Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Saturday, January 31, 2009 Less Is Less One of the effects of this craphole economy that gets on my nerves is how it's quietly Sovietizing the contents of our pantries. I don't mean Soviet in the political sense, but when you take the wrapper off a "chocolate chip" granola bar and it looks like something pressed together from the bottom of a hamster's cage -- complete with all of two "chocolate chips" the size of you-know-what -- it's a little tough not to flash back to the food stories that came from behind the Iron Curtain back in the day. Okay, obviously I'm trivializing the hardships that people went through in that place and that time. But hey, that's what I do. After all, have you bought a container of hummus lately? I was enjoying some last week, until somehow, about halfway through it, I'd already hit the bottom. I flipped it over and saw that the disk-shaped container, a little bigger than a hockey puck, had a big divot in the bottom of the package that would have almost accommodated another hockey puck. It wasn't so much a disk of hummus as a ring. Once you notice it in one product, you start to notice it elsewhere. Like how a 12-ounce jar of peanut butter is suddenly 11.3 ounces, probably due to the fact that the bottom of the jar is as concave as the dish at Aricebo. Or the fact that a Hershey bar, once a hearty slab of decadence, is now thin enough to get swallowed by an ATM. And that's just the stuff that's physically smaller. There's no way of telling how much of what we used to buy in a box of food has been replaced by air and melamine and salmonella germs. I think it started last summer, when four-dollar gas was affecting everyone's supply chain. One could look at the distinctive narrow lettering in the corner of the package and see that the nice round numbers between "NT WT" and "OZ" had grown a couple of decimal places. And it's not like anyone was going to announce it with big lettering on their labels: "Same great taste! Same great price! Not as much!" Some might have tried to sell us on the "convenience" of the new packaging, like everyone's been waiting for a jar of cooking oil that you can carry around in your pocket, but for the most part they tried to sneak it past us wherever possible. It hasn't happened to everything, like stuff where everyone knows how much is supposed to be inside, but I suspect it's only a matter of time before we start seeing that a gallon of milk contains 59.543 fluid ounces, or that it takes four one-pound butter packages to make three pounds. I'm sure that won't be the case if the trend ever reverses. One day, huge red-and-yellow letters will be screaming at us from every shelf on every aisle, "NOW 3.8% MORE --FREE!" But now that gas is cheaper, there are other reasons not to restore stuff to its previous amounts. Or cut prices, for that matter. I just don't know what they are. My economics classes were a long time ago, which is probably why I had the harebrained idea that when everyone got poorer, stuff would get cheaper. Do those supply-and-demand curves really only go in one direction? I've been trying to think of a way to make money off this economy for a while now, beyond the obvious bit about how cheap we're getting the units in our 401(k) accounts lately. So far all I've hit on is the idea to hold onto some of these shrunken packages until they become collectors' items, like Depression glass only more cynical. One way or another, those ounces are going to be written in whole numbers again. I just hope they get rounded up instead of down. Otherwise nobody will be able to afford to buy my collectors' items from me anyway. posted by M. Giant 9:55 AM 6 comments 6 Comments:Fewer Girl Scout cookies per box, too! What's the world coming to?
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It's not like this is exactly new. I remember (and I'm not OLD old) when a whoppin' big Three Musketeers bar was 5 cents. Now a relatively small TMB is 55 cents.
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I always buy Reynolds Wrap in 200 ft. rolls, which means that I go for great lengths of time between purchases.
By You're not the only one who has noticed that particular phenomenon. The Consumerist blog calls in the "Grocery Shrink-Ray." Suddenly you're getting less product for the same price (or more). Check out a 'gallon' of ice cream the next time you shop. Or OJ, or Pampers, or breakfast cereal... The list goes on.
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http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2008-06-11-shrinking-sizes_N.htm
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I need to have coffee before I read blogs. I just read your first sentence as:
By Tuesday, January 27, 2009 Hacked In You know how every once in a while you realize you've entered a world you never knew existed, even though it's right in your back yard? It's a common theme in the work of recent Newberry winner Neil Gaiman; some humble but secretly noble everyman crosses the wrong garden hedge/subway turnstile/Norse god and finds himself surrounded by exotic wonders and mysterious creatures. Well, that happened to me the other day when I went to the computer supply store. I didn't even know the place existed until a couple of weeks ago when we got a notice in the mail saying they were giving away free flash drives, just for stopping by, no purchase necessary. We didn't especially need a flash drive, but the price was certainly right. It even took me a little circling around to actually locate it. And then when I went in, I did not get the place at all. I used to be in a band with a software engineer. A guy who, while not part any kind of 733+ h4x0r subculture per se, knew quite a bit about them. And of course I used to watch the Lone Gunmen on The X-Files (though not on their spinoff. There are limits). But I've come to realize that expecting to understand anything from that limited exposure is like watching Shōgun on TV and expecting to be able to learn Japanese. Which I've also done, so I should have known better. But do anyway, I get in there, and this store is huge. It's cavernous. And it's got enough computer components to build your own Matrix. You think I'm exaggerating, but I've never seen so many merchandise racks devoted to nothing but cooling fans, and that was only scratching the surface. And then there was the "home entertainment" section, with all the giant screens showing movies, but then a closer look revealed that they were in fact computer monitors. Obviously finding a tiny little thing like a flash drive in this maze of technology beyond my ken was going to be a challenge, so I flagged down one of the earnest tie-wearing dudes, who directed me to the cash registers. This is where I started to get worried, because the line for the registers was two dozen deep, and I had a four-year-old with me. You know that stereotype about how computer nerds never leave the house? Well, they do. They all do. And they were all in line ahead of me. Which wouldn't have made me nervous, except that from the back of the line -- and the middle of the line, and almost the very front of the line -- I couldn't see at all where these flash drives were meant to be. I was just taking it on faith that they were there, and if I got to the front of the line and turned out to be wrong, I would have wasted a great deal of time and there would have been a lot of irate people ready to flame me in terms I wouldn't even understand. With only five people working registers, M. Edium and I had considerable leisure to peruse what passes for impulse buys for this market. Stuff like DVDs. A mind-boggling assortment of caffeinated beverages (why can't they just sleep?). A rack of t-shirts bearing clever legends like "I VOID WARRANTIES." It was hard not to engage in a little amateur anthropology. Quietly, to myself, of course. Eventually, when the line snaked around the last corner, I spotted the rack of bins that held the flash drives, snatched up the one described as free in the mailing, and waited for the next register. Where a guy in a bowl haircut rang up the cash-free transaction by entering my street address from the mailing, and my e-mail address from my mouth. Obviously I gave him the address for my spam-buffer account, but I'm sure it's still enough for these geniuses to get into my computer and steal my bank accounts next time I sign into it. Which is why I haven't. So the flash drive was free, but at what cost? posted by M. Giant 9:30 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:733+ ?
By ^ LEET. Computer nerd speak, sort of like LOL Cat language.
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Hey, don't knock the need for multiple caffinated products. When you're raiding for three hours and you have to wait for the boss you're on to spawn again so you can make 'just one more attempt', you need the Penguin caffinated mints because more Bawls is just going to make you have to take a bio in the middle of the fight and then there's a wipe and it's all your fault and Vent goes crazy with everyone cursing you...
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I'm married to one of the nerd guys (he actually has an MS in CS) and I think I need to buy him the "I Void Warranties" T-shirt for his upcoming b-day.
By Saturday, January 24, 2009 Dished Out I'm not sure exactly how old our dishwasher is. I do know that it's less than 16 years old, because we moved into this house in 1993 and replaced the existing one some time after that. I also know it's more than 12 years old, because otherwise I don't know if I can justify buying a new one yet. But as of this evening, I'm afraid that's what's going to have to happen. We've been putting up with this dishwasher more than we've been enjoying it for the last few years. When my dad and I installed it, we never did get it in quite straight, so it's always been at a bit of an angle. It goes through erratic phases where it leaks water onto the kitchen floor, and the only way to predict whether it will or won't in a given load is by checking to see whether we've remembered to put a towel under the door(if we didn't, it will). It's been through three door springs. I've never been able to shake the suspicion that it's somehow leaking water into our subfloor behind the access panel. And the metal brackets holding it in place under the counter succumbed to metal fatigue long ago, so the only thing holding it in place is inertia, which means it tilts alarmingly forward whenever we open it and the bottom dish rack would crash into the center island if we let it. But you didn't come here to read my Craigslist posting for it. But as much as I hate the thing, at least it managed to continue living up to its core competency, that is to say, washing dishes (save the occasional archipelago of crud inside the odd pint glass now and then). But now it's not even doing that any more. Tonight, when I started it, I heard it fill up with water as usual. And then it emitted this loud, electrical buzz and went silent. I went to investigate. A couple of the setting buttons on the front were incompletely pressed, probably because M. Edium sometimes likes to pretend the dishwasher door is the tailgate on WALL-E's truck. So I returned them to valid settings and started the machine again. Nothing, except more sullen silence punctuated by that occasional angry buzz that made the lights in the house dim. I was hoping that if I let it cycle through that way, it would correct itself and run properly after that, but it's still too pissed at me. Imagine that. It. Is pissed. At me. So now I'm writing this entry as a way of putting off the decision as to whether I should crack it open and see what's what, or start shopping for a new appliance (installed this time, naturally). Either way, I've still got a mess to deal with: two racks of dirty dishes, plus the ones that have accumulated in the sink, plus all the water that's standing in the bottom of the tub. That's the trouble with having a dishwasher break down; it never happens at a convenient point in its cycle. Nobody ever finished unloading the clean dishes and putting them away, only to have their dishwasher then tell them, "Oh, by the way? That was my last load. You should probably make other arrangements going forward." No, you're always left with whatever mess the dishes where in when the machine crapped out on you. Either way, though, it's looking like we're going to be washing our dishes by hand for at least the next few days. And this when Trash is about to start teaching her university classes at night, and when I'm writing two recaps a week (soon to be three). If this is just a temporary strike by our dishwasher to make us appreciate it more, I find the timing quite cynical. Just what I needed: another reason to hate it. posted by M. Giant 8:44 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:Do yourself a favor - go as soon as you can and replace it. Our dishwasher died just before Christmas (luckily, we weren't entertaining this year), and the longer my husband dinked around trying to fix our 9-year-old dishwasher, after I had already asked him to please give it up for dead, the more irritating it got. Your dishwasher sounds like it would need repairs that cost at least something close to a new one, and parts for one that old would be pretty hard to come by. While washing dishes by hand is not the end of the world, when you're a busy family not used to having to do it, it will play merry hob with your schedules and lives.
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It's time M.Edium started earning his keep. No more free rides, little guy...
By Go to the local appliance store and get the new one ASAP. You'll all be happier, incl. the installation guy. See the dishwasher is just trying to do its part to help you stimulate the economy!
By Wednesday, January 21, 2009 I Want Candy One of the things Trash and I have always done when we travel -- dating all the way back to the road trip out west the first year we were married -- is try out new candies. At a gas station somewhere in eastern Montana one morning in 1992, we picked up something I remember very little about. Just that it had a brown wrapper with old-fashioned white lettering, and that it was very nearly the last thing we ate until we reached Billings that evening. That was the trip when we learned that just because a town is on the map, it doesn't necessarily mean you can get lunch there. Despite having a packed meeting schedule during her trip to Savannah last week, Trash somehow found time to uphold that tradition. She found a little candy store on the riverfront and picked up a few treats to bring home for us. They included a couple of rolls of Bottle Caps, which I love but can never find at any of the places we shop here in town; a sheet of those little candy buttons, which she thought M. Edium might like (he didn't); some Charleston Chew (which didn't make it home for some reason, probably because it didn't want to venture this far from Charleston); and something called Razzles. My first mistake was reading the package. It looked like it came in fun flavors, like strawberry banana and pineapple and tropical punch. So far so good. Looked like a "tropical" pack. But the label also read, "First it's candy -- then it's gum!" Hmm. Intriguing. Too bad I don't like gum. Okay, that's not true. I like the first ten seconds of gum, but then I always forget to spit it out and four hours later I wonder why I'm still masticating an eraser. But I was willing to give this a try, for several obvious reasons, one of which was that I'd already eaten all the Bottle Caps. Razzles turned out to be colorful little discs, about the size of large vitamins, but with the consistency of a tiny little tea-light candle. I popped one. Almost immediately, I realized that the tagline on the front of the package must have been heavily edited for length. A more accurate description would have been, "First it's bad candy -- then it's this disgusting dry pulp -- then it's an insultingly tiny atom of gum!" But maybe then there wouldn't have been room to list all the flavors. Later, I said to Trash, "It was so sweet of you to pick these up for me. With everything else you had going on, you still remembered that I like to try new candies from different places. Thank you for being so thoughtful. These are vile." If there had been any danger of that comment starting an argument, it vanished after she tried one and had to agree with me. Although she thought they were worse than I did. "I tried not chewing one to see if I could prolong the candy phase," I told her. "Maybe skip the pulp phase and the gum phase and go right to the gone phase." "How did that work out?" "I just had bad candy in my mouth for a long time." It was true. Whatever compound it is in Razzles that reacts to human drool and releases the flavor was completely protected by the paraffin-wax coating you have to bite through in order to release it. I could have tried sucking on it like a lemon drop, but it would still be exactly the same size on the day I died. Probably from choking on it. "Maybe if I try three of the same flavor at the same time they'll be better," I said hopefully, and dug three of the scab-colored ones out of the packet (bypassing a couple of pus-colored ones and booger-colored ones). But about the best thing I can say about that experience is that when it was over, there were three fewer of them left to eat. This morning, M. Edium came into our room and curiously picked up the open package. The remainder of its contents clattered onto the floor. "Uh-oh," he said remorsefully. "Oh, don't worry about it!" we assured him. We even gave him extra kisses for helping us pick them up and throw them away. But in the long run, there's really no such thing as bad candy. When it's good, it's really good, and when it's bad, it's still good for a blog entry. posted by M. Giant 7:47 PM 11 comments 11 Comments:My husband gets Razzles every time we go to a Cracker Barrel! He loves them! I, on the other hand, agree with you! So I get sour balls... From Cracker Barrell in case that wasn't clear...
By I wonder if the Montana candy may have been a "cow tail". It was a sort of green apple flavor mash wrapped in a soft, grainy-ish type of caramel....something. I haven't seen them outside the Mountain West region. But I can't imaging them being all too isolated. They were a staple of my childhood.
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The guitarist in my old band was a candy connoisseur. When we went to Europe, he was in heaven with all the flavors he hadn't experienced. He only got burned a couple of times, but it was really funny watching him go ballistic and then be surly for a few hours. I'll have to see if he's tried Razzles. I know I have. I should have warned you...
By I'm a candyfreak of long standing & I have a rock hard spot in my heart for Razzles. They are revolting. They appeared too frequently in my childhood, and I now physically back away from them in the candy store. I always thought that they were SweeTarts wannabes that failed abominably.
By I like how you didn't give up no matter how bad it got. "One was bad? Better try three! How about just sucking on it? What if we baked it into a souffle?"
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Chicago to New Orleans and only ONE gas station had Bottle Caps. It is a travesty that they are not more readily available.
By When I was a kid my friends and I would buy candy on the way home from school at the convenience store. Since my mom forbade me to have gum (got it in my hair or something once), I was intrigued by the Razzles. I think I put the whole bag in my mouth because I was so excited. Then I stayed home sick the next day. Those things are nasty!
By Trash went to River Street Sweets, I'm guessing, and if she didn't bring you back any pralines, you should make her go back and get you some. Because they are SO good. And to make up for the gross Razzles.
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You must not have seen that Cinematic Masterpiece "13 Going On 30." If you had, you would know all about Razzles.
By There is such good candy available in Savannah - like the pralines, for instance! And divinity. And the pecan log. Better luck next time.
By The brown wrapper, white lettering candy... was it a Big Hunk? I freakin' love Big Hunks. :)
By Monday, January 19, 2009 Photo 2008 This is a little late, obviously, since it's been over a month since we met the photographer at Bachman's for the annual Christmas photo shoot. This makes four years in a row that we've stuffed him in a red sweater and hauled him to the Newark of Minneapolis so Trash can have photos of him to stick in our Christmas cards. The big change this year is that he's old enough to be willing to smile on command:  Which is why a lot of people got this picture instead:  Even when sitting next to the big guy he had a little trouble keeping it real:  And then there was this:  Of course, he's always happier when someone else is in the picture with him:  Threatening to dunk him in the fountain didn't help:  And we had limited success squeezing him until dimples spontaneously appeared:  But sometimes you catch lightning in a bottle, which is why we keep hiring the same photographer every year:  A much bigger disappointment was the fact that they've redecorated Santa's Workshop and turned it into Santa's House instead. So the big red-and-yellow lollipops we had him photographed with every year are gone. How are we going to know if he's grown?    I guess we'll just have to find this ornament again next year. 
posted by M. Giant
1:17 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:He looks so big!! It is a shame about the lollipops, because it's pretty impressive how they kept shortening the size of the stick every year...
By You should have sent out his prison/passport photo. But only to people you don't want to hear from ever again...
By The "lightning in a bottle" photo is gorgeous indeed, but I have to say, when I got the black-and-white above it in my Christmas card, I also adored and loved it, partly because it is the most perfectly radiant and personality-capturing photo of Trash that I have ever seen or ever will see. Seriously, if you don't know Trash and you wonder what Trash is like? Trash is like that.
By Sunday, January 18, 2009 Trash here, taking over the blog to once again say Happy Birthday to the man I love, admire, and desire most in the world. Thank you for being an amazing husband, dad, and friend. Have a wonderful birthday. (and from M. Edium, who had his own message to share) Happy Birthday Daddy! I love you. Don't forget I want a stuffed snake. Love, M. Edium. posted by M. Giant 5:51 AM 3 comments 3 Comments:
Happy birthday, sir! You always share the best stuff. Thank you so much. I'll continue to enjoy reading what you've got to write.
By Happy birthday, sir. I gotta say, things are good out here, but I miss you guys like crazy.
By Happy Birthday! We are celebrating in Seattle!
By Friday, January 16, 2009 The China Syndrome Most weekdays, Trash leaves the house around 7:30 in the morning, M. Edium likes to wake up and come downstairs to do the goodbye ritual, and then it’s my job to get him dressed, fed, and at school by 8:30. That went a little differently on Wednesday morning. By 7:30 that morning, Trash was in the stratosphere, en route to Savannah via Atlanta for business. M. Edium has known this trip was coming for weeks; almost as long as we have. Before he went to bed on Tuesday night, we told him that we’d wake him up to say goodbye to Mom. Which we did, kind of. But then, when it was time to get up, his first question* was whether he could say goodbye to mom. I had to tell him that he already had, and she had left. And from then on, he was inconsolable. Utterly. “We’re never going to see Mom again!” he wailed tearfully. I assured him that we would, and even though he didn’t seem to believe me, I had several tasks in front of me, not necessarily in this order: 1. Get him out of bed 2. Get him dressed 3. Get him to go potty 4. Get him to eat breakfast 5. Brush his teeth 6. Get him into his winter gear 7. Get him into the car 8. Get him to quit carrying on like the biggest drama queen at any mob funeral ever. Of course he wanted no part of a single one of these. All he wanted to do was lie in bed and be sad. And/or asleep. Whichever. And no way were we going to ever be able to do two of them at a time. What this meant in practical terms was that I dressed him in bed, then calmed him down from the round of hysterics that triggered. Then I got him out of bed, holding him as comfortingly as I could while he indulged in a fresh round of hysterics. I even let him have something for breakfast he never gets to have: “road crackers,” which is what he calls Club crackers because you can line them up like a little road. This morning, though, all he wanted to do was cry over them. I figured that as long as he was sitting there doing nothing, I might as well put his boots on him. Big mistake. The way he saw it, that was trying to do three things on the list at a time, and even though none of them succeeded, just the attempt was enough to send him into a shrieking fit. I never understood why someone would tell a crying kid, “I’ll give you something to cry about.” The kid’s just going to be like, “Uh, I got something already, thanks. Hence the crying.” But I understood it that morning. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to yell at him to knock it off, quit acting like a baby, and get his shit together already. Even when he was raging sweet nothings like “I don’t want to be your kid any more” and “You’re the baddest dad ever” (I actually kind of appreciated that last one), I knew that I just had to keep reminding himself that he was acting like this because he missed his mom, and he felt like he didn’t get to say goodbye. Responding even a fraction in kind would be, at the least, counterproductive. Plus I recalled having read, just a few days ago, the blog of another parent who was filled with regret after having snapped at his or her own child, and how I didn't want to have to deal with that regret myself. Still, it wasn’t easy. He’s had meltdowns before – what kid hasn’t? But this seemingly endless series of them had me at wit’s end, plus his time-consuming histrionics were making me late for work. “Eat your breakfast.” “I have to pee!” “Okay, I’ll take you to the bathroom.” “Don’t put me down!” “Okay, let’s put your coat on.” “But I’m hungry!” “Then eat your breakfast.” BUT I HAVE TO PEEEEEE!!!” Eventually I got him ready and out the door, even though it involved a lot of counting, a lot of Hobson’s choices laid out for him, and, regrettably, a bit of gentle but firm manhandling. And when I dropped him off at school, he did that back-up-and-run-into-me-hug thing he does every once in a while that just thrills me. And it was worth it, because when I picked him up that night, he said, unbidden, “I love you, Dad. I’m sorry we had that fight today.” A fight isn’t what I would have called it, but I’ll take it. Plus, knowing that I could keep calm even during that nightmare gave me the knowledge that I could do it again when the next morning came, and it turned out he was almost as much of a pain in the ass then. * I’m counting this as his first question, even though his actual first question, “Is today a school day?” is one that he asks so often that it hardly counts. posted by M. Giant 6:03 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:I can sympathize, so way to keep your shit together, if only just barely.
By The unsolicited "I'm sorry" from a little kid is second only to the unsolicited "I love you."
By Tuesday, January 13, 2009 Snowed In As Minnesotans, it's supposed to take kind of a lot to snow us in. But Trash and I hit that point the other night. Unfortunately, we hit it about 200 miles from home. Christmas at Trash's mom's house in Iowa had been rescheduled to the weekend after New Year's, and we planned to leave that Friday night. But early in the day we started hearing rumors about ice storms in the area where we were headed. I did some research, but it turns out to be harder than you might think to get a weather forecast for a 260-mile streak of the Midwest. All I could figure out for sure was that the further south we'd go, the higher the chances of snow. Just snow isn't too scary. I've driven through snow before. Plus it's not like they let it build up on the freeways around here. And the highs would all be below freezing almost all the way to my mother-in-law's town, and no thaw means no rain, and no rain means no ice, right? Trash and I spent most of Friday debating whether to go that night or leave early Saturday morning. We were not to know that the correct option was neither. The first flakes started drifting past our headlights near the state line, some time before eight p.m. An hour and a half later, we had gotten about sixty more miles, the two-lane freeway had dwindled to a pair of wagon ruts, intermittent streaks of icy pavement peeking out from under the snow, and the view out the windshield recalled the 1980s Doctor Who title sequence. Occasionally the ground blizzards would let up for a few minutes and I felt safe accelerating to forty miles per hour. The snow that was supposed to pass over central Iowa and move on had decided instead to park there. I suspect it was too charmed by Trash to want to leave. When we reached Ames, which would normally be about an 45 minutes from our destination, we realized that under these conditions, we would still have about two to three hours of driving ahead of us. Assuming we made it at all, of course, which was becoming less certain by the white-knuckled mile. Even though we were pretty motivated to get there, due to the non-refundable hotel reservations that we didn't want to lose, the other thing we didn't want to lose was control of the car, ending up in a ditch in a blizzard in the middle of nowhere. So we got off the freeway to find a hotel. Since the first one we checked was all full up -- not surprising, considering the weather -- I began to worry that we might end up reaching Grandma's house after all, just one hotel at a time. But the second place we checked had a room, and we snatched it up. This marked the first time we ever paid for two hotel rooms for one night. But we figured it was worth it, since by the time I'd unloaded the night's necessities from the car, it had already been buried. And so, almost, had I. When morning came, the weather people on the TV told us to stay home. So, what, were we supposed to say, "Oh, okay, we'll drive back 200 miles to get there." Nothing for it but to press on. The snow had stopped falling, but it was still sitting -- on the car, on the parking lot, on the street, on the freeway -- but at least now we could see more than a few yards ahead of us. We made the 45-minute drive in an hour and a half, and went to check into the hotel we hadn't been able to reach the night before. Here's where it gets cool: they had already cancelled our room for that night, and refunded that night's charge back to our credit card. In fact, they were kind of irritated at the hotel in Ames, another in the same chain, for not calling to let them know we were staying the first night there instead. Best of all, the hotel we stayed at the first night was cheaper than where we stayed the second night. So ultimately, the snowstorm, instead of killing us, ended up saving us some money. I don't think we'll ever be intimidated by foul driving weather again. posted by M. Giant 7:03 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
Hubby and I had an eerily similar experience once that involved driving home to upstate NY from NYC, where we'd spent the weekend visiting his mother. About 30 minutes outside of the city, the weather started getting bad - ice everywhere. I kept suggesting we stop, as we crawled by various exits in northern NJ off of which lived various friends or relations of mine. Hubby thought that things would get better once we were out of NJ and back into the PA/NY area, where folks "knew how to drive in winter weather." See, *that* was the problem in his opinion: the craptastic Jersey drivers.
By Somehow, this is all part of Canada's evil plot to annex Minnesota (and Iowa just for fun). The Canadians work their juju on the storm clouds and eventually, no one can find the states in the upper portion of the US. When the snow melts, everyone talks funny, has cheap medicine, and they all act like it's been their's all along.
By Sunday, January 11, 2009 Over My Head, Part II Thanks to those of you who were actually interested enough to guess. Nobody quite nailed it. The recaps of the four-hour 24 premiere were actually finished over a week ago, thanks to the nice people at Fox sending me an advance screener DVD that I was able to recap during the holidays. And the gunk really isn't hard to clean up. I made a note to wipe it all out of the tub with a paper towel after every session, but even if I hadn't, it would have easily come off once it dried. And even if it hadn't, the stuff is water soluble. Which, when you get right down to it, is kind of how I ended up in this situation in the first place. However, the first anonymous commenter came the closest, and wins the prize of being invited over to finish the project for me. No ID necessary; any old anonymous individual can feel free to stop by any time during business hours. Let me clarify. That roughly circular spot just above the corner of the shower surround is where the end of the tension rod that holds the shower curtain usually goes. The combination of the rubber ends and years of steam exposure took the paint off the wall, so I figured that while I had the curtain down and the tools out, I might as well patch those parts as well, right? Notice how the dry compound almost glows white. Notice how the compound on the ceiling, which had been applied two days before this photo was taken, doesn't. It might just be the difference in contrast between the tan wall and the white ceiling. I hope so. But after cutting a small hole in a piece of white printer paper and peering at both areas through it, I'm not so sure. So now I'm wondering if I was too hasty in getting started on the mudding. Does this mean the stuff on the ceiling isn't drying at all? Is the moisture that caused the damage still coming in from above, maybe from that crack in the wallboard core? Am I going to do the best mudding and sanding job of my life, only to watch it fall down again in six months while I'm washing my hair? Maybe, maybe not. There's only one way to be sure. And that's to finish this up in due time and then sell the house immediately. posted by M. Giant 7:09 PM 6 comments 6 Comments:Judging from the way the ceiling looks, I'd say your patch isn't drying completely, based on my previous patching jobs. Regular drywall/plaster takes a VERY long time to dry out before you can work with it. I found this out during a re-tiling job I did in your shower surround. That was a fun week of keeping water off the wall of my shower. If it isn't greenboard (and, it looks like it isn't), that stuff will take a good long time to dry.
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Okay, make that "my shower surround", not "your shower surround". There. That makes it lots less scary/stalkerish.
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I tried that "hurry up and finish the project, then sell the house ASAP!" thing. It doesn't work in this economy. Refinished original 1925 hardwood floors, new paint, new stormdoor, new copper pipes in upstairs bathroom, new fixtures in upstairs bathroom, new pvc pipes in kitchen, etc., but the house has been on the market for 9 months and nada! Which might not be so bad except that the house is in MI and we are in SC and therefore are paying for two houses right now. It sucks.
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I'm someone who has done a LOT of plastering (100 year old house with a lot of spots of water damaged plaster)
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Find out if a friend or acquaintance has a moisture sensor you can borrow (or you can buy one for about $30)
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We are going through the same thing...in preparation to sell our house (we must be crazy), we decided to "quickly repair" some cracking paint in the bathroom. I chiseled a bit off and a giant chunk fell down right down to the horsehair plaster. Ha.
By Friday, January 09, 2009 Over My Head Well, the good news on the bathroom ceiling repair project is that it wasn't as bad as I thought. But now I'm starting to worry that it might be worse than I thought. I should probably back up. Here's what it looked like before I did anything other than clear out the bathroom and pull down an experimental flap of plaster:  Let's take a closer look at that, shall we?  Okay, now the proper demolition begins:  Oops, sorry. M. Edium, who was supposed to be helping me, instead nabbed the camera and embarked on a lengthy "EVE and shop vac" study. But after he and I finished putty-knifing off all the parts of the ceiling that would come away, here's what I was left with:  Not really all that major. I was expecting to see ceiling joists by the time I got this far, but as you can see, I only had to go up as high as the wallboard core. Which has a couple of cracks, but is otherwise intact. Nothing a quarter-inch of sheetrock compound couldn't cover up, if not patch. And so I began spackling the stuff up there. My plan was to do one thin layer at a time, let it dry completely, and then begin the next. That way, I hoped, the final result would be not only more solid, but smooth enough to minimize sanding when the time came. I haven't had many near-death experiences, but as a person with latent asthma and not-so-latent allergies, a shockingly high percentage of them were a direct result of inhaling plaster dust. Two things I didn't know. The first is that spreading "mud," as they call it, is a lot harder on a ceiling than on a wall. The ergonomics of balancing on the edge of the tub with your head craned back at a ninety-degree angle to see what you're doing are less than ideal. And then you've got this thing called gravity to contend with, and the crap kept falling off into the tub. I decided to quit climbing down to retrieve fallen dollops of goo after…oh, I'd say the first one. And not so much "after" as "during." But I got the first coat done in an hour or so. Observe:  I waited 24 hours for it to set, and then applied the second layer, as seen below:  And here's where it was after three layers.  It's getting there. If you look closely you can see that it's not exactly mirror-smooth, but it's getting to the point where I can almost imagine starting the sanding after another thin coat or two, which will serve primarily to fill in the gouges from my own clumsy putty knife work. But there's one thing that worries me a little. Can you guess what it is? I'll give you a few days. posted by M. Giant 3:32 PM 7 comments 7 Comments:that... you patched over the problem instead of fixing it? ;)
By oh, no, that stuff's not all dried to the bottom of your tub, is it?
By My guess is the way the damage goes right up to the wall :P The little white patch above the tub might be an exploratory into the wall... hope you haven't got wet damage in there, could be a bitch.
By I second Annie. That stuff is on your tub, isn't it?
By That no matter how good a patching job you did, you're still going to have to go back and paint the whole ceiling so that everything really matches?
By I'm going to go with you are worried about how you are going to finish the project while also recapping four hours of 24 in one week.
By You're worried we could have a Cardinal/Raven Super Bowl?
By Tuesday, January 06, 2009 My Year in Movies (2008) Part Two To continue the rundown of what I saw in the theaters this year: Horton Hears a Who The first movie that M. Small saw in the theater all the way through. He was totally engaged, asked lots of questions (quietly, of course), and when the credits rolled he asked me, "why did it stop?" I figured he loved it. Then we went home and he told his mom all about the Wall-E trailer. As of this writing, he has no memory that this movie has ever existed. And in fact my own is somewhat fuzzy. But did you know that Will Arnett has played two animated vultures? That has to be a record. Baby Mama Trash assumed at first that Tina Fey had written this, which she didn't. She still thought Tina Fey had written it when I came home from seeing it. She wouldn't have thought Tina Fey had written it if she had sat through it. Gerd got her money's worth, though. Every time things slowed down, she would just remember the line, "I think she wants me to put olive oil on your taint," and laugh. In fact, that may have gotten her through the whole rest of the year. Iron Man I don't care what anybody says about how "faithful" this movie was to its source material. This was absolutely the worst adaptation of the Pete Townshend musical I could possibly imagine. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull I dragged Dave and Tara to see this with me when they were in town, even though they'd already seen it. I'm glad I did, although it wasn't the life-changing event that the hype had built it up as. I did enjoy the first reel a whole lot, though. That could have been the best twenty-minute short ever. I also love how the ancient stone engineering still operates perfectly. Will my garage door opener still work in twelve hundred years? I think not. WALL-E I love WALL-E. Everybody loves WALL-E. M. Edium loved WALL-E even before it came out. I can't tell you how many times we watched the trailers on the computer. For a while, I think the film's release date, June 27, was fixed more firmly in his mind than December 25. So then we're in the theater, and EVE is blowing shit up, and he wants to go home. Maybe I should have taken him home. I did, with Ratatouille the year before, when he was bored instead of scared. But I know he'll regret it if he doesn't see it through. So we take a few breaks from the mayhem by visiting the hallway. And this ends up being the first movie I've ever seen from two different sides of the auditorium. Also, I don't know how this happened, but between this, Baby Mama, and Be Kind, Rewind, I may have seen more Sigourney Weaver movies this year than ever before. Hancock This had been out for a few weeks, and I went to see it without having read any of the reviews. By the end, I was wishing I had. WALL-E Took M. Edium to see it again one weekend afternoon, this time at a different theater. This time we sat through almost the whole thing, save a few minutes in the first act when EVE's being all destructo-bitch. I got a much clearer sense of the plot this time, and it holds together well. But I've become convinced that the reason Pixar works so hard on its movies is because they know parents are going to have to sit through them five hundred times when they come out on DVD, and will have considerable leisure to pick them apart. Which I will now do. 1) Buy 'N' Large is supposed to be this evil, hyperconsumerist monopoly, but they built a robot that can keep itself running for seven hundred years. Bring on the evil, hyperconsumerist monopolies, please, and do it before my laptop crashes. 2) EVE is pretty and all, but given that her mission is to seek out life on earth, maybe she shouldn't be spending her first couple of days on the job NUKING THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYTHING THAT MOVES. 3) Pixar is generally wise to avoid rendering humans that occupy the Uncanny Valley where Robert Zemeckis's last couple of films have languished, but it kind of stuck out in WALL-E. The film was full of fantastic environments and characters that looked like they'd been photographed the old-fashioned way (freaking Roger Deakins is in the credits, for Chrissakes), but it was all being interacted with by humans who looked like they'd been dropped in from a cartoon. It was like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in reverse. Save Fred Willard's character. of course. By the way, I dressed as him to go trick-or-treating with M. Edium on Halloween, when he wore his WALL-E costume. I had a little homemade BnL pin and everything. Nobody got it. 4) I'm used to movies asking to believe that gravity exists on spaceships, but the bit where the Axiom rotates in deep space and the deck pitches over by thirty degrees, like it's hovering over Omaha? I think it was Marion Zimmer Bradley who said that suspension of disbelief is not the same as hanging it by the neck until dead. I should add that this is true even if it hangs at a thirty-degree angle. M. Edium now owns the DVD, obviously. Two copies, in case we can't find one of them. Lightning McWho? WALL-E Trash and M. Edium both seem convinced that I brought him a third time, but I'm pretty sure I didn't. Our friend Bitter did, though. Tropic Thunder The night I saw Tropic Thunder, It was between this and The Dark Knight, and I decided on this because it was shorter. I kind of regret that, because I still haven't seen The Dark Knight. You know sometimes people get burglarized and they wonder how someone walked off with some of the bigger items? This is a big movie, by any measure, and Robert Downey, Jr. walked off with it. Although Steve Coogan had the best exit from a movie I've seen since Samuel L. Jackson in Deep Blue Sea. And that was it. Things dropped off in the fall, after The Amazing Race started, and then it was the holiday season. But 2009 should be another good year for moviegoing, since I've seen two already and possibly a third tomorrow. More on that a year from today. posted by M. Giant 7:29 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:Gerd and I will go see Dark Knight with you. (Only once though - I'm not a repeat movie guy.)
By Saturday, January 03, 2009 My Year in Movies (2008) Time to go through the movies I saw last year. Again, this covers only films I saw in the theaters, because otherwise these get too long to fit into one entry. Except that this year, Trash pushed me to go a lot more often. Plus I didn't have a book to write, and while I churned out plenty of weecaps for TWoP, I didn't write a full-length recap until July, at which point I had almost forgotten how. So that ended up resulting in a lot more movies. Hence this is going to take more than one entry. I Am Legend In keeping with the first two installments of this annual feature, the first movie I saw this year was actually released late the previous year. I do seem to be drawn to these apocalyptic pieces, don't I? But the thing that stuck with me isn't the scary super-zombies or how cool it would be to have all of Manhattan to yourself, all day, every day. It was signage. In an early scene set in the waist-high grass of Times Square, there was a shot of a billboard that simply featured the Superman logo superimposed over the Batman logo. I want to see that movie. The other thing that jumped out at me was the scene at the gas station, where we learned that as of the end of civilization, gas was nearly seven bucks a gallon. Sure it was a mutated measles virus that brought about the end of the world. Cloverfield Sundry pointed out that between this movie and the previous one, it's clear that people who live in Manhattan need to have some kind of emergency escape plan, and it's obvious that a helicopter isn't going to cut it. I expected that by the end of this year, affluent-yet-paranoid New Yorkers would be investing in home and office escape pods, which upon the first sign of freakazoid epidemic or giant-beastie attack would launch you directly into the stratosphere before parachuting to a soft landing in southern Ohio. But maybe there needs to be a reissue of Deep Impact or something before anyone gets around to inventing one. Anyway, I can buy a group of yuppie pukes venturing through dark subway tunnels in order to get to the not-exactly-girlfriend of one of them. I can buy jumping to the roof of a tipped-over skyscraper from the window of an intact one. I can even buy the invasion of New York City by a gigundous, multi-tentacled beastie that sprinkles somersaulting, man-eating, parasite-injecting spiders the size of a dishwasher everywhere it goes. What I can not and will not buy is the idea that an amateur-shot videotape could ever present a coherent narrative without the person who filmed it sitting next to you explaining the context of everything. Be Kind Rewind It's probably not fair to compare this movie to Crazy People, the 1990 Dudley Moore/Darryl Hannah clunker about an adman who goes a little nuts. But I'm going to anyway. I hated Crazy People, but loved the ads in it. I didn't hate Be Kind Rewind, but without all the "sweding," I probably would have. Jack Black wasn't as exhausting as usual, and Mos Def's underacting serves him much better here than in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but there was too much "behind the nonexistent scenes" story and not enough fucking around with cheap remakes of famous movies. Gondry was wise to turn down the volume for the hokey ending, even if the decision did leave some questions unanswered. Top of my list: community support or no, how is Mr. Fletcher going to cover the multibillion-dollar copyright fines he owes when he's serving 63,000 years in prison? Plus Linda totally busted on me for being amused by the Get Smart trailer. What can I say, I'm conditioned to laugh at Steve Carrell without even thinking now. More in a few days, when things will take a decidedly parental turn. posted by M. Giant 8:10 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:It feels like Be Kind, Rewind came out 3 years ago, not just last year. I watched it on an airplane this summer and I had the same exact opinion of it as you do - "Meh, Mos Def was ok; I don't get how that old man is off the hook now; at least I didn't want to kick Jack Black in the junk."
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