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Dear Moen company in specific, and plumbing enterprises in general:

You know what would be nice? If you could be consistent with your connections. Or, barring that, you could clearly label your stuff so that poor schlubs like me don’t discover, as I did last night, that the expensive new kitchen faucet I bought doesn’t fricking fit.

Our kitchen faucet has been falling apart for months; it, like the one replacing it, has a built-in sprayer, a function I like very much, but something funny popped loose such that only the spray mode works now. It’s fine for washing dishes, but kinda sucky for, say, filling a water bottle. So, I decided to replace it. Went to , bought the aforementioned faucet, brought it home.

I lucked out in that we have a split sink, and the faucet sits right on the divider of the basin, so it was reachable from underneath, which meant I didn’t have to go and buy a basin wrench. After much cursing and dripping of hot water into my left eye, I managed to get the old faucet off, and tossed it aside with much élan.

I unpacked the new one, and discovered that the instructions are entirely in picture form, which I guess is great if you can’t read, but doesn’t do much to answer basic questions, such as for example why the faucet had 1/2″ threaded male connectors, when the old one had 3/8″ threaded female.

The new one doesn’t fit. It’s not just a matter of being the wrong size; as I posted on Facebook, both the faucet and the supply connections are male, and neither is willing to go gay for the other and make the whole thing work. (As one wag pointed out, I have to find a couple of lesbians to get in the middle of them, although in my limited experience, the only time two lesbians get in the middle of two men is when they’re breaking up an argument at a softball game.)

Lowe’s supposedly has flexible connectors to solve the problem, but

1. They vary widely in price, from $4 apiece to $30. No idea what I’m going to have to buy.


2. Most of the pictures on the Lowe’s website don’t match the product. Does this look like a 3/8″ C x 1/2″ FIP x 20″ stainless steel faucet connector to you?
   
   Don’t the ends look like…the same size? And does it appear to be 20″ long?

Since I can’t take the supply connections out of the wall to screw them into a connector and see, I’ve brought the old faucet to just sort of hold next to it and compare, and the new one to actually screw on and verify. If it doesn’t work, I’m going to assault someone, since I’ve already thrown parts of the old faucet in the garbage, and I have no idea where the receipt is for the $180 faucet I purchased.

So if you hear about a Lowe’s in northern Delaware burning to the ground, um…I actually will have had nothing to do with that.

I bet your July 4th wasn’t as awesome as mine. Yeah? Oh yeah? Oh, you traversed the Grand Canyon on horseback, ingested more than the recommended dose of peyote, and woke up next to Anne Hathaway? Okay, you win.

Our weekend started Thursday night with a quick dinner and cake at my parents’ house, and then a lot of packing, finally getting to bed at something like 1am. We were up shortly before 7 to continue packing, rousting the offspring, and getting on the road to Strasburg, PA (home of the world famous Strasburg Railroad, which we did not see) for a lengthy family reunion of sorts at my aunt and uncle’s farm there. Upon arrival, I immediately threw my new golf clubs in my dad’s car and set out to Lancaster Host Resort for a “quick” 18 that lasted 4.5 hours. My slice and push are abysmal as ever, but I will say this: the putter is spectacular. I kept swishing 8- to 12-foot putts like I knew what I was doing, although I had a hard time getting the speed of anything longer, and as you might expect my golf game requires a great deal of long putts.

After the game we settled in for the evening at the farm, where Charles chased cows and sheep and I drank staggering amounts of beer. There was also a chicken-grilling competition; I remember eating it, but do not remember tasting it.

Saturday we loaded up and went to a nearby elementary school where I discovered the following important fact: if you are overweight and wear athletic shorts that are too snug and display every delicious contour of your ample posterior, the rest of the players will be distracted and you can go 4 for 5. If you also position yourself at a spot in the outfield where few balls get to you, you don’t have to be a defensive liability. When most of the players are over 50 or under 15, you’re not gonna have to spear a lot of line drives in center field.

My team won in dramatic fashion; down by three runs with one out in the bottom of the 7th, my uncle Marty hit an inside-the-park grand slam. After two days of lengthy athletic efforts, even two days later, I can barely walk. Muscles hurt that I guarantee did not even exist before this weekend.

In the afternoon, we ate some more food and enjoyed a beer-tasting contest, after which I fell asleep in an easy chair and completely missed the fireworks.

Sunday morning started at 5:30am, when Josephine decided she wanted to be up and around; Sarah had put the kids to bed the night before while I sawed wood, so it fell to me to entertain the child. Charles came down around 7, but we let Sarah sleep in until 8am because she needed the rest; this later turned out to be a Mistake of the first order.

We planned to go to my mom’s family’s ancestral church, Grace Lutheran, where we would all sing in the choir and play in a small brass ensemble and in general take over the musical duties of the church for the day. When I woke Sarah at 8, and told her we needed to leave for the church by 9am, she said “There’s no way that’s happening.” It had not occurred to me that she would have to get herself ready, a half-hour effort, but also feed Josephine and get her and Charles ready. It was agreed that I would ride to the church with Charles in my parents’ car, thereby making it possible for Sarah to be out the door by 10.

Went to church, had a good rehearsal, Charles behaved himself, and then around 10 I got two texts from Sarah.

You aren’t going to believe this but the car won’t start!

Help!

I called, and she said the car was making noises that indicated to me that the battery was fried, which isn’t wholly unexpected since the car’s almost 4 years old. We agreed that she’d just stay at the farm, and we’d hustle back from church and get the car jumped so we could actually drive home.

The service was very nice. I sang my big solo, which is always intoxicating to do from a balcony at the back of the church because it’s extremely enjoyable to see people’s heads whip around with looks on their faces that say “Holy crap, that guy’s loud!” Satisfying.

After the service I grabbed Charles from the nursery and we hustled on back. Grumps parked his car next to the Honda and, while he got out his jumper cables, I decided to see exactly what noise the car made when the ignition was turned. In my case it hesitated, and then started. I thought Sarah would light something on fire, but she took the news in stride; I think she had been drinking for most of the morning.

After that we drove home, spent some time at the pool, and passed out like meth addicts after a home-cooked meal.

It really was, I tell you. We reorganized our pantry, people. Reorganized our pantry. Because that is how we roll.

Friday night I managed to fit in my last organ lesson for a few weeks, since we’re having a baby in four days and everything. Then I went home and entertained my existing offspring so my wife wouldn’t go all My Lai on the neighborhood (too soon?).

Saturday we spent the day, and I mean the entirety of the daylight hours, cleaning and organizing. Sarah’s homey Jeanmarie brought her daughter over, so she and Charles played while we cleaned up the nursery, ate donuts, did some yardwork, buried a hobo, and cleaned out my car. Major productivity, people.

Saturday night I sang in one of the better concerts I’ve ever done, with the Mastersingers of Wilmington. We performed a few old “chestnuts,” such as three selections from Randall Thompson’s Frostiana, along with some classic renaissance and baroque motets. We also did a lot of modern works, particularly some Italian madrigals by William Hawley (I hope and pray he owns a pet of some kind named “Smoot“), some fun anthems by Craig Phillips, and the pièce de résistance, “Cloth’d In Holy Robes” by Judith Bingham, one of the hardest pieces of music I’ve ever put in a folder. I actually had to bang out intervals at the piano to learn the piece, something I haven’t had to do in years due to my awesomeness (note: I am also the picture of modesty).

Sunday I had church per usual, followed by a trip to Infants Be We to pick up some little clips to make the infant carseat base fit in my whip. Then home for naps, more cleaning, and a complete and utter rebuild of our pantry, which, I swear to The Deity Of Your Choice, contained an item with an expiration date in the Clinton administration, which you may recall preceded the Eight Years Of Darkness covering most of this decade.

It was a box of rice, or something, and it had been moved, by us, from house to house, at least twice. Given the shelf-life of rice, it’s entirely possible I bought it when I lived in an apartment prior to our marriage. We hoped that just simply reorganizing things would make everything fit better, but you know what really did the job was throwing away two-thirds of the food on the shelves. The rice, or whatever it was, was not an isolated instance: the average expiration date of the stuff we threw out was mid-2007.

Just another wild and woolly weekend at Hearndom II. Keep on rockin’, Amurica.

The weekend was full and overstuffed. On Saturday, Charles and I spent all morning doing yard work in a vain effort to tire him out so he’d have an early nap. We dug, and mulched (“melched,” as Charles puts it), and trimmed, and planted. The “early nap” plan was an utter failure, of course; he went down at 10:30, talked to himself until noon, and finally get maybe an hour’s sleep before we woke him to go to a party.

Luckily, sleep or not, homeboy is always up for a party. We met a bunch of our musical theatre friends at one of their homes, out in West Chester, where we got our barbecue on and watched as the Flyers gained and lost a three-goal lead in a deciding playoff game. There was much anger, which was calmed by drinking large amounts of Canadian beer.

On Sunday we were able to sleep in a tiny bit, then got some breakfast at Bob Evan’s, followed by a trip to Sarah’s old church for the baptism of children belong to some old high school friends. I spent the afternoon mowing the lawn in temperatures approaching 90 degrees, and then sitting around drinking water so that I could stop looking like a dessicated husk. (Is it just me, or are temperatures in all seasons getting a little crazy? It’s not unheard-of to have 90 degree days in April, of course, but it seems like year after year we got a bunch of really hot summer days, a bunch of really hot winter days, but we also get some oddly chilly days in early August, and of course last winter there were at least five separate days when I had to chisel frozen saliva from my lips just by walking from my car to the office. That was a really long sentence, which will stay in place because I have no editor. Huzzah!)

After making the lawn look reasonably tame, we went to the in-laws’ for the brother-in-law’s birthday, at which I ate so much chicken-fried steak that I couldn’t effectively breathe for the rest of the day. I tried to stuff some birthday cake in there but it wasn’t happening. I went to bed 4 hours later in a semi-coma, still thinking there was no way I’d ever eat food again.

Turns out I was wrong, which happens sometimes.

My day so far: Charles woke us at 6:15 by falling out of bed and initiating Maximum Tears. Then on the way north I got the bird flipped at me by some dumb broad from New Jersey who was in the left lane holding up traffic all the way through the city. So let’s star the day off with a dose of awesome:

Meat Cards

Business cards made of beef jerky, embossed by laser. Salient quote:

MEAT CARDS do not fit in a Rolodex, because their deliciousness CANNOT BE CONTAINED in a Rolodex.

I know what you’re asking: do they have Twitter? of course they do.

AISOT, this is where I sang not one, but TWO national anthems on Monday afternoon.

You can see where I would have been standing, near the red circle in the upper right, if I hadn’t been in the press box taking the picture. (I can’t be in two places at once, people. It is the great shame of my life.)

The singing went well, although My Canadian-by-birth-Korean-by-choice friend Stefan pointed out that I said “my” when I should have said “our.” Whatever. At least I didn’t fall down.

BTW: I’m posting this from my iPhone. More on this awesome development later.

I’ve never insisted that I was particularly bright. Which is why it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that, up until this week, I had no serious backup setup for my computers at home. What changed this week, you ask?

Computer crash.

My wife’s achy old Dell B130 would only boot to the Blue Screen of Sadness, so I got it into diagnostic mode and did some tests; the hard drive failed like a fat kid in gym. It did at least START to load Windows before it would roll over and point its feet in the air, so there must be SOMETHING remaining on the drive. I deduced that with a little genius, I could get it back to life.

This did at least give me an opportunity to do a little shopping on Amazon. I ordered a new 80GB drive for HW’s laptop, thereby doubling her original capacity. Since I’m a moron and had never bothered to do proper backups, I also ordered a 1TB, that’s 1000GB, USB drive to start doing so. I also picked up a $15 laptop drive enclosure, so that I could put Sarah’s old drive in, and then plug in via USB to my Mac. If I could get the old drive to spin up, hopefully I’d be able to recover some data.

What I didn’t have, and couldn’t easily get, was any kind of “reinstall” CD. If the laptop had come with one, we couldn’t find it. There was a sticker on the bottom of the case with a product ID number for Windows XP Home, so I bugged my dad to lend me his Windows XP Home CD, and went to town. Inserting the new 80GB hard drive was a breeze; switch around a few screws and a protective plate from the old drive to the new, and plug that puppy in. Mounted the Windows CD, formatted the hard drive, and XP Home was on its way. It prompted for the product ID number from the sticker on the bottom of the lappy, and I typed it in.

“The CD Key which you entered is invalid.”

Huh? Maybe I mistyped it. It was annoying flipping the laptop over to get 5 digits of the code, and then flipping it back to type them in, so I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote the code down, then typed it in again.

“The CD Key which you entered is invalid.”

What the heuristic hell? I checked the key I’d written down against the sticker once more; it was accurate. What I had was a Windows XP Home License that didn’t work with the Windows XP Home CD I had. Good job, Microsoft; no wonder you’re laying off thousands. (In a related story, my Mac is awesome.) I later deduced that the code I had was valid if I could have found the original Dell installation CD, but since I don’t have one, I was SOL.

I did a little poking around warez sites to try and get a code, but none worked. Finally, through A Source, I was able to get a functioning code. It might not be ENTIRELY legal, but I reasoned that the laptop has a license for Windows XP Home, I’m trying to install Windows XP Home, it’s not my fault that Dell didn’t give me a CD to match the license key I had.

Finally got it installed and booted, only to discover that the CD came with only the barest drivers, none of which worked with the network cards in the lappy. So I had to waste a CD-R on the drivers I downloaded from Dell, but oh well. These are the prices we pay. (Along with, of course, the $200 for the various components I had to buy.)

Once that was done, I turned my attention to the old hard drive, which I screwed into the little enclosure I’d bought and connected to my Mac. It immediately recognized the drive, spun it up, and displayed all Sarah’s folders. Good times! I’ll just drag and drop. It copied around 6GB of data, and then EPIC FAIL!

Whatever was wrong with the drive (corruption, bad sectors, etc.) was preventing me from copying the entire thing. I decided I’d start with just getting the My Documents directories, so I dragged and dropped those: EPIC YAY!!!111!one

Final result: $200 spent, laptop disk capacity doubled, and 1TB backup drive purchased, which also gives me the ability to back up my entire gaming/recording desktop in the basement and rebuild it from scratch without all the spyware and viruses one gets from developing a truly mammoth collection of pornography illegal music jpegs of puppies.

Since I reach a significant Age next week, I had to go to the DMV and renew my license. My car is also going to require renewal in two months, so I figured, hell, they’ll let me do it now, why not kill two birds with one stone! Particularly when those birds are massive, slavering creatures with Adamantium talons who hate me and everything that we as a nation hold dear.

So I snuck out of work for an early lunch hour, thinking I’d beat the crowds. this handy website shows the wait times for various functions, and it was saying I’d wait no more than 5 minutes for my license, and maybe 10 for my registration. Awesome!

I arrived shortly after 11, and got into a short line at the inspection lanes. As I later twittered, I, as always, picked the wrong lane, and watched as 3 or 4 cars who arrived after me got in first. But the joke was on them! I had, completely on accident, picked the one lane that could do all the regular checks (turn signals, lights, horn, etc.) plus the ODBII check (where they plug into your car’s computer to see if you’ve downloaded porn to it)! All the other lanes could do the car checks, but then you had to get into another lane for the computer read-out. This seems like a foolish way to do it, but I grinned happily as I parked and went inside, where I discovered that the South Wilmington DMV, unlike the New Castle one that is technically closer to my house but horribly inconvenient for a lunch hour visit, doesn’t actually have “line;” it has a take a number system, so you can sit and read horrific books while you wait! (I went with Dude, Where’s My Country? by Michael Moore, a book so painful that I got it at the dollar store. For a dollar.)

They were on number 202 when I sat down; I had number 222. So I read, and occasionally glanced up when the shift supervisor, the Mother Superior of the DMV, would get called over to yell at some poor soul who believed they could renew their car’s registration without having the current one, or without an insurance card, or without retrieving their car from the impound lot whence it was towed for unpaid parking tickets. (An aside: some of these people were at least fifty years old. Folks, how do you not know how this works? How do you reach the age of fifty, probably renewing at least one vehicle every two years, and not know what documents you require for this process?)

Finally I was called up to a very polite gentleman who took my documents and money and gave me a new registration and sticker in three minutes flat. I fail to understand why this is such a difficult process for some people.

By that point it was roughly 12:30, and I had to go get another number to wait for my license renewal. I was number #177; they were at #140. I shed a few silent, hot tears and sat down next to some sort of kiosk. After 20 minutes or so, they had gotten only to #150, and a young woman came out and started fiddling with the computer at the little kiosk. In a flash of brilliant insight, I deduced the following:

1. Eventually, this lady was going to open this kiosk for business;
2. It was likely that they intended it to be an express lane, meaning it would most likely be available for people with simple class-D license renewals (no truck licenses, no new licensees, no state IDs, etc.);
3. It was also likely that the line would be first come, first served;
4. The instant they made any sign of opening up, I needed to spring to my feet and sprint to the head of the line, hardly a challenge since the kiosk was approximately three feet to my left.

Sure enough, at about 1:10pm, a supervisor came out and started to announce that they were opening the kiosk for simple license renewals, and before he had said two words I was standing next to the nice young woman running the show. I think I even semi-accidentally butted in front of another fellow, but he sensed that were he to confront me, I might roll up a Driver’s Education Manual and beat him to death with it, so he held his tongue.

Because I know how to handle a drive-thru bureaucracy (just like a fast-food drive-thru; no special orders, basic meals only), I was through the line in three minutes, had my picture taken, and handed a literally piping hot new ID by 1:15. A little creative driving had me back at the office at 1:35! I think the word I’m searching for is “WOO!”

In short, the DMV is slow, news at Eleven.

A few tidbits:

• I wish I hadn’t spent $200+ dollars on “Party Pigs” for my beer because, frankly, they suck. They’re a nice a idea, because bottling beer is a huge hassle and I have a life to live, people, but unfortunately they don’t live up to the hype. They just don’t dispense beer very well. It starts out really, really foamy (like a real keg would), which I can live with, except that before the thing is even 1/2 empty it starts dispensing insanely slowly. Seriously, filling a pint glass takes so long you could time it with a calendar. The reason, as far as I can tell, is the expanding CO2 pouch inside starts blocking the spout, and there’s not a lot you can do about it aside from just taking the thing apart, which you can’t do without losing the beer (the pressure makes it go all over the place). For 40 bones a keg, I’d like to think I could get more than 2 beers out of it that weren’t absolute foam, you know? Weak.
• Charles is very fond of a TV show called “Caillou“, featuring a little whiny bald boy. It’s a pretty lame show, but Charles loves it; it’s full of crap wherein Caillou is afraid to go down the slide, but his mommy helps him, or Caillou is afraid of Santa Claus, but Santa turns out to be cool and likes Caillou’s drawing (when a real mall Santa would be half in the bag and have no time for smarmy baldies). The parents are astoundingly patient; when they ask Caillou to do something and he whines “But I don’t want to!” they commiserate and work out some kind of compromise, when any decent parent would just lightly backhand the brat and say “Just do it before I make you bleed.”

  Why he’s bald is never explained, so Sarah and I have developed this enormous backstory centered on our belief that he has leukemia and they just don’t want to actually cover it. Anyway, as an example of the horrible, horrible things my wife and I can think up: Charles was watching the show, and Sarah and I were at the dining room table. I looked at the TV and noticed that Caillou’s mom looked a little thick, so I said,

  “I think Caillou’s mom is pregnant.”

  To which Sarah replied, “Yeah…you know they need that marrow.”

  We laughed for a good 5 minutes, and then discussed whether that was going to get us into hell, or if the decision had been made years ago.

Is it just me, or is the presidential campaign, and the coverage thereof, somewhat weakened by the fact that nobody knows how to properly refer to the candidates and affiliated politicians?

Every time I read a headline saying “BUSH BLAH BLAH BLAH” or “PALIN BLAH BLAH BLAH,” I think to myself, you know, these people hold important offices. They may be douchebags, but the office itself merits our respect. Why are they not referred to as President Bush and Governor Palin whenever they’re mentioned? It may just be me, but I have a really hard time taking any pundit seriously when he refers to a United States Senator as simply “Biden.”

I’m guessing it’s just me.

Despite my success in the bike ride a few weeks ago, I’m still having difficulty with my staggering bulk; I hit 250 pounds again, and decided it was time to Rectify That Problem. So I’ve been eating nothing but meat and cheese (and the occasional glass of vodka while we were at the beach), and as a result have lost 6 pounds in about 4 weeks. I’m hoping to shed a good bit more by Thanksgiving, at which time I intend to gain it all back over a period of 8 days.

To that end, I’ve been making beer like Sam Adams’s fat drunk brother-in-law. I have a Guinness-like “Irish Stout” already in the keg and bottles, and am fermenting a batch of English Pale Ale. I have two more kits ready for b’ilin’, including a “Robust Porter” and an English Brown Ale. All in all, I’ll be appearing at our Thanksgiving vacation house with 4 cases + 4 kegs of homemade beer totalling approximately 18 gallons. My uncles are excited.

You may have noticed I put a twitter feed in the top left. Don’t be sadden’d; instead, embrace the technology. I actually plan to make some small effort to keep it updated. At least as well as I do this blog, since my updates this year have averaged a wavelength of what, three weeks? Holy crap, I’m lazy.