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Recent News... Just for Pope Gregory... |
2003-07-06 - 10:01 a.m. Figgy's Five Ah, my friend compound mitre saw, how I laud thy shiny blade and precise violence. Ah, the planer, a new friend, who with persistent bites, smooths the splinters away. Most of the weekend was spent working on more chairs, which brings into specific focus why I have a love-hate relationship with home and garden shows. Seductive things. Showing you new techniques and nifty products, luring you in � but what they *fail* to mention in their glossy productions is agony of the hunter-gatherer. I think this is a shill from the home improvement industry. They don�t show you how a project limps to a slow start after spending hours lost in the hardware store, trying to find everything from tack cloth to clamps. The half an hour lost to help that barely speaks English and thinks women can�t handle tools, plus the ten extra penalty minutes spent while the cashier tries to find a SKU number for a single nut � sigh. It�s a wonder anyone builds anything after a visit to the hardware store. And I still have to return a bad lighting ballast. On the whole, spending the weekend helping my mate build cool stuff was most excellent. Though I now have dangerous urges to clean/organize the shop. (No, no, Theo says Shane. Do not cross the territory boundaries. A shout out to my guestbook visitors: Leofwynne, I do indeed work with a few people who know who Xanthippe was. I also work with such illiterates that I had to define plebian for them. (And you know, when you have to define plebian while using it to insult someone, that kind of makes your point for your right there.) At work, I have been simultaneous lauded and damned for �speaks her mind.� The balance, I guess, tips slightly towards adulation, cause they did promote me this past year. Engineers are often considered dispassionate, logical creatures (thank you Mr. Spock). It�s a lie. In the words of my senior project engineer I�d rather have a passionate engineer any day of the week. You may fight and yell, but it�s because you�ve taken ownership of your work, and you refuse to compromise your standards. I remind him of this whenever I, or my passionate team, drive him crazy. Diccon, in fact, I do work with people who know what a denouement is. I work with a wide variety of randomly educated freaks. John G. and I spent a long day once recasting various coworkers as figures from church history. (We were trapped in a cold dark meeting room for three ten hours days. I think the hallucinations set in.) Steal whatever you want. Snowcat, sorry, no streaming video. The Boy and I will get around to that fight. Our last fight, I had to stop and buy him a Mountain Dew cause he ran out of energy and was quite pitiful. Hmmm, if I want to sell tickets, I better pre-caffeinate him. And, just for Figgy, your five questions: 1. What�s it like when Roland gets mad? Unhappy. Cold. He turns silent and burns darkly. His slow anger is far more frightening than my mercurial flashes. 2. Do you feel people are intimidated by the amount of education and knowledge you possess? �Me! Books and cleverness! There are more important things�friendship and bravery - Hermoine, �Harry Potter and the Sorcerer�s Stone� I used to think the answer was no. I figured I�m a boring bookworm and everyone rolled their eyes impatiently when I used words like �socratic� and �plebian�. Useful for Trivial Pursuits and annoying my friends with the arcane, but otherwise pretty harmless. Roland, however, says I�m very wrong. That pulling obscure classical references like Diogenes and Xanthippe out of the air is very intimidating. I have to trust his objectivity. 3. How did your Momma teach you to handle anger? Do you still find those early lessons useful? She didn�t. We�re Southern. We don�t handle, we repress. Very interesting problem for a Scot-Irish-English-Cherokee, thirteenth generation redneck shoved into a southern mold. 4. Who do you think is scarier than you are when they are angry? See, I just don�t think I�m scary when I�m angry. So I�d say pretty much anyone. 5. Would you help a friend bury a body? Sure. Done it before, could do it again. Okay, before anyone decides that was an admission of accessory to homicide (cause somewhere out there Cuan lawyer person just flinched), let me remind y�all that I am a gravedigger�s daughter. I played blocks among tombstones. Polished granite is stored with these cool plastic blocks between each slab � you want something smooth because careful handling is require to preserve the sheen. These blocks, which are mostly white, often light Miss Piggy pink, and, very rarely, Colonel Mustard yellow, were my childhood playthings. They make excellent, tall pyramids, with the yellow always saved for the top. Also, fond memories of the sandblaster, cause you wear nifty protective clothes and the granite dust was soft and fine to play with afterwards. Which means, before anyone asks for help, I only know *legal* ways to dispose of a body. � � � 
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