Category: Personal

Replacing a leaky shower drain this week. We haven’t been able to use our master shower now for some time because of the leak I haven’t had time to fix. This, unfortunately, requires going into the ceiling. After going in, I quickly realize someone has already been up there. I now suspect the previous owners had a leak, which pretty clearly was caused by a rotten gasket where the drain meets the shower. But rather than fix it by rebuilding the drain, it appears they decided to shove plumbers putty around everything. Sure, that’ll stop the leak for a while.

Somewhat frustrated that the original trap doesn’t have threads compatible with the new one I bought. I will have to replace the whole drain and trap. It’s all PVC. Since I now realize I need to do this, I must return to Home Depot to get a 2″ PVC street elbow. I would have needed to go back anyway, because I just realized my PVC cement is no good. Still have cleaner and purple primer, which I don’t think goes as bad as readily. Been a while since I did any PVC work. It’s times like this I’m glad to have worked for a plumber as a kid. I can do basic plumbing work. Don’t know if I’d want to try to install a new boiler, but a shower drain should be within my capabilities. The question is how many trips to Home Depot am I going to need to make? Real expertise is having to make only one.

Off between Christmas and New Years, but only partially. Too much to do to take the whole time completely off, but it’s an excuse to work from home where I can get things done more efficiently. Since we’re sort of snowed in today, after a coastal storm decided to hit us with snow and wind yesterday until this morning, I might as well get some things done around the house. Installing some programmable thermostats, and in addition to that, I have a leaky shower drain that I’ve needed to fix for some time. Now I have time to do all those things.

I honestly can’t imagine anyone, who upon tasting a Honey Baked Ham, wouldn’t renounce his pork avoiding faith, and adopt a believe system that is more benign, and which allows for such culinary indulgences.

The next few days is dinner marathon. Last night was my Aunt Kathy’s, tonight was pot roast with Bitter’s mother and grandmother, tomorrow is the main event with combined families. To make it more interesting, I haven’t a functioning stove or oven, because the gas line supplying such, which runs under a concrete slab, has a leak. Christmas dinner will be cooked on a combination of a Weber Smokey Mountain, a GE hot plate, a dual burner Coleman propane camp stove, an oversized toaster oven, and a George Foreman grill. Sounds difficult, but you can produce quite a meal with that combination.

My cousin Rob and I, at the Christmas Eve dinner, were going through a big box of stuff from my grandmother’s, who passed away in 2004. I managed to find a really good picture of my mom:

I’m 90% certain this is a graduation photo, which puts her age at 17 or 18. My mother died at 43 of breast cancer, when I was a sophomore in college. The photo above was probably circa 1968, considering my mother graduated in 1969. She had me at the age of 23, and my cousin Rob and I were joking how we always thought our mothers were so old, but you look at pictures of them now, and they were kids. Yet they had children. The picture to the left is from Christmas of 1975, my second Christmas. I still have that stocking somewhere, I think.

I was fortunate that my Uncle Rick had his trains set up this Christmas. That’s one memory I have from years ago. Some of his Lionel trains date from the 1940s, and were purchased at the Lionel Store in New York City. Back then they were made to last. His set up is still quite impressive, and the current setup did not even encompass the whole collection. I have some experience with model trains as Christmas gifts from years ago. Here’s an early scene with my dad, probably from the late 1970s, where I got a set of HO scale trains for Christmas. I would later also get the Lionel scale trains.

We were both a lot thinner then. I had those trains for a number of years, when sadly they were destroyed by fire during my Gomez Adams years.

And that’s not all that far off how they went. Fortunately, I never combined that with my penchant for giving my hamsters a ride in gondola car. They always looked very confused, but tolerated it. They were fortunate my rocketry experiments never resulted in seeing how high I could launch the short tailed rodents, and safely retrieve them.

And here my parents probably thought they were providing adequate supervision.

UPDATE: For those younger folks in the audience who might not know much pop culture trivia, the actor playing the part of Gomez Adams is John Astin, who is the adoptive father of this actor, who’s mother is Patty Duke. He was a child star in one of my favorite movies as a kid, and rather than taking up an adult career of knocking over liquor stores, took up a leading role in more recent movies you may have heard of. Not sure, however, what his separation factor is from Kevin Bacon.

Says Tam:

I would only use my powers for Good. Such as calling in DPICM on those giant twenty-foot inflatable snowmen in people’s yards.

Yes. Bitter and I have been discussing whether it might be possible to train the local squirrel population to gnaw on these things. They seem to get bigger every year. One house on our street has one that could peer into the second story window. I kid you not. Fortunately, high winds have been keeping them at bay, which is good, because if a giant frosty goes floating by my window in the wind, it’s going to seriously freak me out.

My neighbor’s Santa Copter lighted lawn ornament is still in full display, and may be literally taking to the skies if the wind gets much worse around here. Hopefully Santa knows to give it some left pedal as he pulls up the the collective to avoid my car if he gets the proper clearance from the FAA.

Last night, I pondered what it would be like to become a nanny-stater. Instead of being content to simply not like something, what if I felt the need to call for government to ban these things? Once I started thinking about it, I realized just how much fun this could be.

So here’s my Christmas list of things I would ban if I believed in the nanny state:

• Houses with all blue Christmas lights. They make me feel cold. Therefore, they might make children feel cold. If we can save just one child from feeling cold, it will be worth it.
• Olives. Beyond olive oil, olives serve no purpose other than to make my stomach churn.  We must close the olive loophole that allows olives to be sold to the public in a form other than olive oil.
• Holiday inflatable yard decorations. One home in our neighborhood has so many of these, they had to cut back their only tree to accomodate a Frosty the size of their house.  They have a Halloween inflatable that celebrates Death.  These disgraceful decorations are a waste of energy, and, as our neighbors illustrate, not at all green.  We must ban them to save the planet.
• Wonderful Christmastime. It’s for the children.  Seriously, this song is all sorts of wrong, and it’s too easy for little ears to hear the jingle and start repeating it.  It must be banned so we can allow our children to grow up in a world without Paul McCartney holiday tunes.

This is just the beginning.  I can already see the ways I can make the world a better place just by using the force of government to ban things I don’t like.  Have a little fun with your own lists below.

Every once in a while, something comes along that will convince me to venture into the City of Brotherly Mayhem. This is one of those things. My high school chorus generally did one bit from the Requiem each year, and at one time I could have translated the latin. All skills long lost to disuse. Actually, there are more than a few Requiems out there, but if you say “The Requiem,” one generally means that which was written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The historical fiction Amadeus, one of the great movies of all time distorted a lot of the history of this piece. While much of the play and movie were faithful, there was a lot of fanciful embellishment of the story. Mozart’s Requiem was actually commissioned by Count Von Walsegg, who had the odious habit of commissioning works from famous composers, and then passing them off as his own. That didn’t seem to work in this case, though it is true that Mozart died before the Requiem could be completed. Constanze Mozart had lesser known composer finish the work.

I am not familiar but with one other composers Requiem, and that’s the one written by Hector Berlioz. That piece was written to commemorate the dead in the French Revolution of 1830. Not to be confused with the French Revolution of 1832, on which Victor Hugo based his novel Les Miserables, which was later written into a musical of the same name.

I was intrigued by this article on the return of rabbit ears. Glenn Reynolds says “It really is the 1970s all over again.“ I’ve decided it’s finally time to stop paying wildly inflated prices for 500 channels and nothing on. Who needs it when there’s Netflix and Hulu Plus?