Entry 219: What's Making That Damn Beeping Noise?

Nothing of particular note going down in the G & G household these days.  Just chillin' -- much more in the literal sense (see my last entry) than figuratively (Lil' S keeps us from relaxing).  The contractor finished up the repairs for our flooded basement, so once we get new carpet it will be back to normal.  As it is, we can use it without carpet, but we still can't take the little guy down there because there are exposed nails.  I plugged back in the carbon monoxide detector that was down there.  I don't even know if we have anything in our house that could leak carbon monoxide, but I'm not taking any chances.  I know several people who died as a result of carbon monoxide leaks.  Well, I don't know them personally, but I know of them.  That's how Weird Al's parents went, and it's also what got former tennis star Vitas Gerulaitis.  Maybe carbon monoxide has a bias against people with long, frizzy hair.

By the way, is there anything more annoying than smoke/carbon monoxide alarms?  Why aren't they more user-friendly?  Hasn't that technology been mastered?  After I put in a new battery I never know if I need to press a button or just let it go.  And once I press a button, and it beeps, does that mean it's on?  What if it just does a little chirp?  Why do I even have to ask this?  If I designed smoke detectors, there would be a little green light labeled "On: No Smoke Currently Detected" that's always on when the alarm is functioning properly and not detecting smoke.*  Then there would be a red light that says "Smoke Dectected" that only goes on when it detects smoke and the alarm is sounding.  Also, the red light would blink when the battery needed to be replaced, and it started making that little chirping noise, and there would be a label on the alarm that says "Replace Battery When Red Light Is Blinking".  Maybe this is just asking too much from today's technology.  It's only been 45 years since we sent a man to moon after all. 

This type of "space age" design would have been very helpful the other night when one of our smoke detectors started chirping.  There were two in the vicinity of the chirp, and I couldn't tell which one it was.  (Standing in the hall between two rooms trying to figure out which one an intermittent beep is coming from is it's own type of madness.)  One of them is connected to our house alarm, and every time I touch it it seems to set off the alarm and calls the security company, so I tried the other one first.  The chirping persisted.  So I changed the battery in the one connected to the house alarm.  In fact, it did set the alarm off, and the security company called, which was pretty annoying, but nothing like what happened next.  Something chirped again.  At this point, I was losing my mind, and it was starting to affect my marriage.  S was getting irritated with my irritation ("It's OK.  Don't get so worked up."), and I was irritated -- on top of my previous irritation -- with her lack of irritation ("How can you just sit there and listen to thing chirp every 10 seconds?  Why doesn't that drive you crazy?") 

Eventually it all got resolved, and things settled down.  What had happened is, when we first moved in two years ago, there was a smoke alarm directly above the stove, which would go off constantly whenever we would cook something (I don't know how the lady who lived here before us managed), so I took it down.  With no good place to hang it, I stuck it on a shelf in our basement, where it got buried under a bunch of other crap.  That's what was chirping.  I finally found it, after a half hour or so of chirp-induced psychosis.  I was happy to solve the mystery, and stop the madness, but I was also a bit -- I don't know what the right word is -- embarrassed, I guess, because it was really all my fault.  I didn't take the battery out of the smoke detector initially when I put it on the shelf.  It was going to run out at some point.

The moment made me reflect a bit, because normally I don't get too bent out of shape about things.  S calls me a robot, because of how little most things bother me.  And yet something relatively small like an untraceable beep will drive me up the wall.  I think I figured out what it is.  When things that should be simple aren't simple, it sets me off.  The "I shouldn't even be having to deal with this" part of life can get to me.  

Alright, I see that that jag went on longer than expected.  I'll have to hit the rest of the items on my agenda rapid-fire style.

• Speaking of things that should be simple not being simple, I had to relay to S over the phone a work order number that a guy had written down for us and I couldn't tell if his 4s were Us.  What the hell?  I understand bad handwriting if you're taking notes and trying to keep up with a lecturer, or if you're just writing yourself a note, but if you're just writing ten numbers on an invoice for somebody else then there should be no such thing as bad handwriting.  Unless you have cerebral palsy, you have the eye-hand coordination to make a 4 look different from a U if you really want to.
• Lil' S has figured out how to talk to Siri on an iPhone.  It's cute, and it's funny to hear what she will reply to his baby-babble, "I found 15 churches.  Several of them are very close to you."
• Why is proper comma usage so difficult?  It's seems like, since the written word is such a common form of communication and since the comma is such a vital bit of punctuation, that we could've made the rules for commas a bit simpler.  I put punctuation in the same boat as taxes.  It should be something any dope can do correctly on his or her own, and yet the vast majority of us need a professional or software (or both) to get it right.
• I got a new computer.  It's one of those tablet/laptop combine thingies.  S's parents bought it for me, seemingly out of the blue.  I asked S why they wanted to buy me a new computer, and she said, "It's for that house ceremony thing", referring to the blessing they did for their new house in November.  Uh ... S's parents buy a new house, so I get a new computer?  Okay, sure.  Thanks.  I appreciate it.
• The other day when I was laying some cable at my office, I noticed the guy in the stall next to me had on those Aquasox-type shoes with individual toes, and instantly I didn't like him.  Without even seeing him, I didn't like him.  I admit it.  I'm prejudice against people who wear those things in public.        

Until next time ...

*My carbon monoxide detector actually has something like this but even then the label is "Operate".  You can infer what it means, but "Operate"?  Of all the phrase in the English language this is the one you chose?  If you want to keep it short, why not "On" or "In Use" or "Activated"?  Even "Operational" would be better than "Operate".

Entry 218: Is "Colder Than a Witch's Tit" the Greatest Metaphor Ever?

My vote is yes.  I love that saying.  It makes me chuckle; it makes no sense; and I have no idea where it comes from.  As best I can gather from the Internet*, it was coined by an American writer named F. Van Wyck Mason in his 1932 novel Spider House.  Whatever the case might be, it is extremely apt for the D.C. region right now.  It is indeed colder than a witch's tit outside.

Few things are more unsettling than waking up in the morning, checking the weather and seeing a bunch of numbers in the single digits.  But that's how it's gone the past few days, and there is no break in sight.  On Tuesday, the forecast calls for a high of 19 and a low of 7.  Brutal.  The thing is, it's not so much the physical discomfort of the cold that bothers me -- thankfully, we mastered indoor heating, what, 50, 60 years? -- it's the chain reaction the cold has on every other facet of your life.

For example, it snowed on Tuesday, enough for most people to get a snow day.  That would be awesome, except I can work from home, so it wasn't a day off for me.  Then daycare was closed so S and Lil' S were both here, which normally wouldn't be an issue -- I would just work downstairs -- but since our downstairs is out of commission from the burst pipe (another side effect of the cold), I have to work upstairs and do my best to ignore the beeping and blaring coming out of all of Lil' S's toys in the next room.  By the way, does every toy have to make some sort of obnoxious now?  Actually, don't answer that.  I don't want to get started down that road.

Also, trying to occupy Lil' S all day without letting him play outside is a bear.  I had him all day last Saturday, and we both got some serious cabin fever.  I took him to the National Building Museum, which is usually a good place to go, but the play area was "sold out" all day.  It seems absurd that a giant room full of toys can be sold out all day, but there you go.  I was extra annoyed too, because we just bought a year's membership, so I felt like we should get some sort of special play privileges, like it's an American Express black card or something.  Kick out some non-members and give us their slots.   Oh, and here's another unsettling thing: returning to your car five minutes after you paid for an hour and a half of parking.        

[Stock Internet photo of a snowy DC.  I meant to take a picture of my street during this latest snow, but forgot.]

Another bad thing about the cold: it makes you fat.  Think about it.  Not only are you way less active when it's cold, but you have less incentive to stay in shape.  Dropping pounds will only make you colder (like a whale losing its blubber), and there's no shame in having a doughy frame, if it's hidden underneath layers of thick clothing.  It's the perfect fat storm.

Anyway ...

In other news, Lil' S has started employing tantrums as a way to try to get what he wants.  He hasn't quite worked it all out yet, though, because he doesn't realize that a tantrum is only effective if the person you're throwing it for can actually give you what you want.  Like if he wants to watch YouTube videos while he eats, there is some logic to throwing a tantrum, because we might cave and put some on.  However if he tries unsuccessfully to hold his ball and work his little toddler-cycle at the same time, throwing a tantrum isn't going to do him much good because there's nothing we can do to significantly advance his motor skills in a span of five minutes.  Well, I'm sure he'll learn.

[The guy who made the run in this video is now in a wheelchair.  He's not yet 60.]

What Lil' S could really use is a lil' sibling to whip him into shape.  S and I got a little taste of what that would be like tonight, as we had to babysit our friends' two girls (five and two) for a few hours.  It went fine, but it wore me out.  My right knee in particular.  The five-year old is a little bruiser, and she kept wanting me to play the "tackling game" -- which I'm pretty sure she made up on the spot -- where I run and then she jumps off the ottoman onto my back, and I fall down.  It was actually pretty fun, but by about the fifth iteration I started feeling a kink in my knee, and now it's starting to stiffen up.  Getting injured roughhousing with a child is a great sign you're not old yet, but you're getting there.  An old person would've even be doing it, and a young person wouldn't be getting hurt.  Well, now I can see why former football players like Earl Campbell are cripples at age fifty. 

Oh, speaking of football ... Go 'Hawks!  That's the only thing I will mention about the 2014 Super Bowl on this blog.

Until next time ...  

*As you might notice this link is a response to a The Straight Dope article.  The response links to the original article, but that link is broken, and I'm unable to find the article online anywhere.  I did however learn that Carlos Castaneda was likely a liar.

Entry 217: Can You Put Wax Paper In the Oven?

The other day S was preparing to bake something, and she asked me if it was okay to put wax paper in the over.  I didn't know so, I typed into Google "can you put" and the number one auto-fill was "can you put wax paper in the oven" -- number one!  Off just the first three words.  That's crazy.  Out of all the "can you put"s in the world I never would have thought "wax paper in the oven" is the most popular.  And, no, I didn't Google it once before, and it was just remembering my previous search.  A dubious friend of mine tried it on his iPhone and got the same result.  It's just a question a lot of people have apparently.  Oh, and if you wondering, the answer is, you probably shouldn't.  You should use parchment paper instead. 

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We finally got a profession cleanup crew out here to dry out our basement.  They came at 7:30 pm on Sunday, which goes to show how busy they've been.  The carpet couldn't be salvaged, which is too bad as it was less than two years old.  It's not so much that I loved that particular carpet, or that we have to pay to have it replaced (should be covered by insurance); it's the wastefulness of it.  I hate it when things are wasted.  Food is the worst, but it's anything, including carpet.  S doesn't have this same abhorrence of waste, which makes for fun "discussions" over things like heating and air conditioning settings, gas, and groceries.  It used to drive me crazy when S would come back from the store with, say, a dozen ripe bananas or a dozen samosas, and we'd eat four or five and have to chuck the rest.  I used the past tense in that last sentence because this hasn't annoyed me much lately.  Either S is getting better or I'm just not noticing it; both are quite possible.  The new grocery thing S does that gets under my skin is she doesn't read the label carefully and gets the wrong thing.  Like she'll get lo-fat cheese or Garden Vegetable Ritz instead of plain Ritz, stuff like that.  Part of the problem is that there are too many varieties of things now -- I've come to realize "choice" is often a euphemism for "waste of time dealing with stupid shit" -- but she should know that and check the labels more carefully.  Of course, this might be why she can get out of a supermarket in about the half the time I can.

Anyway ... Where was I?  Right, basement flooding.  So things are still in the drying out stage, but the water is ostensibly gone.  The cleanup company and the damage assessor from our insurance company happened to be out here at the same time, and they got into a little tiff about what needed to be done.  Each one -- I hope you're sitting down for this -- wanted to pursue the course of action that was the most financially beneficial to them.  The cleanup guy said the drywall was still in danger of getting moldy and wanted to pull up the base boards and run the dehumidifiers longer.  The insurance lady said it was dry.  I trust the cleanup guy more, because he had a little device to measure the dampness, and the insurance lady just had her fingernail.  Plus, if we're doing all this work anyway, let's do it right.  Ultimately the cleanup guy just did what he wanted.  His company is supposed to be reimbursed directly from the insurance company, so I'll let them duke it out.  Until of course we get stuck with the bill for the extra work, which inevitably is going to happen.  Sigh ...

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So far so good with my New Year's resolution.  You didn't even know I have a resolution, because I've never mentioned it before.  But I do.  It's to not read the comments of online articles*.  I found myself getting caught in a time-sucking vortex of chatspeak snark and idiocy.  I just had to go cold turkey.  In fact, I think the major sites should just turn off their comments section altogether.  They sound like a good idea -- they help optimize user interaction or whatever -- but they don't actually serve a real purpose, unless you consider propagating troll wars a real purpose.  Online comments are like car horns, sometimes they're helpful, but overall I think we'd be better off as a society without them.

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I recently read a good/sad/infuriating article in the New Yorker about the War on Drugs.  Shortly after finishing it, I was watching football (because that's what I do), and I heard a post-game interview with Peyton Manning in which he joked that the only thing on his mind was how fast he could get a Bud Light in his mouth.  And I thought about how utterly bizarre it is that we produce hundreds of thousands of gallons of a dangerous drug called beer in the US everyday, and we're all so okay with it that we casually joke about its consumption.  But then we spend billions of dollars terrorizing villages in impoverished nations in South and Central America to destroy this other dangerous drug called cocaine.  Think about that for a minute.  It makes absolutely no sense.  I'm not saying that beer and cocaine are exactly equivalent nor that we should let InBev start manufacturing recreational hard drugs.  This isn't how we should do things.  But if we did, it would be better than what we're doing now. 

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Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Until next time ...

*Some sites, such as Rex Parker, Football Outsiders, and FanGraphs are excepted because they have relatively few comments and are mostly interesting.  I'm primarily just talking about the big sites, ESPN, NY Times, Washington Post, etc.

Entry 216: A Week in Annoyances, Small and Big

Pretty lousy week so far.  It started with some relatively minor annoyances, and then our basement flooded.

On Sunday, I bought a bunch of tofu for dinner without realizing the expiration date was Christmas.  I opened it later that night and threw up a little bit in my mouth.  I had no idea that tofu -- boring, flavorless tofu -- could pack such a rancid punch.  But it can.  It did.  It was twenty times worse than any spoiled milk I've ever smelled.  Plus, I touched it, and it was all slimy and it chunked off between my fingers and ... yuck.  I dumped it all down the garbage disposal, but the scent lingered in the air, on the knife, on the cutting board, on my hands.  I felt like I needed to scrub the kitchen with lye, and scour my hands with a bar of soap Howard Hughes style.  I had to throw out almost all the other packages too, and I just bought them that morning.  Apparently the store didn't notice the expiration date either.  Annoying.

Actually, that rotten tofu is still sitting outside in the garbage bin on our curb.  Why?  Because nobody collected our trash on Wednesday, our trash day.  Why not?  No idea.  Just nobody came.  Recycling came, but not trash.  I know it's not our fault because it's everybody on our block.  S called the city, and they told her only that our trash would be picked up in 48 hours.  That was on Thursday morning, so they still have tomorrow morning to make good on their word.  I'm not confident.

Some slippers I ordered arrived this week.  My parents bought S and I a gift card to Amazon, so I decided to buy something I normally wouldn't buy myself, something pampering-y to make it more gift-like, so I bought a pair of high end (well, high-ish end) slippers.  I wear size 11.5; a pair of 9s arrived.  And they were the wrong style.  The receipt verified that this was indeed Amazon's mistake.  Stupid private sector, they bungle everything.

I got a crossword puzzle submission denied by the New York Times this week.  Usually I take this in stride, but this one stung a bit more because I thought it was really good.    

Then the big one happened.  On Wednesday night I was awoken by somebody trying to open our baby gate to get upstairs.  It was S's friend P who was in town from New York for work and staying in our basement for a few nights.  I got up to open the gate for him, and he said, "Something happened downstairs, there is water everywhere!"  Instantly I knew what happened.  We have a pipe that freezes when it gets cold, and it burst.  I've heard that this is something that happens, but I've never actually witnessed it.  Or I should say that I had actually never witnessed it, because now I have.

S, P, and I rushed downstairs -- the water was about ankle high -- and I closed the main water valve to the house.  I'm actually slightly proud of myself for knowing how to do this.  For normal people this isn't a big deal, but for me and my awful handyman skills it is.  It's like when I taught community college, and a student would feel pride for successfully adding fractions.  I did the factotum equivalent of finding a common denominator.  I also cut my finger in my haste to close the valve, so I have a little war wound for my efforts.

[I don't get it.]

Once the water was off, we didn't know what to do next, so we did what people do when they don't know what to do.  We Googled.  We Googled like the wind.  We called every emergency plumber we could find online, but nobody could come out.  We called our insurance company, but they couldn't do anything more than take information.  So there wasn't really much to do.  We salvaged what we could from the basement, shut off the electricity down there, and went back to sleep.

Well, we tried to sleep anyway.  Restful slumber doesn't come easily when you know an entire floor of your house is fucked.  Plus, we turned the heat off since the furnace is in the basement, so we had to get Lil' S, because his room gets exceptional cold without heat.  I quickly discovered that three in our bed, one of whom is a 16-month old who either tosses and turns all night or bores his body into your back, just doesn't work for me.  P was in the guest bed, so I took the sofa.  I believe I slept three hours total.  And as luck (or lack thereof) would have it.  I had to give a presentation at work the next day -- something that happens about ten times a year total.  (It went fine, though.  It would be better for my story if I bombed, but I didn't.)

The damage isn't too bad, all things considered.  The water was mostly drained.  I don't know where -- I don't see a drain anywhere on our basement floor -- but it drained somehow, so, hey, I'll take it.  It didn't get high enough to get into our TV or DVD player or anything like that.  In this regard we were lucky P was staying in our basement.  If he wasn't, man, who knows when we would've noticed it.  Although what would've been really lucky is if it happened in the middle of the day while I was downstairs, or better yet, not at all.

 [I get it.  But it's not funny.]

We got a plumber out here yesterday to fix the pipe and reroute it so that it won't freeze anymore. The main thing is our carpet.  It's soaked.  We are on a waiting list for every business in the DC area that does flood cleanup, but the earliest appointment we could get is Wednesday.  Because of the cold spell a bunch of pipes burst apparently.  One company told us they had 250 calls in a night.  So cleanup is still going to take a while.  Then there is the cost.  I'm cautiously optimistic our insurance company will reimburse us for most of it, but our deductible is $1,000.  So that's a grand down the drain (get it?).  Whatever, I'll gladly pay to get our basement back in order.

Well, that's been my week so far.  And it's not over yet.  In fact, the Seahawks play a playoff game tomorrow -- they are heavily favored -- so a loss would really push this over the edge for me as an all-time shit week.  On the other hand, a win would be a consolation -- a very small one, but a consolation nonetheless.  So let's do it, 'Hawks!  Forget the dying little boy with Seahawks posters plastered all over his hospital room; forget the special-needs kid who wears a Russell Wilson jersey everyday.  Forget them; think of me.  Think of every thirty-something, upper-middle class whitey, who has quite a good life overall, but has had a real bummer of a week.  Win this game for us, damn it!  We need it.

Until next time ...

Entry 215: A Few Matters, Personal and Otherwise

A few things to talk about today.  Some of it is bullshit personal stuff; some of it isn't.

In the news of my life, Lil' S has inexplicably reverted back to his newborn days and has been waking up multiple times throughout the night.  It's awful.  We've gone through the same pattern four nights this past week.  He wakes up around 12:00 a.m., pitches a fit until we come in the room to calm him down (we usually give it 15 minutes), goes back to sleep for twenty minutes, wakes up, and then does the same thing all over again.  After the fourth or fifth iteration, he final breaks us (or I should say he breaks S who in turn breaks me) and S just sleeps in the guest room with him.  Once in bed with his amma, he stops crying, giggles himself to sleep, and snoozes peacefully through the night.  It's cute, but it's not practical.  It's really hard to get good sleep when you're sharing a bed with him.

We're going to try the Ferber method again.  It mostly worked before.  I don't think there is anything special about it, but at least it will give us a schedule to follow.  I think that's the most important thing.  It's like dieting; it's not so much the specific diet that makes you lose weight; it's the fact that you're systematically limiting your calories.  The diet is just the bookkeeping.  I think sleep training is the same way.  I say "I think" because I honestly have no real idea how any this stuff actually works.  S and I are mostly just winging it, you know, like every other set of parents in the world.       

OK, enough about sleep schedules of 16-month olds.

In other news, non-personal news, a very interesting article was published yesterday in Deadspin by former NFL punter Chris Kluwe, in which he alleges he was cut from the Minnesota Vikings in part because of his outspoken views on various political issues, most notably his support of gay marriage.  It reads a little like an excerpt from Jim Bouton's classic tell-all (and one of my favorite books ever) Ball Four, only about football instead of baseball.

The article is most pointedly critical of Vikings special teams coach Mike Priefer, whom Kluwe says treated him hostilely and frequently used homophobic language around him.  You should read the entire article -- it has the provocative headline "I Was An NFL Player Until I Was Fired By Two Cowards And A Bigot" -- but here is an excerpt if you don't.

Near the end of November, several teammates and I were walking into a specialist meeting with Coach Priefer. We were laughing over one of the recent articles I had written supporting same-sex marriage rights, and one of my teammates made a joking remark about me leading the Pride parade. As we sat down in our chairs, Mike Priefer, in one of the meanest voices I can ever recall hearing, said: "We should round up all the gays, send them to an island, and then nuke it until it glows." The room grew intensely quiet, and none of the players said a word for the rest of the meeting. The atmosphere was decidedly tense. I had never had an interaction that hostile with any of my teammates on this issue—some didn't agree with me, but our conversations were always civil and respectful. Afterward, several told me that what Mike Priefer had said was "messed up."

Priefer, as you might imagine, adamantly denies all this, and right now it stands as nothing more than a "he said, he said" type of deal -- a man-on-man oral confrontation, if you will.  But Vikings' owner Zygi Wilf -- who once commended Kluwe for his political stances and apparently had no prior knowledge of all this -- has called for an internal investigation, and there should be ample witnesses one way or the other, so we shall see.

Kluwe is a pretty interesting dude.  He is an NFL punter (or was, anyway) who advocates for gay rights, plays in a rock band, loves World of Warcraft (hey, nobody's perfect), and occasionally pens slightly hard to follow anti-Ayn Rand polemics.  Not exactly your typical jock.

[Chris Kluwe was a good punter, but he was no Reggie Roby, a three-time Pro Bowler who, as you can see, wore a wristwatch while he played.]

By the way, speaking of Rand, before I go, I just have to mention a story, which is simultaneously sad and hilarious.  As you might have heard, unemployment benefits for many Americans recently expired.  That's sad.  Libertarian dumbass Rand Paul supported the expiration using very specious reasoning in which he utterly confuses causation and correlation.  Specifically he has repeatedly cited a paper by a fellow named (coincidentally) Rand Ghayad.  The only problem with that is this in his study Ghayad draws the exact opposite conclusion as Paul, and he writes as much in an article in The Atlantic.  That's hilarious.

Although it's also kind of sad, because I guarantee you this will not change Rand Paul's mind on the matter one iota.  It should.  It would if it were me.  If I based an opinion on somebody's work, and then the author of this worked called me out by name saying I got it wrong, I would a) be utterly embarrassed, b) seriously rethink my position.  But that's not Rand Paul's style.  That's not the libertarian style.  They already have the world all figured out, with a bow on it.  If facts don't fit nicely into their neat little package, well, they didn't need those facts anyway.

Ugh ... I've asked it before (twice, actually) and I'll ask it again.  Why can't everybody think like me?

Until next time ...