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forced to hear HGTV commericals
Thursday, December 9 2004
Since the heatshield project was put to rest, I've had difficulty getting the bug of native masonry out of my system. Now I want to cover every concrete surface with native stone, or, failing that, tinted mortar. The origins of this interest date back to late 2002, when tiles were being professionally installed in the upstairs bathroom. At the end of one their workdays, they simply abandoned their leftover thinset, a crime of wastefulness I refused to let happen. So I took that thinset and smeared it all over the concrete blocks of the boiler chimney where it's exposed as it passes through the television/map room on its way up to the roof. Then I stuck whatever pieces of stone I could find into the thinset, but the sun had been setting and I hadn't been able to find many good pieces. That's how it is when art is propelled by the emergency of keeping materials from going wasted. Since that time, I've daubed the leftovers from many mortar and thinset batches onto that chimney, completely covering its exposed surface in a mixture of a little mortared stone and a lot of faux brick. (By faux brick, I mean that I used a putty knife to scribe a bricklike pattern into the wet mortar.) Today I finally got around to doing something I'd been planning to do, filling in the many gaps in that original slapdash stonework with more stone. Since none of the holes in that original stonework were particularly large, I had to use lots of small pieces. As I worked, I had the teevee on, since it was there in the room with me. I was watching HGTV shows I'd recorded on the Tivo. (I particularly like House Detective.) Normally I blast through a half hour show in about fifteen minutes, but with my hands all covered with wet thinset, I ended up hearing quite a few commercials. The worst of these were for an upcoming tour of the Whitehouse Christmas decorations. That's not the only thing about that channel that makes me think a lot of spray-on-hair-headed Republicans watch it.
Gretchen came home from a job today and all she wanted to do was kick back and watch episodes of her new favorite soap opera on DVD, The L Word, in which a group of gorgeous lesbians live a Sex and the City lifestyle, but with sensible shoes and no particular need for penises. Gretchen had told me yesterday that she wanted to go out tonight, but that was then. In the end, we actually did go out, but all we did was eat dinner at Stella's in Uptown Kingston. That's the Italian place with the ho-hum pasta but the best salad in the known world.
We were seated in the main dining room, which tends to be loud anyway but today it was especially so because at the table in the corner there was one of those guys whom the world knows mostly as "the loud guy." On the occasions when we could hear each other, we discussed such things as "Who is the sexiest woman/man on Mujer de Madera?" My vote: Aida and Cesar, though (as I told Gretchen) I know all the characters so well at this point that finding any of them sexy feels like a violation of the incest tabboo.
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