Whiny Bitches and No-Shows
Ahhh, life in the South. We've lived in this house for four years now. When we looked at the house originally, it was a tad shocking to find that our master-bathroom shower has a sliding glass door in it. No, not in place of a shower curtain...in place of the exterior wall! Outside that door is what probably could be best described as either a poor man's sauna (not my description), or a grow room (also not mine). It's a "feature" that almost put us off buying the house at all. Since then, I've made numerous phone calls to numerous handy men and contractors seeking an estimate of what it's going to take to restore sanity to our shower. But this is the South, and we do live in a real-estate boom town. The result? In four years, we've only had two guys even show up at all, and not a single estimate. I'd actually given up on finding someone interested in doing the work, and planned to just do my best and fix it myself. Then yesterday, I had so much luck getting people to call me back for guttering estimates ...
Posted on April 29, 2008 12:54:28 PM EDT
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"Away"
I ran out of cereal this morning, and threw the empty box away. We recycle what we can, but unfortunately the list of what our curb-side service will take doesn't include cereal boxes. We also compost what we can, including any veggies from our CSA subscription that go uneaten for too long. Everything else gets a one-way ticket to that magical place called "away." But where is away? Is it really some magical place like Heaven, or that farm where so many urban dogs go to chase rabbits? I'm guessing plenty of people will bristle at my comparison of this place to Heaven, and rightly so. Nobody in their right mind would equate a landfill with the ultimate reward for a pious life. But if the landfill isn't magical, how can it hold so much stuff without filling up? Well, it can't. We're dealing with trash in essentially the same way as our ancestors going back thousands of years: we dig a hole in the ground and put the trash in it. When the hole starts filling up, we cover it over and dig a new hole. The problem ...
Posted on April 22, 2008 12:21:57 PM EDT
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Inexpensive and Cheap
Something I’ve heard all my life is the distinction made between something that’s cheap - lacking in quality - and something that’s merely inexpensive, which I guess just means something that’s priced below its actual value. I think these two terms really are completely equivalent, since you can’t really have inexpensive goods without them also being cheap in some way. My barber thought that the price we paid for our bamboo flooring was exorbitant at $5 a square foot, when we could have just gone down to Lowe’s and bought bamboo at $2 a foot. Some people think it’s funny that we boycott Wal-Mart, and wind up paying more for some things as a result. But the bamboo at Lowe’s can be scratched by a human thumbnail, so it doesn’t have a hope of holding up to our dog; and you can bet there’s a lot more behind the scenes of how Lowe’s brings flooring that carries the name ‘bamboo’ to its customers at $2 a square foot. It’s cheap ...
Posted on April 5, 2008 11:30:08 PM EDT
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