Category Archives: Misc

Things I am "so over"

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We all have that thing that just wears on our last nerve when it’s just over done, and at that point we become so over that thing. There are plenty of things that I am so over, and here are a few of them, in no particular order.

Michael Jackson, his family, his music, his videos and all things related to him and his famous weirdness. Just this morning I heard on the radio that someone is making a tribute movie or something like that. Guess what? The fans and maybe even a few converts will buy all that stuff if you let him be dead for a few years before you pillage his legacy. It’s called the nostalgia factor, but we have to actually miss the person first.

Classic rock. Yes, I love me some Van Halen and the Beatles are at least 10 hours of music in my iTunes. I’m talking to you Doors, Led Zepplin and Allman Brothers. And, music industry people, Ozzy, Poison and Motley are not classic rock. They are 80s rock. Somehow there is a distinction there.

CSI everywhere and Law & Order everything. Yes, I like crime and murder shows, and I admit to being addicted to Criminal Minds. I don’t know why CM is better than all the others, but it may have to do with lack of over saturation in the market. How many CSI and L&O programs are there anyway…like 20?

Vampire ripoffs. I am a dedicated Sookie Stackhouse book reader and True Blood show watcher. I’ll even allow some Twilight and Vampire Diaries because they have been around forever, same as Ann Rice and my old favorite Brian Lumley. But have you looked at the shelves of the “young adult books” at Target lately? They are filled with all sorts of weird vampire books that have solid black covers with an embossed tear drop or broken heart locket. Ugh.

Poop. There’s toddler poop once in a while still, plus there’s three animals in this house, two of which seem to lose their ability to “hold it” from time to time, and…well, anyway. I am So. Over. Poop.

Political advertising. Gone are the days when people had the time and made the effort to find out what the candidates stood for and made their own decision as to who to vote for. Seems like all we hear now is negative campaigning, e.g. one candidate points out the foibles of the other candidate, and no one really stumps on what they stand for, why they are going to be successful, and what kind of ethics they employ in their life. Rather than vote for the lesser of two evils, how about showing us why we should vote for you?

Rap music. When is this going away? I can’t even understand what they are saying most of the time. Wait, maybe that’s just me getting old. No, no I didn’t like it when it first came out and I was young then. And what is the deal with decorating your teeth with all that gold and stuff? Do they really think it looks good? Someone give these guys a mirror.

Celebrity divorces. Unfortunately, marriages don’t work out in some cases. it’s bad enough that these people have to go through the deep emotional train wreck that is divorce, but they have spouses calling up talk shows to give “their side of the story,” and they are expected to be glamorous/handsome, give great performances, and exude confidence. Why do we want to see celebrity divorces destroy the divorcees?

Well, I have to say that I feel so much better! Ranting over these things reminds me of how good my life really is. I can turn off the TV and radio when the music or shows I don’t like come on. I think I’m gonna go watch some Criminal Minds and have a glass of wine.

The day my house looked like CSI: Cypress

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Who thought that a little water leak would result in such chaos? Every day since Tuesday the 29th, we have had at least one company come by to do something to my house. Most days, it’s been Serve Pro, which is responsible for drying everything. Drying everything is a fancy euphamism for “ripping out everything you walk on, pee in or wash clothes in.”

The latest chapter in this saga picks up after the initial tearing out of the wood floor and installation of 10 indistrial fans and two dehumidifiers. Which by the way are so loud it sounded like the Indy 500 in my house.

Last Friday, the guys from Serve Pro were there drying everything and a person from an asbestos testing company came by. While they were at the house all the power shut off. I checked the breakers and they were fine. The very nice young man from Serve Pro is incredibly kind, flexible in scheduling, and goes above and beyond, but that day I wanted to just slap him. I told him that I had checked the breakers and that didn’t seem to be the problem. He said “well, what should we do about it?”

I said “how should I know, I’m not an electrician.” Outside the house I discovered that the entire neighborhood was without power. The thunderstorms passing through the area had knocked out power all over Cypress. Ugh. At this point, I’m stressed. There’s no cell signal except by standing in the middle of the street. The house phones are out because there’s no power. I had planned to leave by 11 a.m. to go set up for the Marching Thru History Exposition, and was just waiting for my sister and dad to arrive.

Once Dad was there, he pointed out that the wood floor in our entryway had started to bubble. The entryway shares the wall with the laundry room and bathroom which were directly affected by the water and it must have leeched under the wall. The very nice young man from Serve Pro advised that he would have to come back to dry everything there too.

Marching Thru History was insanely hot and humid, but a good respite from the drying everything taking place at home, but it was too short a respite, as Monday dawned cold and drizzly, and the scene was set for more craziness.

The hallway has been taped off with plastic sheeting because our house was built at a time when asbestos was used in the wallboard. Well, the wallboard had to be cut out by a professional abatement company (and not some illegal who will work for a sandwich and a coke) and disposed of property (i.e. not in the city dump). The abatement company – I’ll call them the forensics team – came and created a tunnel into my house from the garage, made of more plastic sheeting, with a dedicated air supply and return. Then the forensics team dressed in those white tyvek bunny suits and respirator masks, and went in to dry everything in the walls. We haven’t been back there and I’m afraid I’ll find a dead body if I do. There was a lot of banging, sawing, and thumping, and I’ll leave it at that. Once the forensics team was finished inside the crime scene, they had to take a shower in my hose. Nice. The neighbors must think we really did find a dead body in the wall.

Oh, and I now have concrete in my entryway, since Serve Pro needed to dry everything there, too.

My adjustor assures me that once they are finished drying everything, we can get on with repairs. That should be interesting!

The never ending saga of the water leak

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So, last Thursday as I came home, I heard a strange noise in the house. I couldn’t quite decide what it was, and since it’s rather chaotic when I get home, what with the dogs barking and the child laughing & yelling, I didn’t investigate immediately as I would have if I was alone. About 5 minutes later, I went back to the washer/dryer area, and there was that sound again. I turned on the light, and the globe was full of water. Uh oh. With great dread, I realized we had a burst water pipe in the ceiling. We had experienced one sometime in ’09, so I recognized the signs immediately.

Panic! I’ve got water inside an electrical light fixture! I’ve got water leaking somewhere in my ceiling! Holy moly! Called John, he wasn’t available. Called my dad, he was in the shower! My mom was shouting to him “what does she do?” We decided I would shut off the electric to the house and the water main. Thankfully, when our water pipe burst last year, John had a quick shut-off lever installed. Something good came out of it, I suppose.

Then, I got hold of the plumber and begged them to come (of course at the emergency rate) right away. Spoke to John, he was headed home. Melody had no idea what was happening, but was excited we were going to have pizza. Sigh.

Hundreds of dollars later, the pipe was fixed and the plumber left.

The next day, two of our three toilets didn’t work. I had to have the plumber back out to fix them. As it turns out, when galvanized pipe gets old, it rusts from the inside out, and that rust travels down the line and clogs everything in its way. Just like a blood clot in an artery. With all the banging on the water pipes to fix them, that is exactly what happened.

By Monday, we had the musty smell of damp wallboard. Oh great. Numerous people suggested we find out if it would be covered under our homeowners insurance (it is) and they sent an adjustor out to review the damage. Hey, guess what? That water that we thought had dried up never really did!

My wood floors have been ripped up – there were puddles of standing water underneath – and I now have 10 blowers and 2 gigantic dehumidifiers in my house. The damage went everywhere. If you’ve been in my home, picture the entire back hallway, the bathroom, the closet of my guest room, the powder room in the front and my living room – which shares the wall with the bathroom. Oh, and I have huge holes cut into my ceilings where they fixed the pipe.

Tomorrow, more water clean up, some other person coming to check for asbestos since they will have to cut the drywall to repair/replace it.

The good news? Right at this moment I can’t think of any, but at least we don’t have the hideous 70s era faux wood vinyl flooring that was under my wood floors, right?

The strange competition for recipe cards

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Since I started my other blog, Gram’s Recipe Box, back in March, I haven’t had to worry too much about source material, because I was working my way through the old recipe box. Now that I’m reaching the end of the cards, I’m seeking new source material. My friend loaned me some cards from her family and my sister is working on some others that she has. In the meantime I figured I’d look on eBay, the great garage sale of the internet.

It’s amazing what people will put on eBay, and it’s even more amazing that there are lots of people out there bidding on that stuff. I did a quick search on vintage recipe cards and there were numerous auctions for old boxes of recipe cards. Many were handwritten notecards, much like Gram’s. Many were big collections of clippings, handwritten cards, and those funny Betty Crocker cards from the 70s.

What is more amazing is that there is a strange competition for these cards, with a few buyers paying up to $75 for a collection of old recipe cards. I find that very weird! I bid on six auctions and on three of them, I was outbid in the last few seconds of the sale! Now, that’s not unusual, but the fact that it’s on something that I think of as somewhat low on the “hot item” list is what throws me.

But, this tells me something much more important. All of these auctions said “great estate sale find!” noted in them. Meaning they were left as junk by the relatives of some deceased lady who collected recipes her entire life. It seems there are enough people who either don’t have their own family recipe books, or they just love old recipes, that these old recipes, almost lost to the ages, are now a “hot item” for collectors.

The moral of the story is to pass on the recipes from your family. Even if you don’t cook, please pass them on to someone who will appreciate them. As I’ve learned through my recipe project, recipe cards hold a lot more than ingredients and instructions on them.

What is with baby names these days?

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As parents, you spend so much time considering the name(s) of your children. You want the name to be something that inspires confidence, happiness, respect, and more. It has to sound good with your last name, endure as a good business name for the future, and not upset any family members. We agonized over what to name our child, ultimately settling on Melody. We considered family names, but with 14 cousins on Dad’s side there weren’t a lot of family names that hadn’t been taken and Borghild was definitely out. Then we looked on my side, and well, we pretty much have a monopoly on names like Harriet, Henrietta, and Mary. Plus, I have five cousins who have children, so a lot of the family names were taken here as well.

While joking about the crazy ways people spell names these days, we came up with KeLliE, Kassan’dra, and then Mel o’Dee. Melody. Yes, suddenly the quest was over and we selected Melody, not a family name, not an unusual name, but an uncommon name. Of course, there are lots of parents who come up with trendy or unusual names for their children, like ESPN (pronounced Espen) and Talulah, and that doesn’t even consider American “ethnic” names. Unusual names can be difficult to grow up with these days.

But, if you thought some of these trendy names were the original made-up sounding names that make you shake your head in confusion, let me just give you a sampling of names from my family tree, which goes back hundreds of years, but the greatest offenders are the Puritans.

On the male list, we’ve got Ebenezer and Elisha at least ten times; Ichabod, Barzillai and Bethul; Darius, Zeno, and Zophar; Balthazar, Elihu, Jabez and even Gustav, which suddenly sounds pretty normal; Ozias, Obed, Asahel, and oh my god, Nutter; rounding this out we have Pownall, Lyman, Elphias, Arashur and Azariah.

Two long lost relatives whose gender has been lost to the ages are named Freegift and Freeman.

Female names are equally unusual: Huldah, Love, and Experience; Hepzibah, Tamar, and Submit; Charity and Mercy are so common sounding now, next to Zerviah, Desire, Wealthy and Mehitable. We have a Hopestill, and we even have a Jemima.

Hmm, Dakota, Cullen and Piper are all sounding pretty usual, aren’t they?

 

I thought I’d lost you!

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When I was a child, I had a brass baby bank. It was basically a cylindar, with a small base and a nut that held the whole thing together. I also had a plastic egg, but that wasn’t as fun or interesting to take apart. For years I held onto that brass baby bank. For a while I used it to keep coins and then I’d empty it out and go buy an ice cream or some other treat. I had another special box that I put my wheat pennies into – it was a “silver” treasure chest shaped trinket box which I used until the hinges broke, and then I transferred the coins over to the brass bank.

At some point I started using the brass baby bank to hold my old money – old coins and bills – and foreign money. I filled it with $2 bills, and I even had a silver certificate (for $1) and pennies and dimes dating back into the ’40’s. I kept it around and whenever I’d find a “new” coin I’d slide it in through the little opening, which was mostly obscured by the bills wrapped up inside the bank.

Well, when Melody was born, I started thinking about that bank again. I thought it might be fun to share it with her, or even give it to her at some point. So I started looking in the obvious places for the bank. And I looked. And looked. This year, after looking for two years, I figured it was gone. Maybe it had been accidentally donated to Goodwill (I did that once with a piece of jewelry), or even picked up by one of the numerous workers we have had to the house for repairs and improvements.

It wasn’t! John found it this past weekend in a box with a variety of other unrelated things. I can only assume that it was put in the wrong place during packing for a move, or rearranging after a move. I was delighted to open it up and show Melody the interesting coins I have in there – Greek, Canadian, Mexican, English – and the old wheat pennies, a buffalo nickle, a silver quarter. Something tells me I’m not completely ready to pass the torch, so to speak, but I’ll continue collecting these little treasures for her until the day that she is interested.

I thought I’d lost you, little brass baby bank, and I so thankful to have found you again!