Welcome to toast & cereal

Remodeling update

It's been a while, so I'll begin from the beginning: we cut a hole in our living room wall, and it turned out there was a door there when the house was built. We are putting French doors in.

We set about relieving the walls in the living room, dining room, and new office of their ghastly texture. This usually takes about 3 coats of drywall mud, and a coat of primer. The unicorn wallpaper border came down. The badly-hung molding came down. The one radiused corner became a square corner. We're now on our last room.

After determining that our 107-year-old fir floors would best serve as a sub-floor rather than a top-floor, we bought some sustainably harvested eucalyptus flooring.  The boards are now acclimating to our house after making the long flight from Argentina.

More photos of the remodel are in my photo album, along with photos of the house when we bought it. Please tell us how different it looks now. Please.

If it weren't for me coercing Joe into working in the yard this weekend instead of working on the inside of the house, we might be very close to installing the floors. But, I am very convincing and the weather was beautiful. My next update will cover the progress in the yard.

Cutting hole in Living Room to New Office

Oldest "new" truck ever purchased by us

We bought a 1978 Chevy Scottsdale truck last week. Though it is old, it loses the "first-born vehicle either of us have owned" contest to the 1974 Pontiac Ventura Joe owned in high school. And though its interior is red, it loses the "vehicle with the reddest interior we've owned" contest to our first Ford Ranger, dubbed "the womb" for its hue. But plenty of superlatives still apply. Oldest vehicle we've ever owned (calculated by age at time of purchase), first vehicle with only AM radio we've ever owned, only vehicle we've owned with desireable hubcaps.

This means the black Ford Ranger will go away (anyone want to buy it?), and M-Space will save hundreds of dollars a year in batch-delivery fees because Joe will be able to pick up the batch in the truck. (Batch is raw glass).

It could be said that I am being influenced by the new Discovery channel miniseries, Planet Earth, in which narrator Sigourney Weaver never misses a chance for a superlative. The ocean is "by far the largest habitat on our planet," the desert is "the most varied of our planet's ecosystems," the series features the "first-ever footage of a snow leopard hunt" and the first complete African wild dog hunt captured on film, proving that the Discovery channel has "more money than Warren Buffet had before he gave it all to that charity that helps HIV-infected children in the most varied of our planet's ecosystems."

We watched the premiere last night, and it's already affected our lives in profound ways. While making tonight's dinner, I declared our garlic "the oldest garlic ever used in cooking," to which Joe replied, "now captured in heated olive oil for the very first time" in his best Sigourney-ish urgency.

I did learn some things from the series, though. I never knew there were so many animals that could be described as "like a deer, except..." Such as the impala, like a deer except with big twisty horns. Or the ibex, like a deer except more like a goat.

The Jetty

My second post this year on large public artworks, this time about Spiral Jetty, an earthwork created in 1970 by Robert Smithson in the Great Salt Lake. We drove there last weekend with Marc and Shannon, and, though it was partially submerged, it was beautiful.

Here's an image from robertsmithson.com showing the jetty completely above water.

This was probably taken in 2002, when the jetty emerged for the first time in about 20 years, because the rocks are completely covered with salt.

We didn't have a helicopter to take cool overhead photos, but here's a photo from our visit:

We walked the whole length of the spiral, though the water was knee-deep at times. At high noon, the lake was like a giant mirror, its edge disappearing into the sky.

Though it involved lots of driving, and then more driving, and then renting a 4-wheel-drive and driving some more, the trip was definitely worth it. I wish we could go back every year, but who knows when it will be completely underwater?

For more photos, see my photo album. To see the full directions to the jetty, which read like a dangerous poem, see the Dia Center's site. And to hear Marc do a dramatic reading of a portion of the directions while Jess navigates the Ford Explorer, see the video links on my homepage.

Failed ideas for mix tapes

I will not attempt to rival the genius that is tinymixtapes.com, but it is no secret that I like to conceive playlists. Perhaps it is for the best that few of them become actual compilation cds.

Lately, these ideas have come to me:

Songs from debut albums that the band later snubbed as not socially conscious enough
Pearl Jam/Black (Ten)
Beastie Boys/Paul Revere (License to Ill)

I was going to also include U2, but Joe said they've always been socially conscious. So then I ran out of ideas.

Songs with key changes
Kenny Rogers/The Gambler
Sahara Hotnights/Who Do You Dance For
Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young/Country Girl

Key changes are fun, especially in these two songs (can you hit the right note when singing along with Kenny on the line, "Every gambler knows/that the secret to survivin'...".? But then, there are a whole lot of songs out there with key changes. And Country Girl is really three songs put together, so it might not count.

Gerund alert

I was aware that the noun "calendar" had become a verb, as in, "I'll calender that lunch date right away, Bob." I've even seen it in past tense, as in "Shelly, I thought you calendared that lunch date yesterday!" (Note the gender-specific roles I'm suggesting with my manager and and admin characters).

But I didn't know until today that this nascent verb could also take the form of a gerund, until I received a communique from my IT department, quoted here (italics are mine): "If you're running a Mac, you will eventually have to update your machine. However, if you are running calendaring, please do not update it at this time. If you are not using any calendaring on your computer, please contact us and we can send you a link to the updates."

I am at once amused by its efficiency and alarmed by its IT-tinged pompousness. Perhaps William Safire has already addressed this; I will look. In the meantime, I challenge my readers to create another sentence that pairs two gerunds in a row, as the above one does.

Oscar questions

Some questions that occured to me while watching the Oscars, some of them rhetorical:
Can Clint Eastwood really not only understand Italian but interpret spoken Italian on the spot?
Could the Dreamgirls songs be any more annoying?
Who is cuter: Martin Scorsese or Ennio Morricone?
Or Forest Whittaker?

A few lists

Towns where Shannon's relatives live that start with the letter "f":
Frostproof, FL
Fuquay-Varina, NC

Some of my favorite Onion headlines:
Local Synagogue to Feature Jews, Prayer
WebMD Doesn't Know How to Tell You This
Guy 'Just Giving You A Hard Time' Truly Despises You

Things left to do on our living room remodel:
Cut hole in wall between living room and bedroom; install French doors
Install new eucalyptus flooring if it ever arrives in this country

People I know who don't like grapefruit:
Bob Miller

George

In honor of President's Day, I would like to share with you this amazing video tribute to George Washington's prowess, both on the battlefield and in the president's seat. Watch it with the sound turned up, but not at work.

Valentine's Day

Some advice: If you're making some potato-bread dough, and it is Valentine's Day, and you are saving half of the dough for cooking the next day because you went to yoga and didn't get home until 7 and don't want to stay up till 2am baking bread, then don't wrap that bread dough in wax paper before you put it in the refrigerator. Because when you take it out two days later, the wax paper will have completly integrated itself into the bread dough. And you will spend half an hour trying to carve it off. But the bread will still taste good because it is homemade.

But we had a very lovely Valentine's Day. The menu included oolong-crusted scallops and jasmine tea rice (both recipes from NYT), some asparagus, Sofia champagne, and prugne addormentate, aka sleeping plums, which pairs half of the aforementioned potato-bread dough with plums, brown sugar, heavy cream, and liquor to make a sort of heavenly yeasted cake. Oh, and we replaced the orange juice in the sauce for the scallops with blood-orange juice, making the whole dish a gorgeous opaque pink. How lovely!