This much snow, right now, interbedded as it is with slippery slippery ice, would shut down any city, even the ones that own snow plows.

I am getting pretty good at this “working from home” thing. Just now I SSH’d via VPN into my work machine (which I have trained to turn itself on and off every day) and committed a bunch of files to the SVN repository that I neglected last week. I had a fine through-the-looking-glass moment when my remote box dropped me into vi for a commit message — vi in a Coda terminal window, running remotely on a desktop machine. A text editor on a desktop box running inside a terminal inside a text editor inside another desktop box. This was the WIRED magazine crap I used to dream about ca. 1994.

Driving in this stuff is like skiing. You don’t so much steer as suggest a direction to your car.

I feel especially bad for Jenny in this. Inasmuch as I am not a homebody or an indoorsy person at least I have the experience of being stormbound in a 10' x 15' hut in Alaska for a week as training. Jenny and Orion are used to being out — running, running errands, swimming, shopping — from 9am to 5pm every day.

Lately I don’t regret buying such a big house after all. Or a TV. Or the kinetic trainer Jenny bought me for Christmas (in direct contravention of our mutual “no gifts” agreement.

I spent the whole weekend cleaning. I mean like the whole weekend because I got up at 6:00 each day and fell into bed exhausted at 8:30. And I mean like cleaning as in rake up all the leaves and windfall from last week's storm, and pick up the dog poop in the yard, and sweep the porch and the patio and the street in front of the house (and did you know red cedars lose about half their needles in the fall? I did not), and mulch the garden¹, and air out the garage, and scrub the bathrooms and kitchen, and vacuum the basement and stairs.

Then last night I shaved my head and shaved my face like I do every Sunday night and I woke up this morning feeling new born.

¹So I have this theoretical method of garden mulching inspired by a phrase I heard somewhere: “compost is what happens when you pile up organic material.” In September, I cleared the vegetable garden (which had become badly overgrown under the previous owners’ tenure) and have been fighting weeds there ever since. So instead of spending the winter fighting those weeds, I piled up all the pine needles and leaves from the yard, which cover the garden to a depth of about 8 inches. My theory is that some of those leaves will compost into the soil (which is pretty rich already), and the rest will a) discourage weeds and b) encourage earthworms. I can pull away the mulch in the spring and add it to the compost pile, which should be pretty mature by then anyway. We’ll see how that works out...

Of the two big life changes we’ve made in the last year — buying a house and having a baby — the really stressful one (so far) is turning out to be the house. One of the fun aspects of our particular house is our refrigerator, the previous owner’s “beer fridge,” unhelpfully located about ten vertical feet away from the kitchen. Which is to say, our only refrigerator is in the basement, and cannot be moved upstairs without deleting a few walls. (Among the previous owners’ skills was a knack for building walls in what should be an unfinished basement). Because the previous owners didn’t leave their kitchen fridge, this means a lot of trips up and downstairs at dinner time.

Anyway, long story short, we need a new fridge. This expense has been a long time coming, and Jenny did a good job researching refrigerators and picking a suitable new model. We have learned that one of the reasons home ownership is so damn stressful to me is that I have an almost religious dread of spending more than about a hundred bucks, so I can’t be trusted to do something like shop for a refrigerator. (This is true even for purchases of things that I really like purchasing — like bicycles or computers. It takes me months to get up the nerve to finally buy something like a new bicycle.) And when you own a house, you spend bucks by the thousands. Ouch.

But the weird thing is that I’m not a frugal person. At all. I don’t clip coupons or reuse tea bags. I like buying my groceries at the chichi yupippy organic grocery. I drink the expensive beer. I have no qualms about picking up the tab when I’m with friends, or spending any amount of actual money on any number of impulsive purchases. In some ways my behavior is anti frugal. I hate shopping and buying things so much that I’ll pay a premium to procure them from somewhere that streamlines the shopping process. I’d rather walk into the Levi’s store and pay whatever price they ask for the exact jeans I always wear (model 527, size 32/32), than dig through the extras bins at TJ Maxx or wherever to save big $$$.

My particular tight-fistedness was the source of a certain relationship friction — not so much because we disagreed about the expense (we really need that fridge), as because it hurts me so much to acquire an object. It makes me grumpy. But in our, ahem, discussion about the new fridge I had a realization. Jenny likes nice things. I don’t mean she has high tastes or likes spending money, but just that, if she needs to own something, she would just as well that thing be nice.

But that’s not actually the realization. The realization I had was that my ideal relationship with possessions would be to have none at all. Like, literally. I suppose I really really need a pair of shoes and some sweatpants or something, but otherwise, it would be nice to have no responsibility for any physical objects whatsoever. So when I actually do really need something (and, as it turns out, modern life requires more accessories than a pair of shoes and some sweatpants), my inclinations is to buy them as easily, and, more importantly, as disposably as possible.

So when Jenny and I have a “fight” about “money,” we aren’t really fighting and it isn’t really about money. We’re having a conflict of worldviews about the importance of physical objects.

Of the two attitudes on display, Jenny has the more grown-up. Responsible adults can’t conscionably sit on the floor and eat from plastic plates (← I am describing my bachelorhood here). She has come by her attitude honestly and organically. Which is to say, she has always been like this, and she knows it.

I don’t know if I’ve always been like this, and I’ve always felt conflicted about it. As a teenager and young adult I was recklessly acquisitive. For example, when I got my first real paycheck at my first real job (as an archaeological fieldworker in North Dakota), I spent the whole thing — $800 — on a single shopping spree at an outdoor store in Billings, Montana. At literally the same time, I harbored fantasies about losing all my possessions in a disaster.

This whole thing is a little bit mysterious to me. It’s like those cartoons where Sylvester has an angel cat on one shoulder and a devil cat on the other. The little Acquisitive Angel is saying “Paul, buy a new backpack! You have the money! You deserve it!” and the Destructive Devil is saying “Don’t be a sucker, that’s just more crap you’ll have to schlep around. Carry your stuff to work in a paper bag! Why the hell not!” When I was younger, I guess the angel was winning. Maybe because, when you haven’t owned nice things, it’s fun to buy those things you’ve always wanted. As I age, the devil has pretty much taken over. Probably because by this point in my life I’ve owned already owned all the things I’ve ever wanted, so there’s no fun left in buying something new.

Pretty much the only improvement we’ve done to this house since January is to remove the really horrible back patio roof:

(Michelle’s boyfriend Otto did this for us BTW.)

This has proven a 99% improvement. It lets a great deal more light into the kitchen and back of the house, and we can see greenery out the windows, instead of the dirty underside of a corrugated steel roof. The patio has become more usable in good weather (because it isn’t cold and mildewy), and surprisingly not less useful in bad weather. (Because bad weather generally comes from the southwest, i.e. the front of the house, so the roof overhang provides enough space to maneuver dryly around the patio without the full cover.)

Today I discovered the 1% situation where having a dark, fully covered patio would have come in handy. All that sun washes out the backlight on my laptop so it’s a pain to work outdoors.

Yesterday I installed a new (NEMA 10-50R) outlet for our dryer (replacing the old range-style outlet [10-30R] on the same circuit). I hate working with electricity. I've been shocked plenty with 110v and was scared crapless at the prospect of getting zapped with 220v. My fear was that whoever wired the breaker box hadn't properly labeled the dryer circuit, although it was the only 30amp circuit...so why so scared, Paul?

I also figured out, using Science™, why the dishwasher backed up when Jenny ran the in-sink-erator. It backed up for the same reason the in-sink-erator backs up when the dishwasher drains (but in reverse). Except that apparently the dishwasher doesn’t drain on its own, the circulator pump needs to cycle first. The Science™ part is that I figured this out by treating the dishwasher like a black box and drawing a diagram, then testing the black box by running coffee grounds and other stuff through the in-sink-erator. So Science™ has at least two uses:

1. Asking stupid questions during ultrasound tests
2. Figuring out really basic plumbing problems.

The “fix” for the dishwasher — such as it was — was the run the dishwasher through the end of its cycle. Also (and FFR): don’t drain a full sink all at once through the in-sink-erator.

I need to point out here that I am not usually a handy person, so this is probably about 50% of the Handy Homeowner stuff I’ve done in my whole life.

Probably Related:I'm trying to teach myself some knots from Knots and Splices. I never remember knots. I remember a few knot fundamentals, like slipknot, double-8, and hitch, but my knot philosophy is “if you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot.” Someday I’m gonna have to teach my son how to tie good knots. I can’t throw a baseball and don’t know jack about cars, so I figure need to pass on some kind of manly stuff.