a previous mink for previous rants

Previous Mutterings:

Quote of the day: The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society--in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence--that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is "society" which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word "society." by Albert Einstein, voted TIME's "Person of the Century." The quote was made in 1949.

I've been sick, and so took some time off from this page. I'm recovered, and certainly intend to make some major improvements to this thing (not the LEAST of which is the addition of dates and splitting things up) but it will probably not happen until right after New Year since I will be a bit... busy until then. In fact, I will not be at work until December 30, whereupon I will come in for the day merely to turn the machines off, so this page won't even be up from the 30th to the 4th. We get the 31st and the 3rd off, so I will come in and turn the machines on on the 4th. We're a bit antsy about possible power surges, but other than that, stuff's good to go for Y2K.

It was 3 F and clear this morning. The high today hit a whopping 16F, and there is still the faintest remnant of the dusting of snow we got earlier in the week. Once again, sky is blue, sun reflecting off the silver radio tower out my window, grey smudge of trees in the distance against the sky, it's a great day.

December 9th I spoke at a forum about the WTO in the Allen Hall South Rec Room. It was a good forum. People who went to Seattle brought all sorts of pictures and journals and poetry and performance back from the event, and spoke about their experiences.

I managed to drop around $150 in books at the Faculty Staff night at the Illini Union Bookstore December 1 and 2. During those days, after 5 PM everything was 25% off if you just show your staff ID card, and they have Santa there, and free cookies, and carolers, and pretty much every year I just walk out with as many books as I can carry. I got some O'Reilly books and some Bill Bryson books and Darwin's Radio and a lot of Eric Hobsbawm and a book on gardening, and... *ahhhh* I wanted to get "A people's history of the United States" by Howard Zinn but someone else beat me to it. Dang. I guess I'll just have to keep checking that one out of the library. I think there's me and one other guy in town that keep trading this book back and forth. But wow, nothing beats having good books to read and they're yours so you can highlight the important parts and spend lots and lots of really good time studying all kinds of stuff and then other people read the same books and you can talk about it over coffee...

Last night I had spaghetti at Ben and Bill's house (one block from me) for Aunt Barbara's birthday, and then we went to Les' Lounge and sat around talking while consuming various intoxicating substances. It's not far from my house (pretty much nothing I ever do is far from my house) so we walked there, and on the way Bill needed money so we walked through the drive up ATM at Busey Bank since their lobby is closed. It's always interesting doing that, standing in line with a bunch of cars.

Tonight I am going to Aunt Barbara's house for a potluck and reading party. I gotta dig through my old poems and find something to bring. Or maybe I'll write a new one.

It turns out two of my friends got arrested in Seattle. I don't know much more than that at the moment.

I had a fabulous 4-day weekend a week back on Nov. 19-22, and just now another fabulous 4-day weekend for Thanksgiving this Nov. 25-28. Both were absolutely wonderful, and in between I had the great 2-day workweek of Nov. 23-24. Whee. As is currently SOP for this page (and yeah, I intend to overhaul it Any Day Now), I'll start with the latest first.

Thursday (Thanksgiving day) I spent mainly cooking. In particular, I made two cheesecakes. It was a rather cloudy day without anyone around, and I had some fun listening to old tapes of Jeff and Jer from way back, and just puttering around in the kitchen. I'd slept late, and cleaned the house beforehand, so things were nice. I then went to dinner at my friend Mark's friend's house. Only peeve was that I managed to break my glasses Wednesday night, so I was pretty much visually impaired for much of the weekend. I brought a cheesecake to dinner. We didn't have turkey, we had steaks, but man, they were some good steaks. The other three days of the weekend I pretty much spent gardening. Yep, I spent upwards of 4 hours each day putting in bulbs. The highs were in the upper 40's to low 50's, quite nice, and things were clear. It takes quite a bit of time and effort to put bulbs in. I now have some nice blisters on my hands... but there should be a nice crop of flowers in the spring, provided of course that the squirrels don't eat the bulbs first. They did manage to dig up a few bulbs because I didn't do the deep watering until the last day (not wanting to make it harder to dig) and so they'd come upon a nice recently dug patch of earth, and think "hey, woah, I can get some easy pickin's here" and dig stuff up. They didn't take all they dug, so I could replant... anyways I put in tons and tons of stuff in a more or less random arrangement (it's kinda hard to plan, really, when there's NOTHING but dirt to look at!) so it should be cool. Hopefully. Generally, I'd wake up latish (around 8:30), lounge around, go to coffee, and then come home around noon and plant until 5, when the sun set. I managed to plant everything except some grape hyacinths and some large lilies, but I can maybe pop those in next weekend if the ground isn't frozen on those days (it's frozen this morning). The final thing to do after that is to spread bark chips and leaves around for mulching. That too can happen next weekend. It feels good to be done with the gardening though (done enough, anyway - if I can't get the final few plants in, so be it) and able to mentally switch into winter mode.

Speaking of switching into winter mode, this Friday was of course the traditional biggest shopping day of the year. I don't do that kinda thing generally but I ended up going to the mall to get my glasses repaired on Saturday and saw the throngs. Yow. Talk about your insanity. But, I could finally go out shopping and not be peeved at hearing the Xmas music. To me, Xmas music just means winter, and I actually like to hear it when it's getting cold out. Actually, I most prefer the non-Xmas but winter songs (peeve there is, I hate how they stop playing those the 26th of December!!) but there are some actual classical type songs I like too. I just hate hearing them in October, because for me it's very much a winter thing. October is time for fall songs. I checked out the sweater situation for possible deals come New Year time. I also realized that this is the time of year for buying little white lights, which I want to have put up all around the ceiling inside my Most Favorite Room (the room on the front of the house with all the windows) all year round for some nice diffuse happy lights at night. Time to go to the hardware store.

Finally last night (Sunday night) I went to the best concert I've seen in a long time - The Prince Myshkins (that's Rick Burkhardt, Andy Gourevich<??>, and Paul Kotheimer) at the Red Herring. It was a benefit for those going out to Seattle to agitate against the WTO, and most of the songs were political or topical in one way or another... I just loved it. All of a sudden they were up there singing a song called "Heteros in Hillcrest" about straight people who are WAY too worried about "blending in" while walking around Hillcrest, in San Diego. Frequent readers of this page might recall that I used to live in Hillcrest, so I knew of what this song speaks and found it simply hilarious. My other absolute favorite was a take off of Frank Sinatra entitled "Their Way". Oh, this was way, way, WAY good, talking about bending over and "doing it their way..." through higher education, becoming a full professor and making others do the same... particularly all the people in the audience who either are in graduate school or have ever been were just laughing hysterically, it was SUCH a great song. Ah, great evening, I'm very glad I didn't miss out on that!

Now on to the weekend of Nov. 19-22. I went to Santa Cruz for a PeeveFest. We were going to stay in Palo Alto but some of the people we were visiting were ill, and others simply cheesed, so we changed plans, rented a car (for less than the Motel 6 in Palo Alto charges, lemme tell ya) and stayed at Larry's house in the Santa Cruz mountains, in Felton, CA in particular. He lives on Highway 9. It was awesome, I saw the biggest trees I've ever seen in my life. Lots of these trees were clearcut in the 1850's, but they didn't die. Instead, their roots sprouted up new trees, so that now there's an old moss covered stump surrounded by a perfect ring of trees and each tree is higher than any tree I've ever seen. Larry has one of these wondrous natural cathedral room things in his back yard, and it has a fireplace built into it, overlooking the river. Amazing. But then we went to Big Basin and saw trees that had never been cut. I've never seen trees like these, I couldn't keep my eyes off them or my mouth closed, they were just so so so great. Wow. There is one that's still living but the inside is rotted out, and I could go in there, and the area inside it was as big as my old apartment!!! It's one of those things that makes me feel very small, sort of scary but wonderful at the same time. That tree had a hole in the side too and I stuck my head through the hole and took a picture, that should be scanned soon. We also went wine tasting at the Bonny Doon Vineyard and got some nice wines there. I got a t-shirt too from Larry who'd somehow gotten a small size by accident at some point. But perhaps the coolest thing was a visit to Boomeria where we saw the organ played, shared some wine with the King, and got the grand tour. Larry was a student of Boom's in high school. We then went to downtown Santa Cruz too. All in all, a great weekend.

November 13th weekend I gave a speech about the WTO and bought some dirt to fill in the holes left from when I removed the bricks in my driveway bordering the house last weekend and drove the rebar in. I had yesterday afternoon off, actually, to go fill in the dirt and rake leaves out of my front raised garden bed. That pretty much took up all the day time, so I still have to do the bulbs. Maybe Thursday afternoon...

Speaking of leaf litter... I've been going out and doing reading, etc and meetings on the weekend, plus just general slacking and some painting so I'd not done anything about the leaves aside from just sweep the ones off the stoop down into a huge pile next to the stoop. Well, my neighbor has been raking up and removing the ones that are on the grass, including the parkway in front of my house (which doesn't even touch his yard). I'd been feeling a bit guilty about this, geez, I'm some sorta yardwork slacker. Well, I ran into him at lunch the other day and he apologized to ME for "stealing all your leaves" to donate to our other neighbor for use in some large mulching project he was working on. Hehehe. Heavens. Like, dude, you want the ones on the roof? They're FREE! How 'bout the ones in the gutters? No charge! The alley? They're YOURS, man! At any rate, at least I don't have to bag them even if I do have to rake some, because we have a huge compost pile we all share, so they just gotta be swept into a box and then the box dumped. Cheaper and easier for all concerned.

I should be taking out some of the bricks in the driveway so that I can put in some bulbs next to the house on the paved side. However, doing this requires me to drive rebar down next to the bricks I'm leaving in (aside from the ones in back where I'll likely be removing more bricks) which means sledgehammer hefting. That definitely sounds like a two-person job, not to mention the fact that I have to borrow the hammer.

Though a bit warmer, today is also an Akibare Day, my favorite thing ever ever. In particular the ginkgo trees outside the building are at their most bright bright yellow, and are falling off like rain right now, making a huge drift of bright pure yellow underneath the trees and on the sidewalk. I picked up a few choice ones and pressed them in a book, we'll see how that turns out. I think this weekend I might make a leaf waxed paper depending on what's available. Due to the office reorganization I can see these from the window! Of course, the sad part is that we're back on CST which means it will be pitch black by the time I leave work. Yesterday was finally time for double pants for the first time this season, and also my hat. Today I didn't need those things, however.

Monday I finally got to do the big huge office rearrangement. Our new employee Ben moved into my office, and this was excuse to get rid of unused furniture (to the tune of a huge black metal bookcase and two insanely heavy file cabinets, which are now in the hallway awaiting removal), use some unused furniture for Ben (namely the big huge desk that had been sitting unused in front of the window, with the espresso machine on it), get rid of tons of plain ol' CRAP (ancient backup tapes for machines which no longer exist - time to reuse those babies!) and generally just clean out the office for the first time in three years. Plus, I've moved my space right next to the window. In the old lame arrangment I was more near the door and there was old unused crap near the window. The way it is now, my writing table (I don't have a regular desk - I have a table for the computer which is really only big enough for the computer and then a table to write on and use as a normal desk, these are set up to make an "L") is immediately under the window, and the computer table is next to that facing the right wall. This means I now turn to the left, AWAY from the door and TOWARDS the window to write or study stuff. This is infinitely better than the old scenario, where my writing desk was to my right, between me and the door, meaning that all my papers were viewable by anyone who casually stopped in, and turning to write/read up on the things meant turning away from the window. I'd keep turning around to look out the window and not get any work done. Also I've gotten a nice in/out box, and am using a paper box for files, I went and got some file folders to sort stuff out, so I'm much more organized and there is much less paper on my desk. My desk now seems so... expansive.

This past weekend I finally primed my pantry.

The new Asian Market has finally opened where Pizza World used to be, but I've not gone there yet.

Last weekend I finally fixed my running toilet. As it turns out, the only part that needed fixed was the rubber flapper thingy, which when removed turned out to look remarkably like a Star Trek ship, with the bulbous underside, flatter domed top, and then the two arms that hook it to the post coming off the back like the warp nacelles. So now the Starship Pooperprise is hanging from a kitchen cabinet. The new one cost me a whopping $1.85. Walking through the Toilet Parts section of Menards (euphemistically named something like "bath accessories," naturally) I was amazed at the variety in price of various toilet doodads. Why be satisfied with your standard big black rubber floating bulb thingy when you can have a gen-yoo-wine antiqued copper ribbed-in-a-nice-design floating bulb thingy? Are there really people who don't put covers on their toilet tanks? 'Cuz otherwise, who the hell cares what your toilet parts look like?

Remember my evil landlords? Good ol' First Craptional Real Estate? Regular readers of this *ahem* feature will recall that in January of 1999 the management of all of First National's properties was handed over to Roland Realty. Roland had started handling the maintenance requests shortly before that, and you might recall that in the winter of 1998, I got some nice service for my furnace, which had a bad thermocouple in it. I also found out from Roland that I'd been overcharged for my rent, and other behind-the-scenes annoyances that First National had been getting away with. On the whole though, Roland was handling things much better, and I was able to sublet the place with a minimum of guilt. Unfortunately, it turns out that things started going downhill shortly after I moved out, and Pam (my subleaser) was complaining to me about lack of maintenance again. Well, as of January 2000, Roland is relinquishing its management contract. All of the First National properties will now be managed by Ramshaw-Smith. Ain't landlord roulette FUN? Particularly when you don't even need to move to participate? You might like to read up on the details in today's Daily Illini.

As it turned out, it didn't really rain this weekend... so I wandered around and stuff. I stood and read a book about how people are being forced to be "flexible" and mobile in the 90's so there is a lack of place-rootedness causing truly abysmal architecture, and I got the new David Singer book. I also sat around with Ben and Aunt Barbara, watched Saturday Night Live over beer at Mike's house, and gawked at more extremely overpriced items in the New Yorker ads over at Paul and Rosemary's. There's an ad for some kinda platinum and diamonds necklace for only $14K. Yeah, I know it's platinum and diamonds, but GEEZ, that's a lotta dough! Rosemary pointed out that for $14K to be only one MONTH's income, you'd have to be earning around $170K, which is some seriously posh income, and even THEN, who spends a month's wages on a necklace? It just makes me wonder 'cuz none of the people I know who actually read the New Yorker earn that kinda money. However, we all know that the New Yorker is really aimed at those who want to act like they do, with tips for the "right" way to be, just like those awful "Gear" type 'zines are for people who want to be richly 90's hip. If you really ARE hip/rich, you don't need the pointers. Anyway, I wonder how one goes about deciding between the necklace and the trip around the world by private chartered Concorde? Decisions, decisions...

The leaves are really changing color now. It's a great time to walk all over town and take pictures of leaves and run around and stare at the sky and just generally enjoy akibare time. I'm thinking of maybe taking a day off to do that. I can paint the pantry while the weather is crappy. Hey wait, that sounds like a new proverb. "Remember son, paint the pantry while the weather is crappy." I also need to cook and go to Am-Ko.

The end of the summer was quite dry and so it's not been the best season for leaves, many of them did the "stressed and go straight to brownish muddy yellow" thing, and turned/fell off early, so that there are trees with most of the leaves missing, some not so bright colored ones, and then still some branches with green, but the past two weekends of rain have mitigated some of it. The little maple in the parkway in front of my house has turned a spectacular red, though much of the upper branches are now bare. The big maple across the street is now going a wonderful yellow, with the the blending to orange/red at the tips, that is my favorite, and I have a full view of it right outside my window.

Bulbs have arrived! I've not started planting yet, though. I need to get something to dig the holes, and I'll also have to remove the two rows of bricks on the side of the house and rake leaves out of the raised bed to get the planting space.

This weekend I finally MOVED BACK INTO THE KITCHEN!!! The fridge is back in the kitchen, the table and stove in place, the shelf up. I need to paint parts of the trim now. I also need to mount the little light under the shelf above the sink. This light has peevesome packaging. In particular, one of the little slots where you mount the thing to the wall has an annoying piece of plastic in it which apparently served only to hold the oh-so-precious piece of advertising laden flimsy cardboard packaging on the upper half, so that the light could hang from there (aren't we *ingenious*??) sticking out the bottom half like some kinda magic. Heh. Well, I can't get this damn thing out of the hole. It's not even an important part of the product! Argh.

I also went to the movies and saw "The Sixth Sense" this weekend. It was a good film, I'd recommend it. I will also be sleepin' with the light ON.

Last weekend I FINALLY PAINTED MY KITCHEN!!! Woo hoo! Yes, it is now a really awesome shade of blue purple. Ahhh. It looks just like I thought it would. There are a few places I should really touch up one final time (there are a solid two coats on already, but it was late when I finished, and the paint was drying out a bit, so in a few places the second coat isn't really thick enough). I also haven't painted the pantry at all, and I will need to paint parts of the trim in the kitchen too, but the main thing is, with this painting, I can finally move back into my kitchen!!! Yes, I can put the damn appliances back next to the walls where they belong, my stove won't be doing the tango with the table in the middle of the room, my fridge won't be in the dining room, I can put my dishes back... The rest of the work, while still somewhat of a pain in the ass, can be done with all my stuff put away in its normal places. It's not such the huge upheaval.

Painting took a good long time. I started it at 2:30 yesterday afternoon and I wasn't done until 11:30 PM. Insane. The main peeve was painting around all the cabinets and switches and the window on the one wall with cabinets. Painting around the ceiling trim, baseboards and seams was rather time consuming too.

I'm really happy with the kitchen... it's sorta neat, that I had this idea of how it would be cool to have the kitchen being, this longing for a certain kitchen, and I was able to make it like that in real life. I've never gotten to essentially make art out of my own living space before, since I've always lived in apartments.

Peeve: In order to paint the closet door, I removed the little handle with latch that was on it. It's a 1940's cabinet handle (my kitchen is 40's, in general) with a little button in it, you push the button and that pushes a little metal rod which makes the latch holding the door shut move. I had to remove it, since painting around it would have been impossible. Well, I can't seem to get it back on right! I put it on, and the little metal rod wants to go where it shouldn't and make the latch not work. Sigh. It's a matter of finessing it, no doubt... I can make the thing work when it's off the door and I'm just holding it.

The cats have been moved back into their own room, but in order to keep them out of the kitchen I've had to shut them up in there. They are distinctly not pleased with this and have taken to yowling their grievances. I should be able to let them out tonight (until I do the touch up painting, which probably won't happen until at least Wednesday).

Last Saturday was the cmi.picnic! It was spiffy, lots of people, lots of good food. We should be having these more regularly.

Last Wednesday night I went to a United Nations Association forum on the rights of workers in a global economy at the Champaign Public Library.

Thursday was the first day of astronomical autumn - the Autumnal Equinox. If you are near UIUC, you might want to go take a look at Beckhenge at 1 PM. For the benefit of non-locals, Beckhenge is a sculpture in the open space in front of the Beckman Institute and CSRL, the building I work in. When you stand in the open area and face north, Beckman is in front of you and CSRL is to your right. Beckhenge has a spike, and right behind it a globe on a pedestal with a tunnel through it. You can look through the tunnel at the tip of the spike, and right behind the spike, viewed that way, is the north star. At high noon, the shadow of the spike falls directly north (due to the sun being to the south, as Illinois is north of the equator). So why am I telling you all this? Well, the length of the shadow of course depends on the time of the year, as the sun is higher in the sky in summer, and lower in winter. Due north of the spike (where the shadow falls) there are three little "nipples" - little fountains that look like breasts kinda (flattish rounded metal) and water bubbles up from where the nipple would be and runs down the sides. These are placed so that at the winter solstice, the point of the spike shadow ends on the exact center of the nipple closest to the spike, at the summer solstice it points to the farthest nipple, and today, on the autumn equinox, it will point exactly on the center of the middle nipple. Spring equinox too, it points at the middle nipple. You have to go out there to see this at 1 PM, of course, because we're still on CDT (daylight time) and so what's true noon we're calling 1 PM.

I primed the kitchen this past weekend! Woo hoo! It's all whitish now... ready to get the blue on it next Saturday. I also finished taping the other rooms, and then of course regular housework stuff, laundry, cooking the week's lunch, etc.

September 6 was Labor Day, which means cultural summer is now over. Labor Day is the last day for going to the pool, the last "summer picnic" day. Fall picnics just have a different feel to them. Even the late-starting schools are now back in session, and there is a tangible "time to get serious at work" feel to things. The start of September means the start of meteorological autumn too, and by the end of the month the daily highs will only be around 70F. Things are moving in that direction, now the blocks of mid-70s high days seem to have taken over for a while - maybe we're done with 80s. Still, never can tell, sometimes they return later on. The days are definitely shorter now - I stayed at work last night until 7:30 PM, and by 7:00 PM outside was in definite twilight - by the time I left it was full on darkness. Mid-september is where the light change gradient is steepest, after all. The change has been quite noticeable just over this past WEEK! The nights are getting noticeably cooler as a result. Lately we've not had days where the afternoons are hot and humid, but we do get into the low 70's where you don't want to be wearing a sweatshirt out in full sun. But the mornings have required a sweatshirt on the walk in, starting in the 40s F these past few days! At this point I'm looking forward to the cooler weather. I've noticed a few trees with a coupla leaves turning colors, way out on the ends of branches or in more stressed areas, and now leaves that have fallen off of trees are changing color on the ground as they dry out, showing that the chlorophyll is already being pulled back.

I've now started priming the kitchen. I taped it (that alone took a LONG TIME!!) and primed with a brush around all the borders with the ceiling and the floor and the windows and appliances and whatever else. At first I taped all the trim but the trim up by the ceiling, thinking I'd use the straightedge method to do up there, but that requires WAY too much caution, so I went back and taped up there too before I go and put the blue paint on. The extra hour or so it takes to tape up there will more than pay off in the ability to quickly apply the paint.

September 4th was my birthday. I got a new work bag and some very nice comments from people. Saturday was also the first football game of the season, here at home, and believe it or not, Illinois won it 41-3. I spent Saturday going to Carnivale di Teatro in Carle Park and then having homemade veggie pizza at John's house. Monday I went to AFL-CIO Labor Day Picnic and had lots of really good fried chicken.

The weekend before, I also did lots of work on the kitchen, and also worked on the second bedroom, since I've decided to paint that at the same time. I got totally ready to paint then, and then this last weekend (read above) I started priming. Getting ready to prime and paint was itself the majority of the work! I washed the 2nd bedroom with TSP, which actually took quite a while, totally deglossed the kitchen, spot sanded and spackled both the kitchen and the bedroom, and then finally did a final wash of all the walls. This was a good 8 or so hours of work on Sunday (I did in fact slack off totally on Saturday, but geez, it's my BIRTHDAY), and another good 5 or so on Monday, once cleaning time was factored in. Yes, I cleaned. I could do that because I'm now totally, utterly, absolutely, completely DONE with sanding. Egads how I hate sanding. Dust everywhere, in that orange color I never want to see again (at least in dust form), colored boogers, dust in my hair, dust on my glasses, grit on my feet, grit in my clothes, dust on every available surface, having to totally wash everything before I can cook dinner - yow, am I ever happy to be done with THAT. I'd underestimated the time it'd take to finish that, and yeah, it took the whole weekend. But now, I need to mask things, prime, and paint. I've finally gotten to the point where I can put new things UP rather than scrape away at old lameness. I vacuumed totally and even mopped, as the rest of the work shouldn't be making a dust kind of mess. It feels SO good to be done with the dust. So good.

Last weekend was the Urbana Sweetcorn Festival and also WEFT Fest. I did get to some of my home improvement, but also put much of it off. I got the trim back up, in the corner behind the fridge and also along and at the bottom of the doorframe to the living room. I bought all the paint and paint supplies too. So yep, I've picked final colors, both for the kitchen and the pantry room, and I decided while I'm at it to go ahead and paint the currently green room yellow, so I got that paint too. I was a bit nervous about deciding on the blue, and thought maybe it was TOO purple, but when I got the real swatch home (the back of the paint chip, where the guy mixing the paint actually painted some on it) and held it up in the kitchen, it's absolutely perfect. It is going to be WAY awesome. I also found out my kitchen cabinets and sink are from the 40s, since there is an ad for them in a 1942 issue of House Beautiful magazine.

I also got some paint deglosser. This stuff is noxious. Specifically, it's caustic, highly flammable, and poisonous. Think "dip" from Roger Rabbit, and you're there. Great. It says that one must use "chemical resistant gloves" to use it. Now, I have regular all purpose rubber gloves, and I'm hoping those are good enough. The gloves don't have much in the way of documentation, but they do say "for painting, stripping, staining, etc" so I'm thinking they're fine, since it does say "stripping," which is basically what this stuff does. I suppose I'll dip the finger in there before wearing them to see if they get eaten away or not, just to be extra insanely paranoid. Being extra insanely paranoid is my usual modus operandi when it comes to these kinda things. Anyway, the only first aid for getting on your skin is "wash your skin really well three or more times, and dry it off." So it can't be the end of the world.

HugePeeve: I also got some actual paint remover so that I can soak the paint off the long-ago painted over metal handles on the pantry doors. All the rest of the similar handles in the kitchen are bare, so I want these to match. Anyway, this stuff too says "must use chemical resistant gloves." It's also poisonous, deadly, fatal, flammable, evil, etc. Now, you'd think something of that nature would come with the cap sealed on real tight, right? Muahahahaha. NO. The damn cap was loose and it LEAKED right in the BAG, onto the FLOOR. I couldn't believe it! I was able to wipe up the little bit with a a sponge, and it didn't really mess up the floor too much (there's one little duller spot, but you'd only see it if you look - great thing about my new floor is precisely how it HIDES these little things!!), and I even got a bit on myself, washed it off, and have no ill effects. But STILL! Of course, as the stuff leaked out of the can it washed over the side of the can and dissolved the label (since it was sitting like that for some time before I noticed it). Good thing I'd read the label in advance, huh? Geez.

The other Noxious Chemical Concern is that as I need to apply the stuff with a rag, when I'm done I will basically have your standard Do-It-Yourself Arson Starter Kit. I'm wondering what I should do with it, not to mention the bit of used Evil Chemical. I don't want to mix the used stuff with the new stuff (the used stuff will have gross paint residue in it, plus water, etc) and I can't exactly pour it down the drain, so...? Obviously I'll just be using a little bit, hopefully I won't HAVE any left over other than what's soaked in the rag, but hmm. I'm thinking maybe I need to go buy a little metal container over at the Hardware and Gun Shop so I can chuck the rag in there until I can get over to the hazmat disposal. Then again, I suppose I could use it to make some Molotov Cocktails. If I really got ambitious I could then go chuck 'em at the county courthouse, but gee, that's Been Done.

Monday August 16th I went to Chicago for my annual day trip. I took Amtrak, leaving Champaign at 6:30 and arriving in Chicago around 9:15. It's much more pleasant than the bus, if only because we don't ride alongside the interstate. We do go alongside Illinois 47 for parts of it, but that is generally a far more pleasant road. Most of the towns in central Illinois were founded to take advantage of the Illinois Central Railroad. Amtrak uses I.C. tracks, which means we pass through the downtowns of Paxton, Gilman, etc rather than just passing near to the periphery of the places if at all, as happens when you drive the interstate. The ride is also shorter than the bus, and quieter, and more leg room, and better times (leaving at 6:30 is far preferable to leaving at 3 AM). Thing is, it costs $29 to the bus's $16. Still, it's worth it for the yearly trip. Once in Chicago I went to John Hancock center, and the Mercantile Exchange, and had my coffee out front of the Mercantile Exchange, and just sat and thought about stuff. It was a great time. I also went into the Marshall Fields store, the main one on State St. If you ever go into a Fields, make it that one. There are others even right downtown, but THE store is one to see. It's like being in one of the big department stores in Tokyo - 10 or so NICE floors, hardwood and marble inlay floors, recessed water fountains, artfully arranged displays. There is even food in the basement, and restaurants at the top! The place takes up a whole block, so that there are multiple escalators, and one can get lost. There are attendants standing around to give directions, even, and in fact when one of them asked me if I needed directions, in English, it startled me! As before, I bought a towel. Just like the pink towel I got 4 years ago, but it's a cool pea green. Why green? Well...

I washed the rug that goes in front of my door. This is a cotton rug, sort of fat-stripes plaid, with the stripes being dark green, blue, and maroon. It had mud on it from people's shoes, etc, and so I tossed it into the washer. Now, washing ONE rug by itself might make the washer go wonky and stop in the middle, which is a pain, so I decided I might as well toss in my bath mat, some dish towels, and two other rugs which I generally use under the litter box (these are also plaid-esque rugs, cheap cheap, that were -were!!- white and purple, etc plaids). The bath mat was a pale cream color. Well... it is now a wonderful pea green. Yes, the rug ran. It didn't tinge things greenish, it didn't leave little green spots of contact on things touching it, no, it did a professional dye job on the things washed with it. I swear, it looks like I went out and bought a new green bath mat. They really do sell bath mats in this color! If I'd known this was gonna happen, I'd have tossed a pair of jeans in there! It was the oddest thing. I reached into the washer, and the first thing I pulled out was a nice solid green dish towel. "Hmm," I thought. "I don't recall owning a green towel, but I DID buy some towels at a yard sale last week, maybe it's one of those?" No, actually it was a previously white towel I'd acquired years ago in the recycling bin behind Cellblock 7. The towel was made in Korea, and "Green Grass" embroidered on the front of it for absolutely no reason. Well, now it has a reason, namely that it's GREEN. So, my bathroom now has a nice green color scheme. Spiffy.

I've finished the sheetrock joining. Yes, the sheetrock is all sanded and blended. This is good, since it's the major pain in the ass part of the wall job. I did the final sanding of it last night with hand-held paper, which is great for blending in those really fine imperfections, where the big sander machine would sand too much away and make you use another coat of spackle to fill it in again, leading to more ridges, etc, repeat, etc. I've also sanded and filled and sanded the entire mud room (so that is ready to be primed and painted, now) and 2.5 kitchen wall panels (ditto). The old wall is much easier to deal with - no sheetrock joining, just sanding to roughen up the paint, then filling any little holes/divots with spackle, then sanding that. There's no CREATING huge flat expanses by myself. The hard parts of the old wall to sand are going to be above the cabinets, between the bottom of the cabinets and the sink, and behind the stove. But all in all, I think the biggest pain is done.

I also got the kitchen table I want last week. I found it at First Street Antiques in Champaign (20? S. First). It's a bright shocking yellow formica and metal table. I thought I was going to have to find a beat up table and paint it to get it that yellow, but woah, there exist shocking yellow tables. It's got a pattern on it too, like little bits of yellow going in different directions, melded together, kinda pearlized I guess. Neat thing is, it's got chrome around it and also chrome legs, which goes great with the cabinets in the kitchen, which are 40's metal, and painted white aside from their handles, which have been left bright silver. The thing came with six chairs, too. I gave those to OJC, as they were quite redone in the 70's. The walls will be blue, so I'll have blue and yellow right there inside, every day.

Friday was a good day for flowers. Looking out my closet window this morning (yep, I have a window in my closet!) I saw another Happy Orange Flower, star shaped, on the fence near the bottom. Woo. These are really really bright yellow-orange, like a highway sign but a bit more shocking day-glo, and they have five petals and they appear unisex, like a hibiscus. I went outside to investigate, and sure enough, it was coming through the fence from Mike's yard. He's got hostas right there, but somehow growing in and among the hostas is the Happy Orange Flower Source. Peeking through the fence I could see more Happy Orange Flowers in there, just hanging out inside the plants. Then in my strip of lilies of the valley on the north side of the house, there is one of those pink flowers on a stick, I don't know what they are called, you never see leaves - just a fat stem comes up from the ground, and at the top of it, there will be five or six lily-shaped (big lily, not the little lily of the valley pearly things) pink flowers arranged. This thing is a nice fat one with a big bud on it. I see these at other people's houses, and I don't know what they are (I'll be trying to find out, today) but they are neato. I'm happy to find one growing there by my house.

Speaking of my house, I started having dangerous thoughts last night. One of the peeves about my house is that the front door is exposed, meaning there is no eave over it right there, so going in and out in the rain isn't fun. So I started thinking, hmm, maybe I should put an eave on. But then I thought, hey, if I was gonna put on an eave, I might as well make it a big eave, a little roof if you will, and then put poles down from the edges of it to support it. But then of course, I looked at the front steps, and thought, you know, I've got some cemented over space here next to the steps not being used that I could cover up, and my house dents in right here (my house is like two rectangles overlapping diagonally, and the front door is in the interior corner where the two rectangles meet, so in a 90 degrees "jutting in" space), so I could make a little porch here. It'd be pretty simple - just make the front steps platform larger, and stick poles up off of that to meet the roof I was thinking of. Now, I'd probably want to get someone else to do it, but it bears thinking about. It wouldn't have to be huge, but looking at it, there'd be plenty of room for just a chair to sit in and a little folding table or so. It would have a nice view of the road and trees, and nice screening from the lilac bush and also trellises that I'd put on it. It could be quite cool. It would fill out the "90 degrees corner" essentially, so I wouldn't even need to get permits. Anyway, it's definitely a "next summer" thing. I can start saving for it now.

My thumb is slowly recovering. I can maybe weed the remaining part of the walk. My thumb hurt yesterday because I spent a good two and a half hours weeding my sidewalk Sunday afternoon. There was quite a bit of grass growing in the cracks (I have a brick sidewalk). I'd weedicided, which killed some of the weeds, but there was still a need to pull the now dead weeds out of the ground. This involves lots of troweling and hard pinching, where I'd grab hold of the clump o' grass with my left thumb and middle finger, then sorta dig at the bottom of it with a trowel held in my right hand. I got maybe 2/3 of the sidewalk totally weeded - not a weed left in it, pristine. It was tiring. My two-doors-down neighbor (the landscape architect guy, who lives in the Hosta La Vista house) was weeding his sidewalk too, with some kinda power water hose which took out most of the weeds along with the dirt between bricks, and then he put new sand over the bricks. That got most of the weeds, he has a few left (which ironically look to be the easy to pull out thin grass clumps) but overall it looks good. Certainly took much less time... Still, I weeded along with Michael Feldman's "Whaddaya Know?", so it wasn't all bad.

My next door neighbor Willard (whose son graciously mows my little strip o' lawn for free!) got a nifty flat hose with little holes in it for watering his new front garden (he ripped out all the plants in front of his house and put in some new ones, it looks spiffy). I think I will buy one of these myself. With it, I could water all the little triangles on the side of the house AND the front garden at the same time, PLUS not spray my windows.

I also sanded and spackled walls this weekend. Yep, the seams between the sheetrock wall boards, and all the screw fastener holes, are gone.

!Peeve: All my somewhat new aegopodium clumps I put under the lilac in the front garden are standing back up now. Some of them had sort of wilted down in the heat. I've been watering them daily, but some perked more than others. I think they're finally taking off.

'Nother !Peeve: Even with the intense rain we had a while back, there was no mud on top of the stone wall around the front garden this morning. The extra layer of stones I put on recently was a good idea.

The current chapter of the Minkly Home Improvement Saga is kitchen improvement. This involves 2 items, namely (1) laying linoleum and (2) painting the walls. Well, okay, you know how it goes. It started with those two items. As chronicled here, I patched the hole in the wall some time ago (the hole left by the wiring guys). I was thinking of painting, then, but, well, I'm lazy. Plus, by then I'd talked to the floor guys (Custom Flooring of Champaign, I'm quite satsified) and they suggested that laying the floor first would be better, since odds are they'll mess up the trim anyhow. Sure, I coulda painted the main wall and just left the trim undone, but, well, I'm lazy. We scheduled the flooring job for July 26th, (today) but then someone else cancelled and it was moved up to last Tuesday. So the flooring is all laid and looks great.

Why did I want to put linoleum on my floor to begin with? Well, the old floor was self-adhesive white vinyl tiles, stuck right on floorboards. These looked pretty good back in January, but were starting to show some wear, as they inevitably will, particularly when (peeve) people drag heavy ladders around on the floor with no dropcloths. There was no subfloor, so they tended to separate, you could sort of see the texture of the floorboards underneath, and it was (1) a light color and (2) a theoretically "seamless" pattern, which makes the separation all the more annoying. Plus Cat #2's hair showed up on it reeeeally well. So... one day I was standing in line to buy some Linzer cookies at Mirabelle Bakery in downtown Urbana (you should definitely go there for some yummy Linzer cookies on Saturday mornings!) admiring the way they've painted a purple and green on cream checkboard pattern on their cement floor, making that old cement floor look quite unique and good. I then got to thinking how I wasn't entirely happy with the floor I have, and then I remembered that for years I've liked the floor inside the bathrooms at Cafe Kopi in downtown Champaign. Then I put two and two together, and decided right then that I'd lay linoleum in the kitchen in that pattern I've always liked. Just deciding was great - I'd look at the floor, but in my mind's eye I'd be seeing it how it'd eventually turn out, wacky colored checkerboard pattern and all. It was gonna be coooool.

The pattern I went with is just like the Kopi bathroom, but with dark grey where they have black tiles. For non-locals (or non coffee-drinkers, for that matter) it's a checkerboard sort of pattern in five colors - yellow/gold/straw color, a purplish blue, green, burgundy/pink color, and black. I have dark grey in place of black. The yellow is the background color, so it's a checkerboard of yellow and <other color> where the other colors vary in a pattern.

Needless to say, this doesn't go well with orange. The kitchen walls are currently orange. It's a nice bright orange which I rather like, and which looked good with white floors, but the orange has gotta go. In fact, with the new floors installed, I started thinking "Hmm, maybe I shoulda gone with black tiles after all, the grey doesn't look so good." Actually, it's just that the grey clashes with the orange more than the other colors do. I got rid of the orange from one wall (read on further) and against that wall, the grey looked really great. Anyway, the walls will be painted a purplish blue and the trim will still be white. The cabinets are old metal 40's style, painted white, with silver handles, and the sink is stainless steel, and this all looks simply awesome. I know there are readers cringing in horror, but trust me. Anyway, the great thing about owning my own house (aside from getting to do my laundry for free and no one stealing my underwear) is that I can have whatever wacky color schemes I want, tailored just to the junk I personally have in there. None of this "let's pick beige to satisfy as many potential renters as possible" stuff. This kitchen definitely says "I don't rent."

While I was at it, I decided to continue the new flooring into the little back door room as well. Now, if you think the new pattern goes just beastly with orange walls, you'll probably agree that it goes even worse with goldenrod, avocado green, orange and brown flowered wallpaper, which covered one wall of this little room. The other walls, like those in the kitchen, are orange. The flowers, while very 60's, went just fine with the dark brown outdoor carpet that was in there. I didn't mind 'em at all. But their time, alas, is up. They gotta get the heave.

The flowers got the heave this weekend, with the wonderful help of Mike Lehman.

Peeve: The "wallpaper," as expected, wasn't actually paper. It was printed right onto the fiberboard/plasterboard wall. We're talking cheesy building materials. The stuff was some sort of hybrid of wood and cardboard, almost... the back of it has little cross hatchings like burlap, sort of the stuff old toyboxes are made out of. Definitely a late 60's/early 70's thing.

This was nailed up and glued on over... Foamboard! Yes, insulating foam stuff covered with a thin layer of wood/cardboard. Woo woo. That was painted pale goldenrod yellow. Yep, at one point someone had that as the actual wall surface in the room. That quickly became cheesy (duh!) and so they slapped up the flowers.

But that's not all. The foamboard still felt hollow in the center part of the wall, and would cave in a bit when you pressed on it. So, off it came right there in the middle. Guess what was back in there? A window, complete with broken privacy glass still in it! Turns out that this wall was once an outside wall, and so underneath the foamboard were green clapboards from the original outside wall. The foamboard smoothed over those. Now, the window had old Sears flyers from 1989 stuffed in it, but the flowers could not have been available in 1989, so I suspect the papers were left in there when people fixing the bathroom entered the wall from other side. We could in fact see the back of the bathroom wall, which is done nicely. As for the breakage, I suspect the people rewiring the house earlier this year broke that, but there was no way to get the glass out without ripping out the wall (like I just did).

At any rate, we left the foamboard on the parts of the wall other than the window opening (as it does in fact make a nice smooth shimming - it just needs to be covered up with something more substantial than paint!). We built a support structure from 2x4s and stuck that in the window, then nailed up modern quality wall board, nice and stiff. Next up for me is spackling and sanding all these new walls and the existing kitchen walls.

See how these things expand?

But that's not all. The old flooring didn't go under the fridge. The walls aren't painted behind the fridge either, a fact which I'd found rather annoying. Heh. I just didn't understand... Now, to avoid the separation problems and possible leaking, etc of the old floor, I'd decided to lay a subfloor of plywood before putting the tiles in, and I am certainly tiling under the fridge. So, in order to lay the flooring, the appliances had to be removed. Including the fridge. Removing that fridge was, according the floor guys, the most difficult part of the job. It was wedged in there. It had no clearance. It scraped on the cabinets, and they had to remove the countertop to get the thing out of there! It took quite a bit of heaving by the two of them to get it out, and it scraped up the door trim on the way out. Once out, it became clear that whoever put it in there had had to cut away part of the wall to shoehorn it in! No wonder the people who put in the old flooring tiles and painted the walls didn't move the fridge!

The wall behind the fridge was all mildewy (no doubt due to lack of venting clearance for the fridge) and had scraps of wallpaper that were a gold/yellow with flowers. The paper peeled off easily. Rather than attempting to clean the wall, which turned out to be a sheet of plywood over really bad plaster, we cut the bottom mildewy half of the wall off and replaced it too with a nice new modern sheetrock wallboard. This will also get spackled and sanded. One thing (yes one thing) leads to another... It became clear too that it would be stupid to put the fridge back in. The fridge is old (late sixties, judging by the goldenrod color and brown handles), is therefore probably using more energy than a new one would, and liable to break at some point. At which point I'd need to remove it again. As I was planning to replace the fridge eventually anyway (do I sense a refrain here?) I decided to do it now. I decided to replace it with a smaller fridge.

That proved to be somewhat hard to find. The old fridge was precisely 28 inches wide by 28 inches deep. That's a full sized fridge by sixties standards, but apparently tiny compared to the desires of the vast majority of today's ravenous consuming public. The smallest fridges I found anywhere in stock measured 27.5 inches wide, and were around 30 inches deep, which is simply too big for the space! I despaired. I don't need that much fridge space. What I really had in my mind's eye was a Japanese fridge. Not a dorm or office fridge, not a full sized American behemoth, but a thinner, svelter fridge, with no ice maker. Why no ice maker? Well, they take up valuable freezer space, and I don't have plumbing over to where the fridge will sit, so the thing wouldn't be usable anyway! So I did what all the hip, connected people are doing nowadays, and looked for a fridge on the web. I started off looking under some shopping links on Yahoo, and after being directed to uku-million on-line electronics shops, started to notice that all of the fridges that looked remotely possible were made by General Electric. Cutting to the chase, I surfed on over to GE's main page, found the fridge area, and found a fridge! Yes, General Electric makes essentially Japanese-style refrigerators here in the United States. This baby is 11.0 cu. ft., enough space for me, and will fit easily into the kitchen. You can take a look at it for yourself here. I went ahead and ordered it by phone from Champaign Appliance on Bloomington Road, a local firm. Whenever possible, shop locally.

The new fridge is white and arrived last Thursday. The slightly ironic part is, the goldenrod color of the old fridge goes great with the new kitchen! White does too, but still. Turns out you can't even order goldenrod appliances anymore, even if you wanted to. As for the old fridge, it will be donated to the Common Ground Food Co-op here in town. My stove, which eventually will need replacing too just due to age and the flakiness of the oven (which, if it needs fixed to the tune of $90 after having been moved around this week, is gonna have me buying a new one pronto for around $350) is still goldenrod, and like I said, it looks great in the new kitchen. Looks better now than with the old kitchen, actually!

Of course, once I had all the power off and the walls ripped up, it only made sense to replace all the wall plugs and switches with nice new white ones (the old ones were that yellowy off white standard color - I should have asked the wirers to use white, but it completely slipped my mind and now I gotta do it). This went fairly uneventfully until the final GCFI plug. Now, GCFI plugs are larger than the other plugs, and self contained, making them more awkward to install in general. However, they do come with a cool feature where you can just stick a straight wire into a hole behind the screw and tighten the screw to join the wires to the box, unlike the normal outlets where you have to curl the wire around the screw and then screw it in. Well, 2 of the 3 GCFI outlets were installed using this feature. The third, however, was not. No, they'd gone ahead and curled the wires around the screws like a regular outlet. The GCFI screws don't come out of their box as far as regular outlet ones do, PLUS you can't get your finger behind them to push them out. So you have to hold the damn thing so that the screw is falling out by gravity to its maximum outness, and then persuade the wire to curl around there. Of course pushing the wire anywhere near there just pushes the screw back in. Argh. The wires are thick (the wiring concept is simple for anyone who's ever breadboarded anything, but the wires are WAY more of a pain in the ass to bend), and would NOT achieve the magical amount of curl so that they coil right around the screw. No, they were always either curled too tight to get them around the screw to start, or I'd get them around the screw but then the loop was too loose so that screwing the thing in would push the wire out. Did I have any wire strippers in the house? Why no, of course not. If I had, I probalbly woulda just cut the things off and stripped a nice straight place. As it was, it took me a good half an hour to get those things on there, amidst much cursing and gnashing of teeth. My mood was not helped by the fact that it was 95 degrees in the house and of course I couldn't plug in the fan since the power was off. However, the outlets all work. I shorted them all and made sure they cut power, etc. The loops might not look good, but they work. Of course the installers made beautiful loops, but then I guess they have all the right equipment plus the experience of being in the IBEW. I promptly plugged the fan back in.

I also replaced the faceplates with white ones. Remember that evil dark brown/"antiqued brass" faceplate on the kitchen wall switch? Well, removing it exposed a manufacturing date - 1978. Woo woo!

The floor is totally laid now. It looks awesome. It especially looks good next to the replaced white walls, without the orange clashing with the grey tiles. I've chosen paint colors but won't be getting those right away, as I need to sand, spackle, and prime the surface first. I've gotten primer and all the sanding stuff ready, as well as ready-mixed spackle. No more messing with the actual plaster in the pot under the sink.

I've started in sanding and spackling. The pre-mixed sheetrock spackle stuff (around $9 for a huge tub of it, at Menards) is simply awesome. It definitely beats mixing up plaster powder in my old metal pot. This stuff, you just slather it on, it spreads perfectly, and it sands to be ultra-thin, just filling the holes, perfect finish. It's funny how more "complete" the place looks just after I filled in the screw holes with white spackle. It takes hardly any time, too. I filled in all the holes and spackled all the joints between boards in maybe an hour and a half Saturday afternoon. I had self-adhesive fiber tape for the boards, just tape 'em together, slather on the spackle, which spreads most wonderfully with the big plastering trowels, and woah, no seam. I sanded some of these, and the stuff sands wonderfully.

I also started sanding the orange walls. The kitchen walls are plywood over bad plaster, joined together with distinct seams, and painted. This actually looks quite good (aside from no longer matching the floor). I'm sanding over the paint, one board at a time. The idea is to roughen it up just a bit (as it's shiny latex paint) so that the new layer of primer and paint will stick better. There are also some odd depressions here and there, and the person who put the plywood up didn't spackle over the nail heads so there are some little dents where those are, and so I sanded over those areas and spackled, on the boards that are done. Overall it's looking good. I'm not really sure how much I need to sand - I think not much, just enough so the paint isn't totally slick all over its surface. I mean, you don't hear people sanding non-shiny painted walls, and with one sanding, the walls feel as rough (well, rougher) than my other walls, so I think I'm okay.

I want to have the kitchen all done before my birthday, if possible...

I've bought a sprinkler. It's a slightly fancy one, a big "side to side" type where there's a line of little jets of water, that spray to one side, then wave overhead to spray the other side, etc etc (the sort of sprinkler you often see kids running in) but you can plug up some of the holes so that the area watered is smaller. This should be good, since both of the places I currently need to water are basically strips - 5 by 29, and 3 x 3?. I removed the last of the storm windows in the front as the sprinkler hits the front of the house.

Last Sunday afternoon I went to Prairie Gardens and got some more ground covers, pretty much all that was left there. I got the very last flat of vinca and 5 medium size (i.e. I could split them up!) aegopodiums. These I put in my front garden, so now the ground cover is done - I just need to wait for it to expand up and green out the area. Planting in those gardens is done until I put bulbs in this fall. I also put a final layer of rocks on my garden wall. As it turned out, the level of the garden was still slightly above the height of the wall, and dirt was able to wash onto the tops of the rocks and erode out some. Then Laura didn't need all the bricks she had, so I was able to use the leftovers to put another row around my garden. It looks better now too, more defined, kinda.

I haven't yet started pulling bricks by the house. That's next as far as the garden stuff goes. The vinca in the little open triangles is doing great, so most of the places I'll open up, I don't think I'll need to put in more ground cover but just sort of train what's in there to go where I want to fill out the rest of the open space. There are a few empty triangles, but by the time I get to them, I should have something I can take from the front.

Thanks to Laura Huth's sister, I now have a really nice blue Nikko hydrangea bush planted in my front garden next to the lilac. That's an ajisai, the ones with blue flowers that I love the best. There's no flowers on it now (probably not this year) but it should be most excellent once it gets going. There is a nice ajisai in a yard on the north side of Nevada St. right past McCullough, and I like to look at it on the way in to work every day. That's a blue/pink one too - most of the people around here seem to only have the white ones.

Oh yeah, people who were wondering what those trees with the bright purple flowers on them in San Diego are, it turns out that they are called jacaranda. Inside the 7th floor women's bathroom in H&SS at UCSD (one of the buildings I used to write on the walls in, as a matter of fact) there is a poster listing all the kinds of trees found in San Diego, with drawings. If anyone knows where I can GET a poster like this, let me know...

Cicadas are out! Yes, walking home from work in the evenings around 7:00 or so (after coffee), things just starting to get that "evening is approaching" feel, walking in the shade of green and grey-green silver maples and hackberry trees lining the street, I hear that distinctive sound of mid to late summer wafting around. Mmmmmm miiin miiin miiin miiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnn..... Fireflies are still out too, and it's a good time for bugs generally, walking around in the evening looking and listening. The cicadas will start coming out earlier and earlier as things get later in the summer and even more humid and hot, so that by August (particularly the latter half) they'll be whining at mid-afternoon. That IS the sound of oppressively hot humid air just parked over town with no breezes...

Right before I left on the wedding vacation I was happy to see even two days with no rain, so I was able to finally garden! Yes! I shoveled the manure into the garden, and even managed to plant a few flowers. I put in some coneflowers, a daisy, some astilbes that miraculously came back from the dead, and a speedwell. Then it got dark... The main thing though is that now I can garden the day after a rain, since all I'll be doing is planting. Mixing things into the dirt requires the dirt to be crumbly, and THAT is what took the "dry day in between" that I'd been waiting for so long.

I got some excellent unsolicited mail recently, namely a bulb ordering catalog. Leafing through there I see that like 99% of the flowers I want are in fact bulbs, to be planted in autumn. Whether I mail order them or buy locally (mail order is from Peoria) I now know what exactly everything is, and see that they are fairly cheap, too. The other plants I want that aren't bulbs, I have some of them thriving right now in pots in my yard already. Plus my Aunt Barbara's not-so-bright landlord has decided that in order to improve the chances of selling the house which Aunt Barbara currently rents, he should rip out all the flower gardens around it (crazy!!) and so Aunt. B. has decided that before he destroys any more, she will uproot the plants herself and give them away to friends. So I can have some of those, not all of them will bloom this year (mainly due to being hacked at!) but they should be fine next summer.

Peeve: My cats destroyed a mini-blind in my living room 2 weeks or so ago. I came home to find it crumpled on the floor, the top piece broken in two, and the little mechanism for keeping it open bent and torn off. I think Cat #2 attempted to climb the damn thing. That's just the sort of thing he does. Now, there are 3 windows in the main room and only 2 cats, so you'd think it would not be a problem for each cat to find a window. Well, yeah, but you forget of course that each cat only wants to be in the window that the OTHER cat is currently in, which means that they have to tear around the house at all hours playing some sort of loud and raucous game of Musical Windows (generally the music consists of various sorts of yowling) and generally ripping up the place. Cat #2 still chases after Cat #1 and tries to assert himself. There is a particular rising trilling "mrreeeooowww!?" noise I've come to fear intensely, as it is roughly the feline equivalent of "Hey you! CHICKEN!!!" or "Come'n'get me, I DARE YA!!" or just plain "Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah NYA--H NYAH!!" and invariably sets off a wild chase around the house, curling up the rugs, tails raised at the butt and then curled back down, puffed up, skittering around.

!Peeve: Now my glasses are FIXED!!. They broke the Monday morning before I left for vacation, the lenses were fine but the nosepiece broke on one side where it attaches to the eye pieces. Broken metal. I called the glasses place on Sixth, they told me to go to O'Brien's Jewellers up by Market Place Mall. I just took 2 hours or so off work right immediately then, took the bus up there, and the main jeweller there soldered it really well in 45 minutes for $25. Quite good service. Not only that, but while I was waiting I went next door to Kohl's to check out shoes, 'cuz they usually have good cheap shoe sales, of brand name shoes even. Well, I got lucky. Frequent readers might recall that I'm always looking for a pair of white leather sneakers just like the ones I've had in the past, plain Reebok tennis shoes, in boy's size, and nowhere ever seems to have them. Most places have something similar in a MEN'S size, starting at size 7, but the boys' shoes have different clunky soles. Well, this place had this holy grail of shoes, in my size. Not only that, they were only $24. In fact, this is the place I got the original pair, a coupla years back, but they'd not had them in the interim. Anyway, I got smart this time, and bought two pairs, which were all they had in my size. They are now safely stashed away in my closet, I'll start wearing the first new pair when the weather turns nice and crisp.

I'm still planning to get an eye examination and a new set of glasses with frames but that can now wait until vacation is over, and I will then have two pairs of glasses so if I lose one, my vision will be just slightly "off" (as it is now, but hardly noticeable) rather than "oh gee, what are those big blobs of color over there?"

I went to the Planners Network urban planning conference in Lowell, Massachusetts in mid June. Actually it was more like a 15 hour drive 'cuz the student driving drove near 100 MPH through entire STATES... It was quite a good conference though, I got to schmooze with the people I needed to schmooze with, for Living Wage, and heard a lot of good talks. I also met some people from Lowell, and got to see some of the local sites, including community redevelopment areas, old mills (one is a museum, one is totally abandoned and has really cool trees growing all inside it and has become a local late-night gathering spot), eat great unique Diner Food, and the like. Still, it's good to be home! More details to follow...

I got to ride on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The turnpike has nifty tunnels. Going through those was much fun. They have fluorescent lights and white tile walls with some green tiles trim on it, and they are parallel tunnels, two lanes each way. Each one has the name of the mountain it's going under on it, on the outside. We drove through four tunnels on the turnpike, the Allegheny Mountain Tunnel, Tuscarora Mountain Tunnel, Kittatinny Mountain Tunnel, and Blue Mountain Tunnel. Also in West Virginia we drove through the Wheeling Tunnel, which goes through downtown Wheeling, WV.

Last week I did manage to finish weeding the front in preparation for the above planting (soil was still a bit too wet to plant, but wet is great for weeding). I got rid of all the grass on the edges of the bed, and pulled up more maple trees. I also got rid of some non-specific weeds from under the lilac bush and popped the broadleaf weeds out of the sidewalk cracks. There's still grass in the cracks of the sidewalk (I'll probably need to spray for that) but it looks a lot better already. While in the front garden area, I noticed, among the lilac leaves, some OTHER leaves that are pinnate, ending in a point, but huge, and very flat. HmmmMMmmMMM. What the...? Then I realized - I know where I've seen these. On Oregon, just east of Race on the south side of the street, there is a plant with identical leaves - it's a tree 70 or 80 feet tall. Woah. Time to get that thing OUT of the garden!! The stem appears to be thick and tree like already though, I might need a saw. It's too bad to have to kill it, but I don't think I can dig it up, as its roots are no doubt all intertwined with the lilac.

I'm seeing more and more fireflies now. Driving back from the Planners Network Conference I could see tons of them on the side of the road, like little flashbulbs... They usually make an appearance in the first week of June and last into July. They are a welcome summer sight, when out walking around in the late twilight, where it's almost dark but the sky is still a dark blue color and the trees a green canopy over the street, walking around in a thin cotton shirt and shorts and being happy that it's finally cooled down, going to maybe have some ice cream and sit on the corner.

On Memorial Day I had my usual picnic at Crystal Lake Park, it went well. I made the usual food but also a batch of tofu along with the meat, and that turned out quite well. I think the trick is to use the American-made really stiff tofu. So, cultural summer as well as meteorological summer is officially here. The season of slack is upon us. Even for those of us who don't get to slack in the summer, there's just a different feel, more relaxed, somehow. It's light late, it's calm and peaceful, lots of seats at coffee... time for late night walks that end up with getting ice cream at Delight's and sitting on the steps of Krannert to eat it, the drone of the fan at night, humid days that end in thunderstorms, and fantastic white poofy clouds. It's time for fireflies.

Next up: Sanding and painting my kitchen, mud room, and cat room. Those rooms will each have walls that are one color chosen from the linoleum mosaic. I'm thinking kitchen=purple/blue (that one's definite), mud room is pinkish, cat room is ?? (maybe green again, but a bit darker green). The goldenrod color inside the pantry and of the appliances matches the yellowy tile, so that's most excellent, it's already done just as I would have.

A few weeks back now, I built the retaining wall around my front garden with much appreciated help from Mike Lehman. It's a nice "brick" type wall of more irregular limestone slabs, three high all the way round. It's spiffy. Now I can start putting in plants! I'm also still thinking up plans for the back area, putting more green space back there and planning out how to drive a solid edge on the sidewalk that we'll leave. Right now we're thinking metal poles (such as rebar type things) pushed in down to the frost line. Calls to JULIE might be in order... Peeve there is that of course, they spray paint your driveway to show where the lines are, which I don't exactly need. I sorta like the driveway paving the way it IS, y'know? Not bright pink lines on it...

The main book I'm perusing for a general guide is "A Pattern Language" by Christopher Alexander. This wonderful book (written in the 70's, the author is an architect) talks about the features of spaces that make people want to live in them, and feel comfortable and at home in them - from entire town plans to individual buildings. We all recognize a great livable place when we see one, and reading this book of individual "patterns," rules that are templates more than prescriptions, just makes a whole lot of good common sense. Reading each one, I think, "well, yes, of course!" At the moment I'm reading the part on gardens, and outdoor spaces accompanying houses in general, and thinking about how much enclosing is good for the final shape, and what shape it should be. I know I want plants around the edges of it, and so I'm thinking of those too, but that's a different book. Incidentally, one of the reasons I'm really happy with my house is that it is built to the rules in this book - most old houses are, because they needed to use natural light and ventilation, etc. It's just nice to be in there. People knew what they were doing in 1912, I guess.

I've also started clearing out the bricks, rocks, etc behind my house on the other side of the walkway. Walking behind my house, the place between the walkway and the fence has hostas and green/white leaves in the fresh garden I put in recently. The side between the walkway and the house, however, has all kinds of junk in it - nice old bricks, chunks of rocks, chunks of cement, broken glass (!!), old insulators... plus lots and lots of weeds growing over it all. Now, the utility meters etc are there, so I don't want to do any major digging, but I can hand dig the small area, and that's going well. I want to put more of that green/white leaves groundcover there to match the other side, and then some flowers, I'm not sure what yet. Certainly bulb things, but I'm not sure what else. The old bricks are kinda cool, I'm thinking I can use them for edging somewhere or something. There's also little flat sheets of marble back there. Definitely strange, like some small building exploded or something. The hose is working wonderfully.

I've decided to go in on a share of Community Supported Agriculture. That's sort of like stocks, but you get vegetables. The way it works is you pay a flat fee at the beginning of the season, and then every Tuesday you get vegetables delivered, in season. There's a little chart showing you what you get when. They also have a cookbook that has recipes for all the vegetables you get, which should save me some library time because some of the greens in particular I've eaten out or at the food service I worked at, etc but I don't know a good way to cook them myself so I need to look it up. It turns out to be cheap, particularly as I'm going to split a share with my neighbors. Between that and the weekly Farmer's Market at the mall about 5 blocks from my house, my veggie needs ought to be taken care of. There's a similar program for egg needs which I might go in on as well. I could have nice fresh brown eggs again! How much you get under both of these programs, of course, depends on how well the growers do.

Last weekend I finally got around to patching the hole in the kitchen wall with the aid of Brynnen and his sanding machine. It looks totally awesome, albeit grey - I've not painted it, and won't paint it until I'm painting the whole kitchen, which should be happening somewhat soon, come to think of it. I'm having the floor refinished in late May, and want to paint the kitchen before I put tiles into the kitchen, so that'd be... early Junish. Hmmm. I suppose there's actually an outside chance that I could have the kitchen all done by the time I go to my sister's wedding. That would actually be quite cool. I finally got my garden bordering rocks installed! I've fixed the leak in the hose so now I can water the garden with a hose instead of the old U-cycle bucket.

HUGE PEEVE: Cinema Caffe is no MORE! That's right, it's gone, gone, gone, just blew outta town like last year's tumbleweed. I heard about this in a "P.S." in an unrelated e-mail exchange with my esteemed city council representative around 2 PM or so. I stopped by the place around 6:30, as I always do on Tuesdays before teaching Perl, and asked Lorien (working there) when they were going out of business. She said, "look around." Geeeeze. They'd taken the posters off the wall, broken down the display case, were hauling dishes out of the kitchen and making off with the furniture. I got some coffee, heard the universal complaints of all the people coming in, and finally got booted out around 7:30 when they needed to take the chair I was sitting at. This is quite lame. I really really really hope some other coffeehouse would open in the space. Really. It'd be nice if say, Cafe Kopi wanted to start an Urbana branch. Where am I gonna go for my Prince Valiant and coffee on Sunday mornings? Instead of there being yet another (unrelated) coffeehouse opening on Green, not even 3 blocks from the Espresso Royale at Sixth and Daniel, they should totally open a new place in downtown. BTW, Lorien has a new job farming.

I did plant my back garden. This is a 2 to 3 feet wide stripe of dirt between the narrow sidewalk in back of the house and the back fence. My house essentially has no yard, it's on a weird partial lot thing, and sort of reminds me of houses in Japan that way. Anyways, I took out the various weeds and put in some hostas, 2 ferns, a strawberry plant that I sort of bought on impulse for $1.99, and some grey-green and white variegated ground cover like over at 806 Nevada. Soon after I finished planting, it got dark and then rained last night, so that should give things a good start! Indeed I see now some new leaves on the ground cover coming up. I need to get some kinda washer for my hose though since right now it's pretty much unusable, leaking more water from the faucet than comes out the other side, so I've been watering stuff with a bucket (more precisely, an old U-Cycle bucket) which is tedious. But, it works. I need to toss out all the broken bricks and random detritus from the other side of that little sidewalk so that I can plow it under too and do a garden on the other side. Then, eventually I'm thinking of taking out part of the driveway, just the back part, so I can have yet more garden back there. Maybe. Until then, I just have to weed it. I do want to remove one row of zig-zag next to the house so that I can expand the little open triangles into a small stripe of dirt near the house big enough for some ground cover (which is already started) and some bulbs, to make things a bit less stark on that side. I also have a bumper crop of lilies, and don't need ALL of them, so I need to dig some up, plant them in pots, and then maybe trade for other things. Turns out I own the green area between my house and the alley and so any extra ground cover I have, that's where it's going! I'd like to eventually paint the house green too, so in a coupla years, it's gonna be q0000l.

Course, it turns out (sensibly enough) that I can't just take bricks out, without replacing the edging bricks (the ones that hold stuff in, they are sunk deeper, etc) so it will of course be a pain in the ass. But what isn't? The back is probably the easier part since the area removed can be decent sized while still only having to replace the one edge row along the back, which isn't too horribly long. It HAS to be doable though, because after all, the sidewalk isn't going anywhere, and it's not edged up on buildings on both sides of it, and the driveway itself as it is now doesn't end at a building in back. It ends with the bricks on edge, just like the sidewalk does. Time for some web surfing...

I'd also like to maybe plow out a foot on the right hand side of the walkway in the "front" (actually side) yard, and put plants in there too, matching whatever ends up in that side garden (lilies plus some other stuff).

I think a Totoro visited Thursday early morning. I woke up, looked up and out the window that's to my left when I'm lying in my usual sleeping spot on the floor, and woah, there was some kinda huge skyscraper size fir tree in the yard next door. Huge. Taking up the whole yard. Scary sized. Giant. After I picked my eyeballs off the floor, I looked again, rubbed them, looked again, wow, such a huge tree, how can you have a tree that big?? I looked away, looked back, ah. Now it's just the usual maple tree in Mike and Elizabeth's yard. Totoro had left. My brain, in its befuddled state, combined with my eyes, which don't see well at ALL for any great distance without my glasses on, had registered the white flat-cloud sky negative space between the maple branches as sun reflecting off of impossibly huge fir branches with those light grey-green spiky needles. I guess not all of us even need drugs.

Lately I've taken to eating lunch at the Espresso Royale in Champaign (corner of Daniel and Sixth). I bring the same old tupperware lunch, but I go buy an ice coffee there and eat my lunch there sitting by the window. It ensures no interruptions during lunch and makes lunch more of a bona-fide break so I am more happy to resume work upon my return. In exchange, I've been brewing more of the morning coffee in my office (rather than getting one to go as I leave coffee in the morning).

They're making ice coffee in advance now, combining the usual espresso and ice water together in large pitchers and storing that in the fridge. This is a sign of summertime, as it means that more people are ordering iced beverages. It tastes pretty much the same, only very very slight difference, but the slight difference, again, reminds me of the summertime so it's sort of nice.

I had my entire yard plowed under so now there is nothing but dirt in front of my house. I spent some time weeding the edges of it where the tiller couldn't go, and then more time (1) sweeping the dirt off the sidewalk back into the yard and (2) putting bricks around it and also a tarp over some so that any rain this week won't wash the dirt all into the road. I'm hoping to start planting stuff this week.

If you would like YOUR yard plowed, you can call up Mike Lehman at Custom Tilling, phone 344-5609. It's only $30 for up to 500 square feet. He does a great job. It will be plowed a whole foot deep. Now think how long it would take YOU to do that with a shovel and a hoe.

I swear Cat #2 has gotten slightly larger. He is just the perfect big sleek black shadowy cat shape. Ooooooh. Other good news is, I came home from vacation to finally find the two cats sleeping together on the puff chair. Oh, how I was waiting for that to happen! You can read more about my cats in the Cat Update.

March 1 was the start of the severe weather reporting season which runs until October 1. That means that the reports from the National Weather Service have a "severe weather outlook" every day, saying there is no severe weather if there isn't, but always reporting. This is because it is now officially tornado season. If you live in Champaign-Urbana you should listen to the weather reports on WILL AM 580 by Ed Kieser and Scott Olthoff. Scott Olthoff has a pretty nice Midwest Weather Forecasting Page you might want to take a peek at, and the Department of Atmospheric Sciences has a page over at WW2010 with even more stuff. These guys give the best forecasts, hands down. You can hear them weekdays at 35 minutes past the hour in the mornings during those hours when you're getting ready for work (5:35, 6:35, etc, up to... 9:35, maybe)?

I finally got around to assembling my table and chairs in March with the help of Rosemary. I am definitely indebted to her, because this was most certainly a two person job. The table was a marvel of good, easy to assemble design - simply slide in a bolt into each leg, slip the bolts through holes on the underside supports of the table top, fasten them with nuts, and voila, a table. Flip it right side up, and we're golden. The chairs, on the other hand, may best be described as do-it-yourself peeves with legs.

Peeve: The chairs came partially assembled. Specifically, they came with part of the curved under-seat support thang already attached (these are "Jussi" chairs, the same sort as can be found in Espresso Royale - 4 straight legs with the back legs continuing up to become the 2 back supports, flat seat, open back with one curved back support at the top of the 2 back edges, curved piece branching off one back leg, up under the front of the seat, and back down to join the other back leg). So where's the peeve? Well, they come assembled the wrong way. Yes, the instructions have you remove the curved part, toss away its evil screws, and then put it back on in a completely different configuration later.

Peeve: All the parts of the chair require much stretching to get the screw holes to line up right. This is the main thing making it a two-person job. The entire thing is stressed, not to mention quite stressFUL, and if you don't pull it just enough to get the holes to line up exactly right, the whole thing ends up unbalanced and rocking (much like the chairs at Espresso Royale, come to think of it).

Peeve: The instructions do not mention a hammer at any point. However, getting the front legs to fit into their respective holes in the bottom of the seat requires much banging and pounding (as well as a good measure of wailing and gnashing of teeth, with a few judiciously placed swear words tossed in). Yes, it was definitely Hammer Time, with a rousing chorus of "Can't assemble this!" Actually, lacking a proper hammer, it was big hefty flashlight time, but close enough...

Peeve: The bolts holding the back legs and supports (all one piece) to the chair seat are threaded and don't like to slide through the tiny little holes provided in the seat for them. No problem, right? If they're threaded, just screw them in? Well, yeah, except for the fact that they have no slots in the heads for a screwdriver. Talk about lame. It was, once again, Hammer Time. When in doubt, force it. That actually ended up working rather well, but again, it was definitely a two person job.

!Peeve: These chairs won't be falling apart any time soon.

!Peeve: They look quite nice now that they are all assembled. They are a great height for sitting, as my feet can touch the ground (unlike the situation with my desk chair). I knew I liked the chairs before buying, because I've sat in identical chairs at coffee many many times. They look like really plain library furniture.

I saw a bluejay on my way in to work last Tuesday morning. I heard the call, and thought for sure that was a jay, so I stood around for a few minutes until I saw it and could confirm the sound. I was happy to have known the call.

The house is really, really great. It is indeed a perfect place for a mink of my sort... I keep wandering around thinking I've left a light on somewhere, when I haven't - it's just the light from outside streaming in the windows. It feels good to stay home, I can do housework and not be thinking I need to get out, get out of my little apartment, to be in the outside sun. The windows in the front room are the best - a whole wall of windows looking out on the street and the houses across the way, plus there's a side window there and the front door window and then also windows in the main room on both sides, so I can stand in the very center of the main living area, and totally see outside and be standing in a sunlit space. Absolute wonderment.

A few weeks back Sunday morning it snowed, big fat wet clumpy flakes coming down fast'n'furious, whirling white outside the windows. I stood in the middle of the main room, and just saw snow coming down all around, while I was still inside. I cannot say just how absolutely great that is for someone like myself who wants to be out in the weather and seeing the sky all the time. Storms in the spring and summer are gonna be waaaaayyyy cool, and when the leaves change in fall, I will have my absolutely favorite thing in the world, bright orange-yellow on blue, from right inside. So, I'm happy.

I did four loads of laundry right in my basement and I didn't have to save up any quarters. I still maintain that this is one of the true joys of having your own house or really just living in someone else's house, for that matter - no hauling stuff to the Urbana Coin Wash or paying a buck a load to wash stuff at my old apartment. Not having to go outside to get to the laundry room is nice, as is being able to just leave the heavy ol' box of soap on the machine rather than haul it around. I can leave the laundry in the machine and no one will care. I can do laundry at 2AM, no one will care. No one will steal my underwear. If the laundry doesn't get dry, I can just dry it some more without needing more money. Ah, bliss.

There is one thing remaining to be nagged about: (1) there is still a square sized hole in the kitchen wall about a foot above the light switch, it has no machinery back there but just a wire passing through, and the hole is open. I have to fix this myself. I found out why the hole in the kitchen is there though - they had to lower the light switch so it's wheelchair accessible. It was fine and working before! But no, they gotta move it. Sigh. I'm all for building stuff low down when it's new, but why move a perfectly good switch when I don't need it low? It's not as if a wheelchair rider is gonna be able to drive down my hallway anyways. Other code weirdness: There has to be an outlet every 6 or 7 feet or so. That means like 8 outlets in the living/dining room!! Who the heck has THAT many appliances? My sleeping room is only 9x9, and it has 3 outlets in it!!

!Peeve: There are phone jacks in every room. All the same single phone number, but this is wonderful 'cuz I can use a normal short phone cord for the modem I use to talk to stuff with my WYSE terminal, no need for the 50 foot phone extension cord from hell.

SERIOUS !Peeve: The sun room, with my desktable in it right up next to the windows, and a nice light in there, is simply awesome. A whole wall of windows, looking out to the street, it has the nice window view feel that I like so much about sitting at Espresso. I can indulge in this at home now, whee!

The wirers left their can of patch plaster and I'm stealing that to fix some of the not-so-great plaster fixes, particularly a bad one in my sleeping room where it looks like they didn't want to wait for it to dry so they used a hair dryer on it, and it's all brown around the edges, rough, and cracked in the middle. Ewww. I'll try to smooth that one over, but it's not covered by anything (it's above the light switch where that old light with the rod was) so I can take my time on it, no hurry. The other holes in the wall next to the new outlets were fixed better. They didn't smooth the kitchen wood scrape though, I can fill that in or just leave it. They don't paint. There's touch up white paint in the basement if I want to DIY, but the kitchen is orange. I can't match that, so I'm gonna paint art around the outlet instead, which will actually be way cool, and I can do this 'cuz it's my house. (Actually latest word is that there might indeed be orange paint in the basement that I've missed, so I'll have to give it a look when I get home - last night I was too tired from Perling). I did plenty of laundry, and the dryer gets warm and works, so the gas to it is okay. My oven is now fixed too - all is fine as far as the house itself and appliances.

Just for Voodoo, here's a picture of Mink in the early 70's, now colorized for your enjoyment. (Rather badly, I might add. But it was fun.)

Cat Update: