fine whine

Some days you just can't win. Today I had one of those experiences that sound like something a bad sitcom would pass off as humor, or perhaps be made into a movie by Ben Stiller. You know the kind of humor of which I speak, wherein a poor schlub keeps getting more and more in trouble from a small thing.

Well, it was my turn I guess. For the last month or so we've been coating some unfinished furniture with liquid polyurethane (a coat every couple days or so). Sunday we spent a little extra time trying to buy another can of the stuff, since our local Bargain Outlet's been out for a while due to some area man who is redoing every surface in his house with the stuff, apparently. Naturally on the way down to the other store I got turned around. Here I had been traveling south, made a right turn and then a left, and ended up northeast of my starting point. I guess I need to get one of those floaty compass things.

Anyway finally we procured the can, and today I managed to spill over half of it on the garage floor. Yeah, whoops. Mind you this is gooey stuff, like a brownish-clear paint. And I needed to step all over it to move the (now in peril) furniture away from the spreading ooze. And I needed to figure out a way to soak it up, other than just the cardboard that half of it spilled onto.

I tried sponging it up with my broken sponge brush, but I realized that wringing out the sponge got sponge bits and the other goop from the floor into the can and I didn't want to taint the stuff any more. So I soaked up what I could and splashed down some mineral spirits to clean up the rest.

What a smelly mess. So now I had a puddle of mineral spirits on the floor. What better way to soak that up than with some kitty litter? We'd coincidently had a bag lying around for some sort of freshness thing (it was for Jessica and I know better to ask a woman about freshness) so I figured I'd grab that from inside. Cleaning as much of the goop and dirt from my feet I leaned inside the house to grab the bag, only to tear the top off and spill some of that all over the hallway.

This could only get better, right? I couldn't find the household broom (or rather wasn't willing to track junk all over the carpet to retreive it) so I grabbed the two and a half foot wide one from the garage, and awkwardly swept up the errant litter. Mostly.

I dumped what I could recover on the mineral spirits, and added a liberal sprinkling from the bag. At this very moment it should be soaking up the remnants of the puddle, or at least be getting glued to the floor by the poly. Then I still needed to get rid of all my cleaning mess and the tainted cardboard, so I had to open the garage door to get to the trashbin. I'm still covered in dirty, sticky goop so I can't go back inside for some presentable clothes, so the whole neighboorhood (half of which seems to be biking laps in front of my house at the time) gets to see me in my shorts hanging low and the top elastic of my underwear. I'm not wearing a shirt because the garage has developed sauna-like temperatures as of late. If I had any free time then, you know, between the cleaning and stepping on the kitty litter, I'd probably been mildly embarrassed.

As it was, I was just frustrated. The feeling stuck and I was sort of nasty to Jessica and she back to me, and it wasn't until I threw Tati's Parade into the laserdisc player that I started to feel some levity again. It's a delightful show about, well, a show with some great moments. There's a bit with a magician and a sort-of heckler that is brilliant, and other little touches that show Tati's light humor genius. I enjoyed it immensly.

I only wish that the story of my evening were somehow more zany, as it really loses a lot in the re-telling. Oh well.

There are times in a man's life where that man's gotta do what that man's gotta do. And this man needed to take a DVD back to the library tonight.

Being my father's son, I grabbed three CDs to which to listen on my half-hour trek to the local branch and back. I say I'm "my father's son" not just to be pedantic but because he will assemble a collection of some ten times the runtime of music for all but the shortest car trips. He's got some thousand tapes and several hundred CDs, though, so he can get away with that sort of thing.

Me, I've got no tapes, six hundred CDs that are all still packed away and a handful from the library at any given time. So I grabbed the latest disc by Filter, something else and the soundtrack for Kill Bill, volume 1.

I was groovin' away for just about the whole trip to the library, thinking that Quentin had done another spot-on job of picking great tunes. Say what you will about what he puts on film, but his music tastes run sweet and deep. It was great walking music, even with the brief downpour and ensuing humidity.

It is a great soundtrack, up until the disco/mariachi rendition of "Don't let me be misunderstood". About halfway through that song everything turned sour and I didn't find anything else worth hearing thereafter. I spent the little bit of time remaining on my return journey scanning through the first several tracks again, having decided that the effort of opening my pocket and switching CDs was just too much to bear. There's a lesson to be learned there somewhere but damned if I know what it is.

I'd normally write something about the mildly delightful time Jessica and I spent in two of Columbus's finest MetroParks today, hiking and spotting the various forms of poison ivy and sweating, but I find myself compelled to write this down instead. Ever since I bought that secondhand boxing monkey, I've had a phrase in my head. Here is my horrible rendition of it: MMMOONNKKEEEYYY!

Um, yeah. So that kept running through my head, and until moments ago I couldn't place the source. It's from the first season of the BBC Office show, from a part or two where affable/cringeworthy loser boss David Brent is showing somebody around the office, points out a stuffed monkey, and apparently does a horrible impersonation of some comedian who hasn't caught on over on this side of the pond.

Well, hey, it matters to me.

Last night Jessica and I watched Heaven, directed by Tom Tykwer, written by Krzysztof Kieslowski, produced by one of the Weinbergs and Anthony Minghella, starring Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi. I was impressed, and Jessica fell asleep. I'd normally be watching, rather listening, to the commentary track right now except that I checked out Red dwarf series one from the library and I'm catching up on that instead. It's funny, but Heaven had some amazing moments. I was really impressed by Cate Blanchett's acting, and struck also by how much Giovanni Ribisi's growing up. He looks, well, grown up, but not in a Fred Savage sort of way.

And speaking of growing up, I've got a new toy.

So yeah, the film was good. The aerial shots were amazing, and only afterward did I understand (or at least theorize) that they had something to do with the heavens and whatnot.

And in the DVD features there were some badly done trailers for Krzysztof Kieslowski's three colors trilogy, and I must admit they look tempting.

So I managed to actually take my half-day off work today, and arrived home to find my wife already there.

Needless to say I spent pretty much the rest of the afternoon on my back.

With an electric screwdriver in my hand. You see, the exterminator had just left and he'd pointed out a particularly nasty bit of insulation and rotting wood under our kitchen in which carpenter ants and other nasties loved to nest. My task, for which I'd bought the wood long ago but never had the great motivation to fight with the table saw to cut, was to rip out the rotting wood, whatever lay beneath it (or above, depending on your perspective) and to replace it with a sturdier sheet or two of better, treated lumber.

Surprisingly it went quite smoothly. I didn't cut the sheet of plywood very straight, but what is to be expected when one is cutting a 4x8 sheet of plywood on a table saw a foot off the ground and no fence to keep the wood straight? I had rigged up some rails, of sorts, using a footstool, 2x4s and my handy-dandy ladder, but it still looked like one of those "don't ever, ever try this" safety pictures. Anyway, two cuts, one sort-of-cut to straighten the second cut, and fifty to sixty deck screws later the gaping hole under our kitchen was again plugged, this time without ants and other insect morass.

At least, that's the idea. We still need to roll some insulation down there and grout around the cracks (as I'd mentioned my cuts weren't exactly square) but I'm with a decent sense of accomplishment.

And I'll let Jessica take care of painting under there. Screwing outside laying on my back just tuckers me out.

Four years of high school Latin, even in light of high marks earned, doesn't count for much at all. Likewise two to three odd years of grade school French via videos of Madame, Merci et Mou and coloring-book worksheets--these too I had and I still only comprehend English. This marks me as particularly American, I suspect, but even more detrimental is the effect this has on my film-watching ability, particularly for films that didn't happen to be recorded in the only language I've ever taken the time to achieve fluency. With my watching of Run Lola run the other day I seem to have gotten on a sort-of foreign film kick. I checked out a couple more Tom Tyker films from the library, as well as Wenders's American friend, which stars Dennis Hopper as a somewhat talented Mister Ripley (as it were). He was in Ticker which I threw in today as I worked on finishing our dining room table (Yeah, the movie sucks but I think Tom Sizemoer's criminally underused in Hollywood), and Anthony Minghella directed the second most recent take on the same story (Ripley, not Ticker, and he makes an appearance as producer on Tykwer's Heaven which is apparently in Italian. I can't wait.

The broken English of this entry's title, "Please advise without late", struck me as, well, cute when I saw it in my email. We've done a lot of exploratory work with overseas vendors and some of them have English as a third or fifth language. Needless to say I've had some fun puzzling through the word mashups, particularly from one woman who seems to lose more control over grammar the more hectic their business gets.

At least that's what it looks like to me, the guy who didn't even pick up the Spanish that Sesame Street beats us over the head with.