Housing Codes

We are slumlords.

This is a fairly busy household. Kim has taken on additional administrative duties down at Home Campus and is generally swamped. I'm actually teaching full time this semester, in addition to a separate part-time job. The girls are in school and have reached that age when they have piles of homework, and their social lives are becoming more jam-packed than mine, which, admittedly, isn't saying much. But they are busy. And there's the cats, who may only be one evolutionary rung above sofa pillows but that entire rung consists of evolving newer and more effective ways of making their wants and needs known.

So things fall through the cracks is what I'm saying.

Two of those things are the hamsters. Hammy and Vee (or Vee and Hammy - I still can't tell) are rather quiet little things, tucked away in their art-deco pink plastic cage safely bungeed to the crafts storage area in the corner of the dining room. They sleep a lot, and sometimes they run around on their little wheel, and neither of those things is designed to attract attention. Call it a legacy of being at the bottom of the meadow food chain, but they're very good at not bringing themselves up in your mind.

So sometime this past week it occurred to us that we haven't changed their bedding or cleaned out their cage in a while. Like since before Christmas.

Not that they minded, really. It was snug, warm, and approximately 30% stored food. Anywhere they wanted to rest, they were within easy reach of a snack. I should have my house set up so well.

Unfortunately, it was also about 30% hamster poop.

Hey, the food has to go somewhere. And it certainly wasn't going in the designated receptacle that we went out and got for them. It was basically, well, wherever they were at the time the need struck.

Eew.

And what wasn't wherever was concentrated in the tube up to their nest. They have a little nest at the top of the cage, which is accessible through a plastic tube that they climb up. Apparently to hamsters this tube looks a lot like a garderobe - the little hole that extended out over the side of a medieval castle and dropped straight down to the moat or thereabouts, which aided its functionality thereby - and let us just say that passage up that tube was getting rather constricted.

I'm sure that if we had waited a bit longer there would have been a tiny little knock on our door and a very officious looking rodent with a white hat and a clipboard would have written out a ten-foot ticket and stuffed it into a pickle and taken the pickle with the ticket and shoved it down our throats.

I don't want a pickle.

So now the hamsters are surrounded by fresh bedding, clean walls, and sparkly toys, and now we don't have to listen (hard) for that little knock for at least another month or two.

Magnum Trivium

Once again, people, say it with me: if you want trivia you need to go to the source.

Last night, for the second year in a row, the team from Home Campus went down to the local symphony orchestra's fundraising team trivia contest and walked away victorious. I wasn't the captain this year, which was a nice break, but in terms of personnel it was more or less the same group as last time. The Dean doesn't really care if we win, so long as we beat Local Tech and Nearby Private College. In theory we could place third to last and accomplish that goal, but in practice we have to win.

Academia is where the term "trivia" arose, and academics are its greatest practitioners. There were teams there from banks, corporations, libraries and charitable groups, but we are the Greatest of the Least, the Masters of all that is not really worth mastering, and you know what? It feels good.

Go, us!

Cable Cutter

I can no longer watch television in my own house.

We cut back on our cable television package last year when the Great Recession hit and my uncertain status as the Extra Historian On Call at Home Campus seemed to recommend such cuts. And in truth, we really didn't miss the stuff we cut. We don't watch a whole lot of television anyway, and most of what we do watch is either cartoons (for the girls) or on Discover, the Food Channel, HGTV or one of the various ESPN networks, all of which can be found on the smallest package you can get and still get internet service, which Kim and I both need for our jobs so that was a Justifiable Expense and Well, Meet and Good.

And then Kim discovered Lost.

It took the better part of four months, but she went from never having seen an episode to being completely caught up and waiting impatiently for the start of the final season, which should take place in five days, seven hours and twenty-nine minutes or thereabouts, not that she's counting or anything. Or that the girls are counting, either, since they too are hooked on the show.

Thank whatever local deity you choose for Hulu, or there would have been much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth around here.

Our friendly local Mega-Cable Monopoly has been deluging us with promotional materials for some months now, eager to have our business back, or get us to provide them with more business, or just hand them more money on general principles - it's hard to tell - and finally I opened up one of the letters and read it. It had a Fantastic Offer, one that was so Fantastic that even MCM had a hard time understanding it when I called to take them up on it. Seriously - it took four phone calls and twice through the computer-generated audio fine print (where you have to say "yes" every time the voice pauses or your offer becomes Unfantastic very quickly) before they decided that I wasn't lying about how Fantastic this Offer was. But eventually it all got worked out, and the cable guy came over to install our new equipment and get us up and running.

The key point, as far as Kim was concerned, was that this new equipment included a DVR, which could be used to record episodes of Lost. Plus, since the Fantastic Offer also included unlimited long-distance telephone service, we could cancel our other long-distance provider and actually save money overall. Win.

On the down side, all this came with a new television remote.

This new remote could land the space shuttle. It could track Osama Bin Laden to within six inches, launch killer bees to make him miserable, and then put capsaicin in his benadryl to make him even more miserable. It could solve the energy crisis, make sense of British politics, cash in on the Nigerian email scam, and find intelligence in Sarah Palin. It could locate the Lost Tribes of Israel, pass health care reform, and make a margarita that will kick you to the curb and leave you wanting more.

But I still can't figure out how to get it to show me television.

Oh, sure, I could ask Tabitha or Lauren - they've already got it figured out and are happily enjoying the plethora of new cartoon channels that seems to have been part of the Fantastic Offer. Or I could randomly hit buttons and hope that somewhere, in between the killer bees and the Nigerian scam buttons there is a television button that I could use to change channels from whatever cartoon network the girls were last watching. Or I could learn to enjoy the cartoons.

Perhaps I'll read a book instead.

Administrative Note

The semester has started in earnest, and posting may be light from now through spring.

At least that's how it probably ought be.  I have three online classes and another at Home Campus face to face, plus a part time job and, you know, a life (or at least a family), so in theory I'll be busy.

On the other hand, I'll probably need breaks, and since I'll most likely be sitting in front of the computer anyway, there might well be a deluge of posts instead.

Not sayin'.  Just sayin'.

Christmas, One More Time!

Christmas has finally come to an end around here, which is only fair since it is nearly Groundhog Day.

In the grand family tradition of celebrating holidays when people can get together - since, really, what else is the point? - we went up to Kim's parents' house today for our Ukrainian Christmas celebration. In some sense it's a lot like the Italian version, only with different starches and soups. Both involve as large a family as you can gather together and as big a meal as you can feed them, and that's not a bad day.

So there was borscht and stuffed cabbage and pierogies and sausages and we all gathered 'round the dinner table and were glad in it.

Of course the fact that we were doing this in late January, almost a month to the day after the Christmas date on the calendar, did not mean that we were prepared for it. No, we stopped on the way up to get our last gifts and wrapped them up there, because it's just not Christmas unless you're doing things at the last minute. I've never understood people who get their shopping done by Labor Day. Fortunately I am not likely to become one of them anytime soon.

After dinner we had the traditional exchange of presents, mostly focused on the various grandchildren that were about - Tabitha and Lauren on our end, plus their cousins Kegan, Brody and Marin. The only adults who got presents during this were Grandma and Grandpa, mostly because Tabby and Lauren wanted to get Grandma a leopard-print Snuggie, although by the time we were packing up the car to come home we somehow ended up with it. Apparently we traded a pink one for it, because it is the Year of the Snuggie on this side of the family too and the things are just everywhere. Whoever invented it is doing quite well from a product that is essentially a bathrobe worn backwards. But it's warm and snug and now we have three of them so one of us will just have to rough it. It will probably be me, since I tend to stay warmer than the rest of my family, and that's fine. I'd probably just trip over it and break something - most likely me - if I wore one.

It was also the year of the Lava Lamp.

The grownups all play the same Cousins Gift Swap game that we played down in Tennessee, and somehow, without consultation or planning, two different people brought pink and purple lava lamps to throw into the mix. And somehow, not naming names of responsible parties (**coughLaurenTabithacough**) I ended up with both of them, just as I ended up with two blue Snuggies in Tennessee for the same reasons. We'll have to set them up somewhere, and then won't we be mod?

It was a foggy trip home but we made it back without changing the shape of anything on the road and that is always a victory.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, finally, a good night.

They Can Have My Allen Wrench When They Pry It From My Cold Dead Fingers

It was IKEA day here in Baja Canada, so we piled everyone into the car and headed south to Chicagoland for some Swedish good times.  I suppose it says something about the stage of life we're at that "Swedish good times" tends to mean furniture and not anything illegal in Alabama.  Though I've never been to Alabama and for all I know Swedish furniture is indeed banned there, so I suppose I should hold my judgment until I know for sure.

IKEA is Kim's favorite store. What Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com is to me, IKEA is to her. She could spend days there, exploring all the various unpronounceable products and figuring out new ways to optimize our lives with each and every one of them.

Me, I'm a bit more ambivalent. It's not like Home Depot or Menard's or any of those other home improvement stores, which only exist to point out some of the more glaring of my many shortcomings. I have a defective home repair project gene and those stores are just giant reminders of what I will never be able to do. I suppose I could learn, but that would imply interest, and so far that hasn't materialized yet either.

IKEA isn't on that level, though, not really. For one thing, most of the items in there can be assembled by idiots using only an Allen wrench, so that's right up my alley. I can twist cams with the best of them. And for another thing, it is full of interesting little gizmos and gadgets, many of which can simply be purchased and used as-is, such as wine glasses.

Plus, they serve meatballs.

We're in the middle of a giant home repair project in our mudroom - the little antechamber of our house right as you come in the front door that nobody ever uses. Really, who uses their front doors anymore? The garage is in the back, so we enter through the back. But there was a closet in the mudroom that was offensive in its suboptimability and so it has been removed, leaving us with the question of what to do with the newly liberated space.

Kim lives for questions like that.

So down we went, and there we stayed for six hours - examining, plotting, discovering, and, occasionally, bashing each other over the head with feather dusters, because after a while you just go stir crazy and want something good and American in the midst of all that Swedishness and what's more American than random senseless violence? Especially when it's played for laughs.

We ended up filling the car up to the brim with things called "Gorm" and a less dignified way to die in the event of an accident is hard to imagine. But we made it home safely and all of the Gorm is outside, waiting to be unloaded in the daylight.

We are no longer gormless.

A Quandary

We had chicken pot pies for dinner the other night, and as I was taking them out of their packages (what, you think I could make one from scratch?) I happened to glance down at the directions written there.

Radical, I know.

And printed right there, in bold green letters on either end of the little wrapper, it said, "Open both ends first."

How exactly does one do that?