things I love

Things I love this week:
The new kitchen faucet T. installed last Saturday. It doesn’t leak! It has a spray hose attached, which I’ve gotten out of the habit of using since our old one didn’t work. There’s even a built-in soap dispenser on the sink. I am happy every time I use the kitchen [...]

moose egg

From the perhaps-slightly-embarrassing file: I just took the Christmas moose down from the mantelpiece. After all, tomorrow is Easter. It’s time. I have a moose egg I could put up there instead (it’s a Finnish thing), but it just doesn’t command the same presence. Instead I put up the old broken mantel clock.
It’s one of [...]

(nearly) the ides of March

I guess winter is over. It hit 94 degrees here in San Marcos today. So glad I got my flannel pajamas sewed up this week.
Tomorrow the swallows will be back. T asks, how can you predict it down to the day? But I’m not predicting. I’m just saying. Tomorrow is the day they come back. [...]

in praise of modern dentistry

I have two rather gory holes in my mouth. They hurt now, even with the Vicodin which is doing unpleasant things to my brain, but getting them made didn’t hurt at the time. It was satisfactorily horrifying, in fact, feeling a couple of teeth rip free from softer stuff, just sitting there observing the process. [...]

complaints choir

There’s a Finnish word, valituskuoro, which means “complaints choir” — a lot of people complaining about stuff simultaneously.
And then there’s this: Complaints Choir.
This is the Helsinki Complaints Choir. There’s one in Birmingham, too, but somehow it sounds funnier in Finnish. There’s even a complaint in the Complaint that the Finnish language is too hard [...]