Before the plunge

This was an especially productive week . . . on Friday.  Right in time for the long weekend, naturally.  In fact, I took care of almost everything . . . save the necessary preparation for the big event coming up in three weeks or so. 

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Today, we finally stowed all the Christmas decorations and cleaned up the boxes that had formed huge snowdrift-like formations in the garage.  Also went and studied bathroom fixture options at some of our local home improvement stores.  And why would we do something like that?  Because starting this coming Tuesday, the hall bathroom is being torn down to the studs and the subfloor and everything is being replaced.  What will we do with only one bathroom, you might ask?  Well, we only use one bathroom anyway, to the great chagrin of The Spouse.

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It's football playoff time, which means that the TV is on a lot.  Which means lots of commercials.  Let me again reiterate how absolutely creepy/disgusting/deeply strange those Viagra & Cialis commercials are.  On the less creepy side, those new Windows 7 commercials with the schlubs are funny--especially the "recreations" in which they imagine themselves as male models.  What I can't believe is how many viewings it took before I caught on.  Oh well.  I never claimed to be observant. 

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It's football playoff time, which means we're close to losing football until August.  I know this is heresy to most of my associates, but college basketball (on TV) is a feeble substitute.  There's plenty of creepiness that surrounds college sports in general, and certainly football--but that pales in comparison to the creepiness that one finds surrounding college basketball and TV broadcasts thereof.  brrrr.

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I'm reading a really good book.  Here's a passage about whether our tendency to push 17- and 18-year-olds into college is such a wonderful thing (hint:  no)--


Different kinds of work attract different human types, and we are lucky if we find work that is fitting.  There is much talk of "diversity" in education, but not much accommodation of the kind we have in mind when we speak about the quality of a man, or woman:  the diversity of dispositions.  We are preoccupied with demographic variables, on the one hand, and sorting into cognitive classes, on the other.  Both collapse the human qualities into a narrow set of categories, the better to be represented on a checklist or a set of test scores.  This simplification serves various institutional purposes.  Fitting ourselves to them, we come to understand ourselves in light of the available metrics, and forget that institutional purposes are not our own.  If the gatekeeper at some prestigious institution has opened a gate in front of us, we can't not walk through it.  But as a young person surveys the various ways he could make a living, and how they might be part of a life well lived, the pertinent question for him may not be what IQ he has, but whether he is, for example, careful or commanding.  If is he is to find work that is fitting, he would do well to pause amid the general rush to the gates.

--Matt Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, pp. 72-73

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The boys have become accustomed to my presence, which means that now that I'm spending time at work during the day, they are peppering their mother with "where's daddy?  where's daddy?  when's daddy coming home?"  Well, mainly the Big Brother. 

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I've spent far too long on this, and it's not getting any more interesting.  I'm done.