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My Brain Leaves a Vapor Trail

I thought I’d illustrate for you how my brain jumped from topic A to topic Z. I know this happens to other people, but I’m not here to talk about other people, am I?

Okay, so in the car this morning, WXLO interviewed a comedian who I guess had some connection to the show “This Old House” that ended badly. Or something.

  1. This Old House. On Patriot’s Day, we took the long way back to my sister’s house from Lexington and passed the This Old House house in Carlysle. There are big “no parking” signs all over the place.
  2. They are selling tickets to tour the This Old House house on Ticketmaster. It’s $12 for an adult. I have no idea what they are showing you that is worth twelve bucks. If Norm wasn’t there I’d demand my money back. I should go to tell them we used the B-Dry company to waterproof our basement.
  3. I’m sure they’d care who we used for waterproofing.
  4. Do they always sell tickets, or is this something the owner is doing? Is this how they can afford to pay for custom molding?
  5. I haven’t watched This Old House in a long time. We used to watch it. There were a couple of houses that we actually watched beginning to end. One house was in Sudbury. One was in Acton – I think it was yellow. And a Cambridge house with almost no yard. I remember when they left New England and did west-coast houses. They also went to Hawaii.
  6. The Hawaii show was cool. I remember that I didn’t like the homeowner. I wonder if you can hire someone to pretend to be you, on the off chance you are normally obnoxious. The camera adds 10 pounds and doubles obnoxiousness.
  7. They took a field trip to visit a mansion in Hawaii. The television came up out of the floor. That was cool. I think we should do that.
  8. I remember they had a kind of “culture shock” when faced with the building difficulties in Hawaii. You have to ship materials in and construction debris out. Very expensive. And there was the whole “look, no insulation” factor – it was really odd, coming from New England, to see that as long as the wall is nailed up, it meets code. I think part of the house had barely more than a plywood exterior wall – because that’s all it needed.
  9. Our shed is like that. It would be like living in our shed. That would be cool to order a shed from Home Depot and taa-daa, your new house is here. Where would you like us to put it?
  10. I wonder if you could live in a shed. Not in the winter, obviously.
    Our shed is probably the size of Henry Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond. [ed: I looked it up, it was 10×15, so larger than the shed] How much stuff could I fit in our shed? I don’t think a bed would even fit.
  11. Maybe a television producer should make a reality show with someone live in a shed in the middle of the woods.
  12. Thoreau wasn’t completely alone, and did odd jobs to earn money, so I don’t know how they’d handle that. They’d have to make the contestant walk 2 miles to a fake “town” to find odd jobs. So you could buy meat that you’d have to cook over an open fire because there is no room for a stove in your shed.
  13. Odd jobs. Not odd but random. Although maybe now, those same jobs would be odd odd jobs.

At this point I arrived at work. So if any tv producers want to use my shed-in-the-woods idea, you can send the check to this address.

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Heads Up, Commenters

[update: changes complete. Thank you for your patience.]

Just a heads up that if you are reading this on Tuesday, you may not see any commenting links on the page. I have to temporarily disable them on all pages so that I can block them altogether on the January and February pages. After weeks, nay, months of not dealing with comment spam, they appear to be hitting my January archive page with a vengeance. No, I don’t need any tips for winning at roulette. Here’s how to win at roulette: don’t play. Every dollar you don’t bet becomes a win for you. See how helpful I can be? Someone should nominate me for a Nobel Prize or something.

Hopefully I can do this quickly, and get comments back up for at least the May page(s). I don’t have FTP access from work, so I may not get to fix April and March until tonight. If I remember.

*sigh*

You see what I do for you people?

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Back to Reality

Mother’s Day is over. Another 364 days of not being able to say things like “You do it, I’m just going to relax here on the couch and enjoy my special day.” Cause really, is there a better day to guilt the family into doing grunt work? “I’m sorry, I don’t cook or clean on mother’s day. You’ll have to figure something out.”

We had a low key day, if low key includes having two different meals with 9 people at each – one at the Westminster Country Club (breakfast) and the other at Carrabbas in Tyngsboro (amazing Italian food – I was shocked to learn it is a chain.)

Now it’s Monday. I dislike Mondays. Unless they are holidays, then they are good. Three weeks till the next one of those.

p.s. Have I previously mentioned that my kid is a fussy eater? As in, has waffles for breakfast 6 days a week (pancakes on the 7th) and would eat pasta with red sauce for every other meal if we didn’t for chicken (nuggets) and rice or fries on him once in a while? Salad (his first green veggies since baby food!) was recently added. Anyway, fussypants was sitting next to me while we were all sampling the calamari at Carrabbas, and my nephew tried the spicy sauce. Junior said he’d try one…with the spicy sauce. After they revived me, I tried to act low key, especially when he ate a 2nd one with the red sauce. It was an Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment.

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What Makes Mother’s Day Special

It’s 6:30am. Your son makes gagging noises in the bathroom.

You: What’s wrong?
Him: I just saw something disgusting
You: Where?
Him: In my underpants

(So…many…jokes…must…resist…)

Aw, baby’s first skid marks! (Well, the first ones he’s noticed, anyway.) Maybe other moms get breakfast in bed, but why go that old cliched route?

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Sunning Ourselves

Went to look at some sunrooms today. I saw one I really liked, but it’s oh, 5k more than I wanted to spend. Not even “wanted” to, more like “can”. So now I’m kind of bummed and I’m trying to figure out how I can make this all work.

We have a company coming out on Thursday to show us theirs and do all the measuring stuff. I believe they are less expensive, but I can’t remember if there were some significant issues I had with the actual product. It’s hard to look at all this stuff at a homeshow, when there are a bunch of people selling the same product.

So, feel free to paypal me thousands of dollars. That would be dandy. I’ll invite you over for hummus and smoothies in the new room.

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