seventh

it's hard to get excited about working today. it's been a week of ups and downs. the software has been acting up and we're quite behind in our dictated minutes yet to be transcribed. pressure is mounting. and it seems i keep getting long reports, upwards of 12 and 15 minutes. sometimes i really like the long ones; i like getting into a complex surgery. but when the dictator is difficult to understand, too fast or too quiet or too mumbly, it's a terribly long report to wade through.

kara commences a 5-day holiday today, and i have a 4-day holiday that starts tomorrow. we're taking time off to celebrate the anniversary of our first date. isn't that the cutest thing?

it was seven years ago tomorrow. we were in seattle. on the evening of 2/1/2000 we went to the movies and saw magnolia, which i still think is quite a good film. (at the time i was living in a neighborhood in seattle called magnolia, which added to the import of the venture.) after the movie, we went to a bar called murphy's and met up with friends alex, jeff, and carla. that was the beginning of us.

i'd originally gotten kara's attention by mentioning john sayles. he's a writer and a filmmaker she really admires, as i do, and my recommending a film of his opened her eyes to me. "john sayles? i love john sayles!" we were working together in a bookstore just north of seattle at the time. she was an assistant manager and i was a new employee.

ideally we'd like to go somewhere, away, for this long weekend, portland or vancouver. because of the max situation, we're staying here. he couldn't handle kara's absence for so long, we fear. so we're planning on doing something we haven't done in quite a while, actually going to a movie, and maybe two, over the course of the weekend. pan's labyrinth, maybe. maybe babel. we'll probably shop for a bathroom sink too.

so she's off today, and i don't really feel like working. but i'll be working. i'm glad she's home, doing things around the house, though, because she can deal with the dogs. it seems that when she's at work i'm constantly taking off the headphones and getting up from my desk to find out why they're barking, to let them out of the house or back in. today she can do that, and it'll make my workday run more smoothly. she'll bathe the dogs and watch saw 3, which we have had from netflix for a while and which i cannot handle.

suddenly i'm tired, thinking about working through the day. i should stop thinking about it. what i should be doing is working on my january story; after all, it's the last day of january and the story is nowhere. a woman on an airplane, flying home during the night, for the funeral of her estranged sister's husband. that's all i've got. i'm just not interested in it right now, unfortunately. i'm trying too hard, is what it probably is. maybe i'll pick up this thread a little later.

realistically, i think i'm just going to start fresh with something new in february. sadly, so far, the writing of 2007 is a dud.

special k

today's kara's birthday! happy birthday, kara. we're going out to dinner on thursday. because we're both off friday, we'll be able to party hard. no worries, dear readers; the restaurant and the martini bar we'll likely visit afterwards are walking distance from our house.

i'm not sure why, but i tend to find it interesting to learn what folks share a birthday with folks i care about, and today i learned that today is also the birthday of one django reinhart. sure, he was born several decades before my kara, but still. not that i'm all into astrology or even particularly familiar with the alleged personality characteristics of individuals of given astrological signs (kara's aquarius; i'm taurus), but from a quasi-historical perspective, i'm interested.

other folks with this birthday: stendahl, leadbelly, ernie kovacs, sonny chiba, rutger hauer, richard dean anderson, and (woo!) mariska hargitay. so a very happy birthday to those folks as well i'm sure.

anyway. happy birthday, kara! what fine company you're in. i love you.

bed bugs

well poo, is what i say this morning. i think i slept from about 11:30 last night to about 12:30 this morning. i simply could not get comfortable in bed. i would find a position that seemed okay and relax into it, but before i was able to drop off i would get an itch or something.

sometimes i wish that my limbs were detachable, especially my arms. they just get in the way when i'm trying to sleep, and i don't know where to put them. i don't know if it's me or the mattress or what. kara slept quite poorly last night as well.

all the same, trouper that i am, i'm trying to get some fiction writing in before work. at about four i figured i might as well get up, as i wasn't sleeping anyway. i confess i've been fairly lax about writing this month, and am only about 1200 words into my story. this'll be a short one, perhaps only 5000 or 7000 words. maybe february's will be longer.

front door

well shiver my timbers. it looks like we've got ourselves a new front door. i don't know if it's a 100% stylistic match to the rest of the house but i don't particularly care right now. i'm pleased as all get out, simply because the thing opens and closes without anything close to an unreasonable amount of effort. a fully functional door! i'm thrilled!

it does look new, doesn't it? a little silly in contrast to the rest of the structure? kara will paint it. we'll pick a color and it'll get painted.

the two men who installed it, john and adrian, were even early! i was called yesterday by the company and told to expect them today between 8 and 8:30 in the morning. they were here by 7:45. amazing. adrian appeared to be the apprentice, so perhaps he did most of the work, though i didn't actually watch. (i was playing with the tivo!) it took them less than two hours to do the job. they both were very friendly, kind, and professional. john even took the time to look at the french doors at the side of the house, that open onto the back yard, because they're a bit sticky too. they don't need to be replaced, but the locking mechanism is just a bit wonky.

all in all i'm mighty pleased. here's a picture of the door from the inside. not too bad, eh? kinda pretty.

further snow

it's snowing again. right now. big fat wet snow. no one's pleased about this one. the hope is that it will turn to rain today, although, of course, it's due to freeze tonight, so tomorrow the streets will be ice. i continue to be pleased that i work from home. kara will walk or take the bus this morning.

next week it should get warm enough consistently to melt it all away.

a furnace person is supposed to come today. my hopes are not high. a confirmation call did not come yesterday. i confess i have little faith, especially given the weather.

i had several peculiar and enticing dreams during the night but they rapidly faded. yellow and eliot were climbing all over us all night. i think max got kara up only once. yesterday morning he did poo in the house one time, but, on the plus side, his gastrointestinal system seems to be working well, miracle of miracles, and his stools are firm and well-formed. hence, easy to pick up and dispose of. there is only the lingering odor, which i hardly notice any more.

of course our house smells like shit and piss.

so yeah, on that note, things are great! kara's birthday is a week from today! tivo showers us with unsolicited recordings of tv shows, most of which we delete unwatched! sagan, the limping wonder, has decided she likes cat food!

kara took this picture the other morning, after the second snowfall of the year.

snow, 9/11, faucet

there's still snow on the ground. it's been cold. it snowed when? last tuesday night i think? it could have been wednesday night. i don't remember. but anyway. it's still here. the temperature hasn't been above 35 degrees fahrenheit all week. i carved out my car on friday and drove it to the mall. i returned the garbage disposal to sears without any hubbub. there was ice on the roads and there still is ice on the street in front of our house. the city doesn't seem to be doing anything to take care of that. do they think it will just melt on its own?

it's martin luther king jr day today. happy martin luther king jr day, everybody. no mail today, i guess.

i finished jonathan safran foer's 2nd novel, extremely loud & incredibly close, the other day. it was outstanding. it was one of the saddest books i've ever read. the horrors of 9/11/2001 in new york as well as those of the bombings of dresden are depicted in a startling way. i was startled, and very impressed. i haven't yet read his first novel but i plan to read it one of these days.

the bathroom sink faucet i ordered online on 8/25/2006 arrived the other day. wow. we had just about given up hope. but here it is. it's a bridge design and it looks a little like this. that's the design. next, a sink. is it weird that we bought the faucet before the sink? we don't like the current bathroom sink and we have long planned to get a different one. we found the faucet we liked first, that's all. now that we have the faucet, we can look for a sink to go with it. we'll see how that goes.

tomorrow someone comes to look at the furnace. nothing's wrong with the furnace, for which i am grateful, because it's quite cold outside, but it hasn't had a physical since we've lived here, and i think it could use one. and on thursday, theoretically, we get our new door. i'm not holding my breath, but it's scheduled for thursday morning.

not so surprised

so this is how things go.

yesterday morning the door people called. the installer fellow was allegedly sick and could we please reschedule for next week? my disappointment was great but there was nothing to be done. the new door now is supposed to arrive and be installed next thursday, a week from tomorrow, the 18th. that does seem like a long time from now, with our current swollen and sticking door.

in the afternoon a plumber paid a visit regarding installing the garbage disposal. i was only after an estimate. but the plumber was rather a jerk. he spent quite a bit of time discussing the women in his life. i don't know why he felt the need to share. he said he'd been married for 18 years and then found his wife in bed with his best friend. tragic, sure, but trite. so he got drunk for several months and then got sober and joined an internet dating service. he screened a few women and started dating one of them. she had a lot of issues and he told me he has a weakness for women with issues - he wants to save them. so they dated for a few months and then that woman's mother made a pass at him. or something. he wasn't interested in the mother. while he was in my house he accepted a call on his cell from a woman - i'm not sure if it's the same woman or a new one - and he told her he was on a job and would be busy for two or three hours, obviously a lie. then when he got off the phone with her he told me he was going to buy a huge expensive car and screen women severely before getting involved again.

then he started talking about our kitchen sink. what a disaster. he couldn't stop laughing. the washing machine isn't hooked up correctly. we don't have an air gap at all. the garbage disposal i bought is enormous. he could install it, sure, but the waste from the disposal would flow directly into the washing machine, the way things are set up now. that would be gross. the valves under the sink are the worst kind of valves possible to have. plus, the cabinet under the sink is small and the disposal would block access to the pipes behind it, so if ever work needed to be done on those pipes, the disposal would have to be taken off and then put back on, and he mentioned a dollar amount. he talked a lot about money. how much money he made last week, how much money he'd made so far today, how he would take my money but would feel bad about it. i told him i wasn't going to give him any money.

isn't it not really polite to talk to strangers about how much money you make? sure, i'm making more money now, doing transcription, than i ever have before doing anything else, and i'm happy about that. this plumber makes quite a bit more than i do, and that's of course fine, in and of itself, but he was actually a bit of an asshole about it.

anyway. the estimate he gave me for the installation was in the range of $1200, though he said that it wouldn't work the way i'd want it to. he recommended i return the garbage disposal to sears. on that point, after his lengthy diatribes, i was in agreement with him. he recommended doing some remodeling before even thinking about a disposal. (he personally is against garbage disposals. they're not good for the lines, he said. he recommended i get a pig. i think we'd rather have a goat.) he recommended getting a double sink to replace our small single sink. he said, if this were his house, that he would move the sink to where the counter is now, by the window, away from the dishwasher, next to the stove. make some room that way. then we could think about installing a garbage disposal, if we still want one. the ideas didn't sound like bad ones, and we might do what he suggests, but not immediately.

so kara's not getting the disposal for her birthday. i'm a bit sad after all that. i told her the whole plumber story when she got home from work. i think i was more disappointed than she was. the disposal is going back to sears on friday. she says she's glad i tried to get her a garbage disposal for her birthday. but it's not going to work out.

there are other projects that will take precedence over the kitchen work. she wants windows and french doors put in upstairs, because one day (after max is gone) we'll use the huge upstairs room as our bedroom. now there's just random stuff up there. we still miss all the built-in cabinets and stuff in our old house.

it snowed last night. there's an inch or two on the ground. that's kind of a surprise.

no surprise

i had a dream last night about philip roth. he and i were just hanging out, walking around town, window shopping, having a coffee, spending an evening together. it was fun because we were not talking as if he were a phenomenally accomplished author and i was an undermotivated wannabe author. perhaps there was an occasional reference to a book of his, but largely our conversation went to other topics. it was a relaxed and pleasant dream. mr roth sure is a nice guy.

kara's birthday is the 23rd and the surprise of my major gift to her has been ruined. now, i understand that many folks might not find a kitchen sink garbage disposal the most romantic or otherwise appropriate of birthday presents, but it's the sort of thing that i knew kara would love. i bought the machine a few weeks ago and it's been stashed behind a bookshelf in my office here. i had a guy come out yesterday to install it, and how terrific it would have been for kara to come home from work and find the thing fully installed and ready to go!

it wasn't to be. the contractor said that the trap on our sink was too low and water doesn't flow uphill. that latter bit i actually already knew. apparently the former bit is not uncommon in older houses such as ours. he said he could install it but there would be backups into the sink and he advised against it. so now i'm on a mission to alter the piping under the sink somehow to allow for garbage disposal installation. i called several plumbers yesterday afternoon, left some messages, and then i went to the vet to have eliot's asshole tidied up.

eliot's been rather schmutzy in his nether regions and scooting his butt on the floor quite a bit of late. he was foul smelling and appeared uncomfortable, and i figured his anal glands needed expressed. so i went ahead and took care of that - or, rather, the vet did - and now eliot smells much better indeed. he's more snuggly.

when i came home with eliot, kara was home from work and, of course, there were messages from plumbers on the answering machine, wanting my business and being very specific, mentioning garbage disposals. i suppose i should have made it clear on my messages to them that the thing was a gift for my wife? so anyway, now she knows. she's thrilled; it's a perfect birthday present for her. i'm glad of that, sure, but disappointed that i won't have my moment of surprising her.

the project is still on, though. i'm still looking for a plumber to do the job. then i might contact that original contractor to do the electric work, because there is an electrical component to a garbage disposal as well, as we know. but that's after the machine is in place under the sink and not something i'm thinking about now.

in other news that's at least as thrilling, our new front door is due to arrive and be installed this afternoon. me oh my. i am hoping the inclement weather won't be a factor in their accomplishing the task. i don't know. they were actually supposed to call yesterday to confirm today's appointment, but they didn't. so part of me is afraid it won't happen today at all. oh how it want it to happen, though.

and on sunday kara successfully hooked up our tivo. what a crazy thing is tivo. we recorded two programs sunday night, a new show called "living with ed," about actor ed begley, his environmentally conscientious home, and his less environmentally conscientious wife; and "intervention," about addicts and their familes wanting them to get clean. the tivo also recorded about six other shows on its own, thinking we might like them. we didn't like any of them, and deleted them all, but i suppose it was the thought that counts. a quite nice aspect of this thing is that we can fast-forward through the ads of shows we record. i do like that.

it's electric

okay so i do have a temper. not only do i spit obscenities through gritted teeth while grappling with our front door (the new door comes in 3 days!! holy crap i'm so excited!), but a few weeks ago when i was wrapping xmas gifts i got into a little spat with our packing-tape gun. annoying little gun, that. i ended it up hurling it away from me in frustration, and it sailed through the air, and by chance it knocked out one of the bulbs in the track-light thing in my office here. the bulb popped out quite neatly - all four lights winked out - and landed behind a bookshelf. the track-light system seems to be like a chain of xmas-tree lights in that if one bulb goes, the whole system goes.

so here - i scan the dead bulbs this morning, as a monument to my flash of fury at an inanimate object. pun intended. art from anger? how's it look?

incidentally, my rage did not last. i was immediately sheepish at having destroyed something with my unnecessary outburst. i retrieved the loosed bulb once it had cooled - it took longer to cool than i did.

anyway. it's saturday. yesterday it was quite stormy, with wind and rain. i made a fire in the woodstove, in the afternoon, when i got back from my errands, and lay on the couch and read about electrical activity in the heart. i think now i know more about that than i even need to.

today the sky is clear. jennifer is town - well, in seattle - to attend a conference and kara and i will head up there too soon, to spend the afternoon with her. i'm looking forward to it. i hope the weather holds, so we can walk around a bit. worst comes to worst, and the rain and nastiness return, we'll stay inside, in her hotel room (in the roosevelt, where kara and i stayed last january when we went to see paul auster - how weird is that?) or in the shops across the street. or something. who knows? either way, we'll be with jennifer so it'll be a good time.

couple of hands

hey look, it's my right hand. oh the fun to be had with scanners. actually it's terrible how few ideas for fun stuff to do with the scanner i've had. i would like to create something as beautiful as this (which my dad created, and then blew up as a print for kara and me as an xmas gift), but we'll see. i need to know a lot more about the machine, but there was a curious dearth of instructions included in the box. i guess i need to find me a pretty, dead thing.

not max, though. max is still alive. and his prettiness these days is questionable. (should we have scanned rumble postmortem? no! what a terrible thought; i apologize. plus i didn't have the scanner then.)

curious, perhaps, or perhaps not, the similarites between my self-scan of this morning and the cover of this novel that i started reading yesterday. it's a reaction to the towers' falling from the point of view of a 9-year-old boy, who lost his father in that attack. i'm only a few pages in but the writing is fantastic. i feel like i just read a book from the point of view of a precocious youngster, and i did - the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by mark haddon. that was a fun book, let me tell you.

anyway. for whatever it's worth, it was one year ago today that i initiated this blog with this revealing post frought with portent. is it worthwhile, this blog? or just a waste of time and energy? has anything been accomplished by it? i don't know. it's been fun for me, sometimes, so perhaps the answers are yes, no, and yes.

shooting

yesterday morning at about 7:30, about 45 minutes after i got back home with my paper towels, a student was shot to death at a high school, the high school across the street from the fred meyer where kara and i shop semiregularly. it's terrible. and incomprehensible. i don't know what else to say about it. it's insane that things like this still happen. that they ever happened, and that they are still happening. all over the place. happy new year, eh?

initial dilemma of the new year

happy new year, all. well, that remains to be seen, i suppose. i might be in trouble today. yesterday, because of the wind and rain, max didn't want to go outside to relieve himself of liquid or solid waste. in cleaning up his indoor messes, i used the last of our paper towels. i didn't realize we didn't have a spare roll until late in the evening yesterday. my worry is that today's rain will again keep him from wanting to go outside. i don't have time to go to the store before work!

well, actually, i suppose i do. i have an hour before i'm due to start typing. but i've only written 94 words of my january story. do you perceive my dilemma? should i go to the store real quick? should i get some writing in and hope the old fart chooses to venture outdoors when nature calls him?

what am i to do? what a year so far!

from the larger world, here's a story of a heroic man who didn't waste time making an even more difficult choice.