Jam Packed

That's what my apartment looks like right now. Stuffed to the rafters with sticky, delicious jam. Mmmm... jam.

Actually, it's filled with moving boxes. Right now, about 60 of them. There's probably another 60 coming in about two weeks. The place seemed really spacious before all our junk cluttered the place up. I guess when it's all put away, it'll seem a little better.

As I'm going through the boxes, I feel like Steve Martin in "The Jerk". At first, my reaction is, "What is all this junk. I don't need any of this stuff!" Then I open a couple of boxes and find some things for the kitchen. "Except for these mixing bowls. But that's it!" On to the living room. "And this DVD player. Just these mixing bowls and this DVD player." It continues ad nauseum. I guess we just have a lot of stuff.

I've also been building a kitchen since our place was without one. We ordered some stuff and it came in big flat boxes, which I had to open and transport upstairs to assemble. At that point, picking out the thick solid birch countertops started to seem like a mistake. But I managed. Here's a little "from conception to completion" for you. This is from the kitchen planner software that I used to figure out the layout of this thing.



And here's an almost complete kitchen.



Pretty good, right? That's a one-man show in one day. And the one song that was in my head throughout the time that I was putting it together was Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing".

We got to install microwave ovens/
Custom kitchen deliveries

It was a long day, but it won't be long before our place starts to come together and we can finally settle into that long winters nap I've been hearing so much about.

Damned Singing French Woman

I've been packing this afternoon in preparation for a "business trip" that I'm taking next week. While I've been pulling all my stuff together, I've had on CNN to keep me company. It's the International version of CNN, with the anchors that are a special blend of nationalities so as not to upset or isolate any particular group of viewers. Is he Indian, or Arabic? African, or Asian? Their backgrounds are so muddled, it's anyone's guess. But they all speak the King's English, so it brings a nice sensibility to them when they announce riots in Lebanon or radiological scares on British Airways. But I digress...

There's a commercial for Novotel, which I just learned is a hotel chain in Europe, that has been playing in heavy rotation on CNN. It features animals making themselves at home in the hotel rooms while a woman sings this semi-creepy, semi-sweet song ever so softly in the background. I don't know if the song itself is noteworthy or I've just listened to it twenty times today, but I can't get it out of my head. And it's only five or six lines longs. A quick Google search yielded that the woman singing is Emilie Simon, who is French. She has a website, Follow the Blue Light, which is completely in French. Would it kill her to have an English translation site up? The only reason that I stumbled onto her was because I heard her singing in English on English language TV. But it's her site, I guess she can do as she pleases. Give her a look and see if you can download the clip from the commercial. I'm sure it must be somewhere on there. If you can find it, listen to it about twenty times throughout the day at about ten or fifteen minute intervals. If it doesn't start driving you nuts, then I guess there's just something wrong with me.

But I guess we don't need this little exercise in active listening to tell us that, do we?

Happy World AIDS Day

What's the last thing that you want to hear on World AIDS Day? How about this?



Jeeze. Thanks for "breaking it to them easy", Olde Tyme Quaker Man. You really are a jerk.


On another note, here's what I've been reading lately. Empires of Light, by Jill Jonnes. It's a somewhat dramatic telling of the discovery and rise of electricity in the late 1800s. More specifically, how Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse helped shape the electrical world from its infancy into what we now have today. It's pretty fascinating. It also reinforces Edison as one of the baddest asses of all time. In his day, he had the fame and influence of a Bono/P. Diddy cross. Extreme crossover appeal. One of my favorite passages from the book describes Edison's method of dealing with striking workers in his light bulb factory:

At the lamp factory out in New Jersey, eighty highly skilled filament sealers formed a union and "became very insolent," said Edison, "knowing that it was very impossible to manufacture lamps without them." When they objected to the proposed firing of one of their members, Edison quickly designed thirty machines to automate their work. Then he fired the man as planned. "The union went out," said Edison, following up with the punch line: "It has been out ever since."

The moral of the story? Don't screw with the world's foremost genius inventor.