In which creeping annoyance threatens thermo-nuclear meltdown in my brain

I find this idea of “soaking” the dishes to be a function of bourgeois privilege. I was challenged on this recently by the principle dish soaker hanging around my house. My rebut:

A) Lower income households (especially than us) are statistically more likely to have unresolved vermin problems which would demand immediate cleaning of things like dishes and sink areas.

B) It assumes the availability of monies to replace items ruined over the long term by repeated soakings ie: wooden or wooden handled utensils.

C) It assumes the availability of other equitable dishes to use in place of the ones not able to be used.

D) It assumes future leisure time to “get back to them”, extra space available for a temporarily nonfunctional sink, a certain laziness, and a my needs above the needs of the many, attitude.

E) It is really freaking selfish which is a characteristic one tends to associate with the bourgeois.

BOONDOCKS!!!

Is probably my very favourite cartoon and comic. One of the only lights I have in my life at the moment is that season three of the cartoon is going to start one week from today. That makes life bearable when it is all so very crazy. Here’s hoping, that by next Sunday night I’ll be sitting here all alone, with Oliver chillin’ upstairs, noone squatting in my basement, and just a couple of cool cats wandering about taking care of their important cat business.

I wish Aaron McGruder would be our next house-mate...

Sheer Terror

The guys from the city were out there today assessing and marking the sidewalks for repair. I was sick to my stomach while watching them. This is the kind of thing that sets off my most intense fears. The Gub’ment telling me what I can and cannot, will and will not, do. With no recourse at all available. It’s just “hey you who just had to borrow money for your taxes, hee hee hee, give us more, more, more, bwahahahahahahahah.” I hate that.

So I holla’d out my window to the fresh faced young man in his little fluorescent vest, faded jeans and worker dude boots “Hey, please be nice to my house. I haven’t worked since 2005”. He gave a cheery smile and said “Hey, you’ve only got three, for a corner lot you’re doing good”. I guess I’ll have to accept that that is pretty good, because I had anticipated at least eight. So, I (reluctantly) should count my blessings, albeit rather wanly....

La Maison du Couchant Fumieres

I am making it official. Tomorrow is the day that Nigel Patel joins us here at Chateau Cerise.
Hopefully he is able to overlook really bad French. Among other things.

Keyboards

The roof AIN’T on fire

In fact it’s possibly one of the coolest roofs I now have the pleasure of owning.....

Variations on variousnesses

• Have you noticed how you can look at certain people, you don’t even have to be able to see their eyes, and you can just tell from their physical demeanor and the way they are holding themselves that they are totally batshit nuts and/or close to going postal?

• My new best friend is the Library. He has a good CD collection and as long as I stick with classical the discs aren’t all scratched up from too many debauched and drunken nights. When he thinks I’ve had them long enough he just sends a polite and non-confrontational email asking for them back. I only wish he liked Erik Satie.

• My bathroom is so very awesome now. It has gone from the dingy room with corroded brass lights, too much wood and a water damaged overlarge cabinet sink, (who puts all that brass and fibreboard in a principal bathroom anyway?) to a beautiful pedestal sink, cool gray-white walls, lovely, ember red sconces, and forest green and ember red throw rugs. All due to MaintMan who is really starting to earn that free rent.

• We also have an actual working light over the kitchen sink as well. Soon we’ll have a freshly painted kitchen ceiling with a hanging pan rack and new ceiling fan. The old fan got broken the day I moved in 14 years ago. Sigh.

• The kittens use the drum wall area as their secret cave. They sleep cuddled up, hidden, behind the front wall. I suppose that might change when band practice starts up again tonight.

• I had no frickin’ clue what I was letting myself in for when I signed up for critical thinking. Those one sentence summaries in the catalogue are completely useless. I’m not sure what I thought, that maybe we’d sit around reading newspaper articles pointing out the unused portions of most peoples minds and trashing Bush or something I guess. I had no idea that I was going to have to learn all these new and formal definitions for words which basically constitutes learning a new language with the conceptual ideas as well. All these diagrams and truth tables and 3 kinds of syllogisms wahh! But it’s good, I can tell it’s good inside my brain, just really, really intense.

• We are at that time of year when I can’t get enough of light. But not just any any light, specifically that afternoon, sideways, slanting, westering, cool, fall sunlight. Send it shooting through a bunch of green, gold and red leaves and it’s one of the most beautiful things on this planet.

Migun, me horse and me saddle

So Dali and DoubleN got theyselves a Migun bed and I’ve been checking it out. It’s a little like rolfing so intense is the word. But I have to say that I suspect it’s really good. I am really sore at the moment though. There is a spot it hits and hits and hits which is my number one tension spot and WHOUCH! is it a tough go. But today everything back there is all tingly (and yes sore as hell). It was the second time, it was not as hard and I could tell the difference from the 1st time, so I’m willing to give it a month or so of alternate day treatments and see what happens.
The freaky thing though is there is this infrared heat pad thing to put on problem areas on the front while the back is being worked on, which I could not feel at all in the surgery areas. That is how much nerve damage was done. That just sucks. But I can at least feel the changes resulting from it.

Ahhh the weekend. I have piles of stuff to do as well as homework but I’m really looking forward to it as real progress is being made. I feel like so much less of a consumer and schlub when I know where everything is in my house. The kitchen is getting all nice again as well and that is really a good thing. The thing about having “stuff and pockets” is that you have to turn out the pockets on a regular basis and get rid of all the lint.

Two days earworm radio: Feeling Good - Nina Simone

I’ve come to a conclusion

Which is that I hate fringe. Carpets, mexican blankets, various vests, certain shawls, I just hate it. At best it’s annoying, at worst it’s a tangled, screwy and un-fixable mess.
Don’t even try to wash something fringed except by the most careful, laborious and time consuming hand wash method. Don’t take your oriental carpets to the professionals to be re-fringed and fixed unless you have a private income.

I suspect that fringe was made popular by the wealthiest of the victorian upper classes as a way to instantly discern when visiting others, who had enough money to hire a full-time fringe caretaker as a servant.

And the biggest no-no about fringe is don’t try to cut it off. You will then find you’re beyond the valley of time and patience to fix the filthy, knotted, burr-ridden mess it will become. Needless to point out that that only helps if you want the entire item to become one, big ball of matted fringe. Just give it or throw it away beforehand.

I am the bunny killer

Ok that's it, I have killed the bunnies, I've done shiteloads of laundry, and this is my Bela Lugosi Lily. After never getting to see it last year when I broke the buds off planting it, it was spectacular this year.

Wow

The energy MUST have really changed, I actually started cleaning, a lot. My meditation room had been a wreck ever since I stored a desk in the middle of it, then the cat puked in a festive cascade from the very top of my altar, and I cleaned out a closet in the only out of the way floor space in the house. But no more, the altar cloths are clean and fresh, its almost all dusted and vacuumed and its totally walkable, sittable, whatever.

The cat looked a little crazed sniffing about. I broke her water dish in the process, she was unhappy about that. ( I got her a new one no fear). Then the hallway got vacuumed and now I’m about to hit my room.

Or maybe it’s because I would rather do anything than fill out my student financial aid forms.

The cars, the bars

"I’m going to Detroit and I’m never coming back
Ya I’m going to Detroit and I’m never coming back
Ya I’m going to Detroit and I won’t be back
I won’t be back"

Borax

I learned recently that my neighbor, Radiolady, has to sell and move because she just can’t afford this area as a single. She just put so much work into the house and garden it’s a damn shame. But for the kind of money she’ll then have available, she could move to New Center or Hamtramck and have a huge house with only a 400 or maybe less, monthly. I’ve got to say this is tempting stuff.

I could get, outright, a cool old house in Hamtramck and pocket 200 grand. I wouldn't need to work for a while with that kind of change. So it wouldn’t actually matter so much that I’d be nowhere near anything I know and love. The other tempting option is the same trip only in a different direction, out into the country. But then you’re much more car dependent, and everybody knows my feelings about driving, I frickin’ hate cars. But I don’t like big cities either. Face it, I'm an Ann Arbor girl.

I guess it’s just the lure of making that money off the house. While I find it pretty gross and wierd and creepy that the value has just about tripled since I bought it, (in better financial days obviously), being REALLY poor other than the house, sucking the money out of it seems like good, clean American fun. This place costs an average of ten thousand a year to keep up, and thats just keep up, not doing anything major to better it.

Maybe I’m just dwelling on it today because it’s the first day of art fair here, and no, I’m not going to capitalize it, it doesn’t rate it in my opinion. The traffic in my neighborhood just septupled. I can hear the goofy suburban ladies inane conversations from my bedroom window as they sojourn into the thrall and if Oliver wasn’t sleeping I’d probably open the windows and put on very loud Black Sabbath. For her pleasure.

Then I’ll go down and look at my kitchen floor with the holes in it and the 4 layers of linoleum that I’m trying to get stripped off to get to the wood to make the repairs. Then go to take a shower using robogrips to turn on the broken faucet in the really slow draining tub and I am so very tempted, so very tempted, to just move to Niles or Watervliet where there’s no traffic or commerce or alleged art at all, and I bet I could get a fabulous house for REALLY, REALLY, cheap. Probably with an inhouse plumber thrown in.