Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Thanks for the Memories
As our work on the master bathroom comes to a close, The Wife and I have started working on the basement. That’s our next major project. Our bathroom has taken almost two years and I expect the basement to take about 10. And that’s if I get a sudden burst of inspiration in the next few years. Step one began this weekend: prepping the basement for major work.
Since we moved into this house a couple years ago, the completely unfinished basement became a bit of a storage area for us. There were some rudimentary shelving systems down there, so we utilized them. This worked out great because we didn’t really have anywhere else convenient to store things. Now that I’m almost done with the attic stairs, this is no longer an issue. So our goal this weekend was to (a) buy some new shelving systems and (b) sort through all the shit we’ve thrown in the basement over the last two years.
Part (a) seemed like the easy part. Surprisingly, it wasn’t. The Wife and I are both rather odd when it comes to buying things. We generally have a precise idea of what we want. And when we do, we don’t easily change our minds or compromise. It’s like you want to buy a ’64 red Pontiac Tempest. You’re not going to settle for ’79 Pinto. Well, The Wife and I both knew what we wanted for shelves and we weren’t going to settle. Unfortunately, we both wanted different things. After about 3 minutes of pondering, I realized I didn’t really give a shit what kind of shelves we had. But The Wife and I still couldn’t find what SHE wanted.
Yesterday, after much searching, we found exactly what we wanted at a brand new Loew’s that’s sort of near our house. It’s about 5 miles further away than Home Depot, but it was SO nice inside. I might actually start going there more often. I was able to find exactly what we wanted in about 5 minutes. And the store was significantly less crowded than the Home Depot usually is. I always get conflicting feelings about that. It happens to me a lot at supermarkets. I love the stores that aren’t very crowded. But then I start to wonder if maybe everybody else knows something that I don’t and that’s why they’re not shopping at this supermarket. It makes me very paranoid, actually. But not paranoid enough to start dealing with big crowds. Misanthropy trumps paranoia. (See, misanthropy isn’t all bad.)
The shelves were relatively easy to assemble, and The Wife and I managed to get them all together before Luke woke up from his nap. Then we set about putting things on our brand new shelves. This basically involved a lot of sorting through stuff we’d forgotten about for 2 years. But more importantly, it involved throwing away things we no longer need.
This was oddly satisfying and frustrating at the same time. On the one hand, it was nice to be purging ourselves of unnecessary junk. On the other, it just made me wonder what the hell we were thinking keeping some of this stuff. I actually came across the user manual for my Playstation. No, not the PS2, but the original Playstation. Which came out in 1995. I think I’ve figured out how to use it by now. But for some reason, I felt the need to keep the user manual. I found a receipt for a CD player I bought in 1991 and a tape deck I bought in 1987. You know, in case I need to return them to the electronics stores that no longer exist. (Anybody remember Highland?)
And so I came across a box of stuff that I’d kept in my closet as a kid. It was generally reserved for “important” stuff like report cards and the like. Apparently, it also became a catch-all for things I didn’t know what to do with. And things I should have tossed years ago. (In fact, this might be the first time I actually went through and tossed stuff.)
One of the things I came across was a story I wrote for my 6th grade fiction contest. I read the first page and put it down because it hurt my brain. That, of course, made The Wife want to read it. She almost choked to death trying to read it during dinner. Lesson: mac & cheese and terrible writing do NOT go together.
Here’s the thing about my writing back then. It was terrible. Horrible. But not all that much different than it is now. The one skill I had back then that I have now is that I write like I talk. Fortunately, I’ve learned to talk a little better. (I found it incredibly funny to note that I still overused parenthesis almost 20 years ago.) Anyway, somewhere along the way, I picked up the ability to edit myself. And then in high school, I actually developed a little confidence in my writing, thanks to a couple of great teachers. (Mrs. Larson, our journalism teacher and Mrs., um, Seymour? Creative Lit teacher junior year. Crap, what was her name?)
Anyway, I found one other thing that really amused me. It was someone we compiled in 3rd grade that was “The Great Big Book of Me.” It was 20 or so pages that asked all sorts of questions about us. We probably filled it out throughout the year and then assembled it all towards the end. Great idea. Possibly one of the funniest things I ever read.
I discovered a couple things about my 9 year-old self. One is that I was borderline suicidal. Or at least a little dramatic. In response to what my favorite and least favorite days of the year were, I wrote June 4 and August 29. I deduced that these were the last and first day of school, respectively. In response to how I felt on my least favorite day, I wrote, “Like I wanted to kill myself.”
What makes that really funny is that one of my favorite activities to do at home was home work. And if I had the ability to become invisible, the first thing I would do was my math homework. See, once a dork, always a dork. Of course, I also had a sadistic streak to me. When asked how I felt after getting into a fight, I wrote, “Kind of good.” Yes, I was the kid on the playground who used to walk around and beat kids with his calculator. “I am the evil tyrant Pythagoras. You will bow down before me. And I will compute the hypotenuse of your bow.”
The Wife discovered a similar book that she put together in the 4th grade. Wouldn’t you know it? She liked doing homework too! I wish I could say that I was shocked about this, but honestly, I would have been more shocked if she DIDN’T like doing homework.
Since we moved into this house a couple years ago, the completely unfinished basement became a bit of a storage area for us. There were some rudimentary shelving systems down there, so we utilized them. This worked out great because we didn’t really have anywhere else convenient to store things. Now that I’m almost done with the attic stairs, this is no longer an issue. So our goal this weekend was to (a) buy some new shelving systems and (b) sort through all the shit we’ve thrown in the basement over the last two years.
Part (a) seemed like the easy part. Surprisingly, it wasn’t. The Wife and I are both rather odd when it comes to buying things. We generally have a precise idea of what we want. And when we do, we don’t easily change our minds or compromise. It’s like you want to buy a ’64 red Pontiac Tempest. You’re not going to settle for ’79 Pinto. Well, The Wife and I both knew what we wanted for shelves and we weren’t going to settle. Unfortunately, we both wanted different things. After about 3 minutes of pondering, I realized I didn’t really give a shit what kind of shelves we had. But The Wife and I still couldn’t find what SHE wanted.
Yesterday, after much searching, we found exactly what we wanted at a brand new Loew’s that’s sort of near our house. It’s about 5 miles further away than Home Depot, but it was SO nice inside. I might actually start going there more often. I was able to find exactly what we wanted in about 5 minutes. And the store was significantly less crowded than the Home Depot usually is. I always get conflicting feelings about that. It happens to me a lot at supermarkets. I love the stores that aren’t very crowded. But then I start to wonder if maybe everybody else knows something that I don’t and that’s why they’re not shopping at this supermarket. It makes me very paranoid, actually. But not paranoid enough to start dealing with big crowds. Misanthropy trumps paranoia. (See, misanthropy isn’t all bad.)
The shelves were relatively easy to assemble, and The Wife and I managed to get them all together before Luke woke up from his nap. Then we set about putting things on our brand new shelves. This basically involved a lot of sorting through stuff we’d forgotten about for 2 years. But more importantly, it involved throwing away things we no longer need.
This was oddly satisfying and frustrating at the same time. On the one hand, it was nice to be purging ourselves of unnecessary junk. On the other, it just made me wonder what the hell we were thinking keeping some of this stuff. I actually came across the user manual for my Playstation. No, not the PS2, but the original Playstation. Which came out in 1995. I think I’ve figured out how to use it by now. But for some reason, I felt the need to keep the user manual. I found a receipt for a CD player I bought in 1991 and a tape deck I bought in 1987. You know, in case I need to return them to the electronics stores that no longer exist. (Anybody remember Highland?)
And so I came across a box of stuff that I’d kept in my closet as a kid. It was generally reserved for “important” stuff like report cards and the like. Apparently, it also became a catch-all for things I didn’t know what to do with. And things I should have tossed years ago. (In fact, this might be the first time I actually went through and tossed stuff.)
One of the things I came across was a story I wrote for my 6th grade fiction contest. I read the first page and put it down because it hurt my brain. That, of course, made The Wife want to read it. She almost choked to death trying to read it during dinner. Lesson: mac & cheese and terrible writing do NOT go together.
Here’s the thing about my writing back then. It was terrible. Horrible. But not all that much different than it is now. The one skill I had back then that I have now is that I write like I talk. Fortunately, I’ve learned to talk a little better. (I found it incredibly funny to note that I still overused parenthesis almost 20 years ago.) Anyway, somewhere along the way, I picked up the ability to edit myself. And then in high school, I actually developed a little confidence in my writing, thanks to a couple of great teachers. (Mrs. Larson, our journalism teacher and Mrs., um, Seymour? Creative Lit teacher junior year. Crap, what was her name?)
Anyway, I found one other thing that really amused me. It was someone we compiled in 3rd grade that was “The Great Big Book of Me.” It was 20 or so pages that asked all sorts of questions about us. We probably filled it out throughout the year and then assembled it all towards the end. Great idea. Possibly one of the funniest things I ever read.
I discovered a couple things about my 9 year-old self. One is that I was borderline suicidal. Or at least a little dramatic. In response to what my favorite and least favorite days of the year were, I wrote June 4 and August 29. I deduced that these were the last and first day of school, respectively. In response to how I felt on my least favorite day, I wrote, “Like I wanted to kill myself.”
What makes that really funny is that one of my favorite activities to do at home was home work. And if I had the ability to become invisible, the first thing I would do was my math homework. See, once a dork, always a dork. Of course, I also had a sadistic streak to me. When asked how I felt after getting into a fight, I wrote, “Kind of good.” Yes, I was the kid on the playground who used to walk around and beat kids with his calculator. “I am the evil tyrant Pythagoras. You will bow down before me. And I will compute the hypotenuse of your bow.”
The Wife discovered a similar book that she put together in the 4th grade. Wouldn’t you know it? She liked doing homework too! I wish I could say that I was shocked about this, but honestly, I would have been more shocked if she DIDN’T like doing homework.
