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basic enconomy blues
Tuesday, December 12 2017
I woke up early this morning (just before 8:00am) and began knocking things off my punchlist. Gretchen and I would be flying to Northern California tomorrow and there were a lot of things I needed to do before we left. I needed to stop water collected from the brownhouse roof from continuing to fill its cistern until I can repair its leak (which I think I've pinpointed, though now I have to wait for it to dry before I can repair it). I needed to create some original art as a Chanukah gift for Gretchen's parents. I needed to clean an enormous amount of ashes from the woodstove. I needed to bring several days' worth of firewood into the house for our housesitter to possibly use. And, above all, I needed to wage a mid-to-high thoroughness cleaning jihad. I accomplished several of these tasks well before work began, including the brownhouse cistern diversion and the painting. Here is the latter:
The double flip thing I love.
The painting.
The photo on which it was based (cropped and color-balanced).
Interestingly, as a more faithful copy of a photograph upon which this was based, the image looked two dimensional and boring. But once I added modest shading and highlighting, it really came into its own, though it diverged noticeably from the source material (which I found in a Google Image Search).
The cleaning jihads came later in the day. At some point in all of this, Gretchen tried to check-in to our flight and got a strange message: if she wasn't checking any luggage (and we never do) then she would have to check-in at the airport. Was this more security theatre, like removing our shoes? Or was it some unnecessary punishment developed in the profit maximizing laboratory at United Airlines? Only later did Gretchen realize that this requirement was a consequence of the super cheap ($300 roundtrip) tickets she'd bought, which were in a class called "Basic Economy". In that class, a customer cannot carry on any full-sized luggage, though what exactly "full-sized" means is open to some debate. Later in the day, I managed to crunch down everything I would be taking (including the menorah, my fat little laptop, and all the clothes I wouldn't be wearing on my body) into a space no larger than a fat laptop bag. This was actually my Guatemalan backpack in its "dense" configuration, but Gretchen looked at it and thought it was probably small enough. I should mention that tonight I finally got around to sewing up my backpack, which had developed a rip in the side two or three trips ago. It was cheap and is going on 12 years old, and I think my fix is going to hold for several more trips (or the end of advanced civilization, whichever comes first).
Our house sitter arrived at around 6:00pm tonight. She's a little trollish woman who (based on a previous housesitting stint) isn't particularly good at figuring things out on her own. But she's good enough with animals and doesn't seem to be the kind who rifles through our pharmaceuticals. Because of when she showed up, Gretchen felt obligated to make dinner, and so she whipped up a glorious pasta bowl with fake sausage and mushrooms along with an arugula salad. The housesitter was game to join us in the watching of Jeopardy! and she wasn't half bad at knowing the answers (or, because it's Jeopardy!, questions).
Unexpectedly this evening, soon after I'd finished typing this entry, I went to the Huffingtonpost and saw that Roy Moore, sanctimonious blow-hard and well-known Alabama creep, had lost his race for the US Senate. My expectations of Alabama are so low that I'd assumed he'd win (he had been leading in the polls). So you can imagine my excitement at the news! Gretchen was even more delighted, jumping up and down and clapping her hands together like a kid on Christmas morning (she expresses her delight much more dramatically than I do).
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?171212 feedback
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