Well…last week the show DIDN’T go on. Someone hit a tree down the road an hour before showtime, and my internet went down with the tree…so this is two weeks at once.
Enjoy…and when you travel…leave your Les Paul and antique Steinway at home.
[powerpress]
One of the big hangups about traveling, particularly traveling abroad is dealing with the strange customs of foreigners. It is as if just living somewhere foreign gives them permission to be strange. Go figure! Some of if is charming. Who doesn’t love the idea of gondolas and seranading gondoliers? And who can resist the romance when ordinary objects get translated into Italian.
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Ordinary stuff becomes magical in another language. Still there are risks. you can order something uneatable, like tripe, without knowing. Europeans seem to value tripe much higher than Americans perhaps because it sounds so sexy. It is hard to remember sometimes that the people eating that tripe aren’t Americans. And tripe remains stomach no matter what language you speak.
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Now I like clean clothes and swear by our faithful washing machine, but I’m not talking about clothes washers. I’m talking about the washers that keep your faucets from dripping. Or at least that’s what they used to do. Repairing a faucet was easy. Turn off the water. Take the faucet apart and replace the washer. It didn’t take much time and it was a simple task. The biggest effort was the trip to the hardware store to get the right washer.
These days with all the modern improvements, a dripping faucet isn’t so simple. Yesterday I decided to deal with the dripping shower head that had been bugging my wife for a few weeks. I felt confident that it would be a simple task, yet something warned me to delay. Finally, those comments from my wife kept getting sharper and Monday seemed like the right time to take care of the problem. In our old house, I was quite familiar with the fixtures and fittings. Here at the new place, I’d gotten soft enjoying the luxury of everything being new. Was I still the man of the house? Would I give up and call a plumber or be the master of my domain and fix it myself? I didn’t hesitate.
It didn’t take long to get into the faucet but there were layers within layers before I finally got down to the control. I was feeling good. It wouldn’t be long now. I pulled it out. Now where is that washer?
Somewhere down deep in this black plastic assembly lies the washer but it is quite clear that Kohler never intended for me to replace it. Why let me repair my faucet with a 25 cent washer when they could sell me a $30 module.
At the hardware store, I show them what I need. They don’t have it. They can order it but it will take a week. I’m thinking I can put the old one back and let it drip for another week but the hardware guy finds a place that has it in stock so I drive to the next town and get the part. It’s only $31 and so far I’ve dedicated 4 hours to this project but now I feel elated. The rest is going to be easy. I’m a winner!
The new assembly is almost identical to the old one which is very comforting and it fits the hole nicely. I tighten the screws and turn on the water. The water doesn’t spray. I’m getting really cocky. I’m still the man of the house. I carefull replace the decorative elements and the handle and test the operation. Water flows. Water stops. I finish replacing all the parts and return to normal life. Modern technology had done it’s best to beat me down but with sheer persistence I had pushed on and fixed my dripping faucet.
Lying in bed last night flush with my victory, I relived the day, minimizing the difficulties and rejoicing in the triumph. I hadn’t lost my ability to solve household problems. I started to drift off to sleep when I heard a noise from the bathroom. It was a rhythmic sound that was very familiar. It was the steady dripping of my shower faucet. After all the time and expense dedicated to fixing the drip, it was as if I had done nothing. The new assembly was no better than the old one.
So, as I wait for the plumber to fix my drip, I yearn for the good old days when all you needed was a washer. These modern times where simple, inexpensive and easy to service devices have evolved into expensive assemblies which require professionals to install them properly. Bring back the washer.
I’ve got a love-hate relationship with daylight savings time. When I had a job, I hated driving home in the dark. There was nothing more depressing to me than the feeling that the day was over and I was still in the office. I was fine with going to work in the dark. I even preferred it. It seemed that I was getting a head start on the day. Coming home in the dark was a drag.
These days I find my priorities are changed. Even in the fall with daylight savings time, on most days I sleep late enough to get up with the sun. It’s the days when I have to get up earlier that make me long for daylight savings time to be gone. Twice a week we have exercise sessions scheduled at 7:30 and to get there we leave around 7:00. While we never jump eagerly out of bed to do sit ups and squats, it’s less painful when the sun is shining.
Still whatever the benefit of daylight savings time on the economy or my mood, the change of time- even just one measly hour- twice a year messes up my body, my sleep patterns and my routines. It is difficult to decide whether after all is said and done, daylight savings time makes my life better or worse. But, no matter, since it seems that daylight savings time is here to stay, I won’t worry about ending it. For now I’ll just enjoy
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Every day this country goes father downhill. These days there is no end to stories about how American’s can’t cope with the pressures of modern life. For an old Coot its hard to understand. It’s not like the good old days. So many of these things used to be taken for granted. Kids didn’t need safety equipment to go bicycle riding. Parents could be trusted to ride in a car and hold a baby at the same time. Kids used to ride in the front seat of a car – WITHOUT SEATBELTS and without risk of death from the life-threatening air bags. It’s hard to believe that we have lost so much judgment that the government will arrest us and threaten to take away our children if we even think about acting like a responsible parent from my childhood would act. I’m talking about the 50’s here.
When I look around, it’s hard to see that much as changed. Parents these days look responsible. They stand up. They walk and talk. There isn’t any obvious sign that they are inferior to my parents but you can’t argue with the government any more. And the government tells us that parents these days can’t be trusted to safely raise their children without serious help. Hillary was right. These days it takes a village of bureaucrats to raise a child.
We tried to do the right thing by our kids. I did get a helmet for the younger one just to shut up my nosy neighbor but I never made him wear it. He had his share of bumps- he broke a leg learning to slide into second base and a got a concussion from high school football but he never had anything more than skinned knees from riding his bicycle. The other one surfed. I wonder when the government will insist on helmets for surfing. I am sure that somebody is working on it.
Anyway my kids risked life and limb in our household because of my wife’s and my carefree parenting style. They grew up to tell the tale just like my brothers and I survived our helmet less and seatbeltless childhood. Perhaps the trauma they suffered explains why they are still unmarried and childless but it’s hard to know.
Anyway, each day we seem to discover more inadequacies of modern day parents. Just today, I learned that some eager PhD student in Texas has discovered that parents can’t even manage to pack a lunch for their kids. According to his rigorous study of packed lunches at a nearby preschool, those parent can’t even manage to pack a safe lunch for their kids. It seems that they were all at an unsafe temperature- whatever that means.
My mom packed lunches for us from time to time. Usually there was a sandwich- either peanut butter and jelly or bologna, an apple, a bag of chips and either a candy bar or some cookies. I never remember getting scalded or frozen eating one of them and those are the only unsafe temperature options I can think of. Mostly those lunches were ice cold if they had been in the ice box overnight or room temperature. The worst case was having the candy bar melt which was messy but not unsafe. I just can’t figure out what this PhD student knows that a parent doesn’t about feeding their kid a sack lunch What I do know is that generations of Americans thrived on sack lunches before this rigorous study discovered the peril in sack lunches with a pretty high survival rate.
What this new generation of parents is doing wrong is hard for me to know. Maybe it’s the result of the failing education system or maybe somewhere along the line, the tradition of American parenting self-sufficiency was broken- possibly in the 60’s when black became white and the other way around. All I know is that America seems to be doomed. Nobody seems capable of independent action and responsibility any more and this rigorous study of sack lunches just confirms the fact. The way things are going the only way to fix the problem is to just get those inadequate parents out of the way. Dumb as parents seem to be these days, they might not even notice.