Zombie
The double-header Monday Night Football format is really not good for sleeping schedules. I’m having trouble sleeping lately anyway.
I successfully replaced our kitchen faucet this weekend, which yielded a huge uptick in water flow and probably a bigger uptick in aesthetics. It’s one of those where the spray nozzle pulls out of the end of the faucet, which also allows you to turn the sprayer on and use it mounted into the faucet.
I’ve turned my sights to patio lights, since ours are so low-wattage you can hardly read out there at dusk. I’ve basically announced a war on builder-grade items, whenever that makes sense. If this set passes the home decor challenge we’ll have 240 W on the ceiling and 100 W on the wall, through clear glass rather than frosted.
I always think we could benefit from home automation (a la X10), but then I go shopping for the stuff and find virtually nothing interesting to do aside from computer-controlled interior Christmas lighting, which could really be a hoot. There’s no mystery as to why their annoying pop-ups always had pictures of attractive women being spied on; frankly, there’s nothing overly exciting about the real world applications of their technology.
In Turkey, to try to get into the Christmas spirit (I honestly typed “holiday” first and promptly deleted, ugh) I put the Sony laptop underneath the tree skirt and played Chris Botti’s Christmas album using a network-based Linux music control program of my creation. This year, the guts of the Sony laptop are mounted into my audio box, which as of now will be wrapped like a present and placed under the tree. Might take some serious finesse to pass the Better Homes & Gardens WAF test on that one.
Botti’s “The Christmas Song” was a bit gloomier than the average rendition, but all in all it beat the pants off of the Glee Christmas album, which ended on “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” and generally killed the holiday buzz pretty badly, especially when competing with the minarets.
I’m tempted to go commercial and set up the Christmas stuff before Halloween. I’m so excited to do a full holiday season (it makes sense there, I think) rather than grinding my teeth in Heathrow hoping we get back while burning a hole in my vacation time. That was bad, like, really bad.
I felt like that winter event and the surprise storm landing in Milan were our two paybacks for having the rest of our travels go so smoothly. I’ll take that over systematic small problems any day.