Mission statements

Yesterday morning, I attended a big HR shindig with my entire new division (third iteration of my division since I started here two years ago--it's been a restructuring bonanza!). We, as the new College Relations group, are getting ready to go through our yearly evaluation process. The college came up with this revamped process about four years ago. It has a silly name, special forms, facilitators, and everything. I think the big thing is that it's not supposed to be tied to salary increases (true, b/c as far as I can tell you get cost of living increases and nothing else, unless you have an actual promotion in job title).

So, part of our preparation was to come up with our divisional "mission statement" and "success factors." There are so many obvious Dilbertisms here. As part of the department that markets and writes the messages for the college, I found it amusing that we had to be "facilitated" into creating our own mission statement. Couldn't help thinking, if they had just assigned this to us, we could have had it done in no time. But that would've defeated the whole team-building exercise, I guess. Can you imagine the nightmare of that many cooks in a kitchen, when probably 75% of the people in the division are professional writers?

But, we got through it. Now we'll have individual meetings with our boss, which will go fine. I have a great relationship with my boss and she lets me know how I'm doing regularly. One of the most bogus parts of the process (not counting the mission statement) is that you're supposed to identify "other sources of feedback" and appeal to them regularly, but there's no formal process for it. You're just supposed to say, I'm going to talk to these people every so often about how I'm doing and then I'll mention it to my boss. I sound like the bureaucrat from hell, but come on--shouldn't this be documented better?

OH WELL. There are more important things to worry about. Insurance finally called this morning and gave the go-ahead for the mold people to come do their thing. They're coming tomorrow to start tearing up my kitchen. Hooray!

My email is making me stupid

Jojo just told me that she heard about some study (while she was half-asleep--I thought I was the only one who half-listens to NPR and then half-retells, inaccurately, the stories) that says checking your email obsessively temporarily lowers your IQ.

Folks, I'm your proof right here. Come to think of it, this blog is probably making me stupider, too. I work in the technology field, at a computer much of the day. Much of my work is embedded in emails. Many of my tasks require downtime while applications scurry and spin their little 00101 wheels.

Let me break out my professional voice for a minute. The latest usability info says that the user notices and is distracted by a response/run time of more than 5 seconds (I think it's 5--again, the half-reporting of inaccuracies). I get these little 5-second interruptions all day long (not to mention the phone, the drop-bys, etc). Seems like a good time to check the email.

Two hours later I realize I've been perpetually distracted and very little has been accomplished. Come to think of it, my entire job may be making me more stupid. Or maybe a little more focus and discipline would go a long way.

Holding pattern

The mold people finally got their estimates to me yesterday, and now I'm just waiting to hear from his excellency, my insurance agent. I do like my agent a lot. He's kind of a good ole boy, and he's been dealing with my family for about 25 years so I think he'll do me right.

Aside: What homeowner wouldn't delight at the use of the term "controlled demolition" in relation to one's house? I started getting nervous reading the estimate, but I remembered getting some medical results a few months back and being absolutely sure I was dying. Well, I wasn't.

We forget that every industry has its own dialect, and we do need translators. I was certain I was dying of thyroid cancer last fall, and all my medical friends assured me I wasn't. Luckily, I have a friend in the mold business, and he's helped put the water damage in perspective. This isn't anywhere near Katrina damage, and I'm not living in a biohazard.

But it sure would be nice to get moving on repairs. My good sense of humor can last only so long.

Pleasing words redux

All the house chaos has kept me from updating my pleasing words. Let's see, recent favorites:

ranunculus
homonculus (only natural the two go together, no?)
microbial
Tecumseh

An army of leprechauns

During the approx. 4 hours I spent this weekend pulling weeds, I decided that I'll have to go ahead and hire one of those weed-killing and fertilizing lawn services. Much as I enjoy weeding my lawn (no kidding), life is too short. My only other option is to employ a small army of leprechauns, and I hear they've unionized.

Go ahead and make fun. I admit, I have fully embraced the suburban lifestyle.

Growing up, we never had a nice lawn. Partly, it was because the huge oak and the huge magnolia in the front yard gave too much shade for grass to grow. We had really nice, spongy patches of moss, though. The other reason was my dad's refusal to become a suburban man. He says one day he came home from work and went out to get the mail. He looked to his left and saw men watering their lawns. He looked to his right and saw men watering their lawns. And so he decided not to join the infinite regress of men holding garden hoses.

But, I inherited a lawn so thick the mounds of grass are actually hard to walk on--kind of like walking on the beach. Seems a shame to waste it and all.

Spring blooms again

I knew I had used a similar subject line before, so I went back and mined my archives. Sure enough, a post from last May (halfway down the page linked above) about a yearning for Irish or Irish-American men. I'm afraid I must report the yearning has returned. Hey, at least I'm consistent (though apparently spring bloomed earlier this year).

Yesterday, I happened upon a recent photo of Bono, and I am barely exaggerating when I say I felt physical pain at the sight of him. How can that man still be so beautiful? And don't even get me started talking about my growing devotion to Patrick Dempsey. Every week I endure the abomination of squeaky silliness and medical inaccuracy that is Gray's Anatomy, just to watch Dr. McDreamy.

I could go on at some length about real, not-celebrity Irish-American men that I know, but why embarrass myself further? Sometimes, espeically when the weather is a perfect as it has been this week, I get a feeling that is difficult to describe. It's a mixture of these things: goofy happiness that makes me want to leap and dance; impatience that feels like I'll explode if I don't get my way RIGHTNOW; sadness that it might all just lead to disappointment.

The whole deadly combination is so overwhelming I can barely stand to acknowledge it. That's what spring does to me.

Mold College

Now that the pipe is fixed, we're moving on to The Water Damage People, who have a much greater sense of urgency about things. One company came out yesterday to do the "emergency treatment," which consisted of putting gigantic fans all over my deconstructed kitchen and in the living room, plus a man-sized de-humidifier in the dining room that pees out water through a long, funky hose placed in my bathtub. It's like having a big, warm quadroplegic hanging out in the middle of my house.

I am skeptical on many levels about this emergency treatment. A competing Water Damage Person came out this morning and confirmed my suspicion--that you don't want fans blowing mold spores all over your house. So, the fans are off for now. (Aside: there's a physicist lecturing at work/school next week about how various things in nature share the same structures--spirals in frog eggs, ripples in sand, the big spot on Jupiter. I think mold spores and metastasizing cancers must share some sinister parallel structure.)

It looks like Water Damage Person #2 will likely get the cleanup job, although I liked the first people a lot. #2 just really knows his stuff. I talked to a third WDP, a bigger company not really interested in my plight, and he recommended #2 because he's highly trained. "He's been to Mold College," said WPD #3.

And #2 did impressed. He walked around with his little ghostbuster-type water detecting device and talked at length about what can and should be done. Apparently, I have "black water" under the kitchen floor, as well as "contaminated drywall." It all sounds dire to me, but he seems to think the cleanup part will only take a couple of days.

The part that will take longer is replacing the floor they'll tear up and whatever damage they do to the walls. So, I'll be getting the new kitchen I didn't know I wanted. At least I'll be able to replace the white linoleum floor that shows every speck of dirt. Who thought white linoleum was ever a good idea?

J.T.

First, let me explain that in my house, I have a cute quarter-bath (just toilet and sink) off the master bedroom. Apparently it was standard in smaller 50s houses to have the master quarter-bath. It was a bit more upscale to get even the half-bath (shower, toilet and sink). My, how times have changed in this age of the jacuzzi.

But anyway, my cute quarter-bath still has its original tile work--green and white with a fancy pattern on the floor, where little arrow-shaped tiles fit together into hexagons. It's one of my favorite things about the house, especially after seeing some of the craptacular color combinations of other neighborhood baths--pink and brown, fuschia and brown, aqua and brown.

Over the weekend, I was poking around in the flower bed and swept up some dead leaves over a little concrete walkway that leads to the hose spigot. The original owner of the house, Jack Thomas (a postman), had poured lots of convenient walkways and flowerbed walls, and I had noticed before that this one walkway had some tiles laid in it. For some reason, I had never pieced it together, and for the first time I realized it says "J.T.," spelled out in the little arrow-shaped tiles leftover from the bathroom. With two square white tiles for the periods.

I feel like I've discovered the patron saint for my house. Where are you, J.T? Right now, half my kitchen is lying on the floor, and the other half is covered in plastic and blockaded by the stuff on the floor. Hanging the plastic by myself (12 feet of plastic, one roll of tape) was a challenge, but when I was finished the kitchen had a futuristic kind of feel, like in the movie Brazil. I felt like a performance artist, like Cristo in my very own kitchen. Later, I'll get to tear down the plastic and it will be like unwrapping a huge gift--there's my kitchen!

The indisputable rule to home repair is "it takes longer than you expect." It's a disheartening realization, but you might as well get used to it.

And of course, I'm working on where in my house or yard I can permanently place my own initials.

Which came first, the carpenter or the plumber?

The answer is: the plumber. The plumber has to come back and disconnect the sink before the carpenter can pull the counter and cabinets off the wall, so the plumber can come back and check out the pipes. But the contractor came today to check out the situation and he was chock-full of good news--about the probability of needing to jackhammer my foundation, etc.

It turns out concrete makes a lot of dust.

Of course, this is speculation and there's no point in entertaining the worst-case scenario quite yet, but he's speaking from experience about what happens to 50-year-old houses with cast-iron pipes. Turns out pre-war houses don't have the problem (yet) b/c their cast-iron pipes are two or three times as thick, but post-war, we started getting cheap. Years of food acid and Drain-o make pipes rot out the bottom. So, am I sitting on an inevitable catastrophe? No one wants to say for sure.

The fact is, you're probably not safe with any house you buy. New houses come with their own set of problems, and the older they get, the more esoteric the challenge. One of my friends recently gave me the only advice that seems to help.

He said, "everything gets broken eventually."

There's no fighting entropy, so we might as well get used to it. This idea is rather comforting once you accept it. I adore my house and try to keep it spotless. I put time and effort into it so I identify with it to the point where it feels like an extension of self. But what is it really? Just a house.

The other thing is, much as I love the 1954 aspects of it and want to preserve those, maybe it's time to get over it. My dad, and architect, always surprises me in that he has little nostalgia for old buildings. If it's vacant or rotting, tear it down. To hell with the preservationists. I'm not planning to tear down my house, but I suddenly see the value of PVC pipe. And if my living room floor buckles from water damage, perhaps I'll consider Pergo over salvaged vintage hardwood. Life is too short to worry.

House beautiful

Dear blog,

I've been busy working on some fun things this week. More precisely, I finally got an initial diagnonis on the water that's been leaking out of my foundation with increasing briskness for several weeks. Guess what? I have a broken drain line from the kitchen sink! That explains the funky odor and the brownish goo deposits in my carport.

I've had three visits from plumbers this week, and so far all they've concluded is that yes, it's the kitchen drain. So guess what happens now? Someone has to come pull my wood cabinets and nice white countertop off my newly painted kitchen walls. And if the problem isn't in the wall, they'll break up the linoleum floor.

But wait, there's much more! So far, we've only covered the probable. There's also the issue that some of this water has been running under the pretty wood floors in my living room. We can only speculate if they will be affected. Also, if the pipe in the kitchen floor is in bad enough shape, the plumbing may have to be completely re-routed. That means breaking up my patio and digging up a bunch of furry, well-established sod.

Hey, my one-year anniversary of closing on this house is coming up! Happy anniversary! Oh joyous home!