What Should Be in Your Tool Box

I’m totally stoked about Lauren’s project and I’m about thirty seconds away from ordering Ivy to write up her "How to keep your car from being repossessed" tips for it, but I’m not sure what I have knowledge of that other people don’t.  Still, I’m going to throw in my two cents.  Feel free to chime in or disagree.  If you have practical knowledge you’d like to share, just post it in a post much like this one, and link to Lauren’s post, and click through so she can find it.

 

What Should Be in Your Toolbox at the Minimum

A flathead screwdriver

A Phillips screwdriver

A hammer that has some heft to it, but is not too heavy for you to use.

A tape measure

A level (or a tape measure with a level) 

A nice variety of little screws

A nice variety of nails and tacks

Electric tape

Duct tape

A lug wrench

An allen wrench

Sharp shears

A good box cutter

Needle-nose pliers

Snub-nose pliers

A crescent wrench

Extension cords

Phone & computer jacks and cords

A set of tiny screwdrivers if anyone in your family wears glasses or likes to play around with electronics 

Some white glue

Some quick drying glue

Some string or twine 

A Wheelchair that Can Climb Stairs and Season of the Witch

This morning, I caught Stephen Colbert in a wheel chair that can climb stairs.  It was so awesome.  My dearly loved Uncle B. had crutches and then a kind of motorized scooter do-hickey.  But he was a history teacher and he’d drag anyone who’d be dragged out to battlefields or down obscure roads or out along paths as far as he could get.

How awesome would it have been if he could have gotten farther?  Down rocky paths, right along shallow creek beds, if he could have cast his eyes on the things he’d only heard about?

Shoot, we’d have all pitched in and gotten him a tiny one-man tank if we’d thought of it.   

I don’t know why I was thinking about him today.

Probably that’s where we first got this idea of an afterlife, don’t you think?  The way that someone’s absence can well up out of nowhere to catch you up short.  You hurt like you did days after his death.  Shoot, if grief is that powerful, can stay that fresh, it seems so likely that some part of him must also carry on, doing whatever it is he does, caught up short in grief himself, waiting for us to come to him.

I finally found a cool version for free of “Season of the Witch.”  It’s by Brian Auger and the Trinity.  Julie Driscoll is the singer, I think.  It’s nice.  It’s got a fun organ-heavy arrangement, drums with just the right light pop, and a guitar doing a nice rhythm line.  Something about the whole thing makes you think it’s going to break out into a really grand version of Innagadadavida.  But the real treat is at the very end when everything winds down, the drummer takes a last few slow swats, and the guitarist wraps it it up with a bluesy progression of three notes that resolves into a kind of pleasant chord.

It’s so nice, it makes you wonder if “Season of the Witch” isn’t secretly a blues song.  In a traditional blues song, you’ve got a line that repeats itself, sometimes with slight variation, and a third line that resolves the tension of the first two, in some way.

Here you have a line and then a big variation on that line in the second line and then a third line which is the same at the end of every verse.

I don’t know.  The arrangements I’ve heard of it are all so trippy and I’m no musicologist.

But it’s definitely a song haunted by the blues, that’s for sure.
 

The Butcher Awakens

It’s shaping up to be a beautiful day.  The Butcher has it off. 

I envy him just a little about it.  He could do anything–take me to work and go for a drive, sit out on the back porch and watch the dog play, hang out in front of the television, etc.

I asked him “Why are you doing up so early?”

He said, “Are you kidding me? I dream of sleeping in till 7:30.  I get up at 4.”  And not he’s chastising the dog for getting old.

I love that silly boy.

Teach a Gal to Fish, You’ll Feed the Whole Village

1.  I know we have some academics commenting and lurking.  Now, now is your chance to contribute not only to the silly discussions around here, but to a larger silly discussion.  Say you were going to change the name of your women’s studies department. 

Would you go for “Gender Studies” or…

…wait for it…

“Feminist Studies”?

2.  Bridgett and I have been trying to think of easy to stage one or two act feminist plays.  Any ideas?

3.  Remember how we were sitting around at Blogger Bunco talking about how nice it’d be to have a guide to things like how to avoid the repo man or how to cook inexpensive but tasty meals or how to figure out which bills you can float for how long, etc.?  Well, it turns out that Lauren is putting together a project to collect such knowledge which is sitting in your head and spreading it around where it can be of use to a lot of folks.