Steven Harper's Blog, page 78

Aran at Camp

Aran is at Camp Grace Bentley for a week.  CGB sits on the shore of Lake Huron and is a little clump of old-fashioned summer camp cabins with six beds and six closets in each cabin, old wood floors, and high, bare beams.  They have that old-building scent to them, too.  The main building is a huge, beautiful wood-paneled house that overlooks all the other cabins like a hen over her chicks.  The dining room (in said house) has a half-circle of bay windows that look out over the lake.  CBG specializes in young people with disabilities, giving them a week of summer camp (and their parents a week of respite) in a world where most places don't accommodate special needs people. 

Aran loves it there.  He's been going for four years now.  They allow people to continue going even into adulthood, since special needs people so often have no place to take a vacation.

Aran is able to pack for himself.  He could also drive himself, really, but the camp has no parking facilities for campers (it's generally not an issue), so he has to get a ride.  On Wednesday, he and I drove out in perfect weather.

At the camp, Aran greeted most of the counselors by name, with enthusiasm.  We registered and got his suitcases into the cabin, said our good-byes, and I left.

Next week, Darwin, Max, and I are going up to Harbor Springs for OUR vacation.  (Aran wanted a deliberately separate vacation from ours, as a way to have his own grown-up space, which is why he went to GCB at the same time we planned our up north vacation.)

Aran's grandparents are picking him up when camp ends next week, and he'll have a few days at home by himself before we get home.  Let the parties begin!

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Restaining

The deck needed to be restained yet again. We only did this two years ago, but it needed it again. Darwin is in charge of all outdoor projects, and I kicked him in the head reminded him repeatedly of this fact until he called a local business to come and do it.

It took them a long time because it kept raining. They finally were able to come out and wash the deck one day and two days later come out and stain it. The last time we had it done, the worker used a roller. These guys used an air gun. They got it all and did a nice job!








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Freezing in June

The West Coast and the Southwest are frying.  Seattle is in the 90s.  Arizona is in the 110s and even 120s.  (Don't want to punch global warming deniers?)  Meanwhile, here in Michigan, we're freezing.  Almost literally.

The last two weeks have been a relentless dive into the 60s and 70.  Yesterday, we didn't even make it to 70, and today we're expected to hit 72 at the most.  And it's been rainy.  What is this, Ireland?  Michigan summers by now are regularly in the mid- to upper 80s, and we're heading for the beach.  Nope!  Not now! 

I know--the 110 people are ready to punch me.  But this unusual weather is, in its way, just as frustrating as the super hot stuff.  It's COLD at night, for one thing.  Last night, it got down into the 40s, and we woke up with our teeth chattering.  Should turn the furnace back on?  It's almost July, for frig's sake!

Now the global warming deniers chime in.  "See?  The globe can't be warming!  It's cold!"

Fuck you.  The reason it's so cold is all the extra energy--heat--in our atmosphere is pulling the jet stream south, and like a giant fan, it's blowing arctic air down our way.  This is the epitome of global warming.  And did we mention 120 in Arizona?

Electric cars can't come fast enough.




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Lords of the Ring

When Darwin and I got engaged, we got rings that we used as both engagement rings and wedding rings.  However, I didn't like the style he did, and he didn't like the style I did.  In the end, we decided our rings didn't have to match, so they didn't.

Darwin's ring is faceted tungsten.  It slipped off his finger while he was swimming in a river and vanished.

My precious.

We bought a replacement from the same jeweler.  A few months later, this second ring simply vanished without a trace.  Darwin noticed it wasn't on his finger one day, and it wasn't on his dresser or his nightstand or in the bathroom.  We turned the house upside down.  I even got out the metal detector and ran it over the lawn.  Nothing.

We bought yet another replacement ring, and the jeweler noted that Darwin was his best repeat customer.

About ten months passed.

I already mentioned that we traded in the truck and got a mid-sized SUV instead.  We also wanted to trade in the Ford CMAX Darwin drives for a newer model, but the dealer offered a rotten trade-in price, and we declined.  Instead, we opted to get the CMAX detailed so it would LOOK like new.

The detailer kept the CMAX for a long, long time, but when he returned it, the car was thoroughly cleaned and restored, inside and out.  Even the engine compartment and tires were shiny and new-looking.

Darwin was going through the car and put his hand in the pouch fastened to the back of the driver's seat.  He made a strange face and pulled out his ring.

Precious!

He has no idea how it got there.  Best guess is that he put his hand in there and the ring was swiped as he pulled it back out, and he didn't notice.  Thoroughly strange.

Here's the other thing: this particular ring was a tiny bit large for Darwin (which is why it probably slid off his finger in the pouch).  He'd been intending to have it resized.  However, it happens to fit me.

So now I have two wedding rings--one that matches his exactly, and one that doesn't.

We are Lords of the Ring, my Precious.

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Catching the Refrigerator

You know the old joke. The lady calls the repair man and says, "My refrigerator won't stop," and he says, "Then you better catch it!"

This is us.

The refrigerator won't stop running.  Or rather, it mostly won't.  It runs, then clicks audibly off for a second, then clicks back on, then clicks off, then on, then off, then on.  It still keeps food cold and merrily makes ice, but clearly there's some kind of problem.

Meanwhile, the dishwasher went on strike.  It operates with pushbuttons atop the door, and abruptly none of them worked.  We were forced to wash dishes in the sink.  (Oh, the humanity!)

I called an appliance repair place, and they dutifully sent out a repair technician the next day.  After some rummaging around with both appliances, he said some wires had burnt out on the dishwasher and needed replacing.  An easy fix.  But the fridge had problems with its circuit board.

"The factory that made the boards was wiped out in the Japan tsunami," he said.  "So the part is really hard to get.  We're talking $600."

Eep.

So he fixed the washing machine, and next we have to hunt for a new refrigerator.

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Planning for Ireland

Darwin and I are going to Ireland.  Yay!

We've been talking about it for a long time.  I love Ireland and have visited before.  Darwin has always wanted to go.  He was uncertain about going this summer, and I pointed out that for the first time in years, I'm not under contract this summer, meaning I can go without worrying about a writing deadline.  So he decided it would be a good idea.

The first part was settling on a date.  After some finagling, we choose the second and third weeks of August.  And then when we had the dates all set, I played with the ticket buying program and discovered if we stayed one more day, the plane ticket prices dropped by over $200 each.  That would more than pay for an extra night in Dublin, so we happily extended the trip.

Then we had to figure out where to stay.  After more finagling and discussion, we decided to do what I did last time--spend a few days in Dublin, move to a rural cottage for several days, and then come back to Dublin for the end.  In fact, I discovered the same cottage I stayed before at was available!  Clonleason Gate Lodge  is an easily driveable distance from several archaeological sites we want to see, and there's a bog and a ruined castle nearby, so it's a perfect place for us.  We booked it.

And we ran into problems with finding places to stay in Dublin.  Man!

Darwin and I don't like hotels much.  (Who does, right?)  They're sterile, the amenities are limited, they're small, and if you're tired and just want to hang out for part of a day, you feel foolish sitting in a hotel room to do it.  That's why we like renting cottages or flats.  You have all the amenities of home, you have more space, and if you want to zone out for a day, you feel like you're doing it in your own living room. 

Like a lot of people, we use Airbnb to book places and have had wonderful results in the past.  This time, though, the places that turned up were too expensive or badly located.  When we were looking for a place to stay at our arrival, two times we tried to book places and the host turned the booking down, once because the host said she was looking for people to stay for at least a week, and another who just didn't answer.  At last we managed to find a nice flat.

But the REAL challenge was for the few days before we left.  We needed a place Friday through Monday, and the number of places dwindled sharply, or were REALLY expensive.  In the end, we gritted our teeth and booked a place that was quite a distance from the center of the city and still more than we wanted to pay.

And then . . .

I was surfing around the web site for Trinity College.  TC houses the Book of Kells, which we'll want to see, and I wanted to find out what the College's museum hours were.  Quite by accident, I discovered Trinity College rents out its student rooms and apartments during the summer. (!)  The location would be perfect, of course, and the prices were startlingly low.  In fact, booking a two-person apartment for three nights would cost about $200 less than the flat we'd found, and several hundred less than any hotel.

I canceled the flat and booked the flat at Trinity.  My only regret is that there wasn't an apartment available for when we arrived--they only had rooms with a single bed.

So now we just need to rent a car!





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Salt Potatoes

I came across a reference to salt potatoes as being a really good treat.  I researched them and found they looked interesting, so I decided to try them out on Darwin and the boys.

Salt potatoes are basically new potatoes simmered in heavily-salted water.  Once the potatoes are done, you pour most of the water off and bring the remaining brine back to a boil, rolling the potatoes around in it all the while.  When the water is nearly gone, you take the pot off the heat and keep rolling until the water is gone and you're left with a salty crust that forms on the potatoes and makes them look wrinkly.  You eat them plain or dip them in butter or an herb sauce.

I served them with plain chicken and a fruit salad.

The boys were dubious.  What the heck were these things?  Even Darwin "Salty McSaltSalt" McClary, who once salted a slab of bacon, wasn't sure.  But once they tried them, all doubts melted.

You can't eat salt potatoes timidly.  The salt crust is very powerful, and you have to bite all the way through the potato to bring the mealy inside into contact with the outside salt.  But when you do . . . they are delicious.  And heavy.  Boy, are they heavy!  Two pounds of new potatoes--a weensy bag--was more than enough for two adults and two teens.

The recipe is a keeper, but it's a once-in-a-while treat, not a regular dish.

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Reasons Why I Stopped Watching 13 Reasons Why (And Why I Started in the First Place)

All my students were buzzing about the Netflix show 13 REASONS WHY.  I'd heard of it, of course.  I knew about the controversy.  And I knew, even without watching, that it in no way portrayed suicide accurately, and I had no desire to watch it. 

But then I found out a high school friend of mine, Brian d'Arcy James, was in it as the father of the suicide victim.  Brian mostly does stage work on Broadway (he's currently playing King George in HAMILTON), so I rarely get to see his work.  Most recently I saw him in the movie SPOTLIGHT, and it's always fun to see him perform.  So I decided to give 13 REASONS a look.

I lasted about five episodes.

I suppose I should warn about spoilers in the following, though the show has been out for months, and I don't see it as my job to protect anyone from plot spoilers after that long.  But I'll be nice. SPOILERS.

The show was absolutely awful.  Part of it, I'm sure, is that it does cater completely and unabashedly to the teenaged crowd, and there's really nothing in it for adults.  That's okay--I can enjoy a teen show on its own merits.  But . . .

The premise:  A teenage girl commits suicide (and the show was bad enough that I can't remember anyone's names, so I'm reduced to giving them epithets), and a few days after her death, a set of cassette tapes appears on the doorstep of the main character.  The tapes are an audio diary from Suicide Girl explaining, in detail, how thirteen different people drove her to kill herself, and, she says on the first tape, if you don't listen to all of them all the way through, something awful will happen.  "You're being watched," she says (feeding into the adolescent feeling of being the center of the world and that everyone is always watching you).

Okay, we all know suicide doesn't work this way.  Netflix was even pressured into putting a little disclaimer at the beginning of the first episode to this effect.  But a disclaimer doesn't stop me from thinking, "This would never happen" and "That would never work" and "This isn't remotely possible," which yanks me constantly out of the story and reminds me that I'm watching a fake for fake fakey-fake TV show.  I can't even pretend it might possibly somehow be a little bit real, which wrecks the viewing experience.

Suicide girl, you see, goes through some world-wrecking bullying at school which culminates in graphic sexual assault (I didn't get that far, but I read about it) that is so bad it drves her to kill herself, but she somehow manages to hold it all together long enough to formulate and execute an extensive, Machiavellian postmortem revenge  plan with dozens of moving parts that hold together without input from her.  She narrates the tapes in a chipper, snarky tone with no sign of being upset or unhappy. 

Seriously.  I have an easier time believing in an magical island full of warrior women created by Zeus, or a skinny kid from Brooklyn being transformed by a mysterious drug into a super-hero than this.  If Suicide Girl is so smart and savvy and together while putting this plan off, why doesn't she ask for help?  Or get her revenge while she's alive to see it?  Hell, why not just run away and leave the tapes behind as 13 Reasons Why I Ran Away?  None of it makes any kind of sense.  Easier to believe in giant apes living on an uncharted island than this.

The characters are also unlikable and uninteresting.  Every one of them.  There's Football Boy (the eventual rapist) who heads up a coterie of friends who hang out in his rich parents' pool house (which is bigger than most people's houses) and is for some reason worshiped by the entire student body (in reality, most students at a high school can't name the quarterback, nor would they care).  He drinks, does drugs, and beats up smaller students.  We also have Suicide Girl's Bitchy Best Friend, who gets into a fight with her over a boy (of course) and slaps her in the cafeteria.  We have Camera Kid who peeps into windows and takes pictures of Suicide Girl while she's dressing.  We have Asian Lesbian-in-the-Closet Girl who is being raised by two dads but is somehow too closeted to admit she is herself lesbian.  (WTF?  So being adopted and raised by two men turns you both gay and closeted.  I was ready to punch the fucking screen at that one.  Or just knock the writers' teeth so far down their collective throats that they could chew their own shit as it came out their asses.)  We have Miscellaneous Teens who spread half-naked photos of Suicide Girl around with their phones and make fun of her about it.  I wouldn't have wanted any of them in my classroom, let alone in my life--or on my iPad.

And we have Doormat Boy, the viewpoint character.  He receives the tapes and starts listening, but can't bring himself to listen to more than five seconds at a time before anxiety takes over and he has to stop.  Here's where things become even more unbelievable.  Doormat Boy, we learn, is something like the ninth or tenth person to get the tapes.  The tapes have been passed around from teen to teen, and everyone keeps asking Doormat Boy if he's listened to "his" tape yet (the tape that talks about his role in Suicide Girl's death).  When he says he hasn't, the asker always shouts, "What are you waiting for?  You have to listen!!"  But Doormat Boy can't do it.  And why?  Because if he did, the show would be over.  The show needs him to listen to one tape per episode.  So, against human nature and every bit of reason in the universe, Doormat Boy listens to one bit at a time.

Doormat Boy always does what the person next to him says.  Suicide Girl orders him to be her friend, and so he does.  Football Boy's friends pressure him into drinking, so he chugs a beer.  And, of course, Suicide Girl orders him to listen to the tapes on the first cassette, and he does.  I heard that later he starts standing up for himself, but I wasn't willing to wait for it.

Suicide Girl herself is a nasty little bitch.  She's mean and snarky to her friends.  She walks all over Doormat Boy.  She calls him names (the fact that she calls him by a series of demeaning nicknames instead of his actual name turns into a running joke).  Whenever she asks him for advice and he gives it, she says something cruel to him in return, and when he finally gets up the gumption to protest about it, she simpers at him and walks away.  She starts arguments with her friends and parents over inconsequential matters just to have drama in the episode.  Bitchy, nasty, unlikable.  If I was supposed to feel sorry she was dead, by Episode 5 I wasn't.

I also couldn't swallow the idea that no one tells anyone else about the tapes.  Ten-odd teens have gotten hold of these tapes, and they've told their friends about them, but NOT ONE PARENT has learned of them?  No.  Just no.  Someone would talk about it to an adult.  Or an adult would find the tapes by accident and give a listen.  Or they'd stumble onto their teenager listening and demand to know what's going on.  ("Why are you listening to a tape?")  There's no way something like this would remain a secret when this many people know about it.  I've seen it in action.  Just last week at school, a kid kept spraying stink bomb aerosol in classes as a prank.  It was supposed to stay a huge secret who was doing it.  But within twenty minutes, someone ratted him out.  Someone ALWAYS talks.  Always.  The tapes would be public knowledge in a matter of hours.

And why DOES everyone do what Suicide Girl says on the tapes?  Sorry, hon, but you're dead.  You don't get to reach out of your grave and tell other people what to do.  If I got a bunch of cassettes from a dead person that said, "Go to Spot A in town and listen," I MIGHT continue listening, but I definitely wouldn't go to Spot A to do it.  My overall instinct would be to return the tapes to Suicide Girl's parents, untouched, or maybe to erase them and throw them out.  I certainly wouldn't obey orders from beyond the grave, if for no other reason than a feeling of "Fuck you."  Yet on this show, every single person follows orders.  Another point of disbelief.  No one erases the tapes or throws them away or says, "Fuck this!"?  Sure.

And Brian's role as Suicide Girl's father?  Well, he was barely given enough screen time for me to form an opinion.  He's an adult in a teen drama, so he'd shown up in maybe four scenes by the time I stopped watching.  I'm glad he got the chance to be on what's inexplicably a hit show, though.

When I got halfway through Episode 5, I realized I was watching the show out of a sense of duty more than any enjoyment, and that I actively disliked bringing it up on Netflix.  There was nothing redeeming in the show, nothing fun or interesting to watch, nothing that made me look forward to more.  The show actively pissed me off, in fact.  I decided to remove the show from my queue, and you know what?  I felt a strange sense of relief. 

No more banal adventures of Doormat Boy and Suicide Girl.

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The Noise, Noise, Noise!

I'm starting to despise our neighbors.  I mean really loathe, hate, and despise them.

They're inconsiderate, selfish, and downright stupid.

And it all comes down to their lawns.

Every single day--and I mean EVERY SINGLE DAY--my neighbors in my subdivision are outside working on their lawns or their decks or their gutters.  They must have golf-course level lawns.  If a leaf falls, alarms go off. 

Normally I wouldn't give a shit.  You want to waste your life on this?  Go for it.  When you die, you can have "He kept a nice lawn" engraved on your tombstone. 

The trouble is, they're all so fucking noisy about it.  They do nothing by hand.  Ever.  Everyone has a giant lawn mower that can harvest corn to mow their weensy yards with, and they're LOUD.  Then they whip out the leaf blowers, which scream a high-pitched whine for hours and hours and hours.  I once timed a particular offender and discovered she worked her leaf blower for over three hours one afternoon.  As a write this, yet another neighbor is power-washing his driveway, which apparently requires an air compressor louder than a North Pacific chainsaw.  I have a neighbor who drags a machine out to bleach her gutter every so often.  Bleach!  I'm not making this up.

It wouldn't be so bad if these things happened all at once, for an hour or so a week.  But no--they happen every fucking day.  When one neighbor finally finishes, the next revs up his rusty toy.  It's like they wait.  "No, I can't do mine now--Fred over there is already making noise.  I'll wait until he's done to keep it going."

It's the leaf blowers that baffle me the most.  I watched the leaf-blower neighbor chase a pair of leaves across her lawn with her blower.  TWO LEAVES.  It would have been faster and more efficient for her to pick them up.  It would absolutely be faster and more efficient for her to just rake the lawn.  It would take maybe an hour to run a leaf rake over her bit of green, but she uses a leaf blower for three instead. 

Last February, the weather became unseasonably warm--70s all around.  The snow vanished.  My neighbors all rushed outside the get a jump start on their spring cleanup.  Leaf blowers!  Lawn mowers!  Power washers!  Vroom!  Rrrruum!  Fweeee!   All day long.  We had to shut the windows instead of airing out the house with the nice, warm air.  And the next day?  We had a windstorm and blizzard.  Branches came down everywhere.  Snow covered everything.  And when it all melted in March, it looked like nothing had been done.  An utter waste of time and gasoline, and my neighbors ruined a nice respite from the winter's cold with all the noise.

My neighbors are boorish twats, and the awful, rotten machine noise that ruins the tranquility of the neighborhood is the biggest factor in our decision to move away once Maksim has finished school.  We love the house.  We hate the neighbors.

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Strawberry Festival, Without Strawberries

Last weekend, Darwin and I went down to Ypsilanti to visit Sasha.  We had lunch, we discovered a really BAD buffet (and got our money refunded for it when we complained), and we went shopping.

After we dropped Sasha back at his place, Darwin and I decided to drive to Belleville, one town over, and check out their annual Strawberry Festival.  I'd visited it once about 15 years ago and remember liking it, and it sounded fun.  Street fairs are usually kind of cool, and we could get some strawberries and/or strawberry treats.

When we arrived, we got parking at the local high school, which was right next to what we assumed was the Strawberry Festival.  It turned out to be more like a county fair, with rides and games and animals and such.  What we didn't see were strawberries.  Finally Darwin found a building labeled FOOD BARN, which was selling strawberry-themed items: strawberry sundaes, shortcake, shakes, and so on. They also sold hamburgers, hot dogs, tacos, and other foods.

That seemed to be the extent of the strawberries.

Eventually, we realized the carnival was separate from the actual festival, and it was a bit of a hike toward town.  Gamely, we struck out and, after about a ten minute walk, we found the real festival.  It was a lot of booths selling arts and crafts, and LOTS of churches who wanted to convert passers-by, and local businesses who wanted to re-do your gutters, and food trucks selling barbecue and junk food and lemonade and smoothies.

No strawberries.  I mean, NOTHING. 

I was thinking we'd find strawberry pies and jams and salsas and gelatins and ices and strawberry-themed crafts and . . . well, you know.  But, nope!  Not one strawberry anything in sight.  Why they bothered naming it a strawberry festival, we couldn't tell.

We also noticed that downtown Belleville is . . . dumpy.  Almost all the buildings took the worst of 1954's blocky, dull brick and lumped them together into a string of boring offices, with a few liquor stores and tattered bait shops mixed in.  The city hall, which stands on the corner of the downtown, should be an arresting piece of architecture, since it's the first thing people see when they arrive in downtown Belleville, but it's nothing more than a dull pile of brown brick.  A good chunk of the main street sweeps past a magnificent lake, which begs to sport a boardwalk and a boat rental place and some delightful pub/restaurants and at least one night club.  Instead, we have a guardrail, a dead parking lot, one bored-looking restaurant, and a run-down liquor store that looks like it deals heroin out the back door.  What a waste!

We did score a few burping cloths from a craft booth for the upcoming baby shower, and we had supper at an antique A&W, which was giving away free root beer floats in honor of the strawberry festival.  And I got to spend an afternoon with my dear husband and see Sasha.  So the day wasn't a total loss!

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