My Double Life

As mentioned in a previous post, my obsession with working on the house and property has commanded a great deal of my time recently. I found myself chopping down a 40-odd-foot deceased pine tree by ax at a quarter after dark the other night. Strange times in these young and enthusiastic months of home ownership. Tia turned 23 years old the other day! What an old woman! I realized that it was the 8th set of our birthdays, which fall about 7 weeks from one another, that we'd spent together. We're getting old!

Having spent nearly $3 million dollars at Home Depot on the bathroom project (also aforementioned), I could only scrap together a modest gift of a video game Tia had been waiting for, and yet another home-made card (I'm boycotting Hallmark for reasons yet to be determined). She opened up the Amazon.com package before I had a chance to get home and wrap it up, and the game was already half-loaded when I got home from work. She played for a big while, and I finally got a turn at some absurd hour. Tia having had a long day at work was sleeping, so I decided to invite the 18 year-old neighbor girl over to chat. We got along pretty well and before I knew it, we were sitting on the couch together and I was tickling her arm. I figured now was the time, and went in to kiss her neck. She flipped out!! She was yelling so loud that she woke Tia, who came into the living room equally ballistic. What a couple of lamos! You guessed it!! The Sims 2.0!!! Great stuff! I spent almost two hours building our likenesses, and did my best at cloning our house. It's coming along, but at last play we had two babies laying on the kitchen floor all day with dirty diapers and not a red cent for a crib! I'm just going to let the little brats cry until social services comes and relieves us of this miserable parenthood we've fallen victim to. I've got at least a few more Sim-days to work on my 'friendship' with that neighbor girl.




.

What we do for food.

It occurred to me today, that I've been working very hard everyday whether it be at home or in the office for nearly 5 straight weeks. I can't remember the last time I woke up and languidly went about the day, free of a schedule to abide by or a demanding objective to address. What happened to the age when humans would work for themselves, spending from dawn until dusk tending their livestock and fields or hunting mammals and picking berry's. I can't think of another species that doesn't spend their everyday addressing the natural duties of life, building nests, hives, burrows, etc., fending off predators, and of course securing a reasonable consumption of energy in whatever form fits them best.

Nowadays, the modern western human spends their days performing tasks which are highly irrelevant to their basic needs as a mammal, but through some peverse marriage to the monetary system, critical to their survival. The green paper I used today for lunch was earned by performing the several dozen duties of my career. Let's just say for the benefit of consise point, that those seven dollars and thirty-two cents were given to me as a direct result of answering an hours worth of emails at work. Emails that are so distantly removed, but somehow related to the production of food and shelter. The 732 cents I gave to the girl at the deli, purchased me a tuna sandwich with horseradish sauce, sprouts, Swiss cheese, carrots, cucumbers, Italian dressing (oil, vinegar, dill, basil, garlic, etc.), and a French roll (floor, water, yeast, salt, chicken eggs, etc.). Between the growing, harvesting, catching, culturing, planting, transporting, preparing and other tasks related to the creation of that great sandwich, there were quite likely as many people involved as there were pennies spent, not to mention the thousands if not millions of other individuals indirectly involved in the processes (i.e. the people who built the machines that made the hose that watered the garden that grew the carrots that went on the sandwich). It makes me wonder, did we craft this marvelous society of ours simply so we could eat better foods we couldn't think of raising/catching/growing ourselves? After all, America was discovered by a man who was simply looking for a quicker way to sail for Indian food.

Bathroom Madness!!!

Well, my obsessive tendencies showed their ugly head again the other day. Looking back through those blurry neurological highways of memory, I suppose my life has been a series of obsessions. When I was on my 8th lap around that star we call the Sun, my GI Joe collection had swelled to the size of a small army (sorry for the bad pun). Is was about this time that it was only natural I buy out all my friends collections and make them promise never to buy another GI Joe again. My older Brother was an easy target in my hostile take-over, giving up his modest collection for a couple of Transformers he'd had his eye on and a few Canadian bucks I'd hoarded from picking raspberries. One by one, I bought my friends out of the hobby, until I had over 200 of the little plastic bastards. My next obsession seemed to have even more velocity. Hockey cards were the primary preoccupation of my life for nearly 4 years, until the entire market was so slimy with cheaply and massively produced cards that I decided to fold my cards (another terrible pun!). Several obsessions followed over the years, including by not limited to: bikes, knives, girls of course, guitar equipment, CD's, DVD's, computer crap, etc. As I said before(and when I say 'said', I mean 'typed'), it was just the other day that a new obsession smoothly crept into my life; home maintenance and repair. I noticed the main bathroom of our recently purchased first home was in a state of disrepair. The dingy wallpaper and musty smell encouraged me to start what I figured would be a half hour project. First I began to peel back some of that dinginess to reveal a white coat of paint. A few moments into the project, I figured it was best to tear out the entire sink. If I was going to address this wallpaper situation appropriately, I may as well temporarily take down the medicine cabinet as well, and of course if one is to remove a medicine cabinet, it's only best if the bathroom closet is torn apart too. A sink, a mirror, a closet, a floor of linoleum, the molding, two panels of drywall, some insulation, three shelves, and a significant portion of the subfloor later, it struck me that this 'little project' had become a monster. I felt like one of those Hollywood types who shaved just a little too much flesh off their face and don't have much left to work with. The general appearance of the bathroom had gone down the drain!! (Last pun I promise!!) It just so happened that an old friend/web-client of mine was in contact with another old friend and now carpenter, who had just the talent to remedy the situation. After $41.36 worth of supplies at Home Depot, and $96 in the generous pocket of my carpenter friend, we have a new bathroom floor!!! Sure the wall's missing, there's no sink, no mirror, no closet, and patches of dingy wallpaper, but the musty smell is gone and we have a fresh canvas to work with!!


.