A visit from a friend I hadn’t seen in too many years, overabundant food at Libby Hill, obnoxious heat and humidity, mysqldump, The Young Ones, missing my boy, and a (finally completed) bout with insomnia have defined my week. Yours?
Note, please, that the last sentence was more or less a rhetorical request for information.
Sorry I’ve been busy and just haven’t had all that much interesting to say lately.
Consuming my time recently:
In my view, one of the biggest down sides to owning a house is having a yard. I like the idea in principle, of course, since it keeps me from having to share walls with my neighbors and allows for shade trees which block out as much sunlight as possible. I even like the idea of having an attractive yard. Left to my own devices, though, I might end up just paving over the whole thing and calling it a day. If I had the money, I might instead consider paying someone else to take care of it for me.
But as for me, I hate doing yardwork. Absolutely despise it. In fact, there are few things in life I hate more than doing yardwork and being “in the great outdoors”. I’d rather clean toilets, or do laundry, or give blood, or even sit through a “Friends” marathon than do yardwork — or anything else that involves being outside in the sunshine, for that matter. Working in the yard neither relaxes me nor gives me a sense of accomplishment or satisfaction. It just makes me sweaty and itchy and cranky.
I didn’t like playing outside in the sun and “fresh air” as a child, and I whined every time the suggestion was made that I should do so. I react pretty much the same way as an adult. It’s no wonder I hate street fairs, as they combine two of the most distasteful things in the world: sunshine and large crowds. I make an excpetion for the State Fair, but I generally don’t even show up there until dusk. Hanging out by a pool or on a sunny beach is like torture to me. Heck, I don’t even like being in cars with sunroofs.
Though no fan of sunshine himself, Mark likes our yard. He’s willing to work out in the sunshine to give us nice flowerbeds and shrubs and trees. He finds it worth the payoff, which is great. As my part of the bargain, I’ve agreed to mow the lawn as needed, since he really hates doing that. I also water his shrubs and flowers every day when he’s gone, which is no problem since it’s better to do that after sunset anyway.
I very often feel guilty leaving him out there working in the yard while I go inside to do something (anything) else. I’m learning to get over my guilt, though. I’m glad there are people who enjoy making yards look nice. I’m just not one of them, alas, and I probably never will be.
I think it was on a page I removed at some point over the years, but I once mentioned how annoying I found San Franciscans who had a pre-programmed political response to even the most innocuous statements, like “it’s nice outside today” or whatever.
If you mentioned the nice weather, these folks would inevitably launch into a tirade about global warming or the rainforest or corporate-controlled weather media. If you said you were hungry and thinking about lunch, you’d hear all about some famine in sub-Saharan Africa. If you said you were feeling particularly good (or bad) that day, you’d get an unsolicited lecture about disease control in Thailand or the pain of suffering farm animals in Bolivia.
I got one of those responses today, following my relatively benign comments the other day about how I don’t like yard work. I was pretty much informed in no uncertain terms that lawns (and presumably Mark and I, by association) are “evil” and that the very act of our having a landscaped patch of land at all was somehow the precursor to a catastrophe of global proportions.
It pretty much made me want to go out and plant a flowerbed full of non-native plants and then spray at least one can of every aerosol pesticide I could find all over them. If nothing else, it made me appreciate the yard (and my hubby’s work in it) just that much more.
This morning at 11:00…
This afternoon at 3:00…
There is now one less dying tree in Winston-Salem. And three hundred fewer dollars in our checking account.
Funny. The weekend before Mark moved into my apartment in San Francisco, I was all excited about “Mildred Pierce” and “Double Indemnity” being on TV. As the fourth anniversary of that weekend arrives, I’m reading the novels the movies were based on.
In the next day’s entry, I mentioned how excited and happy I was. I still am.
I’m just disappointed he’s not here to experience the great weather.
I’m being interviewed by The Charlotte Observer about my other site next week. I’m not bragging. I’m just demonstrating how I’ve become a formidable power within the retail history web publishing community.
Just thought you might like to know.
Unearthed on a photo expedition over the weekend: the tattered remains of Winston-Salem’s first leather bar.
OK, maybe not. But it was found just three blocks from this building, which, ummm, separates the men from the boys:
Downtown Winston-Salem. Your home for unintentional architectural homoeroticism. Or stupid jokes. You be the judge.
Dammit, I liked this essay, and no one commented on it. So I’m featuring it on the front page again, simply because I can.
Maybe it got overlooked because of the other one I posted the same day, which at least generated a slight argument.
Or maybe no one cares.
Caption: Yer Humble Host. 1976. Aunt Mildred’s living room couch. Somewhere near Tampa, Florida.
I ran across this cool bunch of stuff from my childhood while looking for something else today. The interesting thing is that I didn’t spend my childhood in the Tampa Bay area. I was in the area, at most, for about a week or so each year when we visited my aunt and uncle there. And I STILL remember this whole campaign, from that breezy “WTOG, as far as the eye can see” jingle to the “extended remix” instrumental versions. In fact, I’d actually looked for some of this stuff online before.
WTOG was one of those great 1970s independent stations, all of which were remarkably similar despite their lack of a network affiliation. Mornings were always given over to black-and-white sitcom re-uns from the 1950s, an assortment which always included “Father Knows Best, “Leave It to Beaver”, “Dennis the Menace”, and “I Love Lucy”. Afternoons were about “Speed Racer”and “Brady Bunch” re-runs, and primetime was invariably filled with either a movie or Merv Griffin, followed by “Marty Hartman, Mary Hartman” at 11.
any of these stations later became the first round of Fox affiliates. Some, as of this week, have traded The WB orUPN for The CW or My Network TV. Very few, I imagine, have “Father Knows Best” reruns or a jingle that 10-year-olds will remember thirty years from now. KOFY in San Francisco may have had the last one of those.
I watched way too much TV when I was a kid. Even when I was on vacation.