I am not going to tell anyone how I know this, but I’d like to offer the following statements. Granted they are largely my opinion, but they are based on a great deal of personal and empirical evidence.

If you use Lowe’s Home Improvement to do something to your home, and by “use” I mean “buy” the materials at the store and then “hire” their contractors to do the job, you are not, in fact, doing it yourself.  You are not “building something together” with Lowe’s or Home Depot or any of those types of stores. You are also not saving much money over hiring a contractor and getting an estimate, explaining to the contractor your absolute limit in money you can spend, and having the contractor procure the materials and the labor him- or herself.

In fact, just because you went shopping for the materials in a very dirty and dusty store does not mean you have any ownership over the actual work being done. You’re shopping and hiring a contractor.

And you’re hiring a contractor, and this is the important part, that you are not interviewing yourself. You’re relying on a giant conglomerate to hire and vet a contractor who will then come to your home and do work with little notice and zero inspection of the premises where the work will be done.

So you’re shopping for an item, then handing over the installation - of a counter, a floor, blinds, windows, a door, whatever - to a total stranger who you didn’t select to do work that that stranger is ill prepared to do.

Nine times out of ten, that contractor whom you don’t know and didn’t vet personally will not do the job you wanted. And it’s not like you have any follow up because tomorrow they’ll have another job to go to, far far away.

So when you go to a big box store and hand over so much of the responsibility for installation and follow-through to a total complete freaking stranger who you don’t even hire or of whom you can approve or reject, it’s not about you. It’s about them getting the job done quickly, easily, and allegedly cheaply. Except when it has to be done over again because the first time wasn’t nearly good.

Freebird has:

1 (one) burst eardrum

1 (one) case of the reappearing multi-variational strep throat

1 (one) crusty, irritated and bloody nose from all the drainage due to the first two

and

1 (one) big ass bottle of pink bubblegum flavored antibiotics.

Let there be less snot, more sleep, and no more infections. Amen. 

1. Easter: “Freebird! It’s Easter! Some people celebrate today, and dress up and go to a special church service, and there are flowers and songs and celebrations of spring. And there’s chocolate.”

Freebird: “CHOCOLATE?!”

And there was chocolate (courtesy of daycare, who do beautiful baskets for the children) and all was happy in our world.

2. Except for the crusty, pus-evident ear that I suspect may be caused by a ruptured eardrum (if you’re keeping score at home, that’s 2 for Freebird) and a trip to the emergency clinic in Connecticut, plus a 102.9 fever Saturday night, and the general orneryness and sleepyness and long ass nap that made him stay up until 10pm last night so today he is something of a cranky mess.

3. But there was chocolate so all is well. Baba, for the record, is SO interactive and SO interested in talking to everyone, he gets PISSED if there isn’t enough attention directed his way. I don’t know if he wanted chocolate, but damn he wanted folks to tell him about it. So I assume that once he can eat, he will be all about the chocolate. Which is good and right.

4. Last night, one of us had gas. I’m not going to say which one. But at one point, Hubby said, “Was that a Blackberry or a really long fart?”

5. If you don’t get the joke: we keep our Bbys on vibrate.

6. The kitchen reno progresses. We still have no kitchen. BUT! We are hosting a crapload of dudes this weekend. How fun will that be? Commence ordering in. A LOT of it.

7. We are working on a redesign for The Other Site, and it’s going to go live soon. I am so excited. Seriously, so excited to see it.

8. Also, I had a great talk with Hubby about how to strengthen the business end of The Other Site so that I can figure out ways to increase revenue and offset my expenses while keeping the site attractive to advertisers.

9. Note to self: talk to Hubby more this week. We are like two ships passing in the harbor all the time, and we need to sit down and face each other. Not easy to do when you eat hunched over a coffee table.

I am looking in a catalog for a binder. Not just any binder. A Big ass mofo’in huge mega whopping badass binder.

So I was totally in the “b” section of the catalog looking for the word “big.” Not “binder.” “Big,” for “big ass mofo’in huge mega whopping badass binder.”

Ooops. 

I took the train to work today, which is rare, but I’m not going home this evening and I can’t leave my car in the Park’n’Ride parking lot overnight. Well, I can, but not if I want to see it again. The train takes an hour to get to Penn Station in New York from the station behind my house. To truly compare how bizarre that is, and yes, I know, an hour-plus commute is weird but standard for this area, take a look at my normal commute:

Drive to Park n’Ride : 4-5 minutes tops.
Bus to Port Authority Bus Terminal: 30-35 minutes, sometimes more.
Walk to N/R subway train: 6-7 minutes
Subway to Central Park South: 6-7 minutes
Walk to my office: 2 minutes.

So roughly my normal commute in is about an hour and 10 minutes, give or take.

The train?

Walk to train station: 4 minutes
Train: 47 minutes (note: PABT is at 42nd and 8th. Penn Station New York is 34th and 9th Ave, ~ 10 blocks south)
Walk to N/R subway station from NJ Transit terminal in Penn Station: 10-15 minutes, maybe.
Ride to Central Park South: 13-15 minutes.
Walk to office: 2 minutes

So, that’s already ~20 minutes more than my normal commute. It’s a lot more convenient and riding the train is great, but man, the train is SLOW like damn and whoa.

I’m sure this is scintillating info, by the way.

I enjoyed the train (though not the band of luggage-laden teenagers who were WAY TOO FUCKING LOUD for 645 am. What on earth possesses you to be that loud that early?) and read and was rocked into mellow complacency by the train rhythm, but the best part was the cab ride to my office. The driver was Israeli, and he decided to propose marriage to me, despite having five grown sons my age and a wife of 45+ years. It was nice to be told I am pleasant first thing in the morning, and to receive a marriage proposal from a somewhat zany elderly man driving a cab.

I’ll have to remember that: if I want to put Hubby in a good mood, maybe I’ll ask him to marry me. 

Obama’s speech today was among the most amazing speeches I’ve read.

Especially this part:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

Perhaps the reaction to this speech will identify that other divide that plagues the electorate - the divide between people like me, who don’t get their news (if they get it at all) from the filter of the American News Conglomerate Corporate Media, and seek it elsewhere as unfiltered as possible… and people who won’t see this speech because maybe the ANCCM will filter out the major parts and, as Hubby said, focus on some isolated throwaway line out of context.

Either way, I am so impressed and chilled to goosebumps at the power of that speech. Whomever wrote it: well done.

You know what kind of burns my toast?

There are a good number of people who took advantage of, or who were pressured to take advantage of low interest rates on ARM mortgages who can no longer afford the payments, because at the heart of the transaction was a root truth: it was too good to be true. Properties that buyers were told would sell if they needed to sell them are on the market not going anywhere. People are walking out of their homes and leaving the keys in the door because they’d rather take a big huge hit on their credit - which was probably bad to begin with - than struggle to pay a monthly mortgage payment that went up 200% in a month.

And there are the beginnings of programs and assistance funds being moved into place (slowly by the current shitass administration) to help these people because everyone should have a home, and if they got “swindled” into a mortgage they can’t afford they need help.

Agreed. They need help. Kids getting tossed out of their own homes because their parents are now paying a mortgage they cannot afford to pay is shit ass all around.

But what about the employees of Bear Stearns whose retirement plans were heavily invested in the stock of the company itself? It would make me uncomfortable, surely, to tie up my retirement in my own company - sort of a variation on the shitting/eating sausage/bacon rule, only with less sex and more money - but there are a lot of places that hand out stock options and packages as part of end-of-year bonuses.

Now, Bear Stearns went belly up because they invested in deals based on the sub-prime mortgages (sub-prime meaning shitful credit mortgages - can’t we call them what they are?) so now the people who worked there, who are nearing retirement, whose portfolio is tied to a stock value that went from $100 a month ago to $2 today, those people are shit out of luck.

I know, it’s a lot easier to feel bad for people who lose their homes than it is to feel bad for an investment banker who lost his retirement, but the casting of victimhood and villainy in the press is pissing me off.

It’s ok, even pitiable - and I’m not disputing that it sucks - to find yourself with a mortgage you can’t pay. But there’s no mention of culpability in the mortgage holder making the bad decision in the first place. But it’s a ha-ha omg-isn’t that appalling funny funny to joke about allegedly “high paid” investment bankers losing their retirement funds when they’re in their late 50s. That’s not pitiable as much, at least, not from the jokes and discussions I’ve heard around me, on the radio and on the bus ride home and to work. That’s somehow ok because those people had money (past tense) whereas the people who were just trying to live the American Dream and own homes, those people are so sad, so downtrodden.

I love the double edged sword of American attitude. Sometimes, like after Katrina, you see the attitude that if you’re poor, somehow it’s your fault. That having no money and living in poverty is somehow a moral failing.

But if you embrace the trappings of wealth and class, like by buying a home you can’t really afford in five years, then you’re good. And when your house costs too much, you can get help (eventually, if the Bush administration gets off its ass, which it won’t).

But if you earn too much money, if you earn a salary that’s well out of the reach of most Americans, you’re a villain and somehow deserve that your nest egg has been crushed. That’s just equal justice, that we should all earn the same. The rich should be brought down to the middle class level, but God forbid the middle be brought down into poverty.

It’s the end of the world as we know it. And I feel really, really disgusted. And tense.