The Curse of the White Carpet

It's almost a year since we replaced our living room carpet with white carpeting. New rules were immediately implemented.

Special carpet cleaning liquids were purchased. Good thing. Within a week I spilled coffee on the new carpet. Since we could clean it up, I was allowed to remain.

Shoes must be removed before entering the carpeted area. This means the entire downstairs, excluding the kitchen and bathroom, the stairs and the second floor hallway.

I bought two pairs of footwear to be worn only in the house. My wife designated shoes she already had for this purpose. Visitors are kind. They obey the no-shoes rule gracefully.

Service persons come to the back door to get to the basement to read the gas meter. The man who delivers salt for our basement water softener not only comes to the back but takes his shoes off even before entering the kitchen. Truly extraordinary.

I walk through the house, eyes downward, looking for anything that would mar the pristine surface of the white carpet. If I find a speck I quickly pick it up or get the zuuper, which is what we call our hand-held vacuum cleaner.

My brain is now on automatic alert. If I thoughtlessly begin to step on the carpet with my outdoor shoes a mental alarm goes off. I stop in my tracks and replace outdoor with indoor footwear.

Were we nuts to buy white carpeting? One friend wasted no time telling me we had made a mistake. I didn't think that was a very sensitive remark. On the other hand he may have been right, but about 11 months after installation the white carpet still looks white. More importantly, my wife loves it.

We are on constant vigil to avoid the curse of the white carpet.

Caution is the watchword.

It's a Dog's Life

My neighbor has a fake lawn in her backyard. This is an improvement over what she had. It's green and bordered by medium size white rocks. Actually it's a playground for her four dogs.

She has nice patio furniture and on pleasant afternoons she sits in a comfortable chair and watches her pets at play. They play nicely with each other and only one of them gets yappy from time to time.

My neighbor vacuums her fake lawn and that makes a racket. She sometimes vacuums when I'm trying to take an afternoon nap. I try to ignore it.

I can't imagine what this entire backyard makeover must have cost. I went on line and found several web sites that offer fake lawns. One of them, www.xgrass.com looked interesting so I checked it out.

The site offered promotional views that looked suspiciously like my neighbor's back yard. They also offer their fake surfaces to kennels, boarding facilities, dog parks, pet resorts (if you can believe that) and a host of other pet-related projects. They also do fake lawns for homes.

You're probably wondering, as I am, what this kind of fake grass installation might cost. But I'm not going to pursue that because I don't really care.

If she's happy, we're happy. Talk about a dogs' life.

No Good Deed, etc.

This comes under the heading of no good deed goes unpunished.

We recently hired a new gardening service. Yesterday they treated our lawn and left instructions to water regularly. Seemed a reasonable request, particularly since this summer has been so hot without much rain.

I had been making do with a lawn sprinkler that would move only in one direction. So I bought a new one that would move properly in both directions and late in the afternoon I hooked it up and it worked fine.

However, when I went to turn it off the faucet handle would turn only so far. As hard as I tried, it wouldn't turn the water off. I tried again with all my strength and the faucet handle came off in my hand. And the water was still running.

It was early evening by this time but I wasn't worried. I went to the basement to turn off the valve that feeds the external hose outlet. I don't think that valve had been turned in years. In any case, it wouldn't budge. Not to be deterred, I lugged out my lug wrench and gave it a good turn. You guessed it, the handle came right off. Now I had two broken faucets and the water was still running outside.

I turned off the main water valve and called our plumber. I left a message explaining our situation. I assumed he'd be available in the morning. However, less than an hour later the back doorbell rang and THERE HE WAS!

He said he was watching a movie with his family and when it ended he decided to check his messages. And there we were, and here he was fixing both our faucets that same evening.

In case you're wondering why we get such good service, I have to tell you that this young man went to school with our younger son and also was in my wife's elementary school class. In other words, he's almost like family.

I guess we're just plum(ber) lucky.

I find the following presumptuous...

“It's a question as old as the hills. How do I move music off of my computer or smartphone and into the speakers in my house?”

The fact that it led the tech section of a major newspaper once again tells me how irrelevant I am, and surely others of my generation as well. “As old as the hills?” How old are those hills, young writer? Ten, twenty?

When I was the writer's age our hills didn't have computers or smartphones. And the only speakers we had were inside a radio.

If you wanted to hear music you turned on the radio. If you were affluent, you had a record player, yes a record player, or phonograph as they once were called. They spun discs at 78 rpm. Each side of the disc had one song or segment of classical music. Sometimes you changed the records manually.

And you listened to them in the room the device was in. Of course you could have radios in more than one room. Chances are different occupants had different listening tastes so if they were all home at the same time you may have heard more than one sound at any given time.

Then came television and again, that usually was a one-in-a-room situation. And you know what? We lived with it. I can't remember a single person of my acquaintance asking how they could get “their music” in every room in the house.

Obviously this is a modern dilemma which the tech savvy are busily solving. Good luck to them and many happy hours of listening wherever they may be.

As long as it's not next to me.

I Got Nothing

I'm taking the night off. Hope to have something tomorrow.
Thanks for checking in.

Food and Thoughts

We went to a luncheon today thrown by our brokerage firm. The guest speaker was the chief economist of their sister firm. He was very good at explaining where we had been and why he thought we would be okay going forward. No doomsday scenarios from him.

So although we enjoyed his presentation (the food not so much) we left wondering what other economists would say using their own data. If there's one thing we've learned about economists is that if one says A another will say B and still others will go for C, D, etc. I love the old expression there are lies, damn lies and statistics. And you know economists live and die by statistics.

So what did we take away from our lecture? I'm not sure. My cynicism about the economic mess we're in today has me watching mostly from the sidelines. I still want to see the perpetrators of the financial bust go to jail but I doubt they will. They're too busy cashing bonus checks.

We all appreciated our speakers' sincerity and acumen. No doubt the man knows his stuff. But applying stuff to a slide presentation isn't exactly the same as applying it to real life.

We spoke briefly with our host broker later and after discussing this and that we agreed that all commerce runs on greed. Are we happy about that? Doesn't matter. It's the way the world muddles through.

What Did He Say?

We know we've lost some of our hearing, particularly beginning sounds of words. That's okay when we're having a conversation. We can usually pick up the context without asking for a repeat. Constantly asking someone to repeat what they just said can be annoying.

But what is particularly annoying is when actors in movies or on TV shows mumble so indistinctly we don't have a chance to understand them. That's one of the reasons I record almost every show we watch on TV. True, it's mostly to skip through the commercials but it does help when we need a repeat.

I often playback a segment and turn up the sound to try to figure out what's been said. Case in point: we love the PBS Mystery series but half the time we have trouble with the accents as well as the mumbling. So we just follow the action and fill in the dialogue as best we can. Of course you can't do that in a movie house so mostly our complaints are about TV offerings.

I wonder if movie producers and directors encourage their actors to slur their words or deliberately speak indistinctly. Is this sort of speech considered an art form? Not here.

So add mumbling to my list of modern manifestations we have to muddle through.