More Fun with Carbon Monoxide

In which your humble narrator curses the fools at the Kidde Company for their lousy carbon monoxide detectors.

Regular readers will recall our near death experience with the "silent killer" (no, not farts, carbon monoxide). This prompted me to purchase a carbon monoxide detector. On Friday, I installed it whilst the children were eating their lunch. After 4 minutes, it went off. And it wouldn't stop until I unscrewed and pried the back off and cut it's little battery heart out. Then I opened all the windows and cut off power and gas to all the dangerous appliances. I called the emergency line at Xcel Energy and they sent a guy out within an hour to locate the source of the carbon monoxide.

There was none. Just a #&@%! faulty alarm. Eighty-five decibels of fun and $25 down the toilet.

Kidde Corporation (A UTC Fire and Safety Company), prepare to receive an angry letter. Also, I will be visiting your CEO and board of directors at home in the middle of the night to scream at them at exactly 85 decibels for no reason.

Five Things I Hate Today - Cat Barf Edition

In which your humble narrator expounds upon five hated things.

1. Waking up at 5:00 because a cat is projectile vomiting on your bed. And it wasn't even my cat, it was my wife's mentally challenged, Siamese jerk-cat. Then he ran away while barfing, leaving a vomitous trail across the bedroom (the only carpeted room in the house) and down the wall along the stair case. Just try going back to sleep when your bedroom smells like mostly digested pet-grade tuna.
2. Cleaning the coffee-maker
3. The fact that it's not socially acceptable to laugh at middle aged, spandex clad people on those damn roller-skis
4. People that refuse to use capital letters in emails
5. Ear wax
   

A Head-on Collision on Memory Lane

 In which your humble narrator recounts one of the horrors of high school gym class.

Last night, I went over to a friend's house to deliver some cookies of thanks and some cookies of remorse. This particular friend, (Let's call him Chris, because that's his name) fixed my sister's computer many months ago in return for some cookies. Then she didn't make good on her cookie promise for a long time, so yesterday she came over and entertained the children while I made some snickerdoodles and chocolate chip cookies to repay her confectionery debt (after levying a heavy baker's tax on the finished products).Sister labeled them "cookies of thanks" for the original computer fix and "cookies of remorse" for taking seven months to get them to Chris.

So after delivering the cookies and seeing Chris' (and the affianced bride of Chris') new home we ended up talking about traumatic brain injuries which, of course, led to a discussion of high school gym class. At the Jesuitical boys' high school that I attended we had two required semesters of pain and humiliation gym. In my first year I got a concussion when someone stepped on my head while playing flag football. In my second year I had my nose broken by a volleyball. I should stress that the offending volleyball was not the one from the game in which I was playing. It was some other game's volleyball. I was engaging in my usual, half-assed participatory way in the game. I wasn't awful at volleyball like I was awful at running for a long time or swimming. But there's this sudden whoop from the other side of the gym and I stupidly looked toward the noise only to have a wildly served volleyball slam right into my nose. Here is a helpful graphic representation:

So I went to the nurse and she said of my blood streaked face and shirt, "Wow, that's gross," and gave me an ice pack. What was it with school nurses and ice packs? They're not actually a panacea for every illness and injury known to human kind. I skipped eighth period and laid around the nurse's office until it was time to go home. So I rode home all bloody on the bus and walked from my stop to my house and went in to clean up. This was the first time I'd seen myself in the mirror. And, boy, that was not right. El Schnoz now had a sort of twisty, ski-jump to the right thing going on. This was going to need to be set straight since I could see where the cartilage and bone were misaligned at the bridge.  No one was going to be home for several hours. Since these were the days before cell phones, calling the parents was a giant pain in the butt.

So I grabbed the tip of my nose and stared at my watery eyes in the mirror and pulled down... hard. The feeling of jagged cartilage sliding back into place over bone is something I cannot adequately describe. I don't think I've ever screamed aside from that afternoon.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I don't look like Owen Wilson.

Watcha got cookin'?

In which your humble narrator talks about food, even though maybe he really shouldn't.

I cook. And for the most part, I cook because I enjoy it. It's the least odious component of housewifery as far as I'm concerned. I read books about food. I listen to radio programs about food. I have what's grown into an actual collection of cookbooks. I used to just own cookbooks, but then I started buying weird, non-utilitarian cookbooks with recipes for turkeys stuffed with weiners, tripe, 60's style canapes, et cetera. Once you go down the road of just buying cookbooks for the awful food photography or weird antiquated prose dedicated to the "noble onion," I'm pretty confident that it qualifies as a "collection." I nabbed this from flickr, but it does appear in one of my cookbooks from the 1960's-1970s "creative period" in American cookery.

What always shocks me is that someone spent time creating such a putrid dish. I sincerely doubt that it had been "a winner at the dinner table for generations" when this was published.

The only thing that Americans are more neurotic about than sex is food. Rather than food being an enjoyable component of the whole "staying alive" thing that we've all got going on, it's become yet another arena in which we get to broadcast our social and political viewpoints to the world. I fully cop to being snooty about food. I prefer organic stuff when I can afford it. We don't eat highly processed stuff. We generally avoid food with scary chemical ingredients. But mostly I've made those decisions because the snooty foods taste better and are generally better for us. Yet, I don't think that really confers any moral superiority on me. I think dinner should just be dinner most of the time. And that means not talking about the food and its pedigree while you're at the table. And at the same time, I realize that most people eat garbage. Yet somehow I don't think looking down my nose at people the shop for groceries at Wal-Mart is going to lead them to make better choices when it comes to food. Manufacturers of food-like products have spent a lot of time and money convincing us that we don't have the time to cook and then offering us "convenience foods" that taste yucky and aren't very convenient. The greatest success of American advertising has been to convince us all how busy* we are. But hey! Here's a miracle product that will solve that problem.

When we were kids, my sister and I would ask Dad what was for dinner:

Us: What's for dinner, Pop?
Dad: Food.
Us: What kind of food?
Dad: Good food.
Us: Yeah, but what is it old man? We're too short to see what you're doing on the counter there.
Dad: Good food that you will like.
Us: You are completely obnoxious.
Dad: Yes.

And the thing is... I do this to my wife all the time. She's a picky eater, so I don't like to tell her what's in dinner because then she'll spend twenty minutes trying to pick out the offending ingredient (usually a vegetable).

My Mom was asking what motivated this behavior the other day. "Why does everyone always ask and why does the cook never want to answer the question?" I told her it was like when you buy a gift for someone and do a fancy job wrapping it up and then you finally present it to her and she sits there with a fully wrapped present on her lap and asks, "What is it?" And you say, "What the hell is wrong with you? Just open the damn thing!"

Sit down and enjoy the meal.

*Here's a handy test of whether you are "busy": 

1. Do you watch Dancing with the Stars, America's Next Top Model, Project Runway or Oprah?
2. Do you have machines that wash and dry your clothes for you?
3. Do you have indoor plumbing?
   
4. Do you have time to take footnoted blog tests?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you are not "busy" so please do not talk to me about it.

The Sexual Politics of Baby Clothes

In which your humble narrator decries the public's tendency to assume that his tiny, adorable daughter is a dude.

I didn't realize it when we had Child #1 (male) that everyone... and I mean nearly everyone, assumes that babies are boys unless they are dressed in ludicrously stereotypically girlie clothes. Since Child #2 is a baby lady, this has become much more apparent when we're out doing errands and old ladies start talking to "him" and referring to Child #1's "little brother" and talking about how handsome* Child #2 is.

Since we're cheap, Child #2 wears a lot of Child #1's baby clothes. Babies don't have a whole lot going on in the sex differentiation department. Onesies work equally well to cover up boy bits and girl bits. It doesn't help that baby girl clothes are usually more cheaply made and more expensive than baby boy clothes (Wife and Sister-of-me assure me this is the case for adult lady clothes as well). Yet, unless Child #2 is wearing either pink or light purple, people think she's a tiny dude. What's up with that?

I'm not putting one of those stupid velcro bows on her head. It ain't gonna happen.



*Admittedly she is "handsome" in the traditional sense that it's applied to women as in "pretty but tall with a big nose." Child #2 seems to have inherited "El Schnozola Grande" from my side of the family. I pray daily her head will be big enough to carry it off as an adult.

I married a sex researcher

In which your humble narrator comments on his Wife's profession and a book he recently managed to finish reading.

It's an absolute delight to tell people that you're married to a sex researcher. It's even better if you're telling local, born 'n' bred Minnesotans. Their little eyes get big and narrow quickly. Then they pronounce it "interesting," which is Minnesota-Speak for either "that is so boring that I will probably die right now" or "that is too horrifying to even contemplate; I have no choice but to go into a coma."

Wife wasn't a sex researcher when I married her, but that's what she does now. It's actually much, much, much more boring than you think it is. She mostly does fancy (and sexy) math and writes statistical program syntax and consults on research methodology for the faculty in her department.

If you know the history of sex research (or as I prefer: sexy research) you know that it all started with Alfred Kinsey, a voyeuristic, scientific, hedonistic, occasionally masochistic researcher at Indiana University who collected a lot of super-smutty data from a lot of perverted people. He was also one of two main characters in T.C. Boyle's The Inner Circle, a fictionalized account of Kinsey's sexy research as told by a fictional assistant, John Milk. Boyle's portrait of Kinsey isn't particularly flattering. He is presented largely as a somewhat cold, compulsive man whose control over those who surrounded him extended even into the bedroom. All in all, Liam Neeson seemed a lot nicer in the movie.

What was striking about this book was the listlessness of the novel. Boyle usually creates characters, that even if you don't particularly like, are at least interesting. In this volume he took a man who was arguably one of the more interesting scientists of the twentieth century and makes him into a stern, creepy controlling father figure for a bleating little weiner-man narrator.

Somehow I thought the book would be a lot more salacious. But then again I thought being married to a sex researcher would be too.

This weekend I did not die

In which your humble narrator describes the horrors of code compliance and the likelihood that it will kill you in your sleep.

I almost never die on the weekend, and this past one was no exception, but it I did come closer to death than usual.

Regular readers (hi to all three of you!) will remember my water heater woes from a few weeks back in which we learned that we needed to have an expensive metal liner shoved down our chimney for many hundreds of dollars, so that we would not die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Last Thursday, after most of the coldest, wettest October in Minnesota that I can remember had passed, the chimney guy (I'll call him "Ron" because that's his name) came with his chimney helper (I refrained from referring to him as the "elf.") to put in the new liner. They worked for about three hours, finished up and went away. Hooray!

Then it warmed up, which was nice. So the furnace didn't really run Friday or Saturday. Then it got cold again, and since we don't like freezing it started kicking on Sunday. Everybody was sort of crabby and disagreeable all day. I had a headache that wouldn't go away, even though it never threatened to blossom into migraine-awfulness. It was just sort of a crappy day all the way around.

Then on Monday I woke up with a headache again. I went down to the basement to start one of 37 loads of laundry that needs to be done weekly and noticed that the basement was humid, smelly and was making me feel woozy. Also, the furnace was overheating and blowing stinky air out of the intake vent. Then I went outside and noticed that there was no smoke coming from the chimney. Then I turned the furnace off and opened a lot of windows and called Ron. Ron was there within a half an hour, and seemed more freaked out than I was. I sort of assume basic human decency coupled with visions of lawsuits danced in his head. I figured that since we hadn't already expired that we were probably all good at this point.

Anyway, he fixed it within about 3 hours. (Which is when my headache went away too!) Apparently a piece of the new liner came loose and blocked the furnace exhaust entrance to the flue, causing the furnace to backdraft into the house.

I'd just like to point out that the old, non-code-compliant, ostensibly dangerous chimney liner never tried to kill us all in our sleep.