scrawls.

scrawls

still cheaper than therapy*

27.3.04

And you forgot to mention the other cabinet, which happened to be hell to take off and left big gaping uneven holes in the wall and was painted brown underneath - which only necessitated about seven coats of primer and paint to cover up.

Labels: house

scrawled @ 23:42

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And then you decide that since you're replacing the vanity you have to replace the floor because the people who put the floor in before skimped on all the area under the old vanity - so it wouldn't be level. besides, the floor is boring. so you call the friend with the crowbar and he comes and lends you a bunch of giant razor-blades and you all have a big party taking up the baseboards and the floor and scraping all the glue off the bare cement until it's absolutely perfect and smooth.

And you're still painting because it's a fairly intense color and needs more than one coat. and then you're done painting, and when the friend has time he comes over and helps you put the nice new floor in, and you all go out for sushi. the importance of the sushi step cannot be overemphasized.

Labels: house

scrawled @ 23:40

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and then taking away the existing medicine cabinet and toilet and vanity - ohh, that was fun. i got the medicine cabinet - all you have to do is tug - but the vanity we had to get a friend of ours to come help tug, and he had a crowbar, and that helped too. And the toilet lifts off after you drain & unscrew it. And to put the hole back from the existing medical cabinet is cutting a big piece of drywall to fit, and hammering it all in and taping it all up, and then afterwards it was still a little bit behind the normal wall so i had this big valley and had to fill it up with mud. which may or may not be okay - but i'm betting it will be; they built houses out of adobe, after all, and by now it's all had plenty of time to dry. and of course back when you were taking down the wallpaper all the other things - the towel bars and the robe hooks and the little towel ring and the miniblinds - all those came down and got spackled up before the mud was even in the picture. And then there's more mud and sanding behind where the vanity was and over the old medicine-cabinet-area.

And then you can primer. Twice.

And then you can paint the ceiling ....

And then you can paint it purple.

Labels: house

scrawled @ 23:36

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25.3.04

now i want my bathroom done. it's all pretty - i have a ceiling and four walls and a floor - now i only need all the bathroomy parts - the toilet and the sink and the vanity and the medicine cabinet and towel racks and robe hooks. Only i don't think the vanity will fit in my car.

Sushi is good. i like anything with eel in it. mmmm, eel.

Labels: house

scrawled @ 23:58

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24.3.04

at work. ten minutes and nothing to do.

been to all the websites already.

putting the floor in the bathroom today. maybe, too, the vanity, sink, mirror cabinet, et c.

probably not the toilet, i guess. we need a pro for that - the flange is way, way kaput.

and then sushi later - i have to call around and see who's up for sushi. humm. raw eel.

in the monthly company newsletter they have a contest - two every month: based on these three facts, can you guess who this person is? most people say, I was born in texas, I really, really like football, Some country singer went to my high school, I like olives on pizza, I have two kids, I go jogging with my dog.

I said:
this person likes raw eel, liverwurst, and cow brains - though not together - but really wouldn't reccomend jellyfish or rooster testicles;
this person was once, briefly, held for questioning behind the iron curtain;
and, .. oh, what was the other .. hell, i don't remember, but it was something far more interesting than "I like football."

It might have been this person's high school had no cheerleaders or football team, but was #1 in the state for varsity fishing. Or something like that.

Labels: work

scrawled @ 23:21

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19.3.04

when i was very small - not that this has stopped, but - my mother's flower garden, on either side of the front walk, grew gigantic yellow tulips. they were taller than i was, and i had to bend them over (or have them bent for me) to see the flowers. (i've seen them now that i'm a grown-up, and they're still fairly tall, and stocky, for tulips.) huge, potbellied, evil, yellow flowers, and red ones, and stripey ones. yellow ones were the biggest, though, and the worst. i think i thought i might fall in. Those bulging cheeks ...

i thought that the tulips were a cross between tigers (which i had seen in books) and bees (which happened in matter-of-fact everyday life, and people were afraid of), what with all the black and yellow stripiness and those evil-looking black toothy-stingers in the center. i thought, very specifically, that they would kidnap me, and bite me, and sting me, and that it would hurt a lot.

i did not think that i was in danger of actual death, i think, only because i didn't know what that was yet.

It probably didn't help that my dad thought it would be funny to teach me to pretend i was choking when nice people offered flowers for me to smell. But.

sylvia plath had a funny thing, too. and look - i'm not alone ... but if someone googles fear of tulips or toulipaphobia ... hi.

So getting stoned in Amsterdam was a little bit surreal, yes.

Labels: reflection

scrawled @ 22:05

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18.3.04

jose luis rodriguez zapatero. i love his name. such cadence, such music, such panache. i like saying it. he sounds like a mythological character. like: remember when jose luis rodriguez zapatero jumped off a cliff, and he floated all the way down? or when that orphanage needed money, and jose luis rodriguez zapatero dug a diamond mine in the back yard? or when that truck ran over the kitten, and juse luis rodriguez zapatero lifted it up with one hand and saved her?

john kerry - that nice hard-working farm-boy who was really sweet, but you left in idaho and he grew up and is a cop now even though he's never used his gun. john kerry sounds pragmatic, and believes in the american dream (though he's too honest and aw-shucks to get it), and rural, above all. Maybe you left him in pennsylvania. he couldn't even be as exotic as, say, maine. but i suppose if woodrow wilson could be president - jeez, what a dork - so could john kerry.

rick perry: one of those suave soap-opera types that's sleeping with your sister. with the perfect hair, and the perfect teeth, and the perfect shoulders, but not really so much else, and besides, he's sleeping with your mom, too, and he's awfully sorry, what a bad time to let you know this, but he ran over your kitten.

Labels: people

scrawled @ 21:37

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16.3.04

so, it's been crummy. for a wider variety of reasons. but, to balance out, a variety of texan foibles:
A conversation:
D. (a.k.a. a house-painter we know, a.k.a. our neighbor across the street, a.k.a. someone who sees our house every time he enters or exits his own) wants to paint our house.
the inside or the outside?
the outside.
did you remind him it's brick?

from our friend G, who it is impossible not to love, though i guess his ex-wife disagrees...
(laughing)... so there i am, on ma back, on th' ground, wi' my pants aroun my ankles. thank god he stoppt..

Herman Munster, across the cube-aisle, thinks the following are funny:
homing pigeons
people in wheelchairs
mental illness
feminism
lollypops
bad puns
squalor
vast, sweeping generalities
ethnicity

not that they're all ... well ... maybe they are ...

Labels: texas

scrawled @ 18:10

13.3.04

it's really awfully rude of terrorists to go after fucking mass transit all the damn time. These aren't the people they want, the ones riding the mass transit - it's available to everyone, it's proletariat, it's cheap, it's environmentally conscious. they're not blowing up wal-mart HQ or the CIA or police cars or army bases.

powerful people don't ride mass transit. and unless the powerful people feel threatened ... well ...

who thinks this is important enough for the feds to pay attention to? i mean, do they have better things to do than read random citizens' blogs? even discontented citizens - there must be lots of them. right? if i have an file at some poor intelligence service, they must be awfully bored.

Labels: politics

scrawled @ 00:55

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5.3.04

Had a discussion with a nice international-looking student in the grocery store. he was waffling over coffee - i very determinedly went straight to the shade-grown, organic, fair-trade sticker. he said, is that stuff good? and i said, it's not bad, and look, it's economically and environmentally friendly. he said, They lie. i said, i know, but a girl can dream.

everyone below, from high school, is doing nice, community-aware, good-quaker things.

i sold out, sure... but i buy fair-trade coffee, dammit.

Labels: people

scrawled @ 22:26

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1.3.04

we went to san antonio to see people from college. went to the alamo. (which was ... ahh, maybe i'm too worldly, but even less exciting than the eiffel tower.) the grand canyon, now that was something to see. 'cuz in, you know, hyped-up monuments and things, size matters. and not many things are bigger than the grand canyon.

the alamo was very small. and that front part with the silhouette? wasn't even part of the original (which didn't have a roof) - they put that on long after the war, when it was a foundry, or something. and there was this big fakey souvenier shop right next to it with shot glasses and key chains and t shirts. very cheap. and it's entirely legend - they did surrender eventually. happens when you're shelled into submission - you submit.

though i suppose it was free to get into the thing. nice of them. but then i didn't pay for the louvre either (though that was a complete accident and i'm sure i couldn't have pulled it off deliberately if i'd tried).

i may have gotten fairly silly at the piano bar afterwards. never heard bohemian rhapsody like that before :) very cool. but somebody requested pianoman. it doesn't seem fair to request billy joel at a piano bar (probably not elton john, either, or alicia keys, though i doubt that happens often anyway). not challenging enough - and hardly as groundbreaking as pink floyd.

Labels: texas

scrawled @ 16:21

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