It's Electric...Boogie Woogie Woogie

Being of the me-me-me generation, I've fully come to take for granted the simple things in life. Little things like electricity.

My husband (the wise and wonderful engineer that he is), decided to replace the light switches that were caked in paint with some lovely ivory ones. Horray. All went well down the hallway; splendid, really.

But Jesu Cristo, mang.

We have a panel with three switches in the dining room. One controls the light over the steps to downstairs, one controls the light to the outside porch, and one controls a random outlet in the room. But they do so much more than that.

Apparently, they control the entire upstairs circuit, sans the bathroom, and one outlet in the bedroom.

The helpful hubby took all three switches off at once, and now, surprise! we can't get them to reconnect the same way, because the wires "aren't labeled. Who doesn't label their wires?" Right then. I don't know who DOES label the wires inside of their walls. Maybe engineers do things differently.

Long story longer, we have had no power upstairs since Saturday. It's almost Tuesday. That's a long effin time to have no power. The downstairs has power, and thankfully, my dad got the hot wat heater circuit to work. So at least we can shower.

The entire downstairs remains lit, but for now, we're Little House on the Prairie Styling our life upstairs. In the dark. And my candles are somewhere, in some box, tucked in the corner of a dark room.

Flashlights for the powerless? Anyone? Anyone?

Frantic Update.

I miss Lauren.

That's all.

Out of the frying pan

Well, we're off for a fun filled (pfft) weekend at the new house. We're sleeping there tonight and tomorrow. It's still dirty, half painted, and has a curious kitchen odor. i hope this goes better than I have a feeling it will.

Feel like painting?

Good at cleaning?

Enjoy home improvement?

Then come on down and jump in the fire!

Fun Fact #783

Go to Google, and type "failure" in the search box, without the quotation marks.

Click the search button.

Check out the first listing.

I lubs me some google.

Come Inside, Come Inside

So, since I know that my beloved blog readers have been dying to see the inside of my new house, allow me to show you some of the highlights of home ownership.

We knew when we bought the home that it was a "fixer-upper." This is much different than a handyman's special, in that a fixer-upper is ugly ~ A handyman's special is falling down. Luckily, it's the former.

But, oh, new house, how ugly it is....

We used several quarts of spackle, and replaced all of the outlets. The formal dining room is finished (and lubly, will post pics soon.) as is the hallway. The bedrooms are mostly done. The kitchen is a work in progress - see pics below.

The bedrooms would be finished if GD Home Depot weren't such bastards. Evan and I spent no less than $600 on paint and painting supplies thus far, and have a fairly nice sized vinyl window contract pending. A $10,000 nice sized window contract.

We bought 17 gallons of paint at once. All flat finish, with of course, the exception of the kitchen. Several days later as we're slowly pbut surely trudging through the paint, we see that a palette of 4 gallons is all eggshell. Groan. Moan. Pain in my ass. We schlep it to the nearest Home Depot, who tells us that we have to return it to the Home Depot where it was purchased. We schlep the 30 miles to the other Home Depot, where they will not switch the paint. I showed them my receipt, and the other receipts from the last several days, showing I was a loyal Home Depot customer.

I got no where with the paint department - they don't take back pre-mixed paint. I asked to speak to the paint manager.

I got no where with the paint department manager. He was a miserable little short man. He offered 10% off of my next order of paint to replace the $80 of paint that they mixed with the wrong finish. Whoo-fucking-hoo. I told him that not only did his store lose my paint business, but the window contract was as good as nixed.

Paint manager assured me that this was drastic - they're windows are of the upmost quality. But if they won't stand behind 80 bucks of paint, they'll stand behind me when I spend even more?

No thank you, I will take my business elsewhere.

So yeah. Mucho frustrated. Out 4 gallons of paint. Dirty. Aggitated. And I'm scraping shit (literally) off of the cabinets in my kitchen. Check out the pictures below and tell me - Does it get any better than this?

Kitchen

Kitchen
Originally uploaded by lilmissimpatient.

Here's the kitchen, with painting supplies. Note the floral border, and also the giant scorch mark beside the stove.

Double Ew.

Double Ew.
Originally uploaded by lilmissimpatient.

So, this is what is scraping off of the top of the cabinets. Lauren herded all of the goop onto the end of a paint stirring stick. Shortly after this picture was taken, the goop slithered off of the stick and fell to the floor with a resounding THWAP.

It then proceeded to flow like an amoeba to hide under the cabinets with the ants.

Okay, I made that part up. But it def would have happened if we let it sit on the floor long enough.

Borders Borders Borders

Effin Border
Originally uploaded by lilmissimpatient.

Here's Evan, pulling off MORE wallpaper borders. Just as he broke through the tropical fish border, SURPRISE!!! There's seashell border underneath! Oh, the humanity of it all.

The Bathroom

Bathroom
Originally uploaded by lilmissimpatient.

Here it is. In all of it's yellow glory.

"It's like walking into the sun."

...with a bad floral border (Those mother effin borders)...

Life's too short, Babe. I'm looking for baggage that goes with mine.

We raise our glass...

To days of inspiration, playing hookey, making something out of nothing, the need
To express
To communicate
To go against the grain, going inane, going mad.

To loving tension, no pension
To more than one dimension
To starving for attention, hating convention, hating pretension
(Not to mention, of course, hating dear old mom and dad).

To riding your bike, midday past the three-piece-suits
To fruits
To no absolutes
To absolut
To choice
To the Village Voice
To any passing fad.

To being an us - for once - instead of a them.

To hand-crafted beers made in local breweries
To yoga
To yogurt
To rice and beans and cheese
To leather
To dildos
To curry vindaloo
To huevos rancheros and Maya Angelou.

To emotion, devotion
To causing a commotion.
To creation, vacation and mucho masturbation.

To compassion
To fashion
To passion when it's new.

To sontag
To sondheim
To anything taboo.
To Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham and Cage
To Lenny Bruce, Langston Hughes
To the stage
To Uta
To Buddha, Pable Neruda, too.

To bisexuals, trisexuals, homo sapiens
To carcinogens, hallucinogens, men, Pee Wee Herman
To German wine, turpentine, Gertrude Stein
To Antonioni, Bertolucci, Kurosawa and Carmina Burana.

To apathy
To entropy
To empathy, ecstasy, Vaclav Havel, The Sex Pistols, 8BC
To no shame - never playing the fame game.

To marijuana.

To sodomy - It's between God and me.
To S&M.
To La Vie Boheme.

You bet your ass we raise our glass.

Game Plan

We're finally in the house.

We went at Midnight O'One to let ourselves in and were greeted with the contents of the home spread all over the front lawn. Beds, broken frames, a weightbench, various garbage in and out of cans, assorted bric-a-brac. The works. I stressed slightly. Who do I call about this? The owners? The title company? Dare I say it, Morgan?

But it's okay, when we went back at 7am, it was all gone. Vanished into the night. Thank God.

The virtual tour will be posted tomorrow...Possibly later tonight, if I'm feeling particularly ambitious. Yesterday was filled with this painfully boring task of peeling wallpaper borders off of the wall. Really old wall paper borders. Really old, ugly, sticky, gooey, liquid nailed to the wall, wallpaper borders. Also spackling the many holes in our house/dartboard, and sanding down said spackle.

The previous owners must have decided to paint the fireplace hearth, so they primed it, and then forgot it. So the hearth is half primer white. I sprayed Graffitti-Off onto it. It's a no go. It got alot off, but not everything. Now it's just pastel looking bricks. But in the process, I got a big glob of the Graffitti-Off foam on my foot, and I have a LURVELY chemical burn between my poor little toes. The toes are definately not happy with me. Lauren said to me "Well, don't you have old sneakers or something to wear next time?" Of course I do...But that would totally go against the whole idea of bare feet. Bare feet, how I love thee.

We have 12 windows and a sliding glass door - all of which need replacing. We had several companies come out and give estimates. Most game in, measured, and gave us a 10-15 minute speil on the windows and wrote a quote. But Thompson Creek Window Company came in with a THREE HOUR presentation. Three hours! So boring. So old. And c'mon, I had so many better things to be doing with my day. His estimate came in at almost three times the others at $21,450. Jesus Lord, that's like almost two thousand dollars a window. I asked if they came out and cleaned them once a week for that price. He didn't think I was a funny girl.

My dad is on his way here from Jersey as I type this. Giant stereo and power roller in tow. Yay! Life made simple with a Wagner Power Roller.

Stay tuned kids, good pictures are a-comin'

Toy Soldiers

Not to go uber-political here at the MSNBCasey news station, But I found this essay by E.L. Doctorow, and found it to be quite good. Enjoy.


"I fault this president, George W. Bush, for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty-one year olds who wanted to be what they could be.

On the eve of D-Day in 1944, General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was.

Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear. But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He does not understand.

Why should he mourn? He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be. They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life.... They come to his desk as political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.

How then, can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war, was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism, his was in Iraq has licensed it.

So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this was of his choice. He wanted to go to war, and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options, but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to, but because you have to.

The president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. he knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing --- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children.

He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead; he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance; he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills --- it is amazing for how many people in this country the President does not feel.

But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.

And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.

But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneously aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over the world most of the time.

But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.

Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail: How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves. "


Rock on, E.L. Doctorow. Rock on...

T-30 hours and Counting....

Thirty more hours until we can get into the house. Midnight on Sunday. Monday, a flood of contractors are coming to fix our house's many faults. Poor house.

Things packed= Nothing.
Paint purchased= None.
Cleaning supplies= Nada.
Truck rented= Not quite.
Moving crew assembled= Are you volunteering?


We still have 30 hours...why rush?

Fuck Bush.

Today CNN published an article about an impending terrorist strike. Frightening, yes. But it's somehow disturbingly reminiscent of late 2001 to early 2002 news reports...

"We have a 40% chance of a terrorist attack today somewhere on or around the East Coast. We are currently unsure of the severity of the attacks, the exact locations, or approximate accumulation. But if you stay tuned to the 5 o'clock news, we'll bring you up to date with all of the important details we don't know. And now to Sports with Dan. This is MSNBCasey, signing out."

Right then. Al-Zawahiri, did, however, make a statement that is still ringing in my ears. According to the transcript of his statement, he was quoted as saying "If you continue your politics against Muslims, you will see, God willing, such horror that you will forget the horrors of Vietnam."

Our problem in Vietnam was that we treated it as a fair war. We made military camps. We set up shop in places and climates that U.S. Troops were not acclimated to. We knew very little of the culture, or the terrain in which we were fighting. Thus, leaving us sitting in the jungle (desert?) like sitting ducks, bonfires of vulnerability blazing in the night. We lost thousands upon thousands of good men for nothing. Sound familiar?

Sure, we have the man power. And the bombs. And the technology.

But they have the knowledge of the land. The knowledge of the people. The knowledge of their own weaknesses. And I think that, in itself, is more ammunition than anyone involved in this "war" has.

Bush so tactfully responded with "You can't scare me!" And then promptly went out joyriding.

He joyrides as mothers wonder if her children were killed in the latest mortar bombing. He joyrides as Sergeants in full military dress approach the door of a newly widowed woman. He joyrides as somewhere in a foreign desert, young people are suffering, far away from their homes, alone and scared, faces pressed to the sand, with an automatic rifle loaded and cocked on their shoulder. And he joyrides...

The Golden Key

330k key
Originally uploaded by lilmissimpatient.

We went to settlement on Friday, July 29th.

We had a mortgage check for $320,000.

We have a closing cost check of $10,000.

And no house. We can't have it til the 8th of August. I think I'm going to make a shirt, and it will say

"I signed my life away, and all I got was this lousy key."

Mail Call

wtf?
Originally uploaded by lilmissimpatient.

This is what came for me in the mail.

It came in a cardboard envelope, the kind like FedEx uses, with the little pull tab.

Addressed to "Mrs. Casey Burrows, or Occupant"

No company name, but a return address.

And inside, a blue cotton thong. No note. No card. No nothing. An envelope and a thong.

Right then.

How many perverts on eBay do you think will put a bid on it?