Well, okay, so I’m a lazy bum, and I haven’t written anything in so long that everything here has scrolled off the main page.

The problem is that, here in the Humidity Belt, you tend to get cabin fever in the summer because it’s too awful to go outside most of the time. So you stay in the house and eventually you get annoyed by all the junk laying around and you get involved in all sorts of little projects to make the place less horrifying. Or at least I do, anyway. I am beginning to suspect that Nicole and I might be the annoying kind of people who apologize to guests for the colossal mess just as the guests are marveling to themselves at how damned clean and tidy everything is.

Anyway, it’s better to just stay in the air conditioning, and being refrigerated all the time tends to cause the creative juices to thicken and to stop flowing. So I’m using this time instead to attempt to get the kitchen island rebuilt to my specifications. I usually sit at the thing all day long, and my back is starting to hurt, because it wasn’t really well thought-out to begin with. Actually, saying ‘my back is starting to hurt’ is understating things somewhat; my back is so strained by this practice that once when I sneezed a couple of months ago, something went wrong with the muscles of my upper back and I collapsed. I had to spend the rest of the day laying flat on the living-room floor, whimpering and admiring the dust on the ceiling fan. Say, that reminds me, that thing needs cleaning.

(40 minutes later)

So, inspired somewhat by Lileks, we’re rebuilding the the kitchen island.

The idea is to have two levels on the thing, one at normal countertop height for chopping, mincing, and occasionally dicing, and the other at normal desk height for propping computers on. There’ll be all kinds of electrical outlets, network jacks (for the gigabit Ethernet connections that make it easier to back up data to the computers in the basement), phone jacks, TV and audio wires (for feeding signals back to the AV stuff in the basement), the whole magilla. Several thousand dollars at a minimum.

The problem is that we’re having a hard time finding anyone willing to take our money. The first people we went to said that their granite supplier was too busy to even give a quote, and they actually recommended that we try Lowe’s, who, it seems, have their own granite pipeline. The guy at Lowe’s didn’t seem very interested in what we were trying to do, and in fact they still haven’t called us back.

The place we tried today, the third place, was the first that did anything other than leave me with the strong impression that they were totally uninterested in the work. We’ll see. I already refuse to go into the Burger King, the Taco Bell, the Martin’s, and one of the 7-Elevens in Front Royal, so disgusted have I become with their total inability to even begin to do business; if many more places let me down, I’ll have to move or become a hermit.

So anyway, that’s what’s going on at Tino Manor. There are a few other things in the hopper, but they’re really just rants about how idiotic everyone is. That’s pretty much par for the course here, but it’s too hot for me to work up the proper head of steam for a really good rant; for the next month or so, I might just try something other than ranting. If I can figure out what that is.

I see Nicole coming to rook me into the horrible task of emptying the vacuum cleaner, so I’m off.