The house is really coming together, and I’m starting to think a little bit strategically in terms of what is going to go where.

My cleaning philosophy is simple: Pick a spot and clean it. Once you’ve cleaned / organized a patch of space – do not give up that space. At first, this looks like merely pushing stuff around … but there’s method there. You’re always generating additional clean and organized space. I find that it’s an unconditional win to turn a room with a uniform thickness of mess into a room where half of it is clean, but the other half is stacked deep.

and gave me a nice door that I plan to use as a large desk. The trick is that I need both the space to deploy this desk, and something to rest it upon. Something heavy and stable.

As previously mentioned, I have about 8 bankers boxes of paper that I move around with me without using. These are letters from relatives and friends, old journals, the interesting publications, and so on. These are currently in my office under the theory that if they’re in my way I’ll be more likely to move towards a final solution (some combination of scanning, shredding, and recycling seems the most likely).

These boxes are sitting almost exactly where I want the desk/door to go. It occurred to me that they would make quite nice table legs … until my rational mind said “You fool! You’ll never organize that crap if you set your desk on it!”

Ah well. It was worth a thought.

Woke up this morning in our very own house. The lion’s share of our stuff is here, including the real box spring and mattress. So much better for back health than a futon mattress on the floor. We woke up, dressed, and walked over to the local coffee shop for a quick breakfast. The owner opens the place pretty early in the morning, and we caught the locals coming and going. redmed isn’t allowed to take drinks on the T – so we sat and watched the neighborhood wake up. As she said, it was “civilized.”

Maia is adjusting pretty well. She spent the first day hiding under the pad in her carrier, but then she came out and started exploring. She’s still incredibly skittish – but settling out. She wanders around, returning from time to time to touch base with me.

Our friend Andy from Maine (of Fat Andy’s) came down with a house warming gift of poplar wainscoting. Our bathroom is small, relative to what his shop handles … so he had piece parts and end runs that matched the trim in other places in the house. It was amazing watching him work. I’ve been observing the various craftsmen do their thing – whether it’s Andy, or Elvis (who is putting in the tile), or the plumbers, or the framing guys who moved the bathroom wall. I have developed huge respect for the detail and skill that goes into each of these disciplines.

Andy shared a pithy observation: “The difference between an ordinary carpenter and a really good carpenter is not so much the number of mistakes they make – but that the really good carpenter knows how to fix his mistakes.”

Tile is more than halfway up in the bathroom. This means we’ve got structure, plumbing, electrical, plaster, and most of the tile. We expect the tile to be done today and tomorrow, and then the floor. After that – the plumber comes back to hook up the shower fixtures, toilet, and the washing machine. We’ve got a two or three week delay for the vanity we ordered to arrive, and then I think we’re done!

Also got to see and for lunch on Friday, and then added for an evening of revelry.

We’re very nearly out of the apartment, which is a good thing – since I have to return the keys on Wed. We have the “initial walkthrough” with the landlord, to verify that we’re on the same page about things like “the carpet must be clean” and “holes in the wall should be patched.” These guys have been enough of a pain in my butt that I want no surprises.

I’m somewhat concerned that I’m losing my mind. In two days, I’ve left first my bank card (I think at Home Depot) and then my Visa (at the restaurant last night). I’ll give myself a pass because of all the upheaval in my life … but c’mon Chris – get it together.

The bathroom seems to be coming together. At least we have a floor, walls, and a ceiling now. We’ve got a line on a vanity that we like – and we appear to have a solution to the issue of tile.

I remain astonished by how each and every part of this process ranges from “that’s optional,” up to tens of thousands of dollars – and still you’re doing it wrong. I think that the most frustrating and stressful aspect of this whole process is making snap decisions on expensive items without a feel for how they affect the process downstream. A close second is that the last things that you pick are the pieces you’ll touch every day. So here at the end, when I’m feeling most like the project is out of control budget-wise, I’m tempted to chintz out on the handles I’ll touch in the shower … the mirror I’ll look at every morning … and so on.

Tile is sort of amazing.

We went to this one place and fell in love with a bunch of different pieces. All of them were at least two weeks away … with the custom mosaic including little marble birds being a full 10 weeks out. That also cost more than some small used cars. The tile in that place cost at least $8 per square foot, and went north from there.

After that we went across the street to Home Depot and verified that you really can get basic space-filling tile in standard sizes for closer to $2 per square foot. Cheaper if you look around. We’ll probably wind up filling the majority of the square footage at around that rate.

This afternoon we went to another tile place who proudly said that 90% of their showroom was available for delivery within 1 week. Score. Fell in love all over again, but this time for substantially less money and closer to our schedule. Found a couple of snappy accent tiles, and a really nice dark blue glass for trim.

Once again, it feels entirely possible that we’ll make our goal of having a functional shower by the second week of October. Who knows?

node005:~ root# mkdir fooo
node005:~ root# rmdir fooo
node005:~ root# mkdir foo

Can’t even spell “foo” right today.

For the record, here’s what I think we should do to improve health care in the US:

Public Clinics: I have no interest in providing or mandating insurance to the whole country. Insured or uninsured really makes no difference to me. What I care about is that nobody goes without basic health care just because they lack money. When I say “basic health care,” I’m talking about the same stuff that we provide to third world countries. It’s in the same stack as “food,” “clothing,” “shelter,” “clean water,” and so on. How do you provide this? Public clinics. Plain and simple. I’m told that many cities already have a decent model for this. San Francisco among them. I think there ought to be some nonzero cost as a gating factor – and that cost ought to scale with whatever you reported on last year’s income tax form.

I think that greatly simplifies the rest of the question. Once we take care of the people who *need* a socialist solution, we can let capitalism do its thing. However, in order for the market to function effectively, the consumer needs to be making decisions based on price and value. Instead, we have this crazy cabal of insurance companies, employers, and medical providers driving costs through the roof. Simply having a “public option” (clinics, not insurance) will do a little bit to control prices. However, that’s like saying that a public defender’s office serves to control prices on lawyers. Of course it doesn’t.

Regulate the most egregious sins of the medical Insurance Industry. These people are fucking us. The manner of the fuckery is well documented. Dropping policy holders when they are diagnosed with a serious illness, refusing to even offer a policy of *any* sort to those with “pre-existing conditions,” and so on. I say, if you want to provide health insurance, you need to:

* Never say “no,” to anyone. There has to be a baseline risk pool that everyone can get into. Sure, it’s gonna be pricy and restrictive. However, that pool must exist.
* Give me the option of paying for my own care rather than passing it through and affecting my premium.
* Offer policies directly to consumers rather than to businesses.

And here’s one for the providers: I need to see the price *before* the procedure gets done … and the price needs to be the same whether I pay or they do.

Okay, now the market can do its magic.

Among the small business owners I talk to, an individual medical insurance plan costs about $700/month. A family plan costs around $1200/month. That’s between $8400 and $14,400 per year. In a good year, that’s a lot of money for a checkup and a couple rounds of penicillin. In a bad year, it’s chump change. I suspect that if we stopped trying to cover both our social medicine and our insurance on the same sort of policy, we would see changes.

Ideally, I would like a policy with an annual deductible of about $5,000, that cost me about $4,000. Most years, I would make money, spending the $8,000 I’m saving on insurance. Other years would suck because I suffered major injury … but I would have that catastrophe covered.

I’ve moved. All my historical paper records are in boxes and piled up in my office. I did this deliberately, rather than shoveling them straight into the basement. They’re here and will be *organized* or (better) scanned and destroyed.

I’ve realized that I can’t get down to “paperless”. I do, however, think that I can get from my current 6 file drawers plus 8 banker boxes to two file drawers.

My question is actually related to fashion. I currently own two ass-ugly grey metal filing cabinets. I would like something sleek and sexy instead.

Do you have a sleek, sexy way to keep files readily accessible? Would you show me where to purchase such a thing?

Home again from Atlanta. Since I’ve now exceeded the number of days that they can casually put me on the “visitor” list, I’ve been put in for badging. This will be the lightweight background check version (no outstanding felonies) rather than the “full polygraph” to which a friend was recently subject. Yes indeed, they do still use ole-sparky to verify your good intentions around some parts. If successful, this will push my stack of Major Government Organizational Badges to four. For a supposed independent, I’ve got a lot of ID badges.

I realized today that I’m now happier working at the house than at the apartment. We’ve shifted the center of mass to the house, I guess. Even with all the boxes and everything – it feels like *that* is home now. This is as it should be.

The bathroom / laundry room is coming together. We got “rough” inspections on plumbing, electrical, and structure today. This means that they can start putting up sheetrock. My favorite feature right now is the “copper pan” under the shower. It’s simply a sheet of copper, folded and welded into a pan perhaps 4″ deep. I love metal. It’s weird, I know. It feels like we’re in the end-run here. All they have to do is sheetrock, tile, and install fixtures and I will have a usable shower. We’ve got a woodworking friend coming down next weekend to help install the wainscoting, and the plan is to pick out a medicine cabinet and vanity as soon as humanly possible. With that – um – well – we’re done.

If you want some serious shower porn, check out the German Hansgrohe site. I particularly like the “showerarc”.

The world is moving in unusual ways today.

The cashier at Starbucks talked to me this morning. I was reading my web comics, and while collecting my plate she asked what RSS reader I used (Google). In our brief conversation, I admitted to writing software for biology. “Like, bioinformatics?” she asked? Said she used to work in DNA large scale structural analysis. Asked for my card. If she actually follows up with an email, I’m going to try to help her out. Anyone with the hustle to pick a job like “cashier at starbucks” and work it for the opportunities to talk to people is someone who should have a better job.

Went to Cafe Intermezzo for dinner again, because it appears to be the only bar / restaurant in Atlanta. Seriously, everyone recommended it and nobody had a second option. The kitchen is open until 2am every night with a wide variety of vegetarian options, the wine list is killer, and it has personality. There are real people there.

When I’m on the road, my life is a struggle for consistency and personality (mutually exclusive, I know) in the face of overwhelming blandness and suck. I stay at Marriott, not because they’re better – but because they tend to be consistent. I rent from Hertz for the same reason. In terms of dinner, though, I don’t want to be fed in assembly line fashion – no matter how heavy the tableware or cold the beer. I want to be surrounded – for that hour of my day – by other people. Real people. Not stage extras … but interesting stories to blog about that night. Intermezzo satisfies that. The girls to my left were reading “missed connections” personals from their laptop. The guys to my right were practicing stumbling French on each other and then trying to be suave with it for the bartender. There I was, in the center of the five seats between these groups. After the guys left, the bartender asked my opinion on her crossword. I was able to help out with the author of On The Road. Kids these days. Then we talked about how business is slow all over, and building contractors are in just as tight a spot as bartenders with the recession. Recovery, my ass.

Read the news off my phone while there, and it was odd: A federal judge threw out a settlement against one of the big financial houses, in part because:

“It is quite something else for the very management that is accused of having lied to its shareholders to determine how much of those victims’ money should be used to make the case against the management go away,”

I mean, damn. How often does that happen?

I read about evangelical churches in Brazil hosting “Extreme Fight” nights to bring the kids in. The 29 year old pastor winning with an arm bar in seconds and then grabbing the microphone. The next article was on a food stampede for charity food for Ramadan that left 12 women dead. Confusion to my enemies and all that, but maybe they could avoid hurting themselves quite so much? Fight night for Jesus? Killer stampedes for free food? Seriously?

The air was heavy today. It broke the computers I was working on. Software that worked in the morning failed in the afternoon on the same systems. I’m reduced to installing in text mode and re-burning CDs because of vague feelings that data might be corrupted somewhere.

Finally – I couldn’t seem to make progress with the contractors. We specified shower parts only to encounter massive FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) about the quality of Home Depot parts – same name brand as the plumbers warehouse, mind you. But if you don’t buy from the Plumbers Warehouse – woe betold. Evil Home Depot will fill your brass fittings with plastic guts. It’s how Home Depot makes things cheap, you know. We caved and went with the warehouse in the hopes of having a shower online by the time my dad stays with us, only to be told that the stuff we picked wouldn’t work together. Can’t work. Well, maybe, except that it would take weeks to get the parts. Do you want to stop all work for weeks.

So fine, says I: What should I do? My choice line was “If, at any point, you think that I’ve asked you to make me a shower where I can’t turn off the water, then I’ve mis-spoken and I apologize. Above all things I want a shower that works well. On a grand scale, I care very little about the part numbers, finish, and fixtures. I care very much about being able to turn off the water. I am ignorant on these matters. Your stuff costs more, bt I’ll pay it because I trust that we’re on the same team here. Please help me.”

In my last performance review, they said I was “edgy.” I think that this is the sort of thing that they were referring to.

Thus ends the day.

Welcome to the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Of all the world events I’ve seen, that one seemed most likely at the time to “change everything.” Change, we got … but certainly not the magnitude or scope to qualify as “everything.” In the ensuing years I’ve seen several events that really ought to have changed “everything,” either for the world or for me personally – and they all seem to recede into the same grey mush of things-past.

The most enduring legacy of 9/11 seems to be the fact that I have to take off my shoes before getting on an airplane, and that’s just pathetic. America started two wars over those attacks. We seem to be wrapping up one of them, but the other is just getting underway again. Turns out that merely killing a few tens of thousands of people and building a hospital or twenty doesn’t alter the structure of a nation over the medium term. Meanwhile the epicenter of malevolent craziness in the world has shifted such that we seem to be doing clean-up on yesterday’s news.

I find it valuable to pause for a moment on anniversaries like this, and consider where I was, where I was trying to go, and where I am.

Woke late, after much wine and laughter last night.

Egg sandwich, packed two cars, drove to the house. Unpacked. redmed returned to the apartment to pack more boxes. I attacked the ceiling fixtures in the bathroom. The goal is a functional three-way switch for both the lighting fixture and the vent-fan.

Stepped out for a gatorade and a powerbar. Bought a box of soft sugar cookies with frosting. Three were gone by the time I got back to the house.

arrives with more stuff. Helped her unpack it, wrestled with shelves in the basement. Noticed that she’s nowhere to be found. She’s napping in the hammock. Join her. Nap.

There is something beautifully hedonistic about being awakened in the hammock by friends arriving. Hello technolope, hello capital_l.

technolope sets to work assembling shelves. capital_l works on thesis stuff. redmed removes nails from re-usable hardwood. I continue to hump away at the three way switch. Crazy wires everywhere. Drilling 1″ holes in joists. My cordless drill rules.

Success all around, run back to the apartment for a quick shower. The glorious feeling of being so very much cleaner than before almost makes getting that filthy worthwhile. Then to the new local restaurant for drinks and a light dinner. Run into a friend who we didn’t realize was tending bar there. The place just keeps getting better.

Home. Fold laundry. Sleep.