Dinner with Stephanie
First time Stephanie and I have hung out in a week or so; between me rowing and her going to visit her Dad.
Beast Glatisant Du Jour: An Atomic Bedside Alarm Clock
The Beast Glatisant, or Questing Beast, was a mythological creature in King Arthur tales, with head and neck of a serpent, the body of a leopard, the haunches of a lion and the feet of a hart. Knights in the stories would take off hunting him when word came that he was terrorizing a village somewhere, and he was an allegorical symbol of either the dangers of lust or of Christ eaten alive by the 12 tribes of Israel; you can take your pick.
I thought of him the other day when I was trying to describe, on Facebook, something that I’m hunting for – A bedside alarm clock with some really specific features:
Bedside (not travel; i.e with cord, not batteries) alarm clock, atomic, with large am/pm display. I just want something really specific and can’t find it. This is one of those cases where I search forever for a specific combo of features, and I buy something just off of what I want, and 6 months later, what I really wanted comes out. Before you say ‘iPhone’ this is for an older family member with no computer. 🙂
I want the clock to be just like any bedside alarm clock that plugs in and lights up – but I want it to be an atomic alarm clock – self-setting. And I want the AM/PM display to be in actually letters and fairly large, so you can easily see whether it’s day or night.
Finding this specific combination of features is proving elusive. They make alarm clocks that aren’t self-setting; most atomic clocks aren’t meant to sit near your bed or have you slap the snooze button when you’re half awake.
While I was describing the odd hybrid device I wanted cobbled together the Questing Beast popped into my head (head and neck of a serpent, the body of a leopard…) And I realized I have this kind of quest fairly often.
A few years back, I was on the hunt for a very specific kind of wrist watch that I just couldn’t find: light-colored face, numbers not roman numerals, day and date display, and it also had to light up, but it couldn’t be a digital or sport watch. You’d think that wouldn’t be hard to find, but I spent 3 years looking for that exact combo. Most watches don’t actually have numbers on the face. Most watches with date display don’t light up. I finally found one from Timex. And soon after, that same combo became more available in stores. It just took time for it to come around.
Before that, I was hunting a summer bathroom. I wanted a light cotton bathrobe that wasn’t terry cloth or flannel, and that was actually long enough to cover my legs. They had short ones for women that I would look silly in. They have heavy flannel. But no simple, light cotton. Stephanie hunted in every store in the mall and finally ordered one she found online. The next year, they were in every store.
It seems like the year after we find that specific thing we want, it’s suddenly the new craze. We keep going after the same strange beast. It must really love us.
Bike Trailer Cart Project
Hell, now that I have to blog for real instead of just saving links, I may as well go for broke. Here’s something I’ve been working on lately – making a cargo trailer for my bike out of an old kids bike trailer. I picked one up for $3 at the Goodwill Outlet. That’s a nice price if you’ve ever gone shopping for kids bike trailers – even if they are beat up and crappy, people generally want $20 bucks for them on craigslist.
The first thing I did was strip off the ragged cloth cover stuff to expose the frame.
Then I started looking at how the upper supports worked. I didn’t think I needed all the framework on top, and I wanted a wider area for the wooden deck, so I flipped some of the frame to the outside of the cart.
The frame, dismantled and reassembled. I kept a couple of upright supports to attach some side panels of some sort to.
We had some scrap tongue and groove boards in the garage from when we had our balcony porch floor repaired, and they were the perfect size.
So I fitted some together.
I ended up taking a brief detour through the basement to assemble various tools I’d need to put the wood deck for the trailer together. If you are interested in starting a tool business, by Clicking Here you can learn about various tools and run your business effectively. Stephanie’s dad has given us lots of tools over the years; he’s very concerned that Stephanie be able to do things for herself, so he has basically outfitted our basement with every power tool a gay girl could desire. He’s kind of a lesbian dream dad, actually. Here are some of the things we’ve been given:
These are all various drill bits and screw driver bits for the 7 drills we own.
Chisels, files and planes.
Box 1 of 3 boxes of clamps. For the sake of brevity, I’ll refrain from posting the other two pictures of clamp boxes.
For all your cuphook and eye hook needs. I will need some of these for cargo nets.
Every size of vice grip you could need. We can certainly get a good grip on our vice around here.
Tool detour finished, I screwed together the deck boards and sanded them down. I thought about trimming some of the boards to get them all exactly the same width, but decided it looked sort of cute with ragged edges. I also cut out slots where the upright pieces of the frame will fit in.
After sanding everything down, I put a coat of water sealant on the boards to help preserve them since they’ll be out in the rain.
After letting the water sealant dry for a week, I started painting. I don’t know if I really needed to paint it, but I’ve been dying to paint something this bright blue color I found in the basement; Cerulean Blue, according to the can.
And that’s where I am on the project – I have one more coat of paint for the wood and then I’ll be able to attach it to the frame. After that I’ll have to figure out exactly what I want to do about side panels. I have some plastic lawn chair webbing from days gone by that I can create a frame for, or I could attach wooden slats for the sides. I may go with the webbing to avoid extra weight; I want to be able to pull the trailer easily.
UPDATE: the mostly-finished cart is here…
Basically, I just strap everything down with bungees right now. I still haven’t figured out how to finish the sides.
2022-03-12 Update: I never actually attached this to my bike, and I sold it to a guy in 2019 through Facebook Marketplace, and he was delighted by it.
All Caught Up
I spent the weekend editing and uploading my entire backlog of photos since November. I’v been perpetually several months behind since we went to England last year and I had the overwhelming backlog of photos to deal with. It took me practically the entire two days, but my Flickr photostream is now up to date. If you want to see all the photos, feel free to peruse my sets. I’ll be posting some of my favorites here over the next couple days, and maybe going back through old posts to add photo slideshows to events I’ve written about.
I’m hoping to keep up with editing and uploading on a more regular schedule going forward, so I can add photos as I write about various events.
Weekend Update – My Fair Lady, Roller Derby and Canasta
Stephanie and I went with our friend Elizabeth to Bloomington, Ind. this weekend to visit Joe and see My Fair Lady performed by the Cardinal Stage Company at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater. I’ve never seen the show onstage; I’ve only seen the movie musical and that was when I was young, so I didn’t have full recollection of the storyline. But my mom had the album (she had albums of almost every movie musical in existence) so I knew the words to the songs by heart. (And I’m still humming the tunes today. Sorry to those around me.)
It was a really great performance – for a regional production on a small stage, it was phenomenal. Cardinal really puts on a professional performance; the choreography was fantastic, stage design was clever and costumes were spot on. Chloe Sabin as Eliza was delightful. Chris Vettel played Higgins so well that I disliked him exactly the way I should, because the character is basically a jerk wad. The fellow who played Alfred Doolittle, Mike Price, is apparently a Cardinal regular and stole the spotlight in every scene he was in.
I didn’t realize that George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion had a different ending – SPOILER ALERT – in his play Eliza ends up with Freddie, rather than Higgins, and he was adamant that Eliza and Henry weren’t right for each other. I rather agree with him. Higgins was a pretty big douche and didn’t deserve her, no matter how accustomed to her face he became. Liking the girl does not actually get you the girl, Sir; you have to treat her well, too, and even then there are no guarantees. (So much stalking could be prevented if we could just teach this simple concept to anxious young males.)
After the play we went to a Bleeding Hearts Roller Derby bout – it was a charity event/scrimmage where the team competed with themselves as “Heroes” vs. “Villains” – Of the Heroes, my favorites were the Ambiguously Gay Duo. Also popular with me: when the Villains chanted “E-V-I-L what’s that spell? EVIL, EVIL EVIL!!!” And here’s another SPOILER ALERT – the Villains won. By a lot. Joe suggested this is a metaphor for real life. I mainly wondered how the villains planned to remove the Old Tymey Villain Mustaches they drew on their faces with Sharpie Markers. I wonder (and suspect it’s true) whether it’s better to practice villainy these days without the tell-tale mustache. I wonder if there is such a thing as “Old Tymey Sharpie Mustache remover”? I wonder if I practiced Heroism with an Old Tymey Villain Mustache, would that be an adequate disguise? Would it be ironic, and by extension, (shudder) hipster-ish? I wonder if I wonder way too much about mustaches and villainy? The probable answer to all of these questions is “Probably.”
After dinner, we spent the evening at Joe’s, where Elizabeth and Joe and Stephanie taught me how to play canasta. I can’t begin to tell you how much I love this card game. But I will try. If I bore the pants off of you – well, hey, no pants, right?!! That’s what I’m talkin’ about. I enjoyed canasta more than say, euchre, because canasta is, as Elizabeth pointed out, a blend of skill and luck. Euchre often depends on solely on the deal – if you don’t have a good hand, there’s nothing you can do. If you have a decent hand, you can maybe parlay that into something better (look, I totally used the word parlay in a sentence!!) but often that still depends on what your neighbors are dealt, and if they screw up. In euchre, having been dealt a good hand is the only sure way to take a trick. (Possibly another metaphor for real life?) Double-deck bid euchre tends to break that up and allow for more strategy, which is why I like it better.
Canasta is like double-deck bid euchre in that there are lots of cards (2 or 3 decks, depending on the number playing) and lots of room for strategy, and it has the bonus of being like rummy in that you collect sets. These guys play the game by “Elizabeth Rules” which is basically how she was taught to play; your rules may vary. The goal in each round is to go out (no cards left in your hand) after making two “canastas” – a collection of 7 cards of the same face value. A canasta with wild cards (2s or jokers) is a black canasta, a canasta without is a higher-valued “natural” or “red” canasta. You add up points for your canastas and for the cards you had on the table, subtract what you have in your hand, and the first to get to 5,000 points wins. Also there are some complex things you do with threes, but I’m already getting tedious aren’t I? Anyway, I really enjoyed the game, although I came in dead last. And I’ll probably be babbling about it again sometime in the future after I can rope people into playing with me again.
I spent some time on Sunday re-watching the series Firefly – which I have some thoughts about, but oh, look at the time. I have gotten long-winded, haven’t I? Well that’s refreshing after all the short little link posts, I’ll bet.
Slideshow of photos from the weekend:
swimming across the current
You know how you have those stories that affect you but they aren’t exactly yours to tell, so you hesitate to bring them up? I’ve been going back and forth with that lately. I wrote at the beginning of March about dealing with our rental house and the clean-up efforts post-tenant occupation.
Stephanie’s dad came down to help us with some of the cleanup and repair, and on March 22nd, he was on a ladder cleaning out the gutters and he fell and broke his heel bone. If you don’t want to do, then you can hire different types of maids for different jobs. We’re fortunate that it wasn’t a worse injury, of course, but it turns out that breaking your heel bone is not exactly a walk in the park. Injuries are inevitable when it happens out of accident. Grand Rapids personal injury law firm attorneys can help you to claim compensation for the accidental injuries.It’s a bone you put all of your weight on, and it’s not really cushioned by muscle or other tissue, so it takes a lot of the body’s stress, and a break takes a long time to heal before you can put weight on it again. He was in the hospital for over a week and had surgery the Monday after he broke the bone to put in a steel plate like a cup that holds his bone together. After a few days of recovery, he moved to a rehab hospital where they’re teaching him how to do everything including getting around with a walker. Given that he’s a fit and active guy, this is quite a change for him to be sitting around, and he’s not used to it at all. I sympathize with him a lot.
Stephanie’s an only kid and her dad’s only living relative, practically. And he lives 3 hours away, but is stuck here in Indy, so she’s had to do a lot of care-taking while also managing the work on the the rental and working herself. So – the stress level has been rather high around our house for the past couple of weeks.
And given that I’m not keen on cleaning or painting and tend to be a whiny little bitch about doing either – well, I haven’t exactly reduced the stress much. I’m trying, I really am. I’ve been pitching in, but the real work is going through and figuring out what needs to be done, what we can ditch until later, what needs to be done by an electrician, when to call the water heater repair people, etc. She’s got a lot of that in her head and some on paper, and I can’t quite put together what she can hand off to me.
I’m also struggling with it because we’ve done at least 3 times more painting at the rental house since we bought and moved into our house than the amount of painting we’ve done in ours. Our kitchen and upstairs hall have been half-painted for 3 years now, and we keep doing more and more painting at the rental, including repainting rooms we painted in-between tenants previously. It’s hard not to resent that the rental house gets more attention (and often looks better) than ours. And I’m aware of the amount of time that Stephanie and her dad spent cleaning up the house the last time – it sat vacant from August to March while they worked on stuff, earning no money while the mortgage needed to be paid – and I’m very worried we’re in a similar place.
I would not be winning any landlord prizes anytime soon, clearly. And probably not any marital prizes either. I’m not being the best wife lately, and I know Stephanie and I are both down in the dumps.
Here’s hoping we get this stuff worked out – the house done, Stephanie’s dad up and around and a happier, sunnier spring so we can bounce back.
Way to go, Ace
Had an accident in the parking lot at work. Yeah, I’m feeling like I own the world right about now. Yeah. I kinda want to crawl into bed for a week and not come out, given this and a whole host of other stuff. I need to take some vacation days.
Question: Just not that into you…
Anon Question: Have you ever been dating someone who is obviously more into you than you are them? How did you handle it?
That that scenario has really never come up for me. I have to be really into someone to start dating them, actually. If I wasn’t very into someone, I turned them down. I wouldn’t want to waste their time if it wasn’t going to go somewhere. And I’ve always been more about the relationship than the sex, so “going somewhere” has always been a part of any romantic equation for me. Though, I know some people opt for escorts like Istanbul escorts for casual fun.
But the “they like me more” situation is really rare for me. The vast majority of the time, I was way more into them than they were into me. I’ve usually been the crushing, not the crushee.
Question from WilJ: Have you and Steph ever considered having a child?
We’ve talked about it a lot, because this is one of those big relationship questions that you have to talk about. We’ve arrived at the conclusion of “probably never.” Stephanie has never been particularly interested in having kids. I have very mixed feelings about it. When I was young, I thought I would for sure. But as I’ve gotten older, my feelings have changed a lot. For one thing, I’ve seen some close friends become parents, and it’s been particularly hard on them. In some cases they’ve given up some significant dreams to be a parent, and that’s tough to watch. And in some cases, raising the kids has been a significant struggle. That’s also hard to see. On the other hand… there is something very life-affirming about kids. I’ve had two grandparents die in the last year, and I’ve had some existential crises about that – what am I doing, where am I going, and will I have made a difference when I die? Worrying about that eats at you. But in the past year I’ve also met my two youngest nieces and my new nephew, and watching them laugh and play and learn reminds me that as things fall away in sorrow, there are new joys that spring up to take their place. Do I want to contribute to that? I’m not sure. I do however, want to encourage my siblings to have more kids. As many as possible. Because that’s the awesome thing about nieces and nephews — they are there to reaffirm your joie de vivre, but you can hand them back when they poop their pants.
Question: If you could master one skill what would it be?
Anon Question: If you could master one skill what would it be?
Writing. I’d like to be a successful, published author. It’s the dream I’ve had since I was a small kid. Writing is also the hardest thing for me to do and the thing I’m most insecure about, which is why I constantly shoot myself in the foot and screw up.
Anon Question: If you and Stephanie could change places with any famous or infamous couple in the history of the world who would you choose?
Well… if I have to choose a famous couple, either Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward or Pierre and Marie Curie. History is sadly lacking in couples who didn’t cheat on one another or die young or in tragic circumstances. Newman and Woodward were both gorgeous and blissfully happy. The Curies were intellectual equals who brought out the best in each other and achieved more together in collaboration than they could have separately – both represent things I’d like to achieve in our relationship.
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