hairdos

I judge people based on their haircuts. If someone's sporting a well coiffed 'do, i think "wow! That person's really put together!" Frizzy/messy hair says "lazy", combover says "insecurity", while a closely cut crown around a balding spot is the opposite (and good, in my opinion). If i spot a punkster with multi-colored spikes, i'll likely cross the road. 

As far as i can remember, all my prejudging has been directed at teens or adults, never kids. My question is, do the same stereotypes apply to the under ten crowd? If you saw this kid and his new mohawk hanging around your local park, what would your impression be?

cost of t30 torx bit: $0.84. treating dad to kimball's as a thank you for his help: $7.05. saving $280 while getting 3 hours of quality time together? priceless.

I've been needing a new car for a while now (the subaru forester is currently in first place), but it won't work quite yet. Vivian, my 10 yr old jetta, is hanging in there, but barely. While driving to work last week, the window fell into the door. Annoying. After taking the outside panel off, my dad and i managed to yank the glass up and duct tape it shut until i could get the parts to fix it.

This was good because it poured the next day. After calling, i showed up at the VW dealership to pick up the $57 regulator repair kit. I'd found step-by-step instructions (complete with photos!) online detailing how to fix the clips, and considering it would run $280 in labor alone to have the dealership fix it, thought i'd head out to my parents' house and have some quality time with my dad. Quality time we had! After removing the glass from the door, we disconnected wiring and removed the inside panel.

Then came the fun part- replacing the clips and trying to get the very tight wire to go back where it was supposed to. That took forever and left both of us bleeding, but was very satisfying after the fact. It was super neat to see (thus understand) how the whole thing worked. This picture shows the clips (at the bottom) that hold the glass, and the wires (covered by black plastic in some places) that roll the window up and down when the motor turns.

After getting that back in place, we reinserted the glass, reconnected the wires, and reattached the outside panel.

Good as new! And $280 dollars that can now go towards the new one. Merci dad!

construction

I was potentially going to stay in vermont until sunday, but couldn't find a ride back, so came back yesterday instead. This only matters because i was warned that there would be a rambunctious group of 45 year old guys hanging out tonight, and that i might want to "hide". At first i planned to see a movie, but when i wasn't quite excited about any of my options, i decided to finally build a headboard for my bed, something i'd been planning to do since september when i upgraded from a full to a queen.
I had a mental picture of what i wanted, and after building my full size bed from old doors, this was fairly straightforward. Got some plywood, added some foam, batting, fabric, buttons and legs, and attached to the bed. It took me a good three hours or so (of which 1.5 were used making the buttons and sewing them on), but worked out exactly as i'd planned. Here's my new headboard..

It's a good thing i had a project to do on the third floor, because they're still at it at 2 in the morning. It sounds like i live in a frat house.

skinny pancake

I only had to work for two days over a period of five weeks (which was both a nice break and a financial nightmare), so i was able to get up to the vermont house two times. Since my car is now a senior citizen, it's not able to make the trip so i rely on my guests to provide the mode of transportation. If that weren't the case, i'd probably have stayed for the entire five weeks. The most recent trip was made with two friends and a baby, and was a nice mid-week getaway highlighted by puzzle doing, pond swimming, zip lining, bonfire building, and s'more eating. Aside from the mild issue of large quantities of water pouring through the basement bathroom ceiling and the ensuing calling, fixing and cleaning of said water, it was great and relaxing.
On our trip home, we stopped at the skinny pancake, my favorite crepe place in montpelier. I always get the same thing, the johnny crepe- an unbelievably tasty concoction of pulled pork, caramelized onion, cabot cheddar, and a corn meal crepe. I cannot stress how good this thing is, really. The other great thing about this place is that they use as many local ingredients as possible, and have a map on the wall that shows where each ingredient comes from. The pulled pork, for example, was from duclos and thompson farm in weybridge, and the cheese from cabot creamery in montpelier. Very cool. Today, as an extra bonus, i passed on the water in favor of a root beer that was...

...on tap. It was the best root beer i've ever had. In short, i will now require a stop at the skinny pancake during each trip to the vermont house. It's a good thing i don't live closer.

like a fish

I started swimming when i was little. My dad would take my brother and me to the Y where we took lessons and swam around with him during free swim. I distinctly remember my bubble. It was a pinkish retro bubble (ie- an actual inflatable rubber bladder with the cloth cover- unlike the foam things that are around today), and it had some quite appealing-to-five-year-olds design on it that i loved- maybe a bumble bee? I wish i had a picture of it. Who knows how good i was at that point, but when we moved to a house with a pool when i was nine, my mother signed us all up for session after session of lessons in hopes that none of us would drown in the backyard. I made it to the lifesaving level where you're swimming in your clothes (and blowing them up to make "floaties") before my mother finally was comfortable with my swimming abilities. Though we were in that pool daily from june through september, i can't remember ever swimming any real stroke. Marco polo, jumping tricks off the diving board, playing around with flippers mask and snorkel? Yes. Swimming laps? No. The four of us survived many summers in that pool without incident before they filled it in a few years ago. That was a sad day.
Twenty-years after my last lesson, i decided to start swimming laps at my local Y. Everything was going well. I had a very strong crawl stroke (freestyle to all you weirdos), and with a little practice my backstroke become quite efficient. I wasn't a fan of flip turns, so i took to swimming four lengths in order- one crawl, one backstrokes, one breast stroke, one elementary backstroke. The real work happened on the crawl and backstroke, the other two were my equivalent of stretching. One day it occurred to me that my breast stroke might need to be tweaked a bit. A friend who's also a swim teacher confirmed this- i was doing it all wrong. After checking a few things out, i signed up for five weeks of swim lessons for the low price of $38 (got to love the Y). Three weeks into it, i've now learned the correct way to do the breast stroke (knees together!), butterfly, flip turns, and push offs. What i've also learned is that doing the strokes correctly is much more exhausting than doing them my way. Doh!

new space

I don't like squishy mattresses, especially after purchasing and sleeping on my current firm one. It's fantastic. I downloaded the iphone app "sleep cycle", an amazing thing that monitors your movements while sleeping and gives you a neat graph the next morning. This app confirmed my theory that i sleep poorly on soft mattresses. I toss and turn all night, waking with a crick in my back and a crabby attitude. Thus, after the fourth night of sleeping on one such mattress, i developed super human strength, and shoved my mattress up a very narrow winding stairway (until it got stuck and i got my neighbor to help at 11pm) so the fifth night never happened. Upon getting the mattress up there, i realized that the only way it was going down was through a window. This led to the decision to relocate all my belongings to the third floor- a floor that is empty and never used by others. Within a period of hours, i'd repainted the room, sanded the floors, hung new blinds, moved all my furniture including the box spring (which required removal of staples and dust cover, cutting of three wooden bars, folding in half, tying together, dragging up same narrow winding stairs, unfolding, repairing and restapling), and settled in. Though all that happened fairly quickly, it took another week to finish all the little things like buying and installing new window locks (so no monkeys try to sneak in while i'm sleeping), extricating all my belongings from random 2nd floor closets and relocating them to their new home, and climbing into the attic to adjust the air conditioning/heating dampers to better regulate air flow. Now that it's done, i realize how much i love this stuff. Part of it's the repainting and starting out with a new clean space, but mostly it's the purging of lots of stuff that took up plenty of mental space. Knowing that my belongings are now organized and packaged neatly and that i got rid of five black trash bags of junk lowers some level of anxiety i didn't realize i had. So, tonight when i sleep in my fantastic bed, i expect "sleep cycle" to register an even healthier and more relaxed pattern of sleep.

begin again

I used to love my blog. I wrote daily, added images, liked doing it. Then i got busy and it felt like a chore, so i stopped. When things settled down and i wanted to write again, i didn't understand why it made me so anxious. Then i realized i'd done too much moving forward to back up into the same blog again. Which brings me here- new life equals new blog. Funny how a clean slate makes everything much more appealing.