The Office Superstore
LC and I live in the bottom section of a medium-sized red brick house in a decidedly young-professional neighborhood. Some would mistakenly call what we live in a "basement apartment," but be aware, reader, that we do not, in fact, live in a basement. We have windows. Four of them.
I've struck a mammoth deal with the architects upstairs where we just mooch off their wireless Internet and split the bill every month. Somehow this works out to being like $3.50 per person per month, which is a good deal, barring that there are no huge bandwidth problems like when I try to set-up a download queue of the 8 best Kevin Costner movies.
So here are the things LC and I did this weekend, when, just after the architects packed their car and took off for Virginia Beach, the power flickered, and the router reset, and, trying but failing to break into their living room to fix the modem, we were left, for the entire weekend, with no Internet:
- I built a compost pile; LC dug, fertilized, and planted a 4x10 garden
- I read The Bear by William Faulkner; LC read The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- I beat (finally! finally!) the Water Temple and got the Master Sword; LC wrote all her lesson plans for the next month
- I ran ten miles; LC did not
- I got an extraordinarily large amount of writing done; LC painted a Dodo on a canvass the size of one of our biggest walls
- We went to a wine tasting, watched the Friday night concert series, and saw Who Killed the Electric Car?
- (spoiler alert! I did! I killed it!)
- We made long lists of things to Wikipedia
- I cracked the code: Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain is a straight up sample of Pepe Romero's Concierto de Aranjuez
- I bottled a 5 gallon batch of beer; LC made me put up drapes
- I built a Japanese (I think) rock and sand garden; LC watched as the neighborhood cat pooped in it
The Internet is back now, with all it's wonder, and from my desk of comfort I fondly look back at the time when we did not have its numbing convenience, and when things needed to be done, were somehow done.
Correction: Pepe Romero was not the composer of Concierto de Aranjuez. Joaquin Rodrigo is the composer. Joaquin Rodrigo.
I've struck a mammoth deal with the architects upstairs where we just mooch off their wireless Internet and split the bill every month. Somehow this works out to being like $3.50 per person per month, which is a good deal, barring that there are no huge bandwidth problems like when I try to set-up a download queue of the 8 best Kevin Costner movies.
So here are the things LC and I did this weekend, when, just after the architects packed their car and took off for Virginia Beach, the power flickered, and the router reset, and, trying but failing to break into their living room to fix the modem, we were left, for the entire weekend, with no Internet:
- I built a compost pile; LC dug, fertilized, and planted a 4x10 garden
- I read The Bear by William Faulkner; LC read The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- I beat (finally! finally!) the Water Temple and got the Master Sword; LC wrote all her lesson plans for the next month
- I ran ten miles; LC did not
- I got an extraordinarily large amount of writing done; LC painted a Dodo on a canvass the size of one of our biggest walls
- We went to a wine tasting, watched the Friday night concert series, and saw Who Killed the Electric Car?
- (spoiler alert! I did! I killed it!)
- We made long lists of things to Wikipedia
- I cracked the code: Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain is a straight up sample of Pepe Romero's Concierto de Aranjuez
- I bottled a 5 gallon batch of beer; LC made me put up drapes
- I built a Japanese (I think) rock and sand garden; LC watched as the neighborhood cat pooped in it
The Internet is back now, with all it's wonder, and from my desk of comfort I fondly look back at the time when we did not have its numbing convenience, and when things needed to be done, were somehow done.
Correction: Pepe Romero was not the composer of Concierto de Aranjuez. Joaquin Rodrigo is the composer. Joaquin Rodrigo.
posted by Ryan at 18:32
6 Comments:
I love you guys.
it's amazing what diversions we turn to when denied the electronic teat we so eagerly suckle!
congrats on getting so much done, i'm jealous!
Basement apartments commonly have windows; when I lived in a basement apartment in NYC (complete with a dog-sized rat who lived in the adjacent storage space), we had several windows. The basement of my current house has windows. I think a cellar can't have windows; but a basement definitely can.
Good deal about the connectivity. How did you like The Bear? Somebody else I know just read The Road, ah yes it was badger.
Modesto: I loved the first 2/3rds - the buildup to the hunt and backstory to the area and characters and then finally the hunt itself. The final portion, where he opens up an abstraction of the racial/historical arguments then into the socio-political issues with the south, Mississippi, wherever they were, was absolutely insane, and required a much more attentive reading. It slowed me down considerably and I disliked how I lost my initial pace. And then it ended, and so while overall I enjoyed it, it ended on a down note.
Huh, I haven't read The Bear but my experience with Faulkner is almost entirely of slow, slow reading. Often majestically good and absorbing slow reading! But any time I'm reading it quickly it is because I'm not understanding it, similar to Pynchon that way.
"It slowed me down considerably and I disliked how I lost my initial pace."
then whatever you do, don't read The Sound and the Fury
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