Everyday Stupidities

It's a fantabulous night for a moondance. All seems to be pretty good here in the neighborhood of make-believe, though not without some blatently stupid things going on around me. Such as yesterday's observation that the wall cabinets in my kitchen are 40 inches tall, while the largest one can special order is 36 inches and the largest ready-to-install or you-build cabinets I've seen in the big-box stores are 30 inches tall. There are a couple cabinet warehouses that might be of help, but they seem to have another stupid thing going: the all-wood unfinished ones you stain yourself only come in one door style, and all the rest with pretty doors aren't solid wood inside. Now I see why cupboard door replacement businesses have a niche other than in the remodeling-the-existing realm. Oh, and one other really dumb thing about cabinetry has surfaced, too. Every cabinet that I've ever been exposed to growing up had permanent shelves -- they sat on strips of wood nailed to the sides. Somewhere along the line someone got the idea that shelves should be moveable like is seen in assemble-it-yourself bookcases, and the primary way this is accomplished is by using plastic clips that get stuck into holes in the sides. That's just moronic, five to twenty years from now a lot of people are going to have shelves that don't stay up or flat because of broken mounts... and though the idea was portability, people are going to break those brackets trying to move their shelves. GRRR!!

And on that note, nothing more has been done in the home improvement arena lately but there has been plenty of research of tile (for the kitchen counter, the backsplash, the fireplace front, and for covering the painted-white brick of the fireplace) and lighting for the kitchen. [ten hours later: okay, we've purchased 3 of the 4 overhead lights, thus something has now been done lately.] I'd rather be buying Christmas clutter at the antique places, really. But every so often that sense of my own mortality reminds me that I have too much crap as it is and a lot of it I don't use. I need to go nihilistic and strip myself of many of my material possessions that are just that, material possessions without actual purpose. Some call it Spring Cleaning, others call it dunging out the corral, and I've always been pretty lousy at getting rid of stuff. Others have always done it for me against my will and wishes, and it's preferable to the psyche to have control over such changes (especially since other people tend to throw out the valuable stuff, resulting in a peal of "do you know how much that goes for?!" or "but I got that from my great-grandmother!!" and other blood-angrying-up sentiments). A bit more organization would probably help, or as I look around my office, but this doesn't change the fact that I have two large dead CRTs that need to go to the recycler and three crates of items at my left that I haven't looked at in years... and you don't even want to know about my closet. I'll get to it. Sometime. The thought people have is "I have time", and I figure I do, but I also fear getting to a medical point (sickness or untimely death) or age where I can't physically do it. Don't want no clueless people pawing MY stuff yet again! Hopefully near the same time I dung out my life I'll get a will written so that the crap I keep can go to those who appreciate crap.

Nope, I don't know what either of these photocopies seen taped up around Ellensburg actually mean. But I love cryptic messages by photocopy artists. One of my favorite wheatpaste posters of my teen years, which I wish I had a photo of but lacked a camera, was in Post Alley in Seattle; it was a long-before-Photoshop heavily edited photo of an overjoyed person with her eyes replaced with quarters and a lot of money piled around her, with the single caption "Consumer Fascism".