PAgent’s Progress

Just a quick comment on something I heard on NPR this morning. Republican Senator David Bitter, weighing in on the immigrant worker issue, took a stand against offering illegals amnesty, stating that the U.S. operated under the “rule of law”, and that such an action would decrease “respect for the law”.

And I just about started laughing out loud. The Rule of Law? Hmmm…let’s see:

-Watergate
-guns for hostages
-funding the Contras
-disclosing the identity of Valerie Plame
-illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens
-Tom Delay’s roughshod handling of Texas democrats
-Jack Abramoff’s slimy association with Republican lawmakers

Rule of Law? Is this guy in the wrong party, or what?

Oh wait, I keep forgetting. It’s not illegal if it’s done by rich white guys.

I’ve had my struggles with the Seven Deadly Sins, each of them at one time or another. But of course my longest most desperate battle has been with Gluttony. I like to eat. I love good food. Combined with my genetic heritage, this is a recipe for disaster.

Which brings me to last night. We recently had a “Cheesecake Factory” open near our house. Someone brought some of their cheesecake to work, and I was blown away by it. As a result, I got some cheesecake from there for my birthday, and it was excellent again. So, we decided to have dinner there.

If you want to worship Gluttony, I know where the Temple is. From the immense interior, and the vaulted ceilings, to the giant pillars, it’s almost Egyptian in scale. You approach the dais where the high priestess resides, and she tells you the wait will be 65-95 minutes.

Yes. An hour, to an hour-and-a-half wait. To eat at a restaurant in a mall. I was highly, highly dubious. But off we went and window-shopped for an hour or so, then returned, clasping our little radio-controlled vibrating light box, waiting to be summoned by our god.

It was, in fact, more than an hour and a half before we got seated. My general attitude at this point was that there was no way the food could possibly be good enough to justify a wait like that. The menu is the size of a paperback novel. A paperback novel by Neal Stephenson. The kids were wilting from lack of food at this point, so we started by ordering an appetizer. In particular, the “Roadside Sliders — Bite-sized Burgers on Mini-Buns Served with Grilled Onions, Pickles and Ketchup”. When they arrived, we tucked in.

Oh my God. From the fluffy fresh-baked rolls, to the juicy flavorful beef, these were the best burgers I’ve had in years. I wanted two more orders. Forget ordering dinner.

The wife and daughter split an appetizer Caeser salad. It came in a tureen. It was easily enough salad for 3-4 people. My dinner salad (“Buffalo Chicken Salad — Mixed Greens Tossed with Spicy Crispy Pieces of Chicken Breast, Tomato, Celery, Blue Cheese and Vinaigrette. Topped with Spicy Buffalo Sauce and Blue Cheese Dressing”) was similarly huge.

And everything was good. All four of us enjoyed our meals immensely, and that just doesn’t happen often. What with the portion sizes being as majestic as they were, we got some boxes to take leftovers home, then caved in to filial pressures and ordered dessert. Specifically, the Giant Brownie Ice Cream Sandwich:

It was incredibly good. We split it between all four of us. It was still too much.

Between the scale of the place, the long wait, the quality of the food, and the immense portion sizes, this place really did seem like a Temple to Gluttony. And in penance for having worshipped there, I will have to spend some time at the Temples of Temperance and Asceticism.

But I can still hear the siren song of those little burgers, and the call of the cheesecake. I can’t lie, I may be tempted to commit apostasy, and return to the Temple again sometime.

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We bought our last house in Eugene when it was two years old. It was my dream home. Aside from the vaulted ceilings, oak woodwork, huge kitchen, and location at the edge of the woods, it had another advantage: It was only a couple of years old.

That meant that the wiring worked, the plumbing worked, no dry rot, new appliances, etc. etc. etc. There was still plenty to do, don’t get me wrong, but mostly having to do with esthetics, or landscaping. We didn’t have problems with the infrastructure of the house.

When we moved to Portland, and dropped from two incomes to one, we couldn’t have a nice new house on a hill on the edge of town. We had to get what we could afford. And in the insane real estate market at the time, we had to settle for what we could get. We made offers on five different houses before we actually got the one we bought. It was forty-five years old. Since our purchase, we have:

-replaced ALL the pipes with copper
-insulated the pipes
-removed and replaced the insulation in the crawl space
-remediated the attic to treat mold
-replaced the entire heating/cooling system
-installed new garage doors
-replaced the siding on the entire house
-replaced the front door

In most of these cases, this was not a case of ‘wouldn’t it be nice’, it was more a case of ‘we have to fix that or it will fail catastrophically at an inconvenient time’. Except for the heating and cooling system, which actually DID fail catastrophically at an inconvenient time, and the insulation in the crawl space. Once you find out you have rats in your crawl space, you get pretty darn motivated to clear them out as fast as possible.

In almost all of those cases, we hired professionals to do the work. We did this because we have no time and no skill for such things. But every now and then, I actually try to Do It Yourself.

Security experts say that the door leading into your house from the garage should be one of your defensive strongpoints. This is because once someone gets into your garage, they are unobserved and can apply themselves to getting that door open at their leisure. When we moved in, I noted that our door to the garage was an interior door, hollow-core, with no deadbolt. It didn’t even have weatherstripping, which meant that an arctic blast shrieked under it all winter. It’s bugged me since we bought the house, but it’s always been a low priority (see the above list).

However, the door failed catastrophically over the last week, to the point that it would no longer stay shut. In response to my fuming about this, my wife pointed out that she just pushed a shoe against it to hold it closed. I had had enough, and decided to replace the door myself.

Again, we usually hire a professional for this sort of thing, but I was lulled into a false sense of security by internet articles with quotes like “most of the difficulties in installing a new door have been eliminated through the use of pre-hung doors”. So, the plan was to purchase a pre-hung exterior door, put it in place, hammer it in, and done. Easy as pie.

I should point out that my do-it-yourself projects usually proceed through the following phases:

-researching and planning the project
-purchasing the necessary materials
-beginning the actual project
-purchasing additional necessary materials
-additional research to determine why the project is not proceeding as planned
-sulking
-buying additional tools
-applying unnecessary force
-rationalization

The door project started out innocently enough. Friday night I made all the necessary measurements. Saturday I got up early and headed to Home Depot to buy materials. After prying the old door out, the new one slid nicely into the gap. Huzzah! All that was required now was to shim it, fasten it in place, and install the lockset. I would be done by dinnertime.

It turns out that shimming a door so that it remains plumb and square is something of an arcane art form. Try as I might, everytime I tried to put a shim in place, the frame would get torqued so severely I couldn’t even close the damn door. When I reached the point that I was actually hurling shims across the room, I decided to let it rest overnight.

Sunday, I began to absorb the finer points of shimming, and with frequent references to both my carpenter’s level and my carpenter’s square, I began to secure the doorjamb to the frame. By dinnertime I was installing the lockset, which went gratifyingly smoothly, except for the chiselling necessary to install the deadbolt pocket. By the time I went to bed, the door was installed, locked, and ready for insulating and replacing the moulding. It’s true that the upper left corner of the door does rub the doorframe a bit. And you have to lift UP on the doorknob to get the door to close easily. And the door frame isn’t quite flush with the sheetrock. But in any case, it’s a vast improvement over what used to be there (see “rationalization”, above).

And to my long-suffering wife, I honestly don’t know why I react so negatively when you helpfully suggest I ask someone for help. After all, I already had a vasectomy for you, so I don’t know why a metaphorical castration should even bother me. It’s just an idiosyncracy of the male psyche.