The Boring Details

I'm trying to get out of my apartment as easily and as painlessly as possible. My apartment seems to have other ideas about that. On Saturday my tub seemed to drain slow. Then, on Sunday, the was a thin pool of water at my feet as I finished my shower. Ugh. I've been through this several times over the years I've lived there. Tree roots have clogged the pipes again. The easiest thing to do would be to call someone and have the plumber out to snake the line, but the plumber always wants to spend an hour or two checking out everything else first. The problem is that access to the line is from a vent pipe on the roof so the plumber has to haul the very heavy snaking equipment up a ladder on to the roof. In addition to his inclination to waste $185 an hour looking for the wrong things, the roof situation makes the plumber's visit an annoyance. I am thinking I will have to plan a day away from home and leave a note with the local handyman, hoping they will get the line snaked without me having to be around.

In the meantime, I bought some granularized copper sulfate at Home Depot this afternoon to see if I can take care of the root problems myself. I doubt it will happen, as the back of the container says it takes about 3 to 4 weeks to take effect. Still it's worth a try on the slim hope that I can avoid having the plumber come inside my place.

I also bought some other supplies for cleaning out my place, the most expensive of which was a box of large trash bags for hauling stuff out. I took out two bags of trash last night and that cleaned me out of bags. I still need to get a box cutter for cutting up old, un-reusable boxes.

While shopping for cleaning out supplies, I also bought a pair of 'For Sale' signs to stick in the windows of my Sportage. It saddens me to get rid of the Sportage. That is the only car I bought and paid for all on my own. I got the loan myself with no co-signers— at only 18% interest!— and I made all the car payments (eventually). I am rather proud of having done that, and I really do love that car. I know other people routinely buy and pay off cars by themselves, but when it comes to money matters, I'm not like other people...

Yesterday I contacted my friend and comedy mentor, Bill Word. Late last year, high on the feeling of having some free time, I bought a new round of classes from him with the intent of getting back on stage. Of course, my car then immediately stopped working right. I hope to get a few of those classes in before I leave town. In fact, had I been better prepared, I would have driven into Orange County tonight for the first, but I was just too unorganized. maybe next Monday night. That gives me time to write a few jokes and work them out a bit.

Last Friday I finished the third and final volume of Peter Hamilton's "The Night's Dawn" trilogy. This was a big set of books, running to about 2000 pages in print. I read the entire thing on my Kindle. I probably explained some several posts ago that I'd read the first volume twice before over the last 10 years. This time I pushed myself all the way through and very much enjoyed it. It's a space opera with a large cast of characters— often a confusingly large cast, as even some of the spaceships are characters. It's set about 700 years in our future, after conditions on Earth forced centuries of planetary colonization. At the time the story begins, mankind is bound together by the Confederation, which includes 800+ planets and representatives of two alien species, one far more advanced and one to which the Confederation is actively selling technology. On a backwater colony planet an energistic alien accidentally gets involved in a violent dispute between settlers, a rebelling criminal class, and a long-hidden galactic criminal. The alien's strange energy opens a rift into an energy continuum where the souls of humankind past are wandering adrift in agony. The opening allows them to stream through and take over weakened human bodies, occupying them as hijackers with the original personality locked away. The returned souls discover they have wildly strong energies that stem from their lost continuum, and they begin spreading like a virus. The newly returned, in order to ease the agonies of the other souls they can still hear, use their powers to attack the non-possessed, weakening them to the point where a possessing soul can take over. It's a space opera of high technology and zombies. I am glad I finally took the time to finish it.

Talk to you again soon!

"Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day."— Simone de Beauvoir