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Random Musings
The Washington Post site has been down all morning. Has anyone else noticed this?
Various things have distracted the hell out of me lately, so I failed to make some notes for Sebastian. One is that Teri sold Sebastian's plastic play-area slide thing; I don't know what to call it, but it was large, made out of brightly-color plastic, and included a couple of slides and a tube to crawl through. He never played with it that much anyway, and it's much too small for him now.
He originally objected to the idea of selling it, and said that he would hide it from Teri. Which was ridiculous, because it's huge. But he slowly changed his mind, for reasons which will become clear later.
The list price for a new one is $399, so Teri posted it on Craigslist for $100. It's in good condition, but a little sun-faded and somewhat dirty. To our amazement she got 20 responses within hours, all of them frantic for the thing. She immediately discarded the two low-ball offers ($40 and $70), and eventually sold it to a family from Connecticut who offered $125. Although I should note that she only took $100 for it; it seemed to both of us that it would be wrong to take more than our asking price (we won't have that sort of scruples when the time comes to sell our house, I imagine, but the housing market is unlikely to move in that direction for some time). Anyway, it's gone now. Teri gave me the cash to put in my computer fund, which surprised and touched me.
A while back we were in a Sam's Club, and Sebastian saw a giant swing set on display. It included a fort, two ladders, and arial tunnel, a ten-foot slide, the works. He immediately fell in love with it. Here's his reaction:
Yup, he was begging on his knees for it. It worked, too: Teri's mother was there, and she went online and bought it for him a little later.
The thing is, it comes as BOARDS and HARDWARE. 1,000 pounds of them. It supposedly takes two "moderately skilled" people 16 hours to assemble, but that's BS. It's going to take WEEKS. It also takes a 10-foot stepladder, which we don't have and which would cost hundreds of dollars to buy.
We're also supposed to have a 38' x 23' area of our back yard excavated 12" down, levelled, and filled with some sort of safe play material. Cementing is recommended, though not required. Teri and her mother are setting it up on the lawn, using topsoil to smooth out uneven spots. It's going to take up about a third of our back yard, and our back yard was (comparatively speaking) huge. I don't know what we'll do if we get the chance to move; I can't imagine taking the damned thing apart.
Right now our entire backyard is covered with thousands of boards and bags of assorted hardware. I should take a picture.
Incidentally, the new swing is one reason why Sebastian was willing to give up his old playground slide installation.
Teri borrowed a Sawzall (actually a Tiger Saw) from her brother and we took the old four-person swing apart. I liked that swing quite a bit, but when two main supports literally fell off of it, even I had to admit that it was time for it to go. Sawing through the metal was hellish; the saw was incredibly powerful, and it was like being jackhammered. But eventually we cut it up (some of the pipes were jammed full of ants and some sort of rich-looking red soil/rust mixture), and got it out to the front sidewalk. Fortunately the garbage men were willing to take it away.
It was a good swing, though. I'll miss it.
Quite a few of my entries are written for Sebastian, as a way of chronicling his early life. Lately, though, it has crossed my mind that perhaps I should do some entries actually written to him, from me; telling him things that I've learned, and my philosophy (such as it is). That would be awfully personal, though. I'm not sure if I could pull that off. And if I did, I'm not sure that I'd be comfortable leaving them public, or even as friends-locked posts. I suppose I could make a special filter just for him, assuming he gets a journal some day.
Various things have distracted the hell out of me lately, so I failed to make some notes for Sebastian. One is that Teri sold Sebastian's plastic play-area slide thing; I don't know what to call it, but it was large, made out of brightly-color plastic, and included a couple of slides and a tube to crawl through. He never played with it that much anyway, and it's much too small for him now.
He originally objected to the idea of selling it, and said that he would hide it from Teri. Which was ridiculous, because it's huge. But he slowly changed his mind, for reasons which will become clear later.
The list price for a new one is $399, so Teri posted it on Craigslist for $100. It's in good condition, but a little sun-faded and somewhat dirty. To our amazement she got 20 responses within hours, all of them frantic for the thing. She immediately discarded the two low-ball offers ($40 and $70), and eventually sold it to a family from Connecticut who offered $125. Although I should note that she only took $100 for it; it seemed to both of us that it would be wrong to take more than our asking price (we won't have that sort of scruples when the time comes to sell our house, I imagine, but the housing market is unlikely to move in that direction for some time). Anyway, it's gone now. Teri gave me the cash to put in my computer fund, which surprised and touched me.
A while back we were in a Sam's Club, and Sebastian saw a giant swing set on display. It included a fort, two ladders, and arial tunnel, a ten-foot slide, the works. He immediately fell in love with it. Here's his reaction:
Yup, he was begging on his knees for it. It worked, too: Teri's mother was there, and she went online and bought it for him a little later.
The thing is, it comes as BOARDS and HARDWARE. 1,000 pounds of them. It supposedly takes two "moderately skilled" people 16 hours to assemble, but that's BS. It's going to take WEEKS. It also takes a 10-foot stepladder, which we don't have and which would cost hundreds of dollars to buy.
We're also supposed to have a 38' x 23' area of our back yard excavated 12" down, levelled, and filled with some sort of safe play material. Cementing is recommended, though not required. Teri and her mother are setting it up on the lawn, using topsoil to smooth out uneven spots. It's going to take up about a third of our back yard, and our back yard was (comparatively speaking) huge. I don't know what we'll do if we get the chance to move; I can't imagine taking the damned thing apart.
Right now our entire backyard is covered with thousands of boards and bags of assorted hardware. I should take a picture.
Incidentally, the new swing is one reason why Sebastian was willing to give up his old playground slide installation.
Teri borrowed a Sawzall (actually a Tiger Saw) from her brother and we took the old four-person swing apart. I liked that swing quite a bit, but when two main supports literally fell off of it, even I had to admit that it was time for it to go. Sawing through the metal was hellish; the saw was incredibly powerful, and it was like being jackhammered. But eventually we cut it up (some of the pipes were jammed full of ants and some sort of rich-looking red soil/rust mixture), and got it out to the front sidewalk. Fortunately the garbage men were willing to take it away.
It was a good swing, though. I'll miss it.
Quite a few of my entries are written for Sebastian, as a way of chronicling his early life. Lately, though, it has crossed my mind that perhaps I should do some entries actually written to him, from me; telling him things that I've learned, and my philosophy (such as it is). That would be awfully personal, though. I'm not sure if I could pull that off. And if I did, I'm not sure that I'd be comfortable leaving them public, or even as friends-locked posts. I suppose I could make a special filter just for him, assuming he gets a journal some day.
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I would highly recommend a paper journal for stuff you want to save for Sebastian. All e-content is both eternal and ephemeral, and there's no way to tell which a specific post or writing will be. LJ may not exist in 5 years, never mind by the time he'd be reading it...and even if you back things up (like I do semi-regularly) there's no telling when a HD or backup disk will vanish or die. Doing both paper and ecopies may be the best solution.