Eccentric Flower:200002/Kitty Stairmaster and other stories

It's been a while since I cleared out the attic. The code seems to be going well and I did about four thousand words on "The Jaguar's Wife" yesterday (it'll probably get posted tomorrow - we'll see - it's a long 'un), so I feel I have the breathing space for Oscar speculation, book reviews, and other random notes.

I also have some Serious Comments about something Susan of the Apocalypse and I spoke about at our lovely dinner on Wednesday, but I'm still doing the research on that and it deserves its own entry anyway.

Today I go to The Future House and pry loose a piece of paneling in the basement to check on the only urgent issue the inspector noted - how recently carpenter ants were in the house. They've definitely been there at some point in the past, but with any luck they're not there now. Carpenter ants are serious stuff.

I got a lesson on carpenter ants from the inspector. Apparently you can tell the difference between termites and carpenter ants immediately. Termites are slobs; they leave a mess all over the place. They're not very organized. Carpenter ants don't leave any debris. Ironically, carpenter ants eat termites, so in a way that's good, but unfortunately they're a lot more efficient than termites. They come in, take over the termite operation, unionize, put in assembly lines, and before you know it you're sitting in a pile of sawdust.

I liked the inspector - he wasn't one of these remote unapproachable people, which is good, because I needed to ask a lot of stupid questions. Okay, some of my questions weren't stupid. I've done electrical work and carpentry and drywall repair and plumbing and roofing. I'm semi-competent at these things. But it's the strange things that trip you up. I have never lived in a home which used radiators for heat. (Contrary to what you may believe, homes in Louisiana DO require heating systems, but they're generally forced air.) So I had to be shown how to handle a boiler and how you periodically need to flush the rusty water out, just like a car radiator. The radiator boiler burns oil. No houses in Louisiana have oil heat. Heck, no houses in Louisiana have basements. And here, a northern vs. a southern exposure makes all the difference in the world. Down in the jungle, no one cares.

This is going to be scary. It's also going to be a lot of fun. That's one of the primary virtues of owning your house. Assuming you have the money, you can say, "Hey, let's take that wall out," and no one will stop you. So long as it's up to code.

That reminds me:

This week, in various random moments of free time, I've finally read a book that I've been planning to read for months. It was recommended to me by an Ardent Reader, but I forget whom. It's by a gentleman named Bill Bryson, and it's called I'm a Stranger Here Myself. What happened is that Bryson lived in England for twenty years - or, as he put it, left America as an adolescent and came back as a middle-aged adult with a wife and children. Some culture shock, needless to say, was involved.

Bryson loves America, but he points out its wretched excesses as only an expatriate can. I would like to make this book required reading for everyone, because he does it with genial crankiness and good humor and it's just about impossible to be offended, even as he points out that, collectively, we act like morons.

I admit it: Some of this is especially important to me because of my personal peeves, mostly America's resource consumption. I try not to drive anywhere. Most Americans drive everywhere. Bryson has a handful of sad stories about places which were made pedestrian-friendly and failed because people felt they had to walk too far from their cars.

Bryson notes that five percent of the power used in this country is from computers and other appliances being left on all night or while otherwise unused. I don't have so much of a problem with the computers - you can't just turn a Unix machine off, for example - it's the monitors that bother me. They eat juice and they increase room heat tangibly. I'm sure one company I worked at had its air conditioning bill hiked because of all the monitors left on all night. I always turn mine off. I'd turn off my co-workers' too, if I thought they wouldn't lynch me.

Why does the house remind me of this? Because it has no hot water tank. The hot water for showers and such is heated on demand. The capacity is 5 gallons a minute. As the inspector put it, "Anywhere else in the world, that'd be luxurious; in this country, we're greedy."

5 gallons a minute should be more than enough.

I was looking for "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" yesterday and realized in horror that, while we have approximately a zillion books and at least a few hundred survey-of-literature collections, we do not have a single book that contains this story. Do you know what such books always anthologize instead? Hawthorne. The only Irving I could find was one lone "Rip Van Winkle."

What is the deal with Hawthorne? Okay, look, I have acquired new respect for Melville, once I reread Moby Dick and realized that what he was trying to do was not tell a story but give the reader a complete feel for what whaling was like, the danger and the mess and excitement and all. I can even, after many years of recalcitrance, find a few good words about Dickens - I now acknowledge that he was very good at what he did, it just isn't something I'm interested in reading.

But Hawthorne will never leave my personal Black Codex of banished writers. If there is anything good and redeeming in this tedious little sin-obsessed man, I haven't been able to find it. I do not understand what people see in this guy.

"Fox Trot" has been running a series where Jason has turned into a girl (after hearing about The Metamorphosis and hoping to wake up as some horrible creature). I swear, Amend has been reading some transgender fiction on the web or something, because he has hit every single TG cliche in the book (Jason is horrified as being addressed as the other kids' "sister," there's a training-bra joke, he discovers to his chagrin that suddenly shopping is looking more appealing, his best friend Marcus has brought him flowers, et cetera) and done a bang-up job with them.

It's made my mornings a little brighter. I should write him a nice letter. But he'd probably just think I'm a freak.

On Wednesday I went home to freshen up for dinner, and just before I left, I fed the cats. I thought to myself, "Should I leave a note for Nonelvis to tell her I've fed them?" I decided not to. I was in a hurry, and it was close enough to their regular feeding time that she'd figure it out.

As I was parting company with Susan, she mentioned that this was the first time she'd ever lived with a cat. They were never around the house when she was growing up, because her father was allergic to them, and her mother thought they were sneaky.

Well, they are sneaky.

When I got home, it was gradually revealed that Inu had managed to scam a second dinner out of Nonelvis, by convincing Nonelvis that I hadn't fed her (she had, of course, already consumed all the prior evidence). Inu, once her deceit was uncovered, was unsurprisingly unrepentant.

Just wait. The new house has an upstairs. She's never experienced stairs before. We're going to put her litter box upstairs and her food downstairs and watch as the Kitty Stairmaster program takes effect.

I didn't get to the Oscars, did I? Well, maybe next time.