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Just to butch it up a little around here. Or to demonstrate the mundane futility of middle-aged life in the semi-suburbs, where my weekend will start at either hardware or the chain drugstore, with a side trip for pet supplies, and as a reward: sock shopping.
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Anybody got more ambitious plans to share?
Reader Interactions
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Jamie
I just moved from Cleveland to San Francisco. Have to buy some everything, and also something to make coffee in. And furniture.
The weather is great.
hamletta
@Jamie: That’s what thrift stores are for.
Good luck! SF is still “an oasis in the California desert,” perhaps our most cultured city.
Bill E Pilgrim
I seem to remember a lot of very arch “It wasn’t NPR! It was the local station!” around here the other day. Turns out it was NPR pressure just as it was obvious it had been, and after the local outfit hired her back, NPR dumped the whole show.
Simeone is a freelancer who works on a show about opera.
NPR lost its soul to the flying attack minions of Rush Limbaugh years ago.
kdaug
@Bill E Pilgrim: Occupy Opera?
Bill E Pilgrim
@kdaug: Hmm, no I think NPR, in this case. Though people camping out in front of the Met demanding gigs for more than the top few percent of opera singers could have lungs. Er, legs.
Actually I saw something along those lines, ah here.
Joey Maloney
I just moved from a basement shoebox to a large studio with a private rooftop. I’m still recovering from my Ikeagasm so I’ll probably spend part of the day assembling furniture and adding to my collection of cheap Allen wrenches. Then this afternoon a friend is going to gorge me on leftover leg of lamb.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Jamie: Goodwill store on Clement street is huge. If you drive anyway, and much easier to get to and park and etc than others. I had no tableware at all and 20 minutes and 10 bucks later had a whole collection of beautiful old mismatched silver.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
I am absorbing a two-day tour of the 1st Brigade, 3d Infantry Division at Ft Stewart and Savannah’s US Air Force Combat Readiness Training Center (ANG). I was incredibly impressed with everyone I met from the full birds to the PFC’s.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Joey Maloney: We used to dream of living in a shoebox.
kdaug
@Bill E Pilgrim: Y’all had boxes?
PurpleGirl
Laundry this morning and doing paperwork at some point today. Need to make a run to the bank, too. No fun stuff today, maybe tomorrow.
Re NPR: Since Little Boots put a bunch of Republican thugs on its Board, it ain’t been the same.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@kdaug: “Dream”
MikeJ
@Bill E Pilgrim: The other day it wasn’t NPR, it was the local station. Now it is NPR that is at fault.
The good news is WDAV will probably wind up making more money, and NPR is without a doubt losing money.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
Aren’t you a vet? If so, didn’t you get enough of that world in the ’60s/’70s?
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Yea, Korea (67-68) and Vietnam. I work in higher ed and this was a group of us learning how we can better serve military and vets here in Georgia.
Phylllis
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): If you get a chance, head over to the Mighty Eighth Museum–on the Pooler, GA side of Savannah. Well worth the time.
I’m gonna hang by the hotel pool and read My First Summer in the Sierra on my Kindle. I’m really enjoying digging into the classics on it.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Phylllis: Ah, I would have loved to. We had two solid days of grip and grin and I dragged myself back to Athens. Next time.
SiubhanDuinne
Here in the north Atlanta suburbs, there’s going to be a BJ mini-meetup later this morning between JPL and SiubhanDuinne. This will make the time while my car is being serviced considerably more entertaining than usual.
If the conversation stays this side of slanderous, I expect one or both of us will provide a report later.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@SiubhanDuinne: Have fun!
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
Wonder if this will post? Picture of the tour.
SiubhanDuinne
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
Nice photo. I’m amusing myself trying to figure out which one is you.
Hillary Rettig
Going down to Bioneers in New Bedford:
http://www.marioninstitute.org/connecting-for-change
and then going to try to hear Chomsky at Occupy Boston today at 6 pm
http://www.occupyboston.org/2011/10/18/noam-chomsky-at-occupy-boston-tomorrow/
“try” because it will probably be a mad crush!
RossInDetroit
Couldn’t sleep. Went to bed at 11:00 pm exhausted and was wide awake at four. What the hell am I going to do with the rest of this day?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@RossInDetroit:
Well, the MSU-UW game might be worth watching.
Darkrose
I’ll be sitting in bed, probably gaming. I can’t do much else since in a fit of grace and poise, tripped over a tree root and most likely ruptured my Achilles tendon.
R-Jud
There’s some challah baking in the oven. My brother lands at BHX in an hour. He has a cold. I have a cold. Mr Jud has a cold. The Bean has been up since 5 am puking– and has a cold. She’s quite chipper, though, when she’s not spewing.
Mr Jud will pick up some Wagamama takeaway on the way back from the airport. Good medicine for those of us who can keep food down.
Skepticat
Closing down the house for the season–bundling and bagging things in (vain) hope of thwarting mice, draining pipes, loading the boat, and hoping to remember to take what I’ll need on another island in another country. Put on the cat’s collar this morning, so he knows that travel’s in his near future and is skulking around. He also knows that I never do serious cleaning unless we’re going to leave for a while. Will do a mini tour du mooch– visiting friends in Maine, Massachusetts, and Virginia–then will deal with hurricane damage to the other house next month. Usually this is a fun adventure, but a recent, unexpected heartbreak and an ongoing battle with tax authorities is taking a lot of the pleasure out of it–and everything else. But this too will pass.
Maude
I’ll be looking for a part time job. I have filled out applications and the online ones are awful.
It’s hard to get work around here. The economy stinks.
soonergrunt
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Well, with the exception of spending time in Fort Stewart itself (I hated the place with a passion) did you have fun? For the three years I was there, I lived for weekends in Savannah and Tybee Island.
PurpleGirl
@Darkrose: Ouch — hope you feel better.
soonergrunt
filling out job apps for a part time job, mowing, trimming, and edging the lawn one last time, servicing my lawn tools before putting them up for the winter, and trying to help my wife get ahead on the laundry so it’s not piling up later in the week when I have my hernia surgery.
MikeJ
@R-Jud:
I made some last night.
Braiding
Baked
SiubhanDuinne
@soonergrunt:
What ! ? ! You never went over to Phenix City?
arguingwithsignposts
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Reasonable people. The totebaggerati will hand us to the hordes in the name of reasonableness.
donnah
I’m finishing up a craft book I’ve been working on for several months. I was hired to write a sort of specialty dictionary for rug hookers. Talk about a niche market! I’m also doing the illustrations for it.
The due date is Dec and I’m nearly finished with the second draft and only have about a quarter of the drawings left to do, hopefully this weekend. Then there’s the back-and-forth process between the editor and publisher until it’s all ready. I submitted artwork for the cover, too. It would be great if they choose it.
The release date would be sometime in the fall of next year. Fingers crossed!
RossInDetroit
I’ve noticed an interesting micro-trend. My wife is a machine designer. For the last 15 years or so she’s made machines for checking auto parts quality on production lines. Business dropped off a cliff 2 years ago. Now she has tons of work – effectively two full time jobs at the moment.
But a large portion of the projects today are automation builds. New machines to replace manual production tasks like laying up fiberglass sheet for molding, moving cut stock from a cutting machine to a stamping machine, etc. Business are spending on factories again and they seem to be concentrating to some extent on capital expenditures that eliminate labor.
henqiguai
Stacking (at least, some of it) that 2 cords of green wood that’s been waiting to be stacked to make room for the 2 cords of (somewhat) seasoned wood I need to find before it’s too dark in the afternoons to stack. And the snows come falling down.
Which suggests that maybe I need to get back over to Hillary Rettig’s (#22) website to do some more reading and contemplation…
donnah
Oops, I forgot to show a sample of the rug hooking I do. This rug is from the first of the year, finished in May 2011.
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d27/Rughooker/2b4b05eb.jpg
amk
batshit crazy birthers are eating their own, rubio & bobby fucking jindal their fodder. Sweet schadenfreude
– dana fucking milbank’s attempt at mockery.
RossInDetroit
@donnah:
That’s amazing. My MIL hooks rugs from kits and they look… rather crude in comparison to yours.
Can you say who the publisher is? There are lots of crafters in my family.
amk
@RossInDetroit: Manufacture by machines is the reality. Jobs are now not in hands-on manufacture but in building, maintaining and trouble-shooting those muthafucka robots.
Which of course means more and better education & training. Which of course the real amurikans hate.
RossInDetroit
@amk:
80% of my work time now is machine maintenance and repair. I work for a custodial services company and the work is highly mechanized for efficiency.
Not everyone hates it. I was working on a floor scrubber in an elementary school yesterday. There was an after school program in Robotics. It was well attended and they were doing some pretty neat stuff with Lego NXT automation technology. Kids were into it and they were learning.
geg6
Well, big excitement in my world. Campus was closed yesterday and for the whole weekend (we had a big event planned for today) and I got some unexpected time off. A former student with mental/emotional problems made Virginia Tech-type threats to the campus. State police and FBI are all over the campus and all students (except the international students) have been sent home. Former student’s family has been all over local media asking him to turn himself in. Poor troubled kid. I hope it all turns out okay.
amk
@RossInDetroit: Kindred souls. I am in 100% maintenance of electrical machines but more on the break-down maintenance side. In my 25 years in this line, I have seen the automation technology grow by leaps and bounds, mainly to improve quality and bring down product failures. This of course meant fewer people on the shop floor.
donnah
RossinDetroit, the book is through Rug Hooking Magazine for Stackpole Publishing, which operates for another bigger company. They do several craft publications. I’ve published articles in Rug Hooking Magazine over the past few years, but this is my first book.
gene108
@PurpleGirl:
Laundry! Damn I knew there was something I was forgetting.
Stupid take home mid-term makes me forget something important.
Also, too homework sucks. I don’t care how old you are. It sucks and it never gets better.
RossInDetroit
@amk:
In the ’80s manufacturing got serious about process management. They decided that an expensive machine that performs predictably was easier to integrate than a human. It makes sense.
Also, labor policy has contributed. Unions went for bigger pay and bennies for members rather than guaranteed job counts. Business paid the hourly rates and just waited for people to age out, replacing a lot of labor with automation.
These are among the reasons lately that industrial production and profits are up and employment isn’t.
I love fixing stuff. I LOVE it. I especially love making a $100 fix on something that the factory tech would charge $900 for. So I got a raise yesterday.
soonergrunt
@SiubhanDuinne: I was never at Benning long enough to get around.
I hated Benning with a passion that resembled Ahab’s hatred for the white whale.
Are we seeing a theme here? I hated the bases in Georgia, but I sure did love the beach. I didn’t even hate Fort Hood (and everybody is supposed to hate Fort Hood) like I hated Benning and Stewart. What I hated about Hood was that everything interesting and fun was so far away.
RossInDetroit
@donnah:
I’ve done some writing for Make magazine. It’s an O’Reilly publication and a sibling to Craft magazine.
Congrats on the book! DIY is resurgent and I hope this means success for you.
JPL
@geg6: Hopefully, they find the former student and he is able to get some help. How sad and frightening for the entire community.
Bob In Pacifica
Well, Jamie, I’m moving from the SF Bay Area up to Portlandia, actually Beaverton. I’m retired and just can’t afford to live here anymore. Monday the movers come and Tuesday Arabella (my cat) and I drive north. Today my former lead guitarist is coming over to go up Montara Mountain for a farewell hike.
R-Jud
@MikeJ: That looks great! This was only my second go at making challah. I did a six-strand braid and think I managed not to mess it up too much.
I’m not going to photograph it because a) it turned out a bit darker than I’d like and b) Mr Jud has already eaten half of it.
Phylllis
@SiubhanDuinne: You’re thinking of Ft. Benning, in Columbus.
Ahh, Tybee. A drinking town with a fishing problem.
Edited to correct frackin’ auto-correct.
soonergrunt
@Phylllis: The other thing was that that Tybee Island was a high-class drunk on a beach, compared to Phenix City, which was not.
geg6
JPL @50:
I sure hope they find him, safely, and they get him the help he needs. We all suspected that it might come to something like this with this kid. He was a nice kid and, all of a sudden, started acting very weirdly, saying off the wall stuff, being very paranoid, and finally getting kicked out of the dorm and ultimately off the campus completely. He’s been hospitalized twice in the last couple of months due to suicidal tendencies, but would not stay for further treatment. He somehow got back onto campus a few weeks ago and assaulted a girl, who fought him off and the girl and campus pressed charges. He was wanted on those warrants to begin with and this just adds a whole new dimension to his problems. It’s very sad.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@soonergrunt: Back from the farmer’s market. We had a very good time. Met with the 1st Brigade CO and then got a “static display” demo with 2/69th Armored. I was really impressed with the troops. We broke into small groups and each team explained their vehicle and equipment. Got to spin the turret on a bradley and hang a bit in the gunner seat on an Abrams. So much there seemed new but the CO said they are expecting a rif so education is even more important to the individual whether they stay in or not. Did I mention how impressed I was with the troops? Fucking teabaggers and their anti-immigration shit need to see who these people actually are.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@soonergrunt: We’ve got friends that live there and they just stay away from the beach on the weekend.
soonergrunt
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
As much as I hated Stewart, I mostly liked being mech infantry there. I was a Bradley gunner and later a Bradley Commander there.
GUNNER, TWO BMPS 10 O’CLOCK, LEFT BMP FIRST!
TARGET IDENTIFIED!
FIRE!
TARGET! TARGET! TARGET! TARGET DESTROYED!
RIGHT BMP!
IDENTIFIED!
FIRE!
TARGET! TARGET! TARGET! TARGET DESTROYED!
Yup. That Bradley turret was my office and home away from home for three years.
One of the best men I ever knew, who taught me as much about being a man as my father ever did was an illegal alien who came here as a child and joined the Army and loved and served this country with all his heart. Which is more than most teabaggers ever did.
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
Of course they stay away from the beach on the weekend. The joes from Stewart and the tourists have the beach on the weekend. If I were local, I’d stay away too.
Kristine
Plans for the day include groceries and other errands, side job stuff, and a batch of green tomato relish in between. Possibly fresh tomato soup, if I’ve enough that are ripe.
gelfling545
@Bill E Pilgrim: When we hosted my niece’s wedding in the garden last fall my daughter headed out to Goodwill & bought about 20 great serving pieces for about 1/10th of what it would have cost to RENT them. They’re now in the big family event box for future use.
piratedan
@Darkrose: if there was an animal involved in your accident, the polite euphemism around here is to say/claim that you “did a Cole”.
Linda Featheringill
@Darkrose:
Ruptured Achilles tendon:
Did to go to the doctor? Gotta do that. Torn tendons heal funny unless you have surgery to align all the fibers, etc. And then you’ll walk funny the rest of your life.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@soonergrunt: Great story!
SiubhanDuinne
@Phylllis:
I sure am. Thanks for the correction. In my defense, I wrote that in a pre-caffeinated state.
gene108
I have a 3 year old MacbookPro 15″. The video card/logic board crapped out this morning.
It is costing me $310 to fix, which is still a bit cheaper than junking it and buying a PC. It’ll take 5-7 days to fix, since the Apple Store has to ship it out or charge me $216 more to fix it in store (why, I do not know).
I thought for the premium you pay for Apple products, they should last longer without malfunction.
This is my first Mac computer. I’m disappointed. My prior desktop PC’s, lasted longer without having hard drive failures.
Really disappointed at Apple products right now. I doubt I’ll buy another. The premium pricing isn’t worth it, if it doesn’t last without needing major repairs after only three years.
Jamie
Headed to Community Thrift in a bit, which is walkable from here. My second time living in SF.
Who said you can never go home again?
Although our Galtian Overlords seem to have discovered that burritos were underpriced sometime between my last stretch here and now. I recall living on those for about a year when I was broke last time. I guess the banksters are arbitraging those, too now.
Jamie
@gene108 – I’m not defending Apple, although I do use their products extensively. But 3 years is pretty much the depreciation cycle used by the entire industry, and thus the design lifespan. It isn’t just Apple.
Longevity of hardware is pretty hit or miss, no matter the company. I have a Mac Quadra 610 from the early 90s that still works – when I was in Ohio, a friend’s daughter would come over and play Three In 3 on it. I also have a Thinkpad 600 from when IBM still made them from the same era that works (it runs a wildly out of date Debian Linux. I think next time I’m bumped up to business class, I should take it with me, now that I’m thinking about it.) OTOH, I’ve been through many laptops in the meantime.
With Apple, the rule is, if you’re not a developer or serious gamer, buy the low end, upgrade the RAM yourself (Crucial.com, it always works), get the extended warranty, don’t dump coffee on it, and expect to repeat in three years. When you get more time than that, you’re ahead.
Jamie
@bob –
Hope the move trats you well. I understand the cost argument – believe me, I went from $400 condo fees on a unit I can’t sell now to $1650 in rent (offset, a tiny bit, by renting the condo that dropped 2/3rd of its value since I bought it. That was $40k of my retirement to purchase arguments with the board – I clearly need to hire a banker to manage things. Wait, now I can’t.)
For me, it is more about sanity. I was caring for an ailing relative in Ohio. I’m a city boy, I don’t like owning a car. Was living in Brooklyn before Grandma started having problems. Cleveland depressed the hell out of me. When everyone is struggling, everything seems to be conflict. I hate fighting. This was a one-way move, I can’t go back. A little scary for a 40 year old programmer with his savings sunk in a condo by the Lake. And I know I’m lucky to be able to do this.
El Cruzado
@gene108: The first MacBook Pros were a rushed design to get the Intel switch done ASAP. They are a messy thing inside and a PITA to work on. They also tended to overheat and fry hard drives (it’s happened to me)
The unibody ones, however, are a thing of beauty.
Even then, no matter what, after 3 years you’re on your own. It’s the most Apple itself will risk covering (Applecare is often worth it for laptops btw). And replacing a laptop’s motherboard for that amount, especially that model’s, is actually not expensive (try for a broken screen replacement if you want sticker shock).
Of course these days I only use work macs so the fixes I don’t have to pay for, but they tend to last well past the date I need to replace them (which is usually about 3 years anyway).
Darkrose
@piratedan: Sadly, it was pure clumsiness on my part. I can’t blame the cats for this one.
Darkrose
@Linda Featheringill: After I finished doing my Buster Posey imitation, my wife took me to the Kaiser ER. I’m in a splint, and on Monday I’ll see the podiatrist.
Darkrose
@PurpleGirl: Thanks! It doesn’t hurt that much, fortunately. And Vicodin always helps.
gwangung
I should point out that laptops take on a bit more wear and tear than desktops, by nature. And that’s the same for Macs or Wintel…