minimal damage, but it included hairline fractures in the neck of the faucet.

(If you were, are, or know a breastfeeding mother: You know when a baby suddenly pops off mid-nursing, sending the stream shooting across the room in a fine white thread? Our faucet behaved like that. For those unfamiliar with breastfeeding, now you learned something new about human lactation.)

Meanwhile, this is the first summer in the six years that we have lived here that I have weeded and pruned and even grown a few plants in pots. Something resembling landscaping has been emerging around the house.

I also am researching a remodel of our upstairs bathroom because the time finally has come to do it. The paint and the wallpaper are peeling, the vinyl floor covering is prying loose, the area around the tub has dark spots of water damage, and the vanity around the sink is rotting. Sigh.

In an earlier post, I decried the tyranny of the kitchen island, which in fact was a way of expressing my irritation with the so-called "not-so-big" movement, which seems really to be about not-so-small spaces and kind-of-big budgets.

To get ideas, I am turning to Web sites like apartment therapy because I realize that we essentially live in a duplex apartment with a bit of outside space not unlike a Manhattan roof deck or even a large fire escape.

I also just read about vintagesimplehome in a Better Homes and Garden Kitchens and Bathrooms magazine that I bought at Home Depot. I * heart * the bathroom, which is just similar enough in size and layout to our bathroom - except it might be a bit roomier (or is it just the effect of the pedestal sink?) and our toilet and sink are on the same wall (which I guess makes the layout quite different...) - it gives me hope that we can have a pretty bathroom, too.

A sure sign that I am approaching middle age: I so covet subway tile.

On the other hand, there is always Plan B.

P.S. The photo above came from here.

Bits of inspiration

I am writing this post on the spanking new iMac in my campus office. The screen is about as large as our TV at home! Which might say as much about the smallness of our TV as the largeness of my new iMac, but in fact, I am trying to make a point about the latter. I find myself sitting back in my desk chair b/c the sheer magnitude of the screen is causing me horizontal vertigo. See the above.

Otherwise, I am continuing work on my syllabi and on this Monday morning, not feeling esp. interesting or interested. Sigh. So, I am looking to others for bits of inspiration:

StraightMan claims that Katha Pollitt's column by itself is worth the price of our subscription to The Nation. Which is why I tell Beanie that when she grows up, she could do a lot worse than finding a partner who is a lot like her daddy - and why I want to raise Bubbie to be that kind of man. In her most recent column, Katha takes on the latent (and sometimes overt) hostility to women and girls in current media coverage on the so-called end of men.

Ooh, look! Goodies for feminist mothers or mothering feminists, whichever we choose to refer to ourselves. I kind of regard this like a box of chocolate truffles - I am thinking about each title and which one to sample...

free range kids published an interesting post on the prevalence of the sand table in pre-school America. As an anthropologist, I appreciate the material culture approach that is demonstrated here - take an object that we might take for granted in the pre school classroom, consider its history, and uncover the ideas and practices that we rarely make explicit.

Finally, here is proof again that the fake news is better at telling us what really is going on, from America's finest new source. Sitting here at my new iMac, all I can say is that I believe, I believe, I believe... Sucker.

On the bright side

I have been blogging much too seriously as of late. Here is a follow-up to my post from yesterday, an idea whose time might have come, as reported in the nation's finest news source back in March. I still snortle whenever I happen to think about it.

2 jobs + 2 kids = 2 much

Every night, after the kids have been tucked in, StraightMan and I give each other winks and nods and nudges - from across our adjacent desks in our home office, i.e., the back area of our living room, which is blocked against children by a couch and a baby gate, and where we dig in the trenches of Higher Ed, reading, grading, answering e-mail, and preparing PowerPoint slides.

Not romantic, but I have to say, rather comfortable and companion-ly.

Last night, there erupted much guffawing over this story in America's finest news source.

I am trying to decide whether or not I am "in" on the joke or if the joke is on me. Which seems to be a common thread in this blog b/c it seems to be the warp and woof* of my life.

*That is a shout out to my fiber crafting friends who are reading this occasionally. See? I get your images and metaphors.