Wednesday, June 08, 2005

The House is Done Again

number thirty-three

We are leaving to go on vacation soon, and I feel like I have the stuff that needs to be seen to seen to. Again. 323 words.

[NL]—There have been many times over the last month that I have declared the work on the house finished. I said it was finished when we finally got the shelves up and all of the books off of the dividing wall between the living and dining rooms. I declared it done when I had the furniture in the office set up and the things all put away in the closets. And again when Sunshine set up the spare room, and again when I potted the plants and again when I outfitted the maid’s room with a bed and a lamp. The house was finished when my speakers arrived and the entertainment center was finally available to watch the 400 blows projected majestically on the wall of the TV room. The house was finished, finally, the other day when I set up our new Linksys wireless network, and neatly stowed all of the wires out of the way.

Today, in just a little while, Sunshine will return early from work, and a cab will take us to the airplane that will whisk us off to excitement and adventure in gritty México City. Then, within days, we are off to historical Guanajuato. For two weeks the house will belong to the cat and the incredibly sweet couple who have agreed to come by every day to fed her and water the geraniums. I have finally cleaned the fridge and put the pantry into some kind of order. I have placed the plants where I want them to go. Door keys have been put on a ring, and handed out to the necessary folks. Soon I will cut the power and the wi-fi and the air conditioning (I’ll leave some on for the cat), put the chairs on the tables and lock up. So, now, finally, for at least two weeks, the house is done.

Which means I don't have to think about that anymore.


A house overly finished. Photo © the Author

this happened to Mr. Cavin before 1:53 AM



Quiet Reading Room

This is a quiet reading room. Often, I find it is uncomfortable to digest long tubes of columned text directly off a computer screen. This journal is dedicated to the collection, percolation, and ultimate integration of my personal experiences. Subjects that I want to examine and then talk about--sometimes talk a lot about--€”are presented here. This central content can tend to thousands of words, maybe millions. I was afraid that readers were leaving the presentation boggled, spinning, googly-eyed. Or perhaps when confronted with twenty-four inches, or yards, of monitor sprawl they were just giving up. I am not even certain that I have necessarily solved this inevitable content problem of modern information enjoyment, but here is what I have done.

After long and highly scientific routines manipulating double-blind control- and test-subjects, peer reviewed journal publications, and hours and hours of hands-on experimentation, I have crafted this quiet reading room. There is no scientific way to control the length of the articles I write, but careful handling can somewhat soothe the contextual presentation. In other words: I have dropped the traditional speculation about lexicon, and attacked the question of the matrix itself instead. Brilliant. After years of diligence what I eventually crafted is this reading room.

The walls are contoured to relax instead of constrain; the paper is made to soften instead of reflect. The light is dimmed--just so--€”to prevent strain, angled to prevent umbra, and color-coded to soften harsh red lights and deepen wimpy light reds. There is nothing I can do to control aural environment, but my recommendation is that it should be kept quiet. About ambient sound: these entries are probably best read as far as possible from emergency vehicles, preferably from beneath the muffler of a vintage fire fighter pilot's scarf, puffy old duvet, or snow that is still falling.

My theory is that the wide web world is filled with potent and material opportunities that are just too difficult to digest for many people to take part. Enjoyment of this stuff is regulated to the routines of crawlers and robots at the peril of humankind's peaceful future survival. In an attempt to delay this likely outcome: welcome to this quiet reading room. It is for people like you to relax, kick back, and hate my content for better reasons than the dizzying vertiginous specter of its lousy dpi presentation.

Return to Previously

About Mr. Cavin