Since the weather has been watery this summer we have been noticing that mosquitos are breeding making our outdoor living room with the hot tub tricky to live in at night. I had my dad bring the Mosquito Magnet Defender from Marshfield but as usual it didn't work and instead just runs for a few minutes then blinks with a red light. The Mosquito Magnet will live in my memory forever as the most useful product that was also incredibly unreliable. So operant conditioning has me trying to figure out any way to make that bug killer work.

But among my searches on line I did manage to find a piece of research, probably marketing material in a manufactured study comparing mosquito traps. While this may be an unbalanced research piece I applaud the efforts of people working to shine a light on the critical differences in this area so important to people looking to enjoy their backyards in the evening. I would rather see hundreds of graphs like this than the typical consumer drivel comparisons I normally see of computers, phones, and cameras that are all basically the same product and easy to evaluate by using them.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:24 PM | Permalink

So today I decided to try to catch-up on some lingering issues with people who I pay money to. The two I targeted today was an odd phone message from a company claiming to be connected to Boston Sports Clubs and Verizon. To boot I also had to reschedule a delivery of my elliptical runner. Many of these actions were done while showing Madeline internet programs adding to the challenge of resolving them.

The Verizon story begins with the fact that I now have FiOS but I do not have any bills for FiOS. Since ‘tis the season to pay bills I decided to investigate. I chatted with a helpful online clerk who informed me that I was chatting with Verizon the phone company and not the Verizon the internet provider and that she understood my problem. Apparently online accounts for Verizon are now so high tech that they don’t bill you via the standard mail system but instead using a secret Verizon account that is ultrasecure. In order to determine what you owe for Verizon online you need to have the email address and password. The email address is “something”@verizon.com”. So I tried about a hundred variations of email addresses in the online form to login to my account and failed while listening to them put me on hold for half an hour. When I finally got through to the person on the phone after successfully answering the questions that a computer tried to ask me like what zip code I was in it then cut me off and hung up on me. So I needed to try again in the later afternoon.

Meanwhile in the morning I called a number that had been forwarded to me from my dad. An organization had been calling my parents house leaving gruff messages about my owing money. When he finally asked about why the organization told him that I owed Boston Sports Clubs $132.00. So I called the number and a woman answered the phone. She responded to the item number and told me that I owed money but seemed to have a great deal of difficulty understanding the basics of what I told her as I walked through my credit card information. Then after I gave her the credit card information she started asking a series of personal questions that had nothing to do with my relationship to her or Boston Sports Clubs including “Are you married?” and “How long have you lived in your current residence?” I refused to answer either of these questions and after the call figured that I probably didn’t want these creepy people to have my credit card information.

I decided to call the Boston Sports Clubs people to verify that they may have sent my information to this creepy collection agency over whatever charge they had. I did successfully cancel my account with BSC a few months ago and could understand how they might need money from me but I’m not sure they are buying themselves anything by taking me to a collection agency instead of sending me a letter or calling the phone number they had on file for my account which is my cell phone and hasn’t changed in 8 years. How the collection agency found my parents is a mystery. So upon calling BSC I talked to Dominick who found that I did have a record in their computers but could not answer my question about whether BSC had decided to sick the collection agency upon me. He needed a manager to do this and there are no managers at BSC or anyone capable of looking up what happened to a delinquent account on the day after Christmas.

Luckily Sarah recently lost her credit card and needed a new one. So on my long list of to dos was to order her a new credit card to replace hers. But the Citi people let me know that the best way to do this was to order two replacement cards with new numbers to replace the old numbers. So I did this and felt better about the potential for the collection or whatever they were folks to commit identity theft on me.

Then in the afternoon as I was at the Decordova museum I received a call from the collections agency asking me what was wrong with the credit card I had given them. I told them that I had cancelled it and was waiting to verify whether I should pay them or not with the folks who had sent me to them. The woman then forwarded me to a manager who acted like the typical angry collections agency person talking to a deadbeat trying to weasel their way out of a debt. She let me know that I needed to pay them either via a credit card or via western union money order by the end of the day OR they would make a note in the file to continuously pursue me, notify their client that I was not willing to pay, and potentially cause damage to my credit score. After a long conversation with her explaining that I was happy to pay any debt that I had but that I wanted to confirm with her client that I actually owed money we parted ways on a rather unpleasant note.

So when I got home I was ready to listen to another 30 or forty minutes of musak on the Verizon line. This time I had dug up the official documentation that they had sent me with the installation of the modem that included the phone number to call for help. I again went through the complex menus to finally get put into a nice queue where a person answered after fifteen minutes. The person was surprised that I was calling Verizon about service not relating to a Verizon phone number but then did understand that my problem was that I didn’t have a bill from them for my FiOS or any way to know how to pay them if I did know the amount since I didn’t have an account. The crux f the problem was that I somehow don’t have the “name”@verizon.net email address and password that they use to produce bills. So she nicely let me know that a technician can solve these sorts of problems by resetting the verizon.net email address on the account. All that was left to happen was for her to connect to one of these technicians and then they would change the username and password. I would then get that information and could then login to this account to retrieve my bill so that I could pay it.

So during the extra 15 minutes I was put on hold waiting for the technician to come onto the line I began writing this little blog entry about my experiences today. As you may be able to tell by now I have had a lot of time on my hands to write during the musak experience from Verizon.

Since that issue is not yet resolved to date I can now mention the matter of the delivery of my elliptical runner. I ordered it from Gym Source a couple weeks ago and they scheduled a delivery for last Friday. This was fine since the Friday before Christmas break is a pretty slow day in general. I was home from 2:30 PM on as they requested. Sure enough at 5:30 I received a call from someone outside who was the driver of a truck who had effectively wedged his truck between the small lane on my side street and the more major road of Glenn Avenue. The truck was a rear wheel drive truck with the rear wheels spinning on Leeson lane and the front cab sticking into the snow bank across the street from it. So the driver and his other guy asked for help getting the truck unstuck so that they could get on with their delivery and their day.

Now it isn’t like it hasn’t been snowing the past few weeks so I understand how a truck might get stuck. In truth the problem with the ice on Leeson lane is probably the City of Newton’s fault. They plowed the lane during the first snow storm of the year but for snow storm number two and number three they didn’t do anything. So the lane itself has become a big stream of ice. On my side I did happen to have a bag of quick melt that I happened to have purchased a few days before. I had learned after the first storm that I could go through massive amounts of quick melt trying to clear the ice. My father had offered me a 50 gallon drum of the stuff so that Sarah wouldn’t slip in our sloped driveway while 9 months pregnant. I worked but had run out before the second storm started. For the second storm I had been clever enough to go out to National Lumber in Natick to purchase a heavy metal shovel and an ice chopper. Afterwards I had slipped over to the Gym Source store to purchase the elliptical runner since I was wasting the day anyways planning for a snow storm. At the time I still had some ice melt and the crappy shovel that I had bought at Building 19 thinking I was clever about 3 months earlier. I had no idea what I was in for.

So I had a shovel and ice chopper to fight the build-up but it was not enough to clear Leeson Lane due to the lack of plowing by the City. But I did find those two 50 pound bags of quick melt on the Wednesday morning at a local hardware store. They were about 25 bucks each which astounded me. When the third storm hit on Thursday night Joe A was coming over for dinner and I was getting overwhelmed by all the snow continuously falling. So my dad mentioned that he had a solution – to purchase a snow blower at Home Depot for me. So a few minutes after Joe and his wife Sarah arrived at my house my dad also arrived with a snow blower to clear the snow. I happily tested it out quickly before we ate a random dinner selected from Bills Pizzeria and then cleared things more afterwards.

The basin in the sump pump in the basement was starting to get very full during this storm but that’s a whole other story. So anyways when the truck was wedged between the streets it was snowing a bit and I offered one of the two 50 pound bags of quick melt to them and was shoveling along with them with my shovel and ice breaking tool. After about two hours the team all fought with several neighbors to free the truck and have it climb up the ice to the driveway of my house.

BTW: After 25 minutes of being on hold with Verizon waiting for the Tech support person who would reset my username and password I decided that nobody was coming. There is no way to call out from the limbo of being on perpetual hold. So I hung up and tried to call back only to find out that they have subsequently closed for the day.

So after that truck had reached my house I walked the installers into the front door to show them the door to the basement. He looked up at it and then let me know that the model I had purchased was extra long and too long to fit through that door. The only way to get it into the house would be to go through the basement bulkhead. Well after picking at ice for two hours I had no issue with revving up my new snow blower to clear a path to the basement bulkhead. The did so and not only cleared the snow out from the path but also a large amount of green material from the freshly grown fall grass and a large amount of black material from the soil beneath the grass. The installers were impressed with my path to the bulkhead but let me know that they were sub-contractors and weren’t going anywhere near the back of my house until the ice thawed. They recommended spending a few days once it got warmer pouring the quick melt onto the snow in the path and to reschedule to a later date… which is what I have been trying to do for the past couple of days.

So with regards to the rescheduling of the delivery of the elliptical runner I have made great progress. On Monday I reached someone who told me someone would definitely call me back first thing on Wednesday to schedule the delivery. At 4:30 on Wednesday, before I called Verizon, I called back the office and the man who sold me the runner let me know that he wanted to schedule it quickly but the only way to do so was to go through the warehouse. So he had the warehouse call me back. The warehouse then called me to ask me if I was able to take the delivery on Friday of this week. I thought that would be great and then they told me that they would call me back on Thursday (tomorrow) to tell me whether they would be delivering in the morning or the evening on Friday so that I could be available at the house when the delivery people (probably the same ones from last week) would be there.

In all I am 1.5 for 4.

Citibank – Successful card cancellation and new cards in the mail

Verizon – Still don’t know who much I owe them or how to pay them. At least I know what needs to be done if anyone there ever decides to help me.

Boston Sports Clubs/Collections folks – Awaiting confirmation that I actually owe them money and an explanation for the whole deal with the collection agency. A major nasty note to the BBB might be in order since BSC seems to have the worst business policies I have encountered. I will chalk that up to the company being a bunch of steroid using jock idiots.

Gym Source – Almost done. They are the replacement solution to the BSC people. I think they will come through on Friday.

I am seeking new legislation like the stuff they have in China where CEOs or ministers may need to face the death penalty for issues with quality or customer service.

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:20 PM | Permalink

The holiday season is now in full swing. The only real event where we have a lot of people over at our house is our holiday party so this is almost a house warming event for the Newton house. Sarah has managed to co-ordinate the party thus far but I have been involved doing things like purchasing and carrying in a Christmas tree on Saturday. Madeline was very happy to see a Christmas tree and quickly proceeded to place ornaments onto the bottom branches. Eli the cat then proceeded to knock the ornaments off of the tree. Our tree this year is fatter than last year so the beads didn’t make it around. Since I am Jewish I don’t have a big set of ornaments but we have decided it makes sense to place some dreidels, menorahs, and gelt decorations into the mix on the tree to represent multiple cultures. My other contribution was to go out on a wine cellar stocking expedition with Dave F. to purchase a case and a half of wine at the various wine establishments. We learned the important point that the 15-20% discount when purchasing a case or more at each store still applies if you purchase the case with a friend and split it on two credit cards. So it pays, from a discount standpoint, to shop together for wine. Thus far I have successfully avoided all post Thanksgiving trips to the dreaded holiday mall parking lot. Given how pre-occupied I’ve been with work it will be an interesting question as to whether I’ll have the time to paint Madeline’s new room, the one she’ll be moved to when the new baby arrives, before this holiday party or not. If I start tonight or tomorrow I should be able to pull it off but after Wednesday it will be impossible to do two coats of paint.

The new go-to-sleep routine with Madeline has become for Sarah to rock Madeline in the dark while I pull a chair in and talk with Sarah about life until Madeline goes to sleep. It has been a good way to actually talk with Sarah about life rather than our standard running around chasing tasks or sitting watching DVDs. But Sarah did go out to dinner tonight and Madeline tried to revolt when I went to put her to bed. The various activities prior to sleep including taking 3000 licks on a tootsie roll pop before I needed to bite into it for her to get her to finish it, reading books and watching a baby Einstein video in bed, a trip downstairs for an orange juice, then rocking with her while screaming that she wanted mommy until a few minutes later she suddenly and inexplicably instantly fell asleep.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:39 AM | Permalink

Today I went back to Brookline briefly. I was looking in the mailbox for a check. Afterwards I finally cancelled my BSC membership. Yesterday I cancelled the Verizon service. So other than forwarding the mail to Newton things are all getting wrapped-up in Brookline. Whenever I wrap something up I get the feeling of a new start which might have contributed to my stopping into TJ Max to purchase a new button-up shirt. It also could have been that I didn't want to deal with the parking people at the BSC Allston club. The experience of cancelling at BSC and their whole business model has left a bad impression on me about them. They seem to be the kind of business that works hard to acquire a new customer and then not only doesn't care about the customer's experience but actively works to prevent the customer from leaving to the detriment of the overall customer experience. When you try to cancel you can't do so online, you can't do it on the phone, and you can't do it via the mail unless it is through certified mail. Upon receipt of the cancellation it is considered cancelled 30 days later. This means that you can use their gym for the next 30 days but it is also another revenue cycle for them to charge despite an attempt to cancel before another billing cycle occurs. If a customer happens to be "in a contract" then they claim that you can't cancel at all without filling to the end of the contract. While I somewhat understand their point on the contract situation since they offer preferential pricing for longer time commitments than month to month BUT it isn't like they are giving me a big piece of hardware like a phone or DSL router that they need to sell off. The most similar thing is that they need to pay off the commissioned sales rep who pushes the high cost memberships.

All of this lead me to believe that they have determined that once someone cancels their membership they are never coming back. This is a self fulfilling prophecy on their part since my reaction to the hard-line you can't leave policy and the difficult scenario of my not using a service for 4 months at all that costs over $50 per month makes me not interested in recommending that anyone join or ever joining again.

This is in contrast to NetFlix which I cancelled a few years ago because the movies weren't coming fast enough. They rescued their relationship at first by offering a plan that was more attractive to me as I was cancelling. The new plan had fewer movies for a smaller price. I liked it for a while then cancelled anyways because the local video store allowed me to rent 3 movies at any given time and I could just grab them off the shelf. But now that I moved I don't have that same opportunity with a local video store. Instead I looked at Netflix and Blockbuster and found that Netflix had added a good video download service and had a reference from my parents that their delivery is now much faster. Blockbuster will have a video download service through an acquisition and offers in store exchanges which are nice but the downloads aren't a real offer now so I just signed-up with Netflix figuring that if the movies take too long in the mail that I could watch stuff through some crazy computer-tv hook-up. So I signed-up for Netflix this week and I already have three movies and tested the online downloads with my new super fast FIOS Internet connection. So they never permanently lost me as a customer. I can't say the same is true of the BSC folks. I eagerly await the better managed business model for a gym/fitness club to eat their lunch (probably salad).

Now my main issue is NESN. I don't mind that NESN owns the rights to broadcast the games but it is silly that I can't watch NESN broadcast games on my computer no matter what I might want to do. I don't want to buy a cable package so that I can watch the Red Sox lose to the Yankees in New York (well I'm cynical after the last two games) but in general I should be able to buy the game online somehow. MLB.com would let me do so IF I lived in Texas. But I live in Boston, which is why I am a RED SOX FAN.... so I am urging the folks at NESN to think about their business model and come-up with a way to service the younger generation, the folks who hate cable and love the Internet, to capture a younger audience in Boston and make some money off of serving them. I don't mind paying for baseball. I just don't want to pay for other crap that I don't want along with it and the folks at NESN's marketing department are free to quote me on it.

So I've closed the books on a long chapter in Brookline without a lot of tearful emotions despite feeling like I am losing city life but am giddy with the new start in Newton and doing things like watering the lawn.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:46 AM | Permalink

We moved into our new house in Newton on Saturday. It was one of the hotter days of the summer but luckily we hired movers to handle the heavy lifting and had the air conditioning working in the nick of time on Friday to keep things a little cool at the destination house. The movers were drenched in sweat to the point where they changed t-shirts between the loading of the truck and when they arrived to unload. My parents and Nancy came by to lend a hand and were instrumental in the unloading of the kitchen contents. Sarah’s parents took Madeline and the cats from Friday night until Saturday afternoon that also was a big help to allow us to focus on moving rather than herding the family about the house.

We seem to have unpacked about half of our boxes and I haven’t found much in the other half of the boxes that I actually need so those items remain in their boxes. Most things that I own don’t need to see the light of day more than once every three years. Those things probably should be tossed. It’s that fear of loss that keeps them around allowing them to survive moving. Many items didn’t make the cut including socks that I have deemed to be un-wearable and clothing that bothers me when I wear it like a pair of comfortable but odd looking green corduroy pants.

I have discovered some of my new responsibilities in the house. Today while taking Madeline out to play on the swing set I noticed that we now have a yard that is in disrepair. It is littered with sticks that fell from trees, leaves that are getting a head start on fall, shrubs that were starving for water, and a lot of long yellow grass. The neighbor’s yard across the way is a verdant paradise that they were watering as I looked at my lawn so I grabbed the hose and started spraying things that looked like they were dying or dead.

The house also comes with a new concept for me. We now have specialized rooms for different functions. While before we had a living/dining/tv room, a bedroom/office, and a child/play room these functions are now distributed throughout the house. Our large 42” television is now in the basement out of sight and for now out of mind since it has been separated from it’s couch set so there is nowhere to sit and watch it even if I had set-up the wires. The living room is just a pair of couches but there isn’t a stereo or radio in it because that is in the basement with the TV. The dining room is a welcome change. It allows the kitchen to stay a food preparation area and gives us a real place to sit with the table extended and eat. We even have an empty room for the expected new baby planned for arrival in January.

The office was set-up through a half day’s toil by the Verizon FiOS installation guy and it now is a very nice set-up with the fastest net connection I have ever had at home. I tested using NetFlix download service on my laptop through the wireless and it was amply fast to take advantage of my ridiculously large laptop screen. Furthermore while I type in the office I don’t need to worry about the keystrokes pounding out noise that would keep Sarah up all night. Unfortunately we are still stuck with out of date computers like the Windows 2000 box currently running this machine that won’t show movies because it is incompatible and the old media box I created in 2003 has a hard drive that is whining out of control if I plug it in. That drive happens to contain the full set of all of my photos for the past few years so everything needs to get migrated to some new PC set-up.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On Sunday morning we decided that we would have a little ceremony to inaugurate our new house in Newton. So Sarah and I invited our parents over for a tour of the empty home. We bought some orange juice without pulp so that we could make mimosas. Venkat had given me a basic picture of the ritual in an Indian household on Friday. They put milk onto a burner and cook it until it boils over spilling over the stove. Then you put rice into the milk and make rice pudding. Our plan seemed simpler but lacked the tradition of a milk worshipping culture. Venkat also mentioned that when coming to the US that people are given instructions on names that wouldn’t culturally work well despite being very popular in India. The one he pointed out in particular was Gopi.

Jeremy has been having nightmares lately. He told me one of his nightmares was that bugs were eating his feet. Maybe it’s the season but I had nightmares on Saturday night as well. The first nightmare I was in Vegas at a key conference for my business. While doing a printout through the computer I somehow accidentally requested that all of the money in my life savings accounts be liquidated as cash to be output in another room as $100 bills. I then was running around for the rest of the nightmare trying to get the money back where it belonged. I probably would never have remembered the dream but later in the dream I had Madeline in a backpack and she fell out of the backpack backwards onto the ground from the height of where I was standing onto a hard marble floor. In the dream she instantly died when she hit the floor. It was too much to sleep through so I woke-up. It’s not tough to analyze that with buying a home, having a start-up in the middle of lots of negotiations, and having a child under 2 years old – I have some natural anxiety about money and safety. The cats that keep me up at night don’t even have to work that hard.

Sarah and I arrived about a half hour early for the ceremony at the house on Sunday morning and I was still a bit freaked out from the nightmares. To keep Madeline occupied I went outside to swing her on the playground. She likes to order who goes on which color swing, with her on the red one and me on the yellow one swinging at the same time. I hadn’t thought she would be able to use the swings but we had lightly tested her on a set while returning from Bar Harbor and she was able to hold the chains. On Saturday night we had gone to the Park by Zaftigs, which now has a totally new mural, and she had swung on those. The child next to us was about a year older and kept asking her mother to swing her “super high” and Madeline was interested in going to such a height but I kept her at a reasonable safe height and counseled her that the “super high” height was for older kids. So I was swinging her on Sunday morning on a beautiful cool summer day and she wasn’t too high but for some reason she let go of the chains while on an upswing and fell backwards onto her back landing with her back flat on the hard backyard ground faster than I could think to catch her.

Madeline was shocked and hurt so she wanted Sarah for comfort. The fall looked innocuous since she fell with a uniform distribution on her back and only from the height of the smallest swing, about a foot. But she was upset for about an hour as both sets of parents arrived for the event. Sarah was rocking with her and we all were concerned that she might pass out with a concussion or head injury so when she got tired and started to close her eyes Sarah kept her awake. We gave up on the mimosas and as Madeline settled into more normal behavior we drove the half-mile to the Atrium for a Cheesecake Factory brunch.

After brunch we went up to the play space and we couldn’t help but note the very cushy foam floor that was installed there. It squashes under your feet like you are walking on a piece of hard memory foam bedding. The idea is that the mall doesn’t want any falls by the kids climbing around on their play equipment. I got a recommendation that I’ll be following-up on shortly to install rubber mulch under the swing-set both for Madeline’s safety and any other kids who might want to play on the swings. It cushions falls up to 9 feet. They sell it by the pallet for $500 per pallet at Home Depot. We may also buy a swing with a back to it for her and a baby swing for her sibling we are expecting in January. After reading the book on medical errors, Internal Bleeding, I and other parents need to take the fall by Madeline as a warning sign and fix things before it happens again. Other folks could also consider this event as a reason to put safety mulch under their backyard swings and take other precautions.

I’m looking forwards to an end to nightmares but I’ll need to be more vigilant when I am awake. The nightmares give me practice drills for things I need to be careful of. Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual about this stuff.

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:01 AM | Permalink

Sarah and I did the final two steps in concluding our home purchase today. We did the final walk through and then had a closing. The walk through was simple enough as we wandered the house looking for some kind of horrible thing that might have appeared between the last time we saw the house and the walk through. We spent some time with me, Sarah, and the seller’s agent’s top boss trying to figure out how to open the child proof cabinets all failing until we realized the magnet needed to be turned facing towards the magnetic latch rather than away.

The only thing I could notice was that the door in the back of the house was scraping against the wood kitchen floor leaving a mark. I figured that they had taken the door off to facilitate the move and when it was re-attached to the hinges it was lower to the ground. But since the sellers had left a bottle of champagne in the fridge to congratulate me I decided to ask the crew we had hired to move a giant swing set from one of the seller’s broker’s other clients to plane down the bottom of the door. I spent a chunk of the closing chatting with my Redfin broker about the future of the real estate industry and how Redfin is rapidly growing to take over lots of the market in the Seattle area with a likely growth in places like Boston and San Francisco. Since they have a volume business model they can do things other firms can’t – like offer rates to a large institution like Microsoft for all their employees. Seems like a great idea so it’s good to see they are thinking of building new barriers beyond the rebate component.

During the walkthrough I stopped to check some things I never had checked before looking more carefully into the insides of the closets, seeing if the refrigerator had ice in the automatic ice maker, and shaking loose bolts like the railing on the back. We then were hanging out in the yard and met our new neighbor who let us know which of our trees were slowly leaning into our fence that would eventually break into her yard. But more importantly we bonded on some common topics like how Sarah is involved in early intervention and generally what life is like with kids. I think we’ll need to resolve the falling trees problem. I hadn’t thought of that so it may cause some loss of sleep.

Among our challenges in switching our services for gas and electric was that the house is like a criminal. It has an a.k.a. (also known as). Apparently the house is a subdivision of the great Leeson estate. The other neighbor who drove past us on her way out and said hi as we stacked many cars in a disruptive formation blocking the lane lives in what appears to be the original Leeson home. The rest of the houses on the block apparently grew as subdivisions of what might have been a horse farm with acres of land and a stable, probably a garage turned small brick rental apartment next to our new house. The lane was just the access road or driveway from the street on Glenn Ave. to the main house. But as the new houses appeared they got addresses that the city recognized like 80 Glenn Ave. which is the official address recognized by the city of Newton. Since the house faces out onto the old driveway rather than Glenn Avenue it seemed odd to have a street address of Glenn Avenue. But since the city of Newton doesn’t recognize this winding driveway that runs through the sub-divided former Leeson estate as Leeson Lane. It is just some thing that they don’t want to plow. So the postal service made some form of exception for the house to be called 80 Leeson Lane so that if you saw a sign for Leeson Lane you would know to turn and could find the house. So when calling for a service like electric or gas the right address is to call it 80 Glenn Ave. For mail or giving directions it is to be called 80 Leeson Lane. I haven’t figured out how to make headway of this but hopefully I can use the a.k.a. to my advantage to avoid the paparazzi when they finally figure out that I am someone who In Touch magazine needs to know more about.

I had envisioned the closing itself as being a room full of people with us and the sellers discussing something then all sitting together to sign, with sweaty brows, the final agreement where we pay lots of money and they relinquish their beloved house. That wasn’t the real scenario. Instead the sellers were represented by their attorney who had the power to sign for them and our attorney walked us through about 50 documents about the purchase, the mortgage, the title, the government, the revolution, whatever. We even had to sign our middle initials on one document. We were useful at one point when I noticed that the document which was to set-up notification from the mortgage company to the government of what payments had been received so that we could deduct them from our tax returns had some bizarre social security number that was definitely not mine. I gave my real one and we initialed the change in 20 places then proceeded. Among the annoying thing was that the only important document to keep, the one with all the real terms and hidden costs that could be removed from the final sale for tax purposes was not on 8.5 X 11 paper. So it’s some long thing that will never fit in any file cabinet. Why is all this stuff not electronic?? Our lawyer also mentioned how he found a problem in the title where someone had gone bankrupt who owned the place and there was no closure on the issue in the records and it looked like a headache for the selller's lawyer who was going to have to use the title insurance to pay for resolving the documentation to close out that hole in the records. I suppose I didn't need to know about it but it was odd that a previous transaction hadn't uncovered this information and it made me think that I had gotten a good lawyer as a recommendation from my dad.

Anyways. My favorite document that I signed today was an affidavit that essentially said that I was who I said I was. Given that if I wasn’t I would still sign such a thing since I was already pretending to be someone else for trying to steal a house or set-up a mortgage falsely the document seemed entirely silly and useless. Our lawyer pointed out that he thought so before I could mention it and I decided that the purpose of such a document was to add humor to an otherwise tense situation.

As I was driving home I got a call to tell me that the registry of deeds had closed before the deed could be processed and that we couldn’t go into the house until tomorrow morning. So technically the deed isn’t done yet. But it will be done at about the same time the HVAC folks start tearing holes in closets to install our central air tomorrow morning.

This weekend we begin the fun stuff… figuring out a plan to fix everything and make everything work the way that we need it to.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:39 PM | Permalink

On the way home from work today Jeremy and I passed a new restaurant on Harvard Street that we hadn't noticed before. It was the B Good real fast food place. Thinking we could try something new I pulled a u-turn, got a nasty look from an elderly pedestrian who didn't seem to believe that I was turning around and not attempting to murder her, and pulled into a full lot at the store. I had been reading the Metro in the morning and among the information in it was an interview with William Gibson. The discussion in the interview centered around how he was able to successfully predict certain developments in his science fiction like cyberspace and robotic sex daemons. So as I reviewed the menu I realized that I had thought a similar idea a few years ago about how the world was ready to accept a more family friendly health conscious fast food. Folks who I talked to about it including Yuval and Peter can testify that I was thinking something similar although not identical to the B Good concept. I don't want credit since it's the environment that creates the trends. I just was interested in the concept. Another chain that seems to be benefitting from this trend is Panera Bread. After reading about the founder in Brookline magazine I am likely to buy some stock in the company.

What I discovered upon arrival at the B Good store was a sign that said "Our dream house will be opening tomorrow." It was interesting enough since Sarah and I are closing on our new home tomorrow as well. But having invested in a Brookline U-turn Jeremy and I weren't about to come up empty handed and not eat a freshly ground healthy burger with non-fried french fries. At B Good these are called real fries which still doesn't make sense given that the French part isn't the issue in describing the product using the word fries. BTW - Their web site is www.bgood.com. So we poked in the window and asked whether the busy crew inside was open or not. The answer that came back was that they were opening tonight at 7PM and giving away free burgers.

JACKPOT!

Since it was 6:40 we had somehow inadvertently stumbled upon a free burger scenario. So to kill time we parked in the TJ Max lot, wandered inside TJ Max to find they have great deals on dress shirts for men but didn't purchase one because the line was too long, and then returned to the growing scene building at the B Good dream house. Things were beginning to buzz with a band setting-up shop inside, roller derby people with matching shirts skating around, and a crowd building. We realized we needed to focus on being near the door for the 7PM opening and managed to be among the first 20 people to get our free burger and a seat. I vowed to blog about it as a return for the free burger.

The burger I got was a guapo and had a piece of bacon, onions, and some sauces in it. I was surprised that it came in a whole wheat bun since that never happens with burgers but it was quite agreeable. They offer some odd combos like removing your bun and replacing it with veggies for 25 cents extra that I thought were noble for those weight reduction times in my life. I'll need to make a run of such things after the business passes by. I rate the food as quite good and probably fast in a different situation where we wouldn't be in a mob queued for a free burger. I liked their "style" which includes some 50's styled logos, a car with fire painted on it, a clean internal look, and odd references to weird family members who probably don't exist. They suggest they don't need a fry cutter because there is some guy who does it and have his picture in it. The web site gives some evidence of the style as well. I'm not sure if they will succeed, have succeeded or what and Jeremy cited Boston Market as a failure in the healthy food fast market. But they are certainly a welcome tenant of Brookline and fit with the local culture well. But I won't be living in Brookline for long.

Today is the big day for the closing on the purchase of our house. It was easy enough to put the concept of moving into the future tense until recently but now things have moved into full gear. The money is ready for the down payment to be put into one big scary check, the arrangements have been made for executing the mortgage and purchase and sale including co-ordinating the lawyer, insurance company, mortgage broker, buyer's broker, and seller's broker. All of these people have been very nice and helpful but it is hard to have them all know what is going on. Mostly I feel like mixed messages get passed around between all of these folks and it would be better if there was a secure site where all of the information could be consolidated amongst the parties with utilties to co-ordinate the closing time, upload the insurance binder, post the P&S, etc. and different views depending on role. Maybe the Redfin's of the world can build such a thing. It likely isn't anyone's priority but as an example of collaboration it seems like there is a lack of simple tools.

Sarah worked with some local high school students to pack a lot of stuff in boxes. I cancelled the monthly subscription to Hollywood Video rentals. We got the gas and electric set to be assigned to our name when we arrive. We had Nick and his team move a swing set/play structure that the seller's agent offered us for free if we could move it from a more posh home near Brae Burn. I haven't even seen it but I heard from Nick that they need another day to move it because it is so big and complex. An HVAC company is coming on the 16th to install the central air conditioning. We are moving with a moving company on the 25th. Lisa and Dave are going to move into the condo in Brookline in October giving us time to move out. Things are happening all around. I'm thinking as I walk around the condo... I'm going to miss this place.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:18 AM | Permalink

Sarah and I have been keeping it quiet for a while now but in the past two weeks we have broken the news to most people who need to know. Sarah is pregnant again and is due in early January. If all goes well we’ll have a tax deduction for 2007. We already know the gender. The baby should be a boy. This helps us to plan room allocations for the new house we are moving into at the end of the month. The two children’s rooms are decorated today in boy and girl colors so we can place Madeline in the one with girl colors and the boy in the one with boy colors without having to paint the rooms. Somehow this is a great comfort to us to know that we don’t need to modify wall colors amidst a flurry of other issues we need to deal with to migrate from the condo into the house. The closing is next Wednesday. The HVAC will be installed starting on Thursday. Someone offered us a swing set that we’ll have moved by Thursday. Two weeks later, three weeks from now, the moving van will appear and take us to Newton.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:52 PM | Permalink

While visiting Amy and Max the other day I noticed that they had posted a writ on the wall at the request of their 4 year old son that listed rules for eating at the dinner table. I don’t recall the exact rules but they had to do with not playing with your food and other eating related etiquette. I went off on a tangent about it and started thinking about how every family over time creates their own sets of rules and sometimes they are codified into laws like the piece of paper hanging from the dinner table and other times they are simply verbally agreed upon. I poked around and there are sites like Kids Contracts where people have spent time building some legal agreements for kids and parents. What I didn’t see was the idea of a household constitution where a family sets-up a small-scale democracy or other form of government with a base set of law that then guides the construction of additional laws for the family. While it might be nice to have a pre-built system it would lack in the fit for a given cultural style for a single family. Working through the process itself to gain consensus and buy-in from different parties (kids and parents) and likely multiple of each could lead to the formation of a set of family laws that would be respected. I’m interested in setting-up a government of sorts in my own household to sort through the rules as Madeline becomes old enough, probably another year, to appreciate how rules can help to define expectations and ultimately drive success based on incentives in the rules. I also am generally interested in anthropology so it gives me a chance to run a little experiment with my own family unit. If all went well I can imagine that we’d create a great little blue-print family constitution and laws in a wiki that could be copied and modified by other families who might find it interesting as a point of reference to save time. Ultimately we might end-up recreating a lot of what’s already in religions since they rightly took a lead in this type of framework a long time ago. But I’m not interested in the antiquated stuff and don’t subscribe to anyone else’s religion. Plus they involve praying which doesn’t seem to help much for most things I would worry about around the house.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:47 PM | Permalink

Sarah, Madeline, and I had been looking to purchase a house througout the spring. We went to many open houses with an open mind regarding the pros and cons of continuing to live in the city versus going out to the country. So we looked in both Brookline and Newton. Well it wasn't that adventurous but we saw our share of interesting properties and learned a bit about the inside of many people's homes. We saw one home where the entire back yard had become a concrete swimming pool with a thin walking area behind it. They were handing out sheets to let us know that the pool could be filled in for $15000. Another place reminded me of Graceland because it looked preserved from the 50's in all of the decor and electronics. Some places were too expensive although very impressive including a house that we loved but felt like we would be paying for it for the rest of our lives in mortgage payments. We took a tour of the conversion of the Water Works in Cleveland Circle hoping to see the part that they were going to show the big two bedroom units they were hoping to sell for $4-5 million but only saw some crappy stuff. While looking one day we had brought Stephanie along and she recommended signing-up for RedFin as a broker since her brother Eugene had done so. I signed-up with RedFin. I tried to track which homes were going up or down in price. I watched locations come on or off the market. I called some place that had come down $750,000 dollars that came with a pool and a mini-house only to find that they were pulling the property from the market because of a lack of interest. We almost made an offer on a house that my whole family had toured thinking it might be the right one and watched as it kept coming down in price but then while we were travelling to Orlando we foundd that it had disappeared. We toured one house on Lake Avenue that everyone had seen before while strolling by the lake to gawk at the beautiful porch and flowers only to be disappointed after seeing the interior of it and then getting into a fight with the realtor who hated the concept of a discount broker.

Then one day while touring an open house found on Redfin Madeline found a cool toy that beeped and played music that she could play with for a few hours in a family room. While to we decided that the price was within the expected range of the market, the house was within a reasonable distance of Newton Centre, and that we could afford it and live there. So we worked with our online broker, negotiated a little bit, and to a Tudor house. We completed the purchase and sale agreement last Monday after discussing who would pay for the removal of some asbestos in the attic so that we could install central air conditioning as our way of combatting the effects of global warming. On August 15th we should close pending the success of securing our mortgage and putting down a payment. Then some renovations and we are in our new home.

It actually was a lot of work and energy surfing the net looking at every blip that might be the right place. Now with the All Star Break and no Red Sox to view on Game Day and no houses to scan on real estate sites I am trying to figure out what to be searching for next on the Internet? I'm sure I'll figure it out.

Posted by Dan Housman at 10:09 PM | Permalink

On Thursday morning the ground was covered in ice from the stuff that fell from the sky. Sarah’s car got stuck so I used my steel-toed REI Kilimanjaro climbing boots to knock the ice from under her wheels. Afterwards I wandered around the corner to look for some ice melt to help get my car clear and to get the ice in her spot to melt. What I found was a large supply of day old marked down Valentine’s day candy and a new set of more expensive Easter candy. I did not find any ice melting substances. I then went to Stop and Shop and had the same experience. So my conclusion was that someone should make “Ice melting Valentine’s day candy” or the local venues should stock things that are useful in winter despite the predictions of tropical weather and parrots flying through the Boston rain forest until they actually see a passion fruit plant growing in Boston Commons.

On Saturday morning I watched “Good Morning America” since I was already up for three or four hours from the earlier showing that Madeline put on to demonstrate that she was bored at 4 AM that included readying some exciting board books, testing a new farm music CD, munching on blue berries, and playing pick-up quarters from the floor. On the show they featured a guy who had invented a robo-plow out of an old golf cart frame. It was actually not robotic but instead a remote control device that he could either control by looking out his window or control from his television using the cameras and lights mounted on the front of the plow.

That was the interesting thing to me. Maybe the true application of telepresence is to outsource common household tasks like lawn mowing, driveway maintenance, and vacuum cleaning to people living in countries where they can use fast internet access to control household appliances in other countries. I can imagine saying that we outsource our vacuum cleaning to India and our lawn to Africa at some point in 2015. The key is for the manufacturers of these pieces of equipment like Toro and Electrolux or some smart Japanese manufacturers to figure it out and start making these appliances and the service contracts now. They have outsourced the person who takes your order at McDonalds over that intercom so the time is near. Maybe it’s time to get a patent on the whole business model for remote controlled outsourcing of household chores before it is too late. But what will the neighbor’s kids do for cash?

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:03 AM | Permalink

I went to the gym today and did about an hour of elliptical runner. My main thought while spinning my legs in circles was how lately no matter what area of my life I am looking at I feel like I am starting over when I finally get around to doing something. When it comes to going to the gym the idea is that I should get into some rhythm where every Wendesday afternoon and Sunday night I would go and do an hour of excercise but instead it is patchy and I go a few weeks without going to the gym. Then I start-up again with the same thoughts on one random day that I actually excercise that I am about to get regular with it. The same is true with writing in this blog, doing work to sell new accounts and build the business, keeping the car in good repair, keeping the apartment clean and upgraded, getting the computers tuned to work properly, programming at work, writing at work, reading books, going out, or taking care of Madeline in the times I am alone with her. Lately it always feels like I am starting from scratch whenever I am doing something. Maybe the list of things to keep regularly doing is too long and too conflicted. The one thing I have gotten consistent at is watching a DVD once per day. That's a good 90 minute investment that I might need back. So for today as I begin the work week on a Sunday night I think my best bet is to create a schedule and stick to it for a while and even lay off the DVDs wherever possible and substitute work-outs for every other one of them. Maybe that will work?

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I had my last experience with my first Christmas tree today. At least I think the tree has reached the end of it’s life. We left it up for our little New Year’s Eve get together with Sarah’s sister, Nick, Matt and Kate. The idea was to leave things festive for the evening. So it smelled of pine while we played electronic Taboo and a hearty game of Apples to Apples. Unfortunately for us a late night with lots of wine drinking rapidly becomes an early morning with a demanding baby looking for food attention and fighting off new diapers or a much needed bath. So Monday morning was filled with a headache combined with some baby crying. Sarah and I took it easy for the day by driving out for lunch at Charley’s at the Chestnut Hill Mall and then returning home. I didn’t really feel human until I drank my second iced tea and had a chunk of bread. Madeline was a champ with the crayons though making drawings that looked like dashes both on the paper and in the table. We rented some videos and watched Accepted.

Madeline went to sleep but despite being exhausted I couldn’t really sleep after the movie so I was reading my Murakami book. Then at about 11 O’Clock Madeline started crying. So we tried to calm her down by bringing her into the bed. But she was just bothering Sarah and kicking us a lot while we watched Superman II hoping she would fall asleep. When we gave up on getting her to fall asleep we placed her in her crib where she proceeded to make awful sad crying noises for about twenty minutes. The melodrama of a baby crying because they don’t want to be in a crib is hard to bear. It sounds like some medieval torturer with a lack of mercy is torturing your baby in the other room and she is crying out for help. So we ignored the cries until they quieted down and then when they went silent I fell asleep for a few moments only to be overwhelmed by the fear that the reason she had been crying so much was that there must be something wrong like the cat had suffocated her to make her quiet. So I went into her room to check on her and it startled her so she was awake once again.

Sarah left me in charge of the problem since I was responsible for the second awakening of the little one. So I tried a host of techniques recommended in popular magazines and that I had seen work for other family members or baby sitters like rocking in the chair, singing popular children’s songs, giving her a dropper full of Tylenol, holding her on my shoulder and swinging back and forth in a soothing pattern, offering her some juice to drink. None of this worked and she could be used as a Geiger counter for identifying her crib since every time I got close to it she would raise her voice exponentially. So I gave up and decided to just play along with it. We started with playing with the Tylenol bottle. It has a dropper on the end and she was biting on it but found it much more funny to feed it to me and watch me chew and suck on it. So we played that game for a while. Then I read her a story. Then we went into the other room where the miniature Christmas tree is and we removed, reapplied, and dropped the mini gold ornaments on it about 1000 times. My one stroke of genius was that after she dropped the whole tree off the counter (it is only about a foot high and made out of plastic), I reached over and noticed that I could pull the power cord out of the tree while picking it up along with the ornaments that she had dropped. So we found darkness again at about 3:00 AM. Finally at about 4:00 AM, as the sun was rising,, we went back into her room and I managed to rock myself to sleep only to find her asleep in my arms when I awoke.

So as I was driving home Sarah mentioned that it would be helpful if I were to take the Christmas tree downstairs because it is garbage day tomorrow and we already removed all of the ornaments from it. As a first time Christmas tree owner I had no idea what this entailed. Just walking through the room with the tree left a hurricane of pine needles, attached sap to my hands, and had branches breaking off on every piece of furniture. When I got to the door to the apartment the nine foot tree neither fit through the door nor would it hold on to about 50% of it’s needles so a storm of needles fell on either side of the door. I then dragged it down the stairs brushing against each banister freeing the remaining needles and smaller branches as I made my way out of the building. Finally I threw it in on the curb, looked at it amazed that there was any green part of it left attached and returned to review the path of pine destruction I had made on my way. I then spent the next hour and a half trying to sweep the hallway, clean the scraps off the floor, vacuum wherever the pine needles could be found, including my ear, and pour out the sappy water in the base that held it into the sink.

I did enjoy my first tree. Too bad I wasn’t more alert when I took it out. Luckily Madeline still has that little fake one to play with. And with this vacation done I am ready to get back to some relaxing work.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:28 PM | Permalink

After spending a little time with our friend and contractor getting an idea on pricing we started on the process of thinking through the kitchen and bathroom design to select key things like appliances, cabinets, tiles, layout, etc. I was resistant to having a design from the contractor since I wasn’t sure it was the right place to start given that I didn’t even have measurements. Sarah and I went to Home Depot and they told us they didn’t do much to propose cabinets without measurements so I borrowed a tape measure and took measurements of the room. Since I don’t like keeping things on paper I went online to find a place to put the measurements. I found a 3D home design site that works like an ASP so I registered and paid them $30 for an annual subscription to put in the dimensions of the kitchen and start to lay-out cabinets. It was fun to play with the software and I also purchased a book on kitchen design while walking around at Expo, the high end version of Home Depot. I had a nice little lay-out with the sink in the back by the windows before I realized that the height of the windows was below the counter top. So I modified the design and brought the floor plan to Home Depot figuring they would know what to do next with my rough measurements and design.

When we asked the folks at the store how the process works and when we could put our measurements into their hands they let us know that the process they follow is that they only work with their own measurements to quote or build cabinets and that they offer free design services as a part of the cabinet and countertop sales process. The deposit for measurement and design services is $60 and it goes towards the cost of the cabinets if/when you buy them. I was quite happy with this so we had a Home Depot measurement guy come over today to measure the kitchen in a more thorough and reliable way than when I measured it. Next Saturday we are going to go in to work through a design. I better keep my contractor friend updated on how things are going on that front. I did feel confident that the Home Depot folks know what they are doing with the cabinets they sell and I like the whole idea that I pay a $60 fee to get the thing designed and I can take the design if I don’t want the cabinets and counters from them.

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:19 PM | Permalink

The desk and credenza

I never would have known what a credenza was if I hadn’t gone to Crate and Barrell with Sarah and Madeline. I probably never would have decided to renovate the kitchen either. We went looking for the latest in kitchen gadgets after having some breakfast at Abe and Louie’s a few weeks back. The actual purchases included a snowman replacement doormat for our leaves doormat. the curse of the seasonal doormat is that you need to replace it three times per year. We also purchased an oven safe bowl for cooking a frozen French onion soup that we had bought at Trader Joes with the hope of making our own soup with tasty cheese on top. The rock hard soup has been in the freezer since summer. We still haven’t heated it up.

But the main important fact about our trip to C&B was that we made our way to the third floor where Sarah enjoys gawking at the Vendome collection. She has wanted a Vendome bed since I have known her but because of problems like our already having a bed and that once we bought the bed we would have to purchase every other item in the set or else our bedroom would get out of synch. So we left Crate and Barrell without a furniture purchasing incident.

My general experience with furniture purchasing of any sort is similar to my experience with car tune-ups. The simplest change in a system in equilibrium can tip everything that has been waiting to tip over the top. With the car when I go to fix a gas cap I end-up with new brake pads, some bracket needs to be replaced in the back, and a computer chip that needs replacement. All of these repairs are required because not fixing any of them most likely leads in one way or another to death. Electronics and furniture are also linked.

The last big furniture revolution came when I purchased a new 42” projection television. In order to make it work I decided it would be best to get a new DVD player and since I don’t subscribe to television through cable I also went into a large project to acquire proper satellite television equipment and acquired some hacking equipment to test various hacking with the satellite dish. I also couldn’t just install a television without purchasing a new couch and comfort seat fit for two. Once the new furniture was installed I decided to also purchase a TV friendly computer so that I could send images over to the television. And that could only be made possible by purchasing a receiver to split the signal from all of the components, a universal remote control, and a surround sound set of speakers from Cambridge Soundworks. That was the end of the last home revolution.

So after we got home from C&B I thought I might see if I could use craigslist to find a vendome style bed. People sell everything on that thing. As it turned out someone was selling a desk and credenza at a highly discounted rate that was advertised as a Crate and Barrell Vendome styled set and the whole set was going for $250. I jumped on this advertisement and replied to find that it was available if I could pick it up. Sarah looked at it the next day to confirm that it was something she wanted and I committed to pick it up on Saturday in a U-Haul truck.

So Saturday rolled around and Sarah managed to rope her brother Matthew into the moving process since a desk and credenza are large items. Matthew was to come over by 10:30 because according to Sarah the woman would only be available until 12 noon.

Since it was the beginning of a big furniture transition day I took my PT Cruiser over to Valvoline to get the fluids checked. While I was there I learned that they offer a tire rotating service. So I took them up on that too. Tire rotation at an oil change shop takes about six hours from what I could determine so it was approaching 10:30 when they were finishing the tire rotation. They let me know that my lug nuts are rusted out so my tires could pop off at any time but they did fill the tire that was running low on air.

I then drove home and Sarah was getting quite worried that we were going to miss the window of opportunity to pick up the desk and credenza. So I biked over to the U-Haul which is across the street from the Valvoline but there didn’t appear to be a simple way to exchange cars. The folks at U-Haul have an interesting pricing model. They rent the truck for $19.99 or so but then they charge $1 per mile. They expect the run to be fairly quick since I told them we’d be gone from 10:30 – 3:30 PM and that was about enough to keep them from charging some other late fee. They try to sell all sorts of extra things as well including plastic bags for $300/bag and insurance that costs about $30. So the advertised rate is only there if you refuse the apparently helpful insurance. The sales person let me know that someone had crashed a truck the day before and they hadn’t bough the insurance. I think they are trained to say scary things like that.

I finally hopped into my vehicle to find it to be what looked like a very old front of a truck with a big box attached to the back. How anyone would notice if I did get into an accident is beyond me. I returned to the condo to find Matthew there along with Sarah, still worried about our getting there late, and then hit the road. I called the woman selling the desk and credenza to find that she hadn’t meant that we had to be there before noon but that she wouldn’t be there until noon. So we were on the road in a U-Haul paying a buck a mile and were about to become very early. Matthew was quick to point out that when other drivers see a U-Haul they run scared because they know that you can’t see anything and have no idea how to drive a truck. This made life a little easier making the ride down on 128 towards Norwood where the items were.

Since we were driving to get office furniture I decided to stop at Staples to get a chair. Our chair by our desk, being in equilibrium, was a chair that I found in the condo when I first arrived. It was a yellow wooden chair that hadn’t been covered when people had painted a room so it had white strips of dripped paint on it. For a long time it had been covered by one of those slips that makes ugly chairs look fancy but time had destroyed it and we were sitting at our old desk with an old wooden chair that looked like it was a part of an artist studio.

So we purchased a nice office chair that spins and tilts at Staples. I also bought lots of desk stuff for our new used desk including holders for items and a drawer stuff organizer. We then went on to the real estate agent’s office that was selling the items. The woman there was quite a real estate agent. Despite the fact that we were looking to purchase used furniture from her because her expensive furniture didn’t match her new Ikea cheaper furniture she decided to try to sell me on moving into a new home and using her as an agent. When Matthew and I entered the office we saw a desk and file cabinet. I thought to myself. A credenza must be a file cabinet! But upon asking her I learned that a credenza is actually a large piece of furniture with a bunch of drawers and cabinets and a top piece with cubby holes in it. Now I was thinking that a desk should come with it’s matching file cabinet so I asked the real estate agent whether the file cabinet was on sale. Her response was that anything is for sale but that she had a use for the file cabinet but not the other two items which was why the other two were less expensive. So I decided that we already had rented the U-Haul and settled on a price $50 higher for the file cabinet than I had paid for the desk and credenza together.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the cash for it so I had to go on a little journey down the street to find a bank machine to get cash to pay her. The bank machine at Bank of America was occupied by three employees of a local grocery store who were annoyed that the grocery store had stopped using Sovereign Bank to cut their checks because now they had to go to Bank of America to deposit them. I wasn’t that interested in correcting them that it didn’t matter which bank issued a check for when you deposit them. Two of the employees were fussing around the bank machine because one was confident that you could deposit a check in the bank machine while the other was sure it would just disappear. They had no choice since the bank itself wasn’t opening for another hour or two. The main problem seemed to stem from the fact that they were going to write another check for the rent on Monday and they didn’t want it to bounce because the deposit didn’t get through at the bank. But eventually I got all the cash I needed for the transaction and purchased the furniture.

We loaded the furniture into the U-Haul and as we were driving back to Brookline it struck me that having a U-Haul is not an ordinary event. I can’t usually carry much in the back of my car. We kept passing the Christmas tree vending shops and I had recalled that Sarah had said that she didn’t want a tree this year because it would be too messy. But after passing three tree dealers in a row and when I thought there would be none left I turned into the Winston’s lot, Winston’s is apparently the Cadillac of Christmas trees, and I then negotiated a nice tree along with a stand that we then threw into the back of the U-Haul.

So finally Matthew and I returned to Brookline full of items including a surprise tree. When we brought it into the condo I needed to get my camera to film the reaction from Sarah. I wasn’t sure if she would be angry or elated when Matthew charged into the apartment with a nine foot tall tree. So we first brought the new file cabinet in. I then went back down with Matthew and we tried to set-up the tree in the hallway. I thought that Sarah wouldn’t come out but she walked right out to where she could almost see the tree. I got the camera out and then proceeded to wait about two minutes while Matthew cut all sorts of cords off of the tree and got it attached better to the stand. Sarah was suspicious because I had the camera out so I figured she had seen downstairs and knew what was coming. But when Matthew charged in Madeline started jumping up and down excited to see a tree inside and Sarah was also very happy and excited.

The rest of the afternoon I discovered that moving furniture in my condo is difficult. I finally started to make use of the storage room in the basement and placed the old desk, secretary (looks like a credenza), and file cabinet down there. We returned the U-Haul, I biked home and all was well.

But that is not the end of the story really because we had upset the fundamental equilibrium of the apartment by doing this. I had placed items into the basement for storage for the first time. Other people had placed items into storage before and over time other unit owners had built enclosures to keep the items sorted out so that you could throw out items not in the enclosures. But since I was placing items without an enclosure I needed to build an enclosure in the basement. In order to do this I was going to need some construction help so Sarah and I chatted and decided we could call Nick F. who could do the work.

But if I was going to call Nick F. to look at the condo then I might as well call him about the project we have been thinking about doing for the past three years. That is to install a bubbly tub in the bathroom and replace the kitchen appliances and cabinets. So we are embarking on a new project to plan the kitchen and bathroom replacement stuff. To install a hot tub we needed to consult an electrician so I figured I’d bring-up that I would like to stop the circuit breaker from shutting down everything in the summer and he mentioned that he could put the air conditioners on a separate circuit. To run the new circuit we figured it would be easiest to cover the current popcorn ceiling in the living room with a new ceiling and run the circuit down the middle. If we were going to run wires through the living room it also would make sense to hide the speaker wires for the surround sound, connect the wire to the roof for the antennae and/or satellite dish, and move from a projection TV to a flat screen while placing the components in a media closet. All this sounded very logical until I saw an estimate of what it might cost without the hardware. But the point here is this:

Beware that loose strand on your sweater. If you pull it prepare for more than you expected.

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:20 PM | Permalink

I was thinking this morning about finding a new home again. Every hermit crab must someday leave their shell. My thoughts were turned to the available information online and I came to the conclusion that despite the increase in availability of information to make the real estate market more transparent it has a long way to go. The big problem that I see is that people are still dealing with web pages and not XML data. I can go to the Boston Globe Online and find all the open houses in the area but if I wanted to track that over time and get a real time data feed all I can do is subscribe to an RSS data feed. The RSS feed doesn't provide any organizational/parametric features about the homes that would be helpful for automatically filtering or highlighing the ones that I am interested it. Instead it just gives a list with a link to the site where I can see more information. But I need to know things like listing price, square feet, proximity to T, sales history (has it been reduced? is it a new listing?), condo or home, taxes, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, neighborhood, date/time of open houses, etc. and I would rather not have to know any of these things unless some of them meet my basic requirements for a home. What I envision for a future to the real estate market is that somehow and somewhere each home is attached to a piece of changing data like a stock that has all of this parametric information in it. It might be managed by a realtor or by the owner through a public site. The home can then be located through either newspaper style web sites or advanced tools for visualizing and alerting me about my home search. I don't really want a realtor... I want a more transparent real estate market with Internet geeks working hard to get my attention with better ways to present the information that is publicly available. In a sense this has happened in the unstructured world of text search with folks like Google but for structured data like real estate, even with the Zillow's of the world, it is still not an easy process to see what you are looking for in the market. Maybe the real estate agents don't want this but as always -- the heretics like me are only the bad guys for the people in power. If the realtor folks listen to us and give us what we want then they can stay connected to real problems and provide real solutions of value in a changing world.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:09 AM | Permalink

So I turn 33 today. Madeline has her first birthday tomorrow but we are all celebrating a hodge-podge of birthdays, anniversaries, harvest, pagan, and Indian holidays today. I’m surprised we aren’t getting Madeline dressed in her turtle Halloween costume. Maybe we should bring it? I am hoping this birthday isn’t like that 16 candles birthday. I watched part of that movie last weekend and continually thought how in retrospect Anthony Michael Hall deserved an Oscar for best actor for his performance. But maybe I’m just a little too ready to empathize with the ‘80s high school freshman geek who transcends geekdom by going after glory by betting his friends he can get Molly Ringwald’s underwear. But I do think it was under appreciated in its time. So for my birthday I bought myself an 800GB Seagate Barracuda internal drive. I don’t know how to install it but it can’t be as complex as putting a supercharger in a car. It will be a fun little project for me and can make space for video storage. I probably should have gotten a DVD burner along with it but I’ll get to that next year.

Madeline is wandering about in her birthday dress with yesterday’s salt and pepper grinders from our steak dinner and managed to find an old Ibuprofen pill on the floor of our bedroom. I took it away from her. It is quite hard to be fully baby proofed. In a few more years she will be able to open the bottle herself! But the real treat of the day was that Sarah told me that as I walked past Madeline in her high chair she said “DaDa”.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:16 AM | Permalink

Among the many reasons why it is hard to write these days I must include that the cat actively attempts to interfere with any attempt on my part to use the computer on my desk. She begins by hiding behind the flat screen monitor and periodically swipes her paw at my fingers as I type. After I get frustrated by this and stand-up to get her to follow me away from the computer she will then reseat herself in front of the keyboard in order to block me from resting my hands in the typing position. If I manage to brush her away from this position she will then walk across the keyboard itself in hopes of clicking on a key that will permanently lock the computer in an awful funk like running in Norwegian mode or setting off control keys that show strange symbols for paragraphs while using MSWord. Luckily she appears to be at rest for the evening at the moment and I have been spared the routine. Otherwise this would never have made it out.

The baby on the other hand offers a different form of interference. Basically I have come to the conclusion that if you have a life and a hobby and then you become a parent you will need to choose from among the following options. A – Sleep, B – Doing a hobby. When you no longer have time for sleep this generally means that you will also have no time for playing poker on Friday nights, working out three days a week, writing a blog, creating nify nick-nacks out of pine cones, and other such nonsense. The challenge is simply that a baby is not a fully capable person able to do things like eat, clean, use the toilet, entertain themselves, or play poker on Fridays. Because of these challenges you can’t leave them alone. They have funny hours that they keep for their day including sleeping at 8PM and waking-up at 6AM. This means that you have to be home a few hours before 8PM, like 6PM and awake at 6AM. Doing some simple math on the free hours. If you work from 9 AM to 5PM this basically leaves you with the drive home and the bleary hour or two you have to feed the baby in the morning and then figure out who will care for her while you are at work as your extra time. You also have the hour and a half of time after she sleeps to squander at your leisure only to wish you had spent it sleeping the night before. If you work an hour or two later in the day then it leaves you with nothing in terms of spare time. So this is the more likely reason for not producing anything in writing on a regular basis. It means that information needs to be condensed into forms like haiku. For example here is a brief passage recalling key events from the trip that Jeremy and I took to Vegas.

Circus Circus Vegas for kids with women in lobby giving birth to more kids. Chinese taxi driver – ‘you want to get raid?’. TI club good. Dancing with Nebraskan woman 6’4”. Stripper tells story of popping eyeball out with long heel and coroner’s office job. Jeremy recognizes porn producer at club. Old Vegas – Freemont street experience during the day is mainly looking at a bunch of crack dealers. Old casinos have $2 blackjack. Win money but watch wives gamble their wedding rings. Hard not to look at just the stage during ‘O’. Mayors convention in town meeting mayors. Rio floor no good to dance on because of beer glue. Too many grinding dudes on floor. Next time go to Rio roof bar not dance club.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:44 PM | Permalink

I have now lived with Annabelle the cat for about three weeks now. It is nice to have a pet at home again. She appears to have thwarted the mice. I have seen no evidence of them in the last few weeks. Because of this we have gotten careless and this week alone have had two taco nights where we fill the counter by the stove, the favorite picnicking spot of Brookline mice, with a cornucopia of Mexican foods like onions, tomatoes, tortilla chips, avocados, cheese, and ground beef. No mice have chosen to join the fiesta. Annabelle does not appear to be spending her evenings policing the kitchen. I know this because instead she spends her time waiting for me to fall asleep and then tries to vigorously rub off some form of scent from behind her ear onto my hands. I must admit that I feel a little violated by the experience of Annabelle trying to not mark just her territory but pretending to be a possessed bottle of cheap cologne aggressively marking me. She is headed for a showdown with the vet regardless of this behavior since we signed a contract to spay her as a part of our contract to rescue her from the MSPCA. I am hoping that spaying her will alleviate her need to rub up against me while I am sleeping as I generally don’t get much sleep to begin with given the other new inhabitant of my apartment.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:09 PM | Permalink

The cat

On Saturday we finally managed to pull together and go to the MSPCA to adopt a cat. We were undecided on the key question of whether to get a new kitten, a teenager cat, or a mature one. The basic rationale was that the kitten is the most desirable of cat and that is a pro and a con. In adopting a cat we wanted to get a cat that would benefit from adoption so kittens are likely to get adopted because they are cute and cuddly.

So we arrived at noon on Saturday to a surprising new MSPCA adoption center at the Angel Memorial Animal Hospital. The sign on the door as we walked in informed us that they look for donations and in particular this week they were looking for bleach. The waiting area you first reach when you arrive gives you the impression that you should wait to be escorted into the cat observation area. But things are very busy and actually nobody comes to greet you until after waiting for about 10 minutes you realize that you should just walk into the area with all of the cats, go through the door leading to the dogs, or take a look at some critters like bunny rabbits, mice, or ferrets.

The cat area was chock full of cats. We went first through the hall of tall cages where mainly adult cats were living on their own. I figured these ones were less tolerant of other cats because on either side of the hall the adoption center had large monkey house style rooms facing out the window. The monkey houses were filled with ten cats each all living in a communal lifestyle complete with high walks, windows, and cubbies to nestle into. But just before we entered the first big room we were stunned by the kittens. Two pens on the side had kittens in them. One had a single kitten and it’s mother, both white with calico markings on the top. The kitten was feeding from the mother’s chest. The sign on the pen suggested that they were a packaged deal and that these cats were already pending adoption.

Next to this pen another pen held four or five kittens. Sarah and I held a couple of them and were very interested in these tiny fun creatures. Madeline, who was sitting with us in her stroller, also wanted to say hello to the cats. To avoid the charms of the littlest ones we moved into one of the big open rooms filled with cats. I found one cat that reminded me of Thumper. She was a black cat, somewhat fat but mainly muscular, that looked like she could chase mice. I told Sarah that I was impressed with this cat and we interacted with it for a while. When we asked more information about this cat, nee Fluffy, we were informed that she was a de-clawed cat. Now I don’t think it is right to de-claw a cat but I also don’t think a de-clawed cat would be effective at scaring mice. The woman giving us cat backgrounds also introduced us to a Mane Coon cat that was very interesting looking and seemed quite friendly. Again she let us know that this was a de-clawed cat. The woman asked what I felt was wrong with a de-clawed cat as Sarah looked on at me and I was forced to admit that one of my reasons for wanting a cat was to catch and kill our local mouse population. The adoption center volunteer changed from looking at me as a good potential paternal figure for her beloved cats to how someone might look at a slave owner that beat his slaves mercilessly. She then explained that cats can’t kill mice unless their mother teaches them how and that they kill mice with their teeth and not their claws.

Regardless of her attempt to enlighten me, Sarah and I moved on to searching for a cat in an unassisted fashion to avoid the judging eyes of this adoption volunteer.

We did see a cat that looked thin, young, and strong in a three story cage. She looked much like Cloey, Jeremy’s cat, with a brown speckled body but with a very bushy Coon style tail. I chatted with a helper about this cat and found that she was found abandoned in an apartment when someone had left her there alone after moving out. She was given the name Pigeon at the shelter but was still very thin. The woman helping us this time was very excited to see me, Sarah, and Madeline. She could see that we would be a good home for this cat and told us that she really wanted Pigeon to go home with us.

The adoption process included an hour and a half wait to get to the front of the line to go through the process with the forms. The forms included questions like whether we had pets before and if we no longer had them what had occurred. I put down a brief sentence about Bijoux but the adoption person never asked a question about it. Soon we were home with a cat.

Later in the afternoon Nick and Christina came over and they helped us to cut Pigeon’s nails. I was hoping for a better name and someone called her Annabelle which is now her official Housman family name.

Annabelle is a bit crazy so far. She rolls around in her litter and runs at top speed throughout the apartment. Madeline likes to chase her or at least to chase the beeping electronic mouse at the end of the plastic fishing rod and string that I bought at Stop and Shop. Unfortunately it hasn’t been easy to catch sleep since we brought Annabelle home. Madeline has been very fussy at night and is apparently refusing to sleep in her crib. Our solution for now is to get her to sleep on the floor of her room on the carpet. This plan worked two nights in a row. The first night I got a nice sore back from sleeping with her. The second one I decided to leave her and to sleep in the bed. She slept fine but was about twenty feet from where I laid her down. She is a sleep crawler. So tonight we are trying to put her on the floor within a makeshift pillow barrier system. It was working for most of “The World’s Fastest Indian” but she woke up and Sarah had to go back to try to nurse her and calm her down. Hopefully things will improve on the sleeping front soon. I feel like the mouse front is under control of commander Annabelle.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I went to put the steaks and the asparagus into the broiler in the oven and the mouse scurried past me along the wall going from the radiator to the fridge. I startled the mouse and then it startled me. Then after I placed the food in the oven the mouse scurried back from behind the fridge to the radiator. I looked and found that the radiator doesn't have a cover ring after dismissing the idea that the family of mice lived behind the washer and dryer. My theory is that the mice travel through the building using the pipes for the radiators. I know the other hole they go through in the kitchen across the room. I'll have to seal both of these holes. It will be a good mission for me this weekend to investigate and accomplish this. But seeing the high quadraped rodent foot traffic in the kitchen has helped to spur Sarah and I to prioritize getting a cat ASAP.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:11 PM | Permalink

When we got back from Toronto it was 3:30 AM on Monday morning. I had done the last part of the drive because dad is more of a daylight and early evening driver. He doesn’t like to drive past normal bed times. It was my fault that we were getting in late since I insisted upon watching the World Cup Final game between Italy and France. The highlight of the game was that after two hours of the announcers building-up the retiring French star Zidane to be the second coming of Christ when it came to class, sportsmanship, and skill the guy gave a full force head butt into an Italian.

Upon arriving home I was disgusted, but not surprised, to find the bathtub filled with the dried remnants of the Friday attempt to exorcise the demons of the drain. Since I was awake at 3:30 AM I didn’t have any great urge to sleep. So instead I poured a heaping portion of Drano into the dried-up drain using the logic that since it was dry the Drano could finally find the clog and zap it.

An hour later I was back at fussing with the drain again with the water clogged back into the tub and reinvigorating the refuse with the life of water. I went to the kitchen to find that the vegetables from our weekend had generally turned into rot and mush. The basil, which I figured would keep for a few weeks for caprese salad was all black and was dripping a black liquid. The cantaloupe that I had bought because the fruit salads at the Deroche Supermarket were $6.99 for a tiny amount of fruit was soft enough to put my finger into it and covered with mold.

I was getting fed-up with the smell and the rot of returning home so I tossed all of the vegetables and whatever molding or dried bread floating in the kitchen. I cursed the mice and wiped the stove and vowed to bring a cat home as soon as possible.

I then used the Internet to look-up how to clear a clogged tub drain. The net showed an article with various solutions including covering the drain overflow at the top with a towel while plunging. There was one diagram of removing the drain overflow cap to then use the auger to unclog hidden problems. So I undid the cover and pulled out my rarely useful auger. This time I followed the instructions and carefully snaked it down the opening. Then I closed the nut that tightens around the wire snake. I turned the auger a bunch of times at the bottom. I pulled it back out seeing no effect and went back to the sink to clean out the auger to remove the goop and Drano that might maim me if I touched me. I looked back at the tub and the water was flowing down. I had cleared the drain.

I took the rotting vegetables down stairs and went to sleep.

I didn’t see Madeline until the afternoon since I slept in until about 11 and then went to the gym. I watched a reality show about over privileged Hollywood socialites who were getting their super Sweet 16 party with prices of over $200,000 per party. They had one that remade Vegas and had some pop band play and another who created a Cirque-De-Soleil atmosphere and was pissed that the hotel wouldn’t let her suspend circus performers from the ceiling of a banquet hall. It made me think that they should make a reality TV show just like it for my super bachelor party. It would probably have to be on HBO or the Playboy channel but it would probably be more interesting. I took a shower both before and after going to the gym and felt clean after having wiped down the tub with Comet.

Madeline was a dream to see. It’s hard to imagine how much I can love her until I am about to see her after a long time away and miss her in that last moment. It is like when you need to go to the bathroom and know the rest stop is coming soon. I just wanted to hug her, hold her, kiss her, and throw her up in the air. Then I took her home to my nice, recently cleaned little world.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:55 PM | Permalink

On Wednesday night I smelled gas in the kitchen about an hour after dinner and noticed that one of the burners was still on but wasn’t lit. I turned it off and then quietly opened the windows so as to avoid setting off a spark that might send me flying through them. I whispered to Sarah not to panic but that the kitchen was filled with gas and we then proceeded to open windows throughout the apartment. We survived.

By Thursday morning when I went to take my shower the tub was already filled with enough water for a mock naval battle. Sarah’s shower hadn’t drained because the drain had clogged. I let it sit during the day filled with shampoo and soap and by evening it was empty again. Sarah and I discussed whether to go to the store for Drano but we found a large container of kitchen Drano under the sink. So I poured a few tablespoons into it. I read the container to learn that I was supposed to, according to the Drano folks, place a tablespoon of Drano into my drains once per week. A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down. Somewhere in the world there is a person who takes these labels seriously and spends every waking hour trying to fulfill their weekly duties placing Drano in drains, testing fire alarms, and opening and closing their blinds each day.

The drain should have been cleared in fifteen minutes but ten minutes after I rushed in through the noxious gases to turn the shower on the tub was filled with standing water with a blue tint to it. This clog wasn’t going down easily. I played around enough to determine that the sink was also connected to the clog. If I used the bathroom sink the water ended-up in the bathtub. So I tried clearing the sink with some more gas producing Drano. That didn’t do the trick either. Next I unraveled a coat hanger and tried fishing around for a clog but it never made it past a few inches because of the curves of the drain. So I grabbed a plunger and started plunging vigorously. That was satisfying but it dredged-up the all sorts of things that I couldn’t imagine were in my drain into the tub. Sarah suggested maybe a mouse had committed suicide in the drain but I didn’t see a skull. The detritus that looked like leaves that came out baffled me.

I awoke in the middle of the night for a second round. The water was still standing so I just poured more Drano down the pipe. I pulled out the augur that I had bought the last time the drain had clogged. I don’t really know how to use it and it didn’t seem to get any further than the wire. The water was still standing after I had read 50 pages of my book so I returned to sleep.

In the morning after I had awoken and Sarah was about to get ready for work I found that the drain had emptied slowly over the course of the evening. So I poured a good three tablespoons of the Drano into it, ignoring the warning on the bottle to call a plumber if it doesn’t clear after the second attempt to clear the drain. The stuff fizzed and buzzed and kicked-up a great storm of gas. That was to my liking because it suggested that the NaOH was working. Sarah unfortunately had to use the bathroom and the gas nearly dissolved her lungs. I returned a few minutes ago to check on my work.

The tub was filled with grime and the drain was empty. I turned on the tub in a moment of truth and … it was clearly still clogged. The water just filled up the drain and didn’t go back down. I’m leaving for Toronto in an hour. I guess I won’t get to take a shower.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:41 AM | Permalink

On Sunday we decided to brave the rain and look at a couple of open houses. I have always been a fan of the concept of a fixer-upper. You buy a house that is nearly falling apart at a half of what it is worth and then turn it into a dream home. According to Aaron, a fixer-upper expert, most people say they want to renovate a home but only say that when they think of the price. Most people don’t have the stomach for it. So we took a look at a home on Topcock Street that might have a few defects with a listing price of $1.1 million. A fixer-upper listed at a million? Maybe it could be fixed-up for $400K more and then be worth $5 million?

I thought the high price tag would suggest that this would be a mansion with infinite potential, ready for installation of a grotto and the Hugh Hefner lifestyle; ready for a huge windfall profit. We figured it might be in reasonable condition on the inside although the exterior was surrounded by caution tape and the entry porch had some dark rotted wood that caved in, probably to where the bodies were buried from the crime scene. The front windows by the door were broken and the yard was filled with crab grass, a garage overgrown with moss, and some odd rusted metal pole or wire structures in the style of busted fence had replaced a former wooden porch fence. Sarah had driven by earlier with a few friends after brunch and declared it a potential dream home.

We entered through the front door and were expecting that Lurch from the Adam’s family would greet us. Inside on the first floor was a very nice stairway up to the upper regions of the home. We were greeted by a realtor/preservation nazi. She gave us a 40 page booklet on the requirements for preserving homes in the historic ‘argoyle ridge’ area that included a fifteen step approval process for placing a vase in your window. Any changes to the exterior would require approval or variances from the local historic preservation society. She calmly let us know that she was president of the local preservation committee and was happy to provide a calendar at no cost with 12 of the wonderful historic homes depicted. The lecture she gave to us about the preservation and value of homes in the area led me to believe that the we wouldn’t be buying a home in this neighborhood, we would be doing the valuable duty of adopting the pit-bull or greyhound of homes and helping them to recover. She didn’t want to find an owner that would understand the gravity of the responsibility of taking care of the abused pet. The immediate question I had was whether we would need permission, if we were to pay the 1.1 million dollars, to remove the caution tape.

The first floor wood had been decimated by some kind of random scuffing and staining party. The fixtures in the kitchen had been installed by someone from Kentucky looking through a junk yard to find what looked like rusted out old parts. Other fixtures had the odd look of industrial installations, as if the bathroom toilet needed to have the same design as a 1950’s high school toilet, or an outlet needed to be installed outside of the wall as if in a prison weight room. As we went up the dark stairs we began to understand that this was no normal run of the mill fixer-upper. This was the home where they filmed Poultergeist, The Amityville Horror Show, and The Money Pit. The walls had cracked and crumbled in a way that was beyond the damage I had seen while touring the ancient greek ruins of the labyrinth in Crete. The miasmatic smell and crumbling plaster walls suggested that the former residents were probably running a historic crack house, a historic bargain brothel. I didn’t dare to visit the basement for fear that I would find the meth lab and expose Madeline and Sarah to deadly brain numbing fumes.

We climbed the stairs into the third floor only to find the most disgusting carpet ever. It was a brown carpet that had tried as hard as possible to represent the look and feel of woodland moss. I couldn’t tell if it was actually a carpet or insulation gone bad. Whatever it’s original intent was I couldn’t imagine it was for decoration. One patch of it had been torn out to show the original wood floor underneath it had been better preserved than most other locations. For some bizarre reason one room on the top floor had a nicely sanded wood floor with a urethane coat added to it. The front room on this third floor had a large open window area facing the street. The window woodwork appeared to have been shredded to the consistency of Triscuit by some mythological beast. Was this where the Minotaur ended-up?

We wandered back down the stairs in a daze and shifted from the normal dream home conversation of which room would be our bedroom, where we would put the Jacuzzi tub into a conversation about whether our health would be permanently harmed for having entered this zone of doom. Other people were also walking around in a similar daze although the contractor types seemed to be thinking about how to profit from this location. I was amazed.

The only logical explanation offered, by another real estate agent at the next open house we went to was the history of the house. The house had been sold to a developer who wanted to tear it down and build three town houses on the large lot. The historic commission had wanted to see it restored and rejected the proposal. That might have been why the new realtor was an odd preservation nut. The developer had tried to make the case for tearing down the house by staging it to show how clear it was that the house needed to be wiped from the face of the earth and was rejected again. After about twenty minutes inside Sarah and I were convinced of the developer’s work. This house should be torn down. The ground should be blessed by a priest, rabbi, and shaman and a new home should be inserted in it’s place.

For the partial right not to be allowed to do so… the going rate is $1.1 Million.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Memorial day weekend was one of those times when life goes by so fast and so fluidly that there is no time to document it either in words or in pictures. We spent the whole weekend trying to take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather by hiding out near swimming pools. On Saturday we went to JT’s pool party and I saw a glimpse of the future. My future is a swimming pool filled with little girls age 2-10 bobbing up and down and diving in from the deep end screaming, cutting their lips on concrete, and eating Popsicles. It isn’t a bad future but not one I had foreseen until just now.

Jeremy and I decided to take an epic bicycle ride out to Marshfield on Sunday from Brookline to the house. I took my old mountain bike and Jeremy was riding his slick road bike. I figured we’d be even since he has two bad knees and is out of shape while I am in a little better shape. I learned a few things on the trip.

Sarah and I have been married for a year now. We include the trip to the Bahamas as the major celebratory component of our anniversary but we also took a walk to Pho Lemongrass and ate dinner. I noticed on the door a shaggy picture of former president Al Gore with the staff of the restaurant from some time that he visited Brookline around the corner from us.

Sarah and I had included in our stack of DVDs for watching on our anniversary the movies American Beauty and the Squid and the Whale. Both are portraits of dysfunctional families and marriages that are eroded and falling apart. American Beauty was a much better movie of the two. The Squid movie characters were so annoying and idiosyncratic that it was painful to watch. Sarah fell asleep. The ending of the Squid and the Whale interested me though because the teen son goes back to the museum of natural history to look at an exhibit that he remembered from ‘The good days’ of his memories.

When I worked at ChannelWave I used to go to Au Bon Pain in Kendall Square on a regular basis. It wasn’t the closest place to get a coffee or a sandwich. Pete’s was on the way and the Bean Town was just downstairs in our building. But I would walk there particularly when I was frustrated with work, people, and the world. Au Bon Pain had placed an article on the wall in the middle because they were mentioned in it. It was a Newsweek article from 1997 that described hot high-tech cities for starting companies. The article mentioned Au Bon Pain in Kendall as a great place where techies hang out and build new ideas into businesses. The picture for Boston was a photo taken through the glass door at VirtuMall of Ron and me.

So Au Bon Pain in Kendall Square was the only place in the world where a picture of me hung, unbeknownst to them. Nobody ever noticed or recognized the picture while I was eating my asiago cheese bagels or ordering a sandwich with their herbed mayo, brie, and chicken. I just went there because it made me feel important for a moment. Maybe everyone has these private places? A few years ago they remodeled to improve the efficiency of the restaurant. The took down the article.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:44 AM | Permalink

Among the benefits of leaving on a vacation for the Bahamas in May and having a deluge of biblical proportions fall upon the Boston area while we were gone is that my status as a prophet has gone way up. The main rationale for going on vacation this year in May was that last year, when we got married in May, we couldn’t help but notice that it rained 90% of the time. This combined with our second date on Memorial day when Sarah was violently sea sick on a whale watch that occurred during a hail and sleet storm. I also add my own past experience of trying to hike Mt. Chicorua in May and accidentally lighting my tent on fire by trying to warm me and Pete Forsythe up from a sleet storm we had hiked in using the camping stove inside the tent. So my personal experience with May in Boston is that it is a violently cold and rainy month, which is why we went away. But I do enjoy hearing that people respect how applying such wisdom could allow us to avoid an enormous basement flooding, sump-pump activating, disaster.

Our own challenge came when we returned home and had unpacked all of our shoes to place them into the closet where we store coats and shoes. Sarah stuck her nose into the closet and discovered that it smelled awful. Given that it had been at 100% humidity for about 6 days and that the rain could easily have penetrated the roof one theory for the horrible smell was that some old sandals, golf shoes, and other sweat filled beasts had gotten activated into smelling terrible. This was my hypothesis. I was in denial.

Sarah’s hypothesis was based on the incident prior to our 4AM exit when we were packing in the early morning for our flight. We aren’t normally wandering about our condo at this hour so it is possible to observe things that aren’t normally visible to us. In this case Sarah was in the kitchen and bumped into a small black mouse. The last time this had happened Sarah had let out a primal shriek that led me to believe, when I heard it from another room, that something terrible had happened to Madeline along the lines of her falling off of the refrigerator. This time Sarah was more calm and she just jumped but the mouse was as frightened as she was and rather than returning to a hole in the wall the mouse ran around the corner from the kitchen and into the open door to the closet with the shoes and coats. I had been rummaging for Tivas so the door was open. We spent a good portion of time on the cab ride over to the airport discussing how we were going to finally take the plunge and commit to purchasing a stray cat or kitten at the animal shelter.

Sarah’s opinion was that the smell in the closet, a musty sweaty rotten smell reminiscent of a basement, was the smell of that mouse dead in the closet. It wasn’t like we had closed the door on that mouse. We had left it open expressly to avoid having a dead trapped mouse in our closet upon return but it was left as a possibility. But I still clung to my musty rain theory. We had been trapped in Miami when we were returning due to massive rain that closed the airport for six hours and I could imagine it activating smells in shoes in the spring time.

We were delayed in Miami airport for so long that we got to listen to Bush’s 8PM speech about immigration reform although we had originally been scheduled to make a 3:30 connection back to Boston. I tend to think of the strategy for immigration reform when it comes to the mice in the condo. Our job is to reduce the opportunity for the mice (don’t leave food around) , seal the borders (plug holes that mice come through), and have appropriate border security forces (a cat), and reasonable penalties for illegal immigration (death by cat or if trapped in a humane trap – return to the wild 5 miles away). They have a five step plan and so do I my problem has been getting commitment, consensus, and resources to execute all areas of the plan. I wonder what the government’s issues are?

Madeline had enjoyed the airport. She liked interacting with the faces of people smiling at her and she discovered that Sarah’s phone was the most fun toy she had ever gotten her hands on.

By Friday night my excuse for not going into the closet to clean it out was that it was dark. We had returned home on Monday night. The real reason was that I was procrastinating the event and didn’t want to get too involved with death. So instead we watched the finale of Season 5 of Six Feet Under. In the end everyone dies in some cool scenes flashing into the future with a great song playing in the background. It was a good ending except for one dumb guffaw killing off Keith through gunshots while he is guarding money in an armored truck. It was just dumb but we played the ending scene with the cool song about 5 times. In one frame you can see Alan Poul, one of the producers, at a funeral for the mother. After that we watched Capote but Sarah fell asleep before they executed the killers by hanging. I had expected more from it, to be super curious about reading “In Cold Blood” but the movie was flat and long. I understood why Sarah fell asleep.

But by Saturday morning after having eaten our ritual breakfast at Brueggers I had run out of options and it was time to clean out the closet. I pulled out both bins of shoes, took out the luggage, and took all of the jackets out of the closet until it was bare. No dead mouse. I threw out a number of shoes that seemed to have offensive smells or were rendered useless due to holes in the bottoms out of my bin of shoes. Sarah went through her bin and that was when she found it, the suicide bomber.

The mouse in her shoe bin was grey. I am not sure whether black mice turn to grey or not so it could have been a different mouse but this was a dead mouse. It was a suicidal mouse trying to drive us out of our apartment with it’s stench. I doubt it was totally conscious of the effect that it has on us. Waichi is moving out of her apartment downstairs. Part of her reason for not buying the condo at a good price from the guy who wants to offload it is that she can’t deal with the mice dying. We bumped into her this morning as she was moving her boxes into a U-Haul in front of the building. She found a dead mouse that had been rotting for a long time behind her sofa two days ago and refrained from calling me to scrape it out because it was two in the morning. She had called me down one day about six months ago to scrape one out from under her radiator in her kitchen. It’s funny to see her needing my help because she is a kidney transplant surgeon and goes on missions with Doctors without borders to war torn or disaster areas but she is disgusted by dead mice.

But the effect of the mice rotting in closets, under floor boards, behind couches, under radiators, in cupboards full of sunflower seeds meant for birds, is the same everywhere. We have a dread of it and makes us want to run away to somewhere else. Nobody likes death in their own home.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:47 AM | Permalink

In the dream I was trying to return to my car with Jeremy. The car was parked in a dark garage up a number of flights of stairs. I kept having trouble figuring out how the stairs in the garage were oriented and kept needing to look backwards as I walked up them and it was almost as if my whole nervous system had switched me my left and right or up and down to the point that I was completely disoriented. Jeremy kept trying to explain the right way to go through the garage but I was still wandering in circles up and down a staircase that could have come from an Escher painting. On one floor I got off on near the top I saw a small thin child scurry past me but the child faded in and out of my vision because of the darkness. I was frightened by the sight in the same way I might be startled by a leaf on the ground that for a moment looks like a severed body part, or to find I was about to step on a dead animal on the ground only to find I was stepping on a stone or log. The child wasn’t as scary as the Chucky animatronics but kept moving past me and appeared and disappeared until finally I become so agitated and freaked out that I suddenly awoke.

I thought about the dream and realized that I had gone to sleep without having moved my car from the space in front of the condo to the parking spot down at 2 St. Paul Street. I had parked in front because Madeline had been crying and sweating heavily on the ride home from Bedford fighting through the rush hour traffic. When I had pulled her out of the new Britax car seat that we finally installed she was soaked in sweat and her hair was as wet as if she had come from a bath tub. Sarah and I discussed how we should post an ad on craigslist to see if we could find childcare for Thursdays and Mondays to try to avoid some of the crazy driving that needs to occur to make sure Madeline has around the clock care.

I had gotten further bad news on the parking front at 9:15 when my cell phone had ominously rang. It is the call I am ready for at all times but I dread. The Bar—ch family from 2 St. Paul Street was giving me the 20 days notice until June 1st to leave the space and find a new one.

So after parking the PT Cruiser at 1 AM wearing dress shoes, sweat pants, and no socks I returned home in a bit of shock only to slam the door just loud enough to awake Madeline to the point where she was unable to get back to sleep without being brought into bed with Sarah. Sarah was about as pleased at my door slamming antics as I was about having to get up in the middle of the night to move my car.

So I posted two ads on craigslist, one for a new parking space, and the other for a two day a week baby sitter. I’ll probably need to poster around the neighborhood since it is the most productive way to find parking in the past. There is always something within some distance and I may end-up like last year in a space that is half a mile away and requires a bicycle to reach. With a baby that won’t be acceptable or possible though.

Sarah and I say we are well adjusted and prefer city living but on a night like this the advantages of a little bit of your own pavement becomes apparent as the lack of it reaches into my subconscious in scary dreams. One thought I had was a vision of what will happen if gas (or equivalents) prices reached so high that it was cost prohibitive for people to have personal transportation (cars). People would all move to citys and urban sprawl would become ghost sprawl. More people would telecommute whenever possible. Partnerships would become more geographical in nature as people from Burlington would have trouble meeting people in Cambridge. Public transportation would become more extensively used and services like Zip cars would become the way to acquire personal transport only when necessary. These car seat manufacturers would go out of business. Bicycles and self-propelled vehicles would come into style as the ideal way to travel. Roads would become optimized for self-propelled travel including long time periods when traffic would be unavailable to cars. People would become thinner and get diabetes and other chronic diseases that are tied to obesity at lower rates. Wars over oil and energy might become unnecessary and peace will fill the planets and love will fill the sun.

Well maybe I just need to find a new parking space.

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:11 AM | Permalink

For the past few years I had somehow managed to avoid the Boston Marathon. I was either preparing for a wedding, traveling, or just trying to get out of town for the three day weekend. But this year I decided to give it a new look because it made a great way to see my family in Newton and was the sort of activity that works well with a six month old baby. Madeline turned six months just last Thursday. Time flies.

We decided to get to the event early this year camping out near the 20 mile mark on Comm. Ave. According to other locals near us that puts us somewhere before heartbreak hill so the people passing by were generally cheerful. The race starts with a bunch of people who get to leave early so they don’t get ensnarled when the mass of humanity comes rushing through. The first folks to flash by are the wheelchair racers. I think we came outside just as the leaders for the wheelchair race past us and it didn’t affect me as very interesting other than to see the different designs of wheelchairs that followed. Most of them racers rolled their chairs by turning the wheel directly but a number of less able bodied looking folks either older or heftier appeared to be gaining a mechanical advantage through a crank driven chair design where they could turn the crank with their hands using what looked like bicycle pedals. We pondered the rules of the wheelchair race and without ever actually examining them I determined that they must only allow some people to use this design because it offers an advantage if they can attach gears to it.

The women came next. If you aren’t an elite woman runner then you probably won’t win the Boston Marathon, or at least you won’t appear to win on the news. The elite women get to start an hour early or so from the rest of the racers. It does pose the question and problem that a very fast late starting woman could beat the time of the best elite woman racer even after the elite racer had been crowned the winner. That would make for an interesting outcome but it probably won’t happen in my lifetime unless someone tries that T riding strategy again and T riding is probably much harder now that they are using RFID to track the runners as they proceed through the race.

The first women came through looking very impressive because their physiques made it clear that there was no room for body fat on them. One woman passed by and I thought I was looking at those charts from the gym where they show where all the muscles are that you are working out on the weight lifting stations.

My dad kept pinging back and forth from inside the house to watching the Red Sox game and race results to being outside where he could see the race. I never cared about who was winning. I was more interested in just watching the racers pass by and watching Madeline’s reaction to being outside in a crowd. The crowd around us started to build after the women passed by. Until then it was a small spattering of onlookers doing a little bit of cheering. A guy looking much like Ray Romano was together with a group of friends who were all prepared to root for a number of runners. They had signs ready and even t shirts to show their support. Down on the corner of Water Street a group of kids who looked drunk but didn’t reveal a source of alcohol (maybe they were devout Christians drunk on religion?) had gathered. I figured they were somewhere between high school and college students. They were goofballs but entertaining. When the mass of humanity arrived they learned that they could get a lot of reaction out of the Korean’s running by going crazy when a Korean passed by and yelling about how much they loved Korea.

The men leaders ran by quickly. I had figured that a Kenyan or Ethiopian would be leading but it looked like a Caucasian man was actually leading the race at the 20 mile marker. My dad let me know later that the winner had been Kenyan or Ethiopian and set a new course record by two seconds but I never looked for his picture. I was more interested in the mass of humanity to pass by after the leaders.

The Hoyts must start the race with the wheelchair racers because they were running very close to the men’s leaders and I don’t get the feeling that a man pushing his 30 year old handicapped son in a stroller could compete with 20,000 healthy runners for times. From what I could tell the Hoyts are in their own category of runners, determined to beat a disease, and they win the category every year. They may have gotten more cheers than the leaders running past with the trucks and giant clocks.

The race then devolved into what I was looking for. Plenty of the racers had painted their names or countries on their legs, chests, arms, and backs. That allowed us cheering section folks lounging on our Target outdoor recliners sipping wine in a Solo cup to tell “Amy” that she was “looking good!” or “Todd” that it was only a “Few more miles”.

Nick and Christina arrived because we had heard from Andrew that he was going to run as a bandit, a non-official runner. We had to essentially provide a constant watch for Andrew in case he passed by. Finding someone that you know is running the Marathon is like playing Where’s Waldo for five hours. You look at every body that passes and try to match it against your expectation to what a friend or family member might look like after having run 20 miles. Christina hadn’t been to the Marathon in a while either and she was amazed at how many people the Ray Romano character knew because he called out the names to encourage so many runners as they passed by. She caught on that he was reading their numbers and we all were taking turns calling out encouragement to the runners. We took special pleasure in the MIT runners as they passed by and Nick and I settled on the encouraging phrase for MIT runners – “Move that beaver!”

Scattered among the crowd of runners are a number of entertainers. We had hoped to see someone with a hat and a beer hanging from it but were disappointed on that front. We did see a Spiderman and Riddler separated by 30 minutes. A nerdy guy was running with a beanie on his head. Some folks were wearing large afro-wigs. The MIT folks, probably because they are shy and can’t figure out how to get a date, posted their cell phone numbers on their backs with messages to the “ladies” to call them.

Having watched people pass by for about four hours and consumed a few too many hamburgers and hot dogs we decided that it was unlikely that Andrew was going to appear. What made this clear was the sad bus full of people passing by. The bus picks-up the straggling suffering masses who can’t continue to the end and takes them to the finish line so that they can go home. In front of the bus a police car calls out that runners should move to the side of the road because it will shortly be open to traffic. One Canadian from Edmonton stopped his running to talk to us to complain that he had thought the race would be fun and he had traveled just to experience it but that it was too long and crap. I wanted to give him a lecture that 26.2 miles is the same anywhere and that he didn’t need to go for a run in Boston to learn that he wasn’t a marathon runner but instead I nodded and waited for him to painfully continue running.

Madeline appeared to have a good time for the day. So did I. I would run it if I wasn't so afraid of what it would do to my back.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:16 AM | Permalink

Upon getting home today after an Easter celebration involving eating brunch, walking in Great Meadows, and then screening a mediocre gay cowboy movie, I quickly scarfed down the four remaining Bertucci's chicken wings from the fridge. Little did I realize that they were spiced with a seed that would get lodged under my tongue somewhere in the recesses of my mouth that I just couldn't get rid of despite every creative thought I could think of. The first was the obvious drinking of water. I then moved on to gargling with mouthwash then I flossed hoping that it would be attached to a tooth. Next I tried masticating on a piece of old bread hoping that the bread would catch the seed in whatever standard path food drives behind my tongue. It is still stuck there and I am left debating whether to call a dentist, doctor, or phrenologist to keep it from driving me batty for the next few weeks. I may need to continue to seek strange cures like pouring baking soda and vinegar into the back of my mouth or sending Sarah into there with a pair of tweezers.

Regardless of that we also finally saw the neighbors condo. They are selling it and it is clear from walking across our wall into their condo that the original layout of our condo was a single floorplan for the entire floor. What that plan was is a mystery but the patterns on the wood on our floor go through the wall to form a rectangle on the other side of it. I tried to find an original floor plan for the Brookline one floor apartment, since most condos in Brookline share similar blue prints, but I was unable to find anything on the net. My guess is that taking two smaller units and mushing them into one would be a big nightmare both from a construction and financial point of view. It would be like taking two items worth $3 each and putting them together at great effort to make something worth $5. The easier thing to do would be to buy something that costs $6. Plus any thought of buying anything right now comes with the anxiety of a potentially bursting market. Would buying now but equivalent to becoming the greatest fool on the top of the greater fool pyramid or is it really just reality that prices go up on real estate in Boston over time and never come down all that much.

So not only do I have the seed stuck in the back of my throat I have this idea, whether it is a good one or not, or merging with my neighbor's condo to make the living space that we would need to have a growing family and not need to move to the burbs.

Posted by Dan Housman at 01:31 AM | Permalink

This year at the Passover seder we used some alternative haggadas to the Maxwell House items that we were used to. The Maxwell House ones have the long dissertation about the number of expanding plagues where Rabbi Akiba adds extra plagues for each finger on his hand and they grow exponentially. These new Haggadas have breaks where they expect people to do things like discuss how slavery or discrimination has affected our lives. In general we skipped these. The major highlight of this new haggadah was that the sephardic jews have the option to whip each other with scallions at one point during the Seder. Since we didn't have a supply of scallions we missed out on this highly interesting and bizarre tradition.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:56 PM | Permalink

I shouldn’t attribute such malice to an object but I hate the smoke detectors in my apartment. Last night they decided to stage a revolt or at least one of them decided to stage a revolt in anticipation of April fool’s day. Rather than exploding in a terrible crying sound that could only be met by a replacement of its beloved battery it decided to make a chirping sound intermittently. Now a chirp every six hours would be tolerable in that it could be ignored and a regular chirp every thirty seconds would also be tolerable in that it could be localized and dealt with. But instead the smoke detector in question decided to chirp intermittently and randomly in bursts. So it would chirp every fifteen seconds for two minutes and then stop. So last night I heard it well enough to know that it could wake me up but not well enough to figure out which one it was. Tonight the chirping awoke me at 1am and then again at 2:12 am. Now here I am at 2:54 am trying to figure out which one it is and it has stopped chirping just when I went to hunt it down. There are only three smoke detectors so in theory it shouldn’t be too hard to locate which one is making the ruckus but the chirp is so loud that it seems like it could come from any room. Had it made the noise in the morning or during the day when I was home yesterday I could easily have invested twenty minutes listening and wandering through the apartment to figure out which room it was most likely coming from. But at 1 in the morning I am apt to try to ignore it and when it stops after a few minutes having disturbed my sleep then I can go back to sleep and ignore it. So now I have just gotten aggravated by it to the point where I refuse to sleep until it begins another session of noise making and partying. It sounds like a bird is trapped inside of a chimney when it goes off and if we had a chimney I wouldn’t have suspected that some evil person had designed this device to become the smoke detector anti-Christ in the middle of the night. Why can’t they make them turn blue when the battery is low or blink insistently after chirping. My guess is they are trying to save me from the wacko arsonist who will deactivate my smoke detectors by lowering the batteries in an attempt to murder me. But it’s not like the detector isn’t going to freak out and cause massive havoc when the battery first runs out. My recollection from having ignored one of these mother’s is that they do that if you don’t change the battery. So why not just play an MP3 to inform me that the battery is low.

So I hunted it down. One particular chirp was enough for me to know that it was right overhead in my bedroom. It doesn’t take long to fix the battery problem – if you happen to be able to find 9 Volt batteries in your cupboard carefully filed among the giant zip-lock bag of batteries. I knew we had them somewhere but when you are looking for a 9 Volt battery at 3 AM that is the time when you find batteries that could replace the car unlocking mechanism on your keychain, a mother load of D batteries to power a baby swing, and those AAA suckers that go into the back of the wireless optical mouse. But the 9 Volt batteries that power things like the perpetual motion magnet swing toy. Those go into hiding. So I rifled through the battery looking for the one weapon that could defeat the beeping monster. I had to stop to take a break to read the back of the detector since I wasn’t having much luck finding it food. It offers such wisdom as the obvious – “Periodic flashing (45 sec.) of the red LED, indicates that the alarm is operating. An Intermittent “CHIRP” indicates a low battery…. This device contains .9 micro curies of Americium 241, a radioactive material…. SEE OWNER’S MANUAL FOR COMPLETE INSTRUCTIONS.. WEEKLY TESTING IS REQUIRED”.

So now that I have been convinced unwittingly to read the back of my smoke detector I learn that I am holding on to a radioactive object. .9 micro curies doesn’t sound like much radioactivity but I wondered what they need it for in order to detect smoke. I also had to imagine the poor obsessive compulsive schmuck that tests their smoke detectors weekly as is required of him by the detector police in order to stay current with the smoke detector regulations. But as I pondered this I was still rifling through bags of batteries and I did find a pack of those great 9Volt batteries to provide it with new life. It is the second of three to start chirping so the third one, in Madeline’s room, should be easy to locate when it begins to starve. I would change it now but I figured I would let it suffer for a while. Plus it is 3:15 AM.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Sarah discovered that the door to the closet wouldn't open. I tried turning the knob and found that the mechanism had somehow broken such that the part that sticks out was no longer moving when the knob turned. It furthermore was in the "out" position which keeps the door shut. While we didn't have a dire need to open the closet door it bothered me that we might be locked out of our own closet. I tried to resolve the issue at first by taking the door knob off and turning the rectangular metal bar inside of it with a wrench. This also failed as the mechanism must have broken inside of the door. So I then thought that the Internet might be of some assistance as it had been in the past with bat removal. But all I could find were some lame sites explaining how to make lock picks by hardening metal and chasing after street cleaning equipment. So I gave a couple of shots to using my Hollywood video card because it appeared to be of sufficient flexible plastic.

The answer and I am posting it for the next person hoping to open a wooden door with a latch that is stuck (although I am not sure how to advertise the solution sufficiently that it might be found before locksmithing schools) is that I used a coat hanger. I simply slid the hooked end of a coat hanger behind the latching mechanism and pulled. Presto - the door opened and I could see that the system was quite broken. But fixing the door is another day's work.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

In my all encompassing wisdom to replace the missing part from Babie's 'R Us I failed to notice that step 11 required another major part that we were missing. So we are once again stalled in our effort to assemble the Exersaucer. It looks like we are going to go with the government contractor route with the delivery of the replacement unit to Bedford later this week. Why build one when you can build two for twice the price?

In other news Jeremy is stuck at Emerson hospital after having tried to learn to snowboard at Nashoba Valley. Amazingly Emerson hospital has a large team of people dedicated to emergency head injuries, torn ACLs, and broken wrists. In Jeremy's case he fractured his wrist after falling on it instead of falling on his head like I told him to when he asked whether to go snowboarding or skiing. Snowboarding is not a very kind sport to the newbies. So he's getting repaired with pins tomorrow that should have his hand out of action for six months with an injury similar to the one that I had when I was playing basketball. Since us Jews tend not to tattoo he'll at least get a great scar out of it. He was probably just jealous of my scar.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:08 PM | Permalink

I am not a tidy person. I have always strived to justify my general lack of interest in the order of things around me as a symptom associated with being a forgetful professor who is always locked into big ideas but can’t see the piles of garbage that get in the way. But I decided not to become a professor when I left college so I have little to use as an excuse save that I have realized over time that I am mostly a lazy person. Among the odd compensations for this in my life is to have a wife who is much neater than me who keeps my world in order as I try to increase the general chaos in my world. It is a good match for us in the regard that she is more obsessive compulsive and I take a laissez faire approach to living. Sarah worries and I keep her calm. I forget to take out the garbage and she lets me know when it is garbage day.

This weekend we started our search for a new location to habitate with some of the first realistic thoughts being put into where we might live if we were to grow out of this location in Brookline. We are not thinking that we need to migrate immediately given that Madeline still can’t do a full roll over and she has no siblings. But we know that once baby number two or three is born it is going to be impossible to roam about in two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchen that is 50% occupied by a washer and dryer. The baby seating and rocking items that are growing out of the floor like mushrooms including a bouncy seat, swing, gyminee, car seat, high chair, rocking chairs, and a little foam seat will only increase in their coverage until we are in a fungal forest of jr. seating objects. So for now we figure it is only a matter of time somewhere between two years and eight before we will feel like we are old folks living in a shoe.

So we went to a private viewing of a condo on Saturday morning that as previously mentioned costs way more than we would ever have considered spending. Sarah’s initial rationale for this was to see what lots of money would get you and whether it would be worth it. Our sincere hope was to find that rich people live poor loveless miserable lives epitomized by their miserly living quarters that are so rank with the stain of opulence that it would cast a dark pall over the lives of any one to move into such a space. We also thought maybe that a more expensive location would be just another sham where people have figured out how to get your money by installing a bigger refrigerator or painting the walls with a secret green the color of wintergreen leaves.

So we went for our private viewing with a hope that we would be disappointed with the parking, the home, the view, the street noise, the neighbors, or the nasty restrictive condo rules. The expensive place we looked at unfortunately had a layout that looked the way a condo that I would like to live in would. It was about 2500 square feet on one floor laid out with a large kitchen, two open rooms in the front. The children’s bedrooms were perfectly children sized. A room to watch television in was cozy looking. They had a small room for a guest, a nanny, or a visiting parent sleeping the night. The dining room was just the right size for a dining room table and next to the kitchen where one belongs. The floors were a nice quality wood and I felt very at home looking at the closet in the entranceway hiding games like Monopoly, Scrabble, and Sorry. The master bedroom had an attached bathroom with a whirlpool tub with jets. They had a tandem parking space deeded with the location.

This condo that we were looking at looked like the kind of place that adults live in and I was struck afterwards about how the place we are living in today still has the feel of a place that a young sloppy bachelor might live in with his girlfriend. I believe that this feeling is the main reason for not going out to look at other people’s homes.

Beyond just being laid out well it was decked out in all of the glory of a home that is looking to be sold. The realtors have special staging activities that they do to move perfect looking furniture, nice paintings, thoughtful books, and decorate things to look like you would want to live there. For the home, the private viewing is the first impression, the first date, the immaculate ideal coming out party where the home can show how beautiful she really could be if someone let her look that good. And it had these teasing qualities like that it was marked down 20% from the initial offering because it hadn’t sold at the higher price that always makes me interested even if the marked down price is as astronomical as the original price.

So we had trouble sleeping last night and spent time looking at the site Zillow, a map system that shows the price of your neighbors properties with good accuracy. It is almost as amazing as looking at Google Earth to see aerial views of neighborhoods with price tags on each property. We discovered things like – It is really more expensive to buy anything in Brookline than in Newton and Bedford. So we have gotten nice and confused about what we are looking for.

Today we went out and looked at two more locations, both more in the price range of someone who isn’t a robber baron, and our general reaction was that they both were inferior to the place we saw on Saturday. We couldn’t imagine how anyone could live in these other poorly laid out hovels in comparison to this one really nice looking place that we saw yesterday. The place where every item was in the right spot including the girls bunk beds in their room painted pink and the curtains nicely matching the wallpaper or paint in each room.

So as I was about to go to play with a computer or two as I am apt to do I looked around at the piles of junk that have accumulated on the dresser by the bed, clothing on the floor, the papers and magazines on the coffee table, computer desk, and started compulsively neatening and cleaning things up to try to at least make the best of where we are and try to live a little more like the imaginary people living in that condo yesterday who had everything looking just perfect.

Posted by Dan Housman at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

At the end of a Thursday I was already feeling a little run down after finding nothing of interest at Hollywood Video in the new releases. They are still holding out on “The Man”. Any movie with Eugene Levy is bound to have some positive moments. I had decided to make a quick run over to Stop and Shop to grab some chicken to broil for our standard Ceasar salad. The shopping was quick and fine including some vindication of our tastes given that they have finally stocked both Newman’s Own Limeade and French Vanilla Yoplait after multiple fruitless incidents searching in the dairy section. When, haggard, I arrived at the checkout counter I picked a line that was so short that I could just place my items onto the conveyer belt to have them conveyed down to the nice cashier sitting awaiting them. I hadn’t researched before taking 8 individual Yoplaits onto the belt that the person currently interacting with the cashier was a type 1 supermarket line delaying disaster.

The woman ahead of me in line was probably 80 years old. As I looked over the latest periodicals to learn about key incidents like the break-up between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes or the secret meeting between Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey I noticed that the nice old lady in front of me was disputing a charge from the items rung-up in the register. Unfortunately she was having trouble, due to advanced degeneration of her eyesight, reading the monitor designed to allow you to read your receipt before it is published. So after she argued for a few minutes that she couldn’t read it another cashier suggested to my poor cashier to print out the receipt so that she could read it in print. He did so and she then burst out with the accusation that she had been overcharged for apple sauce. The apple sauce had been advertised at 10 for 10 dollars or one dollar per jar and it had rung-up as $1.45. The wonderful woman in front of me demanded a reason why the amount was different than her expectations. The cashier referred her to the manager who normally sits behind the counter where lottery tickets are sold but who was probably hanging out with the butcher in the deli area talking about frozen shrimp. So a bagger girl who looked to be about twelve ran to the customer service area, grabbed a circular, and let the woman complaining about the cost of apple sauce know that the problem was that the 15 oz. Size of Stop and Shop apple sauce is the one that is on sale and not the 25 oz. Size that the lady had placed in her cart.

The 12 year old girl didn’t realize that antagonizing the lady by pointing at the circular and huffing with an aloof attitude wasn’t going to appease an angry woman insistent on fixing the system so the lady become more infuriated rather than less infuriated and demanded to have the apple sauce stricken from her cart and order. The cashier complied and he offered her a new receipt without the apple sauce which she then studied to ensure that no hancky-panky had occurred from the Stop and Shop corporation trying to steal from her through bait and switch signage. She then finally managed to get the manager paged and the manager came over and committed to check out whether the signage was misleading on the apple sauce or if it was actually the woman’s mistake.

Since she had a tab to pay and a set of groceries to bag she decided to complete the transaction sans apple sauce on principle. The bill came out to $13.87. Her response was to write a check for $33.87 and to obtain a cash back of $20.00. While she was slowly writing out this check she then complained that customers don’t have all day to spend at the supermarket. This moment was when I realized that my thousand hours of zen relaxation training had paid off as I looked over at the frustrated cashier and didn’t even laugh.

So finally I was rung-up with my yogurt, chicken tenders, and limeade after about twenty minutes of watching the Stop and Shop drama. The cashier was highly apologetic about how patient I was and I mentioned to him compassionately that we will all get old some day. I wheeled my small cart full of booty out of Stop and Shop and on my way out I passed the woman and the customer service manager. The manager was placing a 25 oz. jar of Stop and Shop brand apple sauce, valued at $1.45 into the old lady’s cart and telling her that the mistake was theirs because of the mix-up of the signage around the apple sauce sale. I wheeled my cart out to the lot, drove home, ate a French Vanilla yogurt, drank some Newman’s own limeade with seltzer, ate some chicken Ceasar salad with freshly broiled chicken, and watched “The Sweetest Thing”, with Sarah as Madeline slept – But I had a craving for potato pancakes with about 25 oz. of apple sauce.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:55 PM | Permalink

On Sunday Sarah and I were returning from our morning brunch at Eastern Standard with Matt B. and the Falkoffs when we saw a sign for an Open House pointing down a side street off of Beacon. Since we have been eyeing the living spaces that everyone else lives in and it was only near the end of the daily house tour schedule at 3PM we decided to drop-in and warm the baby up. We have been thinking about our future need to switch nests to accommodate more of the little tykes in the coming years and now that we are out and about with Madeline we figured it couldn’t hurt to begin looking two or three years before it becomes necessary to move. The people at the Open House were the owners although it was an awkward scene with an ex-husband, his ex-wife, and their child, an eight year old boy, showing the condominium to us. The boy had made fresh chocolate chip cookies to demonstrate the fine craftsmanship of the kitchen and modern appliances recently installed. The ex-husband was an electrician so the condo was wired with audio cable for speakers throughout and he had also installed lighting in a ceiling.

It is hard not to look at someone else’s perfectly staged living space and think to yourself – wow why can’t I live like this. Just seeing some of the appurtenances of their living space made me want to improve our little world. Some of the things that they had were fixable in our world. Like they have a wooden block cut-out of their son’s name on the door for the child painted creatively. We could make one of those for Madeline’s room. The modern stove would be a big step up for us since our attempt to make cookies last night wasn’t quite as successful with the stove where I first need to light it from below and then it doesn’t have very even heating. The egg timer we used didn’t alert me in time before I burned the bottoms of the cookies.

But some things just can’t be changed where we are living. We only have one bathroom and it would take a massive reconstruction to add a second one. We aren’t going to be able to install that working wood fireplace that was running in their dining room. We aren’t going to be having a dining room either since we only have two bedrooms and a living room. And even if we do choose to put a Weber grille in the open courtyard of the condo or smuggle one onto the roof we still won’t have a porch in the back where we can grille a steak, burger, sausages, or vegetarian tofu medley in the summer.

So I think it was good to see how other people live. We aren’t going to be putting a bid on the $650K condo since it actually is not much bigger than our space and we weren’t serious about moving just yet. On Sunday Sarah has already scheduled us to have a private viewing of a condo that costs $970K and is twice the size of our place just down the street on St. Paul. We also are unlikely to want to purchase that but we do want to know what that kind of money will get you in this neighborhood of ours.

Maybe I should put a grill in the back yard this summer?

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:28 AM | Permalink

Last night we were hanging out with Lisa and Dave, who happen to have an upcoming show with the full band and James Li on Saturday night at Sally O'Briens. Madeline had just been going through her tummy time, which is basically a fun time when we watch her struggle to use her neck muscles while lying on her stomach. This is our little fun response to her crying every fourteen seconds after she has breast fed to let us know that she wants to feed again. Sarah appears to be growing weary of this situation but isn't fully into a depressed state.

So while we were eating our Bertuccis pizzas the pink taggie blanket was on the floor of the living room from the tummy time. Thumper marched in with a triumphant look and started rolling about in the blanket. She appeared to have the toy fishing line in her mouth that she vigorously trains for mousing activities but there was no line attached to it. On closer inspection she was frolicking and rolling about with a dead grey mouse. She left it for a moment and I managed to check it for life by holding a small mirror up to it's mouth. Actually I just grabbed it with a plastic bag like I grab dog poop. The mouse was cute and the scene of Thumper dragging the mouse about reminded me of the Iliad when the Trojans were romping about dragging the body of Achilles around. But with a quick toss into the trash our first mouse and severe triumph was complete. Thumper was rewarded with much adoration and agape. We are considering building a gold statue in the living room in her honor.

My guess is that she may have gotten the mouse in the middle of the night at about 3 AM when Sarah and I heard sounds of a struggle and rustling in the kitchen. But with the habeous corpus rule I couldn't find any reason to believe the mouse had been defeated. So I'm not sure if the mouse had been a fun toy for minutes or hours. Either way Thumper was back on duty patrolling the kitchen all last night with another rustling and pouncing sound but no second body. I'm hoping she is a serial killer.

Posted by Melody at 02:59 PM | Permalink

At 4AM this morning when I went to take my evening stroll to the kitchen to check the premises for mouse attacks I found just what I had hoped might happen. The cat, Thumper, was excitedly pacing in the kitchen looking for signs of where the mice might have been. While the stove had some droppings on it from a successful mouse party I also noticed that Thumper was drawn towards a hole near the cupboards across the room near the back stairwell. On inspection I also found a mouse dropping there. I think Thumper is quite happy to now know that she has a purpose in the apartment. Nothing satisfies the mind more than the challenge stress of having a purpose that you are ideally suited for so I think that Thumper is continuing to have a happy stay at the Housman residence. I have new found respect for the cat through this mouse experience. I can see why the Egyptians would worship and mummify cats. They are very useful animals if you are besieged by mice.

Sarah and I cruised through the first season of Lost the past week and a half. Those people have some external driving force that brought them to the island. That is one of the things that makes the story line interesting. So Thumper is Lost here in Brookline and the reason is that the apartment needs to protect itself from mice.

Yesterday we finally watched the six hour extended edition of Return of the King. We had intended to watch it during Sarah's labor but we had very incorrect expectations of what the labor would be like. As I was watching Return of the King I was noticing how Tolkein was very into this concept of every person/thing being tied together in fate whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. For example, when Frodo is about to throw the ring into the fires of Mordor he becomes obsessed with the ring and is about to leave with it when Golem bites his finger off to steal the ring. While Golem is bad, the ring would never get thrown into the fire if Frodo wasn't freed from it by Golem since he became lucid enough only after the ring was removed from his finger.

The only major issue we seem to be having with the mouse hunt is that Thumper's collar includes a bell that may detract from her ability to hunt the mice. A cat has a silent approach and the bell can only be designed to interfere with the silent stalking of the cat. I tried to remove the bell but it is integrated into the collar that she is wearing and it didn't look like a good idea to remove the whole collar. Cat collars are more binding than dog collars since cats are probably smart enough to take off a simple collar.

Posted by Melody at 05:03 AM | Permalink

Last night Sarah and I were talking to Waichi, our downstairs neighbor, about how we have Thumper for the week to help us to combat the wicked mouse population in the kitchen. Waichi was quite interested borrowing Thumper for 48 hours out of the week that we have her because Waichi's problem with mice appears to be more acute than ours. She actually caught 11 mice last year and had just had an incident where she believed that after capturing one dead on she vaccuumed blindly what may have looked like a mother mouse and then took the vaccuum cleaner bag outside. We weren't too keen on loaning out our loaner cat.

Waichi is a renter, not a condo owner, and she has had a long standing disagreement with the owner of the condo about the mouse population. The latest dead mouse that she had found put her over the edge for tolerance and she took digital photographs of the dead mouse and the mouse hole and sent them along with an email to the guy she rents the apartment from. The email basically said that she wouldn't pay the rent until someone came to plug the hole where the mice were streaming into the apartment because it had been open for months.

So today Waichi came back to our apartment to inform us that she had been given notice by her landlord to terminate her lease. The email with the picture of the dead mouse and refusal to pay rent landed her with a tenant at will end point. So Waichi may be moving out and it looks like the mice have managed to remove a fierce ally and opponent in the war against them with their persistence and vigor.

Go Thumper. Get the mice. Get them good. Make them stay away forever.

Unfortunately no mice have been harmed in our condo yet. Thumper spent her first day hiding under the bed and just this morning started to rub up against me and Sarah to provide us with her scent. The mice haven't left droppings since she came but that might because they are scared.

Posted by Melody at 03:04 PM | Permalink

So having laid the traps last night early in the evening and blocking the entrance beneath the sink I was hoping to have fully sealed everything and to see no mouse droppings. Instead this morning I found what I take to be incontravertible evidence that the mice have reproduced and now include a population of both a large mouse with large chocolate jimmy/sprinkle sized poops and a smaller mouse with poppy seed sized poops. Neither the big mouse or the baby bothered to check out the inside of the mouse trap to eat some yummy peanut butter that I had put inside. I also started dreaming of the better mouse trap including fanciful visions with a camera tracking system to watch the mouse piped into my computer in the bedroom, a net that would pull up suddenly when weight or motion sensors were activated, or just a giant bell jar that would be dropped from above. While all of these are somewhat impractical I may have to resort to them at some point. But since I needed to feel like I was making progress while waiting for the first round of traps to take effect I considered poisoning the mouse, then figured I would probably accidentally poison the dog who is dumber than a mouse or my newborn baby when she is born. I also recieved some tips from a local blog reading helper who suggested a fancy trap that lights-up when the mouse walks in and zaps them. I have to deal with my guilt meter internally about the death sentence for the mouse if I could just drive them a few miles down the road but the cat is probably a death sentence for the mouse too, it just seems more natural that way.

So I posted the following onto craigslist Boston in search of a cat that might be interested in hunting on my turf:

Free cat sitting in Brookline (Brookline)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reply to: anon-104785383@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-10-17, 6:14PM EDT

My wife and I are about to have a baby in late October and discovered that we have a mouse that has moved into our kitchen. We aren't ready to take on the lifetime responsibility of a cat to help with the mouse scaring duties but we have had a cat living the in the apartment in the past. If you are interested we would be happy to give your cat a home for a few weeks or a month while you are away. In exchange they will police the kitchen for the mouse and obtain a loving family atmosphere from my wife and I as we are home full time while you are gone.

Posted by Melody at 03:31 PM | Permalink

So having laid the traps last night early in the evening and blocking the entrance beneath the sink I was hoping to have fully sealed everything and to see no mouse droppings. Instead this morning I found what I take to be incontravertible evidence that the mice have reproduced and now include a population of both a large mouse with large chocolate jimmy/sprinkle sized poops and a smaller mouse with poppy seed sized poops. Neither the big mouse or the baby bothered to check out the inside of the mouse trap to eat some yummy peanut butter that I had put inside. I also started dreaming of the better mouse trap including fanciful visions with a camera tracking system to watch the mouse piped into my computer in the bedroom, a net that would pull up suddenly when weight or motion sensors were activated, or just a giant bell jar that would be dropped from above. While all of these are somewhat impractical I may have to resort to them at some point. But since I needed to feel like I was making progress while waiting for the first round of traps to take effect I considered poisoning the mouse, then figured I would probably accidentally poison the dog who is dumber than a mouse or my newborn baby when she is born. I also recieved some tips from a local blog reading helper who suggested a fancy trap that lights-up when the mouse walks in and zaps them. I have to deal with my guilt meter internally about the death sentence for the mouse if I could just drive them a few miles down the road but the cat is probably a death sentence for the mouse too, it just seems more natural that way.

So I posted the following onto craigslist Boston in search of a cat that might be interested in hunting on my turf:

Free cat sitting in Brookline (Brookline)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reply to: anon-104785383@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-10-17, 6:14PM EDT

My wife and I are about to have a baby in late October and discovered that we have a mouse that has moved into our kitchen. We aren't ready to take on the lifetime responsibility of a cat to help with the mouse scaring duties but we have had a cat living the in the apartment in the past. If you are interested we would be happy to give your cat a home for a few weeks or a month while you are away. In exchange they will police the kitchen for the mouse and obtain a loving family atmosphere from my wife and I as we are home full time while you are gone.

Posted by Melody at 03:31 PM | Permalink

I spent a good chunk of yesterday learning about how my 20 year old stove is constructed. The basic problem was that my attempt to lock-out the mouse with my crude hole coverage with a CD was insufficient. Since Sarah and I were out at Home Depot looking for supplies like cabinets to put over the washer and dryer and blinds for the kitchen I wandered into the area where contractors go and purchased some contractor looking materials to plug the hole where the mouse comes in. I considered buying a big piece of sheet rock but they are huge so I settled for some pre-mixed joint compound and the fiberglass tape used with it. We met Ami at Home Depot incidentally which was odd because you don't expect to see a BU physicist without a car in Watertown, but he was buying blinds for Ilana who doesn't sleep well with too much light.

The stove was still in the way of patching the hole where the gas comes in but after taking the top of the stove off where the burners were I realized that I could probably remove the useless clock and light section of the stove that was preventing me from getting into the hole. After fighting with two wing-nuts for thirty minutes I managed to get the top loose, although not off because I was stripping a bolt rather than actually releasing the final connecting bolt. So I then spent a lot of time playing with the gooey joint compound and the tape, ultimately doing what I considered to be a great job of covering the entire hole such that even the pipe was covered all around it. I did all of this without having to unhook the gas, which I considered for a bit, but decided against after reading on the Internet that it was a really bad idea and would probably kill me, Sarah, and my unborn child to do so.

So I anxiously awaited whether the mouse would be out again last night. I was a like a kid at Christmas hoping for the great present that no mouse droppings would appear and I would be heralded as a super-husband and uber-dad that had fought off the menace of a deadly vermin. But Sarah had to pee in the middle of the night and also stopped in the kitchen to get a drink to refill. When she returned she let me know that I would be very "disappointed". At first I sprung into action thinking that she had gone into labor. I have a lot of spare adrenaline ready for this event. But she then let me know that labor wasn't the problem. The mouse or mice had left more poop on the stove.

Now I can take a mouse leaving a dropping on the ground, but when they poop on the stove it is a direct attack and an obvious insult and challenge. Last night there were limited poops on the stove, only about three, so I may have fended off the mouse wine and cheese party for the evening that had apparently occurred on Friday night prompting my all afternoon spackling escapade. So today I took the bait and with the mouse sized dueling gauntlet thrown down and patched the hole under the sink. I actually used so much joint compound that I don't have any left and may need to refuel.

I also investigated the feasibility of borrowing a cat. Jeremy turned me down because his cat Cloey, despite having lived in the apartment for a year, doesn't feel comfortable moving from one location to the next. Sarah nixed the idea of borrowing her sister's cats, although Curtis is a mean small critter killing machine, because she didn't want her sister to have a reason to be mad at her for asking for something stupid. Sarah assumed that her sister would find it wrong to put her cats' health at risk in order to rid ourselves of a pest.

The additional advice I recieved from both Matt and Sarah's mother was that a mouse has a very agile and soft head that allows it to travel it's entire body through a space no larger than the size of a dime. This makes it nearly impossible to ever fully blockade a mouse from entering your space if it wants to. Every one of it's holes even if sealed off can be quickly turned back into a full, dime sized entrance, in no time. But Matt, who has struggled with mice before, happened to have some mouse friendly traps that when tipped lock the mouse inside of them. He loaned them to me because his battles with his own mice ended in victory for him. So I now have two plastic traps with small bits of peanut butter in the back of them waiting to capture a little critter tonight. One is on the stove and the other is on the floor next to the stove. The strategy is: Go where the droppings are. I also cleaned out my toaster oven because I thought that I might be sustaining the family of suckers with the burnt charcoal crumbs that have been accumulating at the bottom of it for the past two years.

Posted by Melody at 03:33 PM | Permalink

I found the hole behind the stove where the mice enter and exit the kitchen. I didn't actually see them coming and going. I actually have never seen them but I can see the mouse droppings on the stove when they have been in the kitchen. The basic theory that I have is that the mice use the hole in the wall behind where the gas pipe goes into the stove as their entry and exit point. So yesterday I tried to patch the hole with some rudimentary tools. The problem with patching the hole is that the stove is connected with a gas pipe in the back so I didn't want to have to turn off the gas, unplug the stove, patch the hole, and then plug the stove back in. I figured the most likely result of this would be that I would slowly gas Sarah and me to death. Best to leave a task like unhooking the gas for the stove to an expert. But there is a valve for it?

So instead I tried to reach behind the stove with some joint compound that was still very runny. It mainly dribbled behind the stove. I then thought if I could actually join something in front of the hole that might work so I basically spackled a CD from the old VirtuFlex days of images of surfers used for marketing purposes to the wall in the upper right corner of the hole. There was still a visible hole though.

I had nightmares last night of unhooking the stove and having the mice go spilling out all over the street into a big parking lot where me and other people were all stomping and killing them.

Today when I awoke the mouse droppings were all over the stove. I am thinking one solution could be to replace the whole stove while we are at unhooking it. It's a very old stove. I'll be looking today at what a replacement might cost. I could then try not to die of embarrassment when the installation guy looks behind my stove to find a gooey mountain of spackle on the ground and a CD glued to the wall with joint compound. But I think I'm on the right track by closing the borders.

Posted by Melody at 03:34 PM | Permalink

Last night the mice sent out a challenge to Sarah and me. We had left a bag of bagels on the counter that we had bought in the afternoon. When we awoke the bag had been skillfully penetrated and each bagel had been gnawed on. To show their victory over mankind the mice decided to have a party on top of the stove and leave hundreds of mouse droppings. I had nightmares last night about the mouse which I now believe is an army of mice plotting to take over the apartment after the nuclear armageddon. In the nightmare it was reminiscent of the lines from Hotel California "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast". We need to borrow a cat, get mousetraps, patch holes in the walls where they enter and exit with immunity, drain the swamp, increase border security, attack them where they breed, send troops, kill-kill-kill.

Posted by Melody at 03:34 PM | Permalink

I woke-up this morning with bad onion breath. Sarah and I had taken stock of our spending habits in a minor joint panic attack on Friday night after a dinner at Vintage in West Roxbury that cost over a buck fifteen. We self prepared a thrifty taco dinner last night. Initially we forgot the onion at the local Stop and Shop but I made a special run on my bicycle back to the market to pick-up one good looking white onion. We split it in half diced for the meal and I probably ate a third of it along with my tacos and salad. The bicycle was handy because we had to move the bikes out of the basement where they were fumigating for mice and they were going to throw out anything in the basement in the morning. I ate a big second portion of the taco stuff because Sarah had gone into the kitchen to see a mouse run away from the counter top. The mouse was probably a refugee from the fumigation. They don’t normally bother to come to our apartment on the second floor both because there isn’t much food and because it is easier for them to hide, nest, and munch on garbage in the basement. So I ate the taco mix in fear of the possible terrible diseases that a mouse could cause for a pregnant wife balanced against my extreme love of taco meat and extreme fear of food wastage. I’m going to wait a few days to see whether it is worth declaring war on the mouse population. For now we cleaned up any scraps that might interest the vermin.

We spent the day catching-up on sleep after a session of apartment work with Sarah’s parents. They had come over to do things like set the dimmer boxes better in the holes in the wall, put together the bed, and help to add to our window coverings. I managed to use the time to put the second high tech shade up in Madeline’s room. Sarah had changed her mind that she wanted curtain rods back in Madeline’s room so I needed to put them back in. We also spent some time putting a shelf above the desk in the bedroom and used the laser level that Sarah’s parents bought me last year during the holiday season. It wasn’t very helpful since level is a relative term in an old Brookline apartment and level with the floor, ceiling, desk, whatever is just a matter of making something look level. It is always fun to play with lasers.

I was doing fine until we moved on to putting a valence over the shades and curtains already in the bedroom. A valence is a decorative piece of fabric that is used to piss off men who want nothing to do with putting shades and other crap up on their window. It was the harder of the many items to put onto the window so I got stressed out about it and was ready for a six hour nap by the time Sarah’s parents left.

The nap was going ok until Sarah decided to read my high school yearbook. It is almost impossible to ignore your wife when she is paging through old pictures of you, your friends, and possible past crushes and lovers. So I took Sarah through the yearbook. With the yearbook and past relationships all stirred-up in my mind we rented Grosse Pointe Blank to watch while we ate our tacos.

It was a good day in the end including sleep, cheap food, hiding out in our little world, and some productive work.

Posted by Melody at 04:11 PM | Permalink

My grandmother Louise was a school principal in New York City. The job is tough and you weren’t always dealing with the most well behaved of children. One disgruntled kid managed to get a copy of the key to the family apartment at 500C Grand Street. The kid broke into the apartment when nobody was home, went into a back room and ransacked the room. It was an odd crime or at least an incomplete story regarding why he did it but the most likely reason was that he was angry with the principal. When the police arrived they entered the apartment and looked at the main room with clothing strewn on the floor, papers scattered everywhere, books in makeshift piles, and general anarchy in the main room and they said “Man, whoever broke into this apartment really did a number on it”. My grandmother then needed to correct them that the criminal hadn’t broken into the room they were looking at and the mess in the room was normal before pointing out the criminally messed-up room. So at a minimum I have heredity to thank for being a bit of a slob and packrat. I have been requested to review the items at my parent’s basement in Newton ASAP because they now have a dumpster in the back yard that is ready to junk items that are no longer necessary. The effort is part of a Feng Shui quest by my mom that may have been brought on in part by the planned arrival of the next generation of Housmans. Make way for Madeline.

Apparently Alice also had a run-in with the police one day. She had come home to her apartment to find that the door was empty. Since she was afraid that there might be a dangerous criminal inside she called the police and asked if they could go inside to make sure it was safe to enter her home. The police carefully entered with guns drawn and peered around. A minute later they came back out with a sorry look on their face. They told her “The good news is that whoever broke into your apartment isn’t there anymore. BUT the bad news is that they stole your television and your VCR." Alice then had to inform them that she didn’t own a television and VCR.

Posted by Melody at 04:12 PM | Permalink

While nesting and moving lots of stuff Sarah dug-up this email. It was the first communication that I ever sent to her and now she is my wife. So if you are looking for a wife and meeting somone through your Asian yenta downstairs neighbor then this message may be a good template to use. It worked for me.

====
From: Daniel Housman (dhousman@channelwave.com)
Sent: Friday, August 8, 2003 3:46 PM
To: Sarah Carvey
Subject: Do you know someone named Waichi

Sara,

Hello. I am Dan Housman. Waichi introduced me to you and you to me although we haven't met yet.

I was spending much of this evening eating ice cream with Waichi in order to console myself after the Celtics lost to the Nets again. Waichi game me your email address and said that we would likely enjoy meeting each other. She thought that the best way to get started would be for me to send you an email to introduce myself so this is what I am doing.

Introducing me:

I am 29.
I live upstairs from Waichi.
I work in Cambridge at a software company that I started after I graduated from MIT.
I recently returned from Africa.
I have always lived in the Boston area but grew-up in Newton and Watertown.
I love to read. I love sports. I love to travel when I can.
I like to laugh. I am going to my improv comedy class tomorrow. It's fun.
I want to wrte although I haven't in 10 years. I am going to a class on how to write a novel next Wednesday. Maybe it will inspire me.
I have a friend named Jeremy who is coming to live with me for the summer.
He was a fraternity brother of mine from MIT from AEPi. He normally lives in St. Maarten.
My sister is a folk musician who plays all around Boston but mostly on the subway. She is teaching me to play the guitar.

I'll bet Waichi already told you most of this.

Tell me about you?
Is your name spelled Sara or Sarah?

I'm looking forward to hearing back from you.

- Dan

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:39 AM | Permalink

This weekend was dedicated to nesting activities in preparation for the impending birth, in November, of baby Madeline. The big plan for months has been to finally paint the condo, after seven years of living here the only time the place has been painted was when I moved in. Painting is a sport also known as opening Pandora’s box because you need to clear each room before painting it. That was part of our plan. We wanted to try moving items around in order to determine whether we needed them or not. That way we could chuck the things we don’t need out the window, give them to family members, or move them to offshore locations. The first room we decided to paint was Jeremy’s old room. It sounded like a small size Pandora’s box since it was supposedly an empty room after Jeremy moved out. But it actually still had a closet full of items, three bookshelves with drawers and cabinets, and an entertainment center that I have been trying to get rid of for over 12 months now. Want one?

It is unbelievable how much stuff is hidden in bookshelves and closets. The living room is now full of all the junk that was formerly in the empty room. I called my parents to ask if we could drop off the many photo albums that we had borrowed for making the wedding photo montage. My dad let me know that he had rented a truck from Zip car, the place that gives you wheels when you need ‘em. Apparently he and my mother had also been infected with nesting instincts due to the coming second generation. They were clearing out all of their bookcases and having all of the floors sanded down and stained in their Newton house. Sarah and I saw this as an opportunity to unload our three not too attractive bookcases so when we dropped off the sixty-two photo albums in boxes in Newton we also looked at the fourteen or so empty book cases that they had emptied out into their significantly larger piles of boxes into their living room, study, and bathrooms.

I offered my mom a swap and she said she wanted to see our bookcases. When she arrived in Brookline she decided she didn’t want ours but did offer a couple sets of theirs for us to take. So my dad and I schlepped an old recliner that I bought at the giant church yard sale across the street in the back of the truck they had rented back to Newton thinking we might take it out to Marshfield. On reaching Newton we decided to throw it out so we just left it under a lilac bush near a fence.

According to my parents there is an underclass of scavengers in Newton who professionally take furniture left on the street by wealthy Newtonians and sell the furniture on eBay, craigslist, or in showrooms. I can imagine that these strange third wave, think Alvin Toffler renewable usage of energy, people will ultimately get highly organized and become a major corporation themselves similar to the Kentucky Fried Movie company that makes energy from pimple oil, used combs, and farts from Mexican restaurants. So my dad was confident that one of these people would take the dingy old recliner despite the fact that it was really second hand garbage.

Once in Newton we carried out two heavy, long, and attractive bookcases into the back of the pick-up truck and realized that they were longer than the flat bed of the truck. The only way to fit them was to take the gate down and tie them in. Tying them used to require lots of skill with knots but the truck came with some odd screw things where you can thread rope through them and tighten them. A secondary rope looked like a good insurance policy to avoid having someone behind the truck have their last memory be of a large bookcase flying through their windshield.

Figuring that I was a sailor I tried to make a useful knot but realized that I was hopeless. I called Jeremy because he is a real sailor and he let me know that it would be impossible for me to get walked through a trucker’s hitch knot while on the phone. He said it was two half hitches and a bowlin’ or something like that. I turned to the Internet hoping that a trucker’s hitch was doable by a mere mortal. I found scary animations that looked like this.

I tried to do this for about twenty minutes after printing out a copy of it. My dad then helped me try as well claiming that he had been a boy scout as a child. But we finally both gave up after making the realization that it was a good thing neither of us went into a profession where we needed to make knots regularly. So I tied a granny knot and called it good enough and we trucked the newer book cases over making sure that I wasn’t driving behind the truck in order to avoid having my last memory being of a large bookcase flying through my windshield.

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:51 AM | Permalink

Sarah and I tried to see Charlie and the Chocolate factory at the IMAX theatre on the way back from Gloucester last weekend. We had gone to Gloucester to see Matt and Kate in their natural summer habitat after having missed their annual party the week before. I am batting .000 with regards to the Gate House party due to a trip last year to Japan and a wedding in Long Island this year.

The Swift house in Gloucester is on the waterfront and is a shell of the former glory of the house that once was on the property. The first main house was demolished in 1972 after about fifty years of fighting with New England storms. There was another small house that once was on the property that was destroyed during The Perfect Storm. So Matt and Kate are staying in the remaining house, the Gate House that used to be the little one at the entrance to the property. When we arrived we couldn’t find people at first but it turned out that folks were at a table by the ocean at the end of a winding grass walkway defined among the grass and sea rubble by a series of stones.

One of Matt’s friends, who is a poet was there with his girlfriend. We got into a nice long debate by the water about whether bicycles are a better mode of city transportation than automobiles for city transportation. The poet was good at presidential impersonations and had a long list of opinions about politics including that George Bush was smart enough to pronounce the word nuclear properly but that he pronounced it newcular to appeal to voters in blue collar jobs despite his very rich boy background. The poet also thought that Hillary Rodham Clinton was the only possible candidate that the DNC would bring as a presidential candidate in 2008.

Kate was worried about her art homework project due Monday where she needed to interpret a story written by a fellow classmate. The story was about a child’s blanket/blanky and the poet gave a full red pen mark-up. He wasn’t fond of it and thought that deceptively anthropomorphizing objects and then later trying to appear clever by revealing that the person is really a beloved object was something that should be beaten out in seventh grade. He gave it a name like fools deception.

The only drawback of the ocean property in the northeast is that it lies near marsh. The mosquitoes are especially fierce and represent a good portion of the variation in the mosquito kingdom. I got a good look at one little mosquito biting my arm and she had yellow racing stripes. Sarah and I slept in a twin bed. In the past this has worked well for us but with the extra half person growing inside of Sarah we kept trying to find a comfortable equilibrium in the bed but were tossing most of the time. At one point of getting bitten we turned on the light and it was like a scene out of a B rated horror movie where worms suddenly come to life after an electric line is left in the swamp or just an epic battle against bugs like Starship Troopers. The bugs were everywhere and the room was filled with a swarm of enemy bugs trying to slowly attack us in our sleep. The mosquitos must have seen us as a welcome treat nicely delivered. I fought them valiantly by swinging a towel at them crushing as many as I could and then went to sleep with Sarah in the bed for 30 minutes before she moved to the other twin bed because I was snoring too loud.

In the morning when we awoke a little after noon we had a Wimbledon breakfast of berries with cream and bacon. It was quite tasty and enjoyable. We thought about flying the kite but there wasn’t any wind. So after a bit Sarah and I took a look at the tide pool that most years had been used as a swimming area but was out of commission because of a combination of low tide and a mysterious fast draining problem. Matt explained that the tide pool is mostly a natural phenomenon where the cold arctic water collects in the rocks to be warmed by the sun. To keep the water in people have plugged the draining points with concrete and rocks. Since every year storms, ice, and the tides batter the pool it develops leaks both in the natural rocks and where the concrete plugs the open holes. This year the leaks are particularly bad and they haven’t had the will to continue plugging them so the pool was empty.

This was fine as Sarah and I were just trying to walk around. We walked down some roads to a lighthouse and a break water and then lay on the break water for a while napping on a flat and wide bed that was comfortable for the two of us. When we returned Kate had been working on her art homework having decided to make a final panel in her interpretation of the blanket story that looked like a child’s drawing.

Sarah and I then tried to attend Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the Reading IMAX on the way home. Unfortunately it was sold out but we did manage to get to see it on Monday night instead with Lisa and Dave. It struck me that the movie and most other children’s movies in America was very culturally American. Like Robots it professed the importance and high status results of being an entrepreneur. The best example of this was when Charlie had his Golden ticket in his hand and he decided he didn’t need to visit the factory since someone would pay him money for it. His grandfather’s response to it was that you should never trade a once in a lifetime opportunity for something as ordinary as money. Translation – In America you will be rewarded for being a risk taker and an entrepreneur but people who just work for money live plain and boring lives.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:11 AM | Permalink

Waichi came over last night to say hello and because she has mice and a leak staining her ceiling. As a downstairs neighbor these are reasonable reasons to visit and say hello. The benefits of a second floor apartment include that mice don’t tend to go beyond the first floor and the climb up the stairs isn’t as bad as the third floor. It also doesn’t get damp and flooded like a basement. But the second floor apartment dweller does need to worry about how to escape in a fire since it is a long jump down, potential babies falling out of windows, and solving mysterious problems of leaks and mice. The solution we came-up with for the mouse problem was for Waichi to borrow Jeremy’s cat. There is no solution to the ceiling leak problem but I’ll continue to investigate it.

Waichi is winning an award for being a good doctor and volunteering with doctors without borders. They are flying her down to Washington to be pinned with a medal by George W. Bush in the rose garden of the White House. I was wondering whether the president actually pins things onto people or if he just hands them the medals and walks away. I would imagine that people wouldn’t be allowed to get too close to the president with sharp objects and a doctor might be able to sever a key artery with a pin so I don’t think they will be giving her pins.

Waichi also told us a funny little true story. It was about an emergency room doctor and his wife. The doctor receives a call on the phone from the emergency room and calmly talks to the person on the other end of the phone. His wife then asks him whether he will need to go into the emergency room. He tells her that he does need to go and that she ought to come with him as well in a calm and collected voice. His wife starts to get worried and frantic and asks him what the problem was. He calmly lets her know that their son had been drinking and got into a motorcycle accident while driving home. She then started acting hysterical and wanted to know why he too wasn’t hysterical as well. He then let her know why he could remain so calm in such a terrible situation with this statement - “I have been waiting for that call my whole life.”

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:12 AM | Permalink

My Canon PowerShot S410 broke while I was at the wedding this weekend. Just as we walked into the church at exactly the time the wedding was supposed to start and we sat down the zoom lens made an awful crunching sound and then proceeded to get stuck halfway between out and in. The camera suffering from an unfortunate priapism then squawked in pain with a beeping sound that was fine before the processional music began but was then deemed unacceptable once the violinists started to play. I tried forcing the lens back into it’s home with some pressure and it went inside again but upon attempting to get it back out it had erectile dysfunction and only peeped out a few inches. It was impossible to get it into the discernibly turgid state necessary to take a photo and instead offered me the consolation of the error code E18 on the screen on the back of the camera. I then pulled at it to get it out of the position but the tiny peeping eye didn’t give much room for yanking on. So I declared it dead for good, pushed the lens back into it’s socket and declared to Sarah that we would have no pictures of this wedding from my camera. Luckily they had a full paparazzi gallery of wedding photographers complete with a man wearing a women’s suit and bleached blond hair working to focus the flash bulb above the bride and groom.

But for me it is a painful and effeminizing feeling to have a camera that can’t shoot so I was not feeling myself for the whole weekend. So this morning I decided to call the Canon corporation to ask them whether they had a little blue pill that could make my camera work better. Apparently Raphael Palmeiro’s blue pills have been working well this weekend as he hit three homers in three games for a 3 of 4 win rally by the Orioles over the Red Sox. So I called and quickly got through to a service representative. The first question I had expected was to identify the camera by the serial number. I don’t have any idea where the serial number would be. This wasn’t their question. The man asked what the problem was and I then told him that the lens wasn’t protracting and retracting normally. He told me to pull the battery out, wait a few seconds, and then try again. I didn’t do this but instead just pressed the power button to turn it on. Of course, without all the pressure to film a wedding, my camera had overcome the stage fright and the lens extended normally. I then went through the paces to try the zoom and this worked well. Next I tried turning it on and off ten times and the lens worked like a champ opening and closing.

Now I am certain that it is broken and this is a short lived phenomena since this lens problem has been happening off and on for a long time with the camera. But if I mail it into the shop without the problem being apparent they will likely mail it back telling me I suffer from a common mental disorder potentially leading me into ruin rocking in the corner in a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. So, despite the fact that the camera will celebrate it’s one year anniversary in mid-August and thereby be ineligible for repairs of blue pills, I am not yet able to send it back to the Canon Corporation. It is probably for the best. I couldn’t find the receipt in the half hour routing around the apartment that I did. It is also good to know that cameras operate by the same principles of most sickness and injuries that I suffer from. When I invest in fixing it by going to show it to the doctor, dentist, electrician, mechanic, or editor - it mysteriously goes away.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:13 AM | Permalink

Summer is blurring away fast. I’ve been living on the fast forward button for a week now. Every day there was something leading to the next thing and onwards.

On Thursday night we went out to the Parrish Café to meet with a crew of people to celebrate Canadians in America day. It was a beautiful night but also too busy of a night so we had to wait for a few hours to get a table outside. I decided to go on a mission to the Rattlesnake across the street to ask about their upstairs patio. The bouncer at the door decided to give me a hard time because I was wearing a red construction paper maple leaf on my chest. Once past him I found the line to go upstairs. The bouncer in front of that door was useless and being a jerk. I asked him how long he thought the wait would be and he told me he didn’t know but I could look at the line and figure it out for myself. I then let him know that his job is partially to answer questions and that it was a reasonable question. Based on his experience, he had admitted to working that door for five years, I asked him, could he estimate how long it would take for the line to pass through to upstairs. He told me no. So I told him that it was fine. I didn’t need to buy beer from their establishment if they didn’t want to be helpful. The next time it is a crummy night and empty at the Rattlesnake I’ll be going anywhere but there.

Sarah and I drove back from work on Friday and then to Olive’s for a fantastic dinner with Hattie, Jose, Matt, and Kate. Kate’s friend Meredith is a chef there, actually an apprentice chef who used to be an intern who works the pasta station. Meredith sent over a sampler of pasta after we had our appetizers including some pasta with truffle oil. I don’t know what is in truffle oil but I am surprised that nobody has made it into a narcotic. I was then far too full to eat my short rib until the next morning but did make room for the assortments of desserts that Meredith sent out after the meal. Kate has been going to art classes where they ask her to draw with non-traditional media. This boils down to decorating with beard shavings, drawing with celery, or making a picture out of the sharp end of thumbtacks. It sounded fun but won’t help in my quest to be a better digital artist.

At the wedding on Saturday afternoon I was looking forwards to a long day of meeting and greeting strangers playing the role of new but unfamiliar to everyone husband. I didn’t know anyone there but Sarah since it was her college roommate’s wedding. We got lucky and sat next to some fun people at our assigned table. I chatted for hours with an animator who worked on the movies Ice Age, The Polarbear Express, and Robots. His job was to move the models like a puppeteer to create the sequences to look realistic. He answered all of my questions about when they do the sound, how they inspire the actions. For example, in a board room scene with Ratchet, the actor pounded his hand down on the table when he delivered the line. The animator saw the tape of this and edited the motion to mirror what the actor had done. He wasn’t a big fan of how they did the Polarbear Express with the motion capture stuff because for him it wasn’t really animating. They were just trying to fix the jerky strange movements from what they had captured. Another wedding highlight was the fountain of chocolate. A company in Waltham rents out a chocolate fondue fountain where they send an attractive college student to help you dip an assortment of items including marshmallows, strawberries, pretzels, whatever into the chocolate. We drove from the wedding to the Marshfield house at 11:30 after trying to dance to some music that we weren’t very fond of. Sarah was feeling a bit self conscious about being pregnant. I kept looking at the little girls dressed in their formal wedding dresses dancing with their fathers and cousins and thought to myself. When I have my little daughter I’ll be dancing with her whenever I can.

In the morning when we awoke in Marshfield we decided it would be easiest to go to town for breakfast. We found a nice place that had a deck overlooking the water and an all you can eat buffet. After that we went back with our bellies full and made a full assault on cleaning the swimming pool. The pool was murky and had leaves at the bottom and flies floating on the surface of the water. The pump didn’t seem to be clearing most of it. Mom went after the flies from the edge and I figured out, while in the murky water, how to set-up the water vacuum attachment. Even that wasn’t working too well so I checked out the big hole in the bottom of the pool where the water gets sucked through and it was clogged by leaves and twigs. So I did some little dives to clear it and that started to move things along. The pool should eventually filter itself through but it needs to be able to pump the water through the bottom to get all the organic material that settles to the bottom. I think that next time we go the pool will be very clean.

Lisa and Dave came out to Marshfield as well. It was Big Papi Day, F-Day, however you need to put it. We were there because of dad. Lisa was learning some Dylan songs from Dave. Sarah and I put the bed together in our designated room. From our construction method of using a drill to screw in and strip the 40 wood screws holding the slats together I think the bed will need to be disassembled using karate. Mom and dad were discussing whether to take the architects advice and put the kitchen where the living room is or to go with their instinct and leave the kitchen where it was. Sarah was working on an eval using my laptop that needed to print on our dysfunctional printer this morning.

A barn swallow had moved back into the porch so mom wasn’t allowing people to walk out the back door to disturb the barn swallow and her four babies. The swallow was moving back and forth into the woods every thirty seconds to return with a new live insect for her children. Mothers work hard to keep their children alive. Dad made some tasty margaritas in the blender with fresh limes.

We grabbed some BK on the drive back to Brookline and then hurried over to the MilkyWay in JP to watch Faith Sollaway’s latest schlock Opera – The F-Word. We arrived about twenty minutes early and given that Sarah and I weren’t the core audience segment, lesbians, we were mainly just sitting in our seats trying to look as normal as possible in a room packed with women wearing shirts like the one that said “Dykes against Bush”. I was surprised by the wide variety of lesbians in the room and thought it would be interesting to perform a anthropological study on the whole society of lesbians in JP to understand the culture. All cultures are formed out of a common bond and a need to band together to protect that bond. In the case of lesbians it is a sexual preference.

This means that their rituals like going to the Milky Way to see a Schlock Opera are bound to focus on this common bond. The show delivered on this promise. During the introduction to the musical faith did a little audience participation where she asked “Only the lesbians” to sing the line from the song then she asked “Just that guy in the corner” to sing. They also had some choice visits to the sexy OB/GYN office where the female doctor was asking questions normally delivered in a professional manner with cruder terminology. The schlock included some funny bits about repressed Jewish memories of uncle Hyman and some cruel angry Chasid telling a little girl that she would never get gimmel on the dreidel. We exchanged gifts for dad’s day after the show as the crowd was dying down.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:24 AM | Permalink

Does everything always have to break?

I had annoying car troubles on Friday night. I was pulling my standard freakish 180 degree U-Turn to park on St. Paul street in front of the condo when I heard a loud pop and suddenly could barely turn the steering wheel. I managed to get it into the space and was grateful that I had car trouble near home so that I could go inside and ignore the problem for a while. Later in the evening I tested the car and got it to drive all the way to the parking lot but with great effort to turn the steering system. It didn't take the folks at car talk for me to know that the most likely culprit was the power steering system somewhere. I figured a belt, gear, pump, or something like that had slipped or broke.

On Saturday morning I decided that I needed to fix this problem so I called the local mechanic at the Gulf Station and he said he couldn't look at it until Tuesday. So I decided to enjoy the weekend. Sarah took her car to Valvoline and they took 40 minutes changing her oil, checking an engine light that was on because the gas cap wasn't screwed on tight enough, and finding an oil leak that had been going on for years. I drank a big Coolatta from the neighboring Dunkin Donuts along with a bagel. Because the Valvoline folks were helpful and useful I decided that I would take my car to them to fix my belt, pump, fluid, whatever problem. They identified that there was a belt that fell off it's pulley in the power steering and changed my oil. Unfortunately they couldn't fix the belt and told me to go to a mechanic. I had another Coolatta during this experience as well so I was pretty high on caffeine at this point.

I then drove to the Mobil station and they seemed very busy but interested enough to take a look under the hood. They poked around and then told me that the pump for the power steering had broken, which had caused the belt to slip off. It was a $500 job minimum and they couldn't even see how anyone could get access to remove the pump so they instructed me to call the dealer instead and had me drag my power steering-less car in a painful three point turn back to the top of the long driveway to the garage.

The people who I rented my parking space from called to hassle me because I hadn't mailed them the check on time and continued to give me a lecture about how it isn't worth their time to track down parking space renter checks. I profusely apologized and promised that I would impress them with the promptness of payments in the future. I may need to do another parking search soon enough. I actually turned down a parking space offer today while I had fifteen minutes to prepare for a presentation to an analyst and was on the line via Skype to a partner in the Netherlands. I did manage to patch together a miraculous pair of people offering spaces, one who had one from the first through the fifteenth and the other who had the fifteenth onwards to replace the evil space we were renting. The space was evil both because the woman who owned the space got into an argument with Sarah when Sarah complained that the 24hour spot was blocked by deck construction 10 out of every 24 hours during normal parking hours. We then got late notice that we were going to be towed on June 1st if the car wasn't gone so we hunted the new spaces using a cheesy sign I made in Illustrator and an agressive hunt on Craigs list.

On top of all this trouble my mom was mad at me for not having responded to the pictures that she had sent me and the folks at the video store only had the VHS copy of Attack of the Clones which was crappy. Sarah and I went to Home Depot and bought lots of home fix-up stuff like new lamps, dimmers, and a screwdriver bit. It was a really long Saturday. So today I am off to the dealership to get answer#3 on the broken power steering. My guess is that it will be about $900 to fix the damn thing and they will determine that my flux capacitor is also broken and that will cost even more.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:35 AM | Permalink