Rambling Rhodes

Windfall

Just before the turn of the year, my parents visited and my Mom handed me an envelope full of bonds. Some of the bonds date back to 1975, the year I was born, and the same year my grandparents started sending me bonds on my birthday. All told, there were two $25 bonds, and 12 $50 bonds, spanning years from 1975 to 1991.

For those doing the math, that's $650 face value. Of course, bonds accrue interest, so some of the older bonds can be worth as much as five times their face value, so I'm looking at $2,000 to $3,000 (give or take a couple hundred) overall. So, in general, this is a good thing.

The thing is, I have a mixed reaction to a financial windfall like this. On the one hand, I can look at it as money for a new gas fireplace, which I need to buy eventually, one way or the other. Still, on the other hand, I look at the bonds and see them as representing three months of financial peace of mind should I somehow lose my job or incur some sort of unknown expense.

This is the dual financial world that always rules over me, often leading to an intractable non-action. I end up building a healthy savings I'm simply too terrified to spend. It drives my wife crazy.

This is also why I don't want to have the coin collection from my more youthful years appraised. Oh, sure, I'm curious as to what it's worth, but once I know, it'll just become another one of those things I'd sit and worry about.

Blogged Down

Ryan: I watched "Julie and Julia" last week.

Caroline: Oh right. We watched that a few weeks ago

Ryan: That's about a time when blogs were still the newest thing.

Caroline: yeah seriously

Ryan: A person writing that kind of crap nowadays would get about 10 visits a day, tops. And nine of those would be people looking for nude pictures of Julia Child.

Caroline: ::shudder::

Only 170?

Sheets that don't rock

I spent a large amount of time over the weekend hanging sheetrock in the basement.

I honestly hate hanging sheetrock, in the basement or elsewhere.

It's not so much the act of hanging sheetrock that I mind; I actually find it to be somewhat relaxing. Rather, it's looking at a day's worth of sheetrock hanging and saying to myself: "That's it? That's all I accomplished?" Because, you know what? Hanging sheetrock is one of the most labor-intensive, nothing-to-show-for-your-work activities this life has to offer.

I mean, seriously. You'd think a sheet of rock that's four-feet-by-eight-feet in size would possibly cover some serious area. Instead, after you button that chunk of crap to the ceiling, you step back and marvel at how tiny that huge piece of shit actually is. It almost makes you sit down and ponder just how insignificant your life apparently is.

And that's just the hanging aspect; it doesn't include the measuring, an exact science which, left in my hands, would result in a room eerily reminscent of most Salvadore Dali paintings. Putting a measuring tape in my hands is like giving a monkey a hand grenade.

Instead, I leave all the measuring to my wife, which leads to an interesting sequence of events. You see, while I would never trust myself with measuring basically anything, that in no way diminishes my impatience with my wife's measuring process. While she labors to exactly determine where light switch openings need to be cut, I'll be circling the perimeter, sighing loudly and asking what's taking so long. I want to HANG the sheetrock, after all, not just stand there and watch my wife make pencil marks. My impatient behavior, though very cathartic to me, does not go over well at all with my wife. The end result of this sequence of events, ultimately, is a lot of bickering. We're professional bickerers.

After a piece of sheetrock has been adequately measured and cut, I then get to actually hang it, which consists of putting roughly eight million screws into each sheet. I don't have a definite formula for how many screws I dedicate to each sheet, but the number tends to increase depending on my mood. If my wife and I have just finished bickering, for example, there will be so many screws in the sheetrock, you probably couldn't throw a dart without hitting one.

And all of this doesn't even begin to address the areas of mudding and taping, which are such maddeningly mundane and repetitive activities, they actually prompt you to wonder if God Himself invented them as a sort of celestial joke on mankind.