I'm flat out of imaginative things to write about, so let me fall back on things I've bought recently. Unusual things I've bought - not food and drink or comic books, but things I've never bought before.
Let's see. Well, right now we're having the house painted. $3,300. The exterior color of the house when we bought it (and, in fact, up to today) was a sort of honeydew melon green, with wine colored trim. Yes, green and purple. As the neighbor across the street said, using great restraint, "Well, about ten years ago the house was owned by a very nice gay man, and he had it painted in those colors. The whole neighborhood was rather, um, taken aback."
But no longer. This week the house will go from baby-puke green and merlot purple to a nice light yellow and royal blue. So it will still be a fairly strong color combination, but now in sort of a Mediterranean villa set of colors rather than an avocado-grape smoothie set of colors.
Yes, we are slightly holding our breath, hoping that it will be pretty and not too strong. Yes, there will be pictures when it is finished.
What else. Well, in order to allow the house painter to do his work, I had an exterminator come out on Friday to wipe out once and for all the two yellowjacket nests at our house. One was under the concrete patio out back, near the house, and the other one was actually in the roof. So they had to go. I had been ineffectually poisoning them for weeks, killing perhaps eighty percent of the hive but making the others stronger, meaner, and probably gifting them with mutant powers. Since we had someone coming to paint the house, and it was unfair to inflict mutant yellowjackets on him, we threw in the kill-it-yourself towel and called an exterminator.
Who came out with the same tactic - insecticidal dust - that I had been using, only he had the stuff that ordinary citizens aren't allowed to buy. And it wiped them right out. He didn't even need a suit, just the pump-action poison canister and a tube which allowed it to reach the roof. In fact, he was surprised by and appreciative of my having wiped out most of the yellowjackets beforehand. In his experience, yellowjackets are the nastiest of the bee-like pests, inasmuch as they come in great numbers and all at once, whereas wasps, hornets, etc generally attack in single or double digits.
$125. But it was a success, and the little bastards seem to be all dead. Which is good, as they had been getting in the house.
On a more permanent footing, I also purchased two powerline network bridges last week, so that Kathleen's computer upstairs could use the Internet. She'd been using my computer, and that was interfering with my ability to goof off. So we had to get the 'net back to her machine, post haste.
In our previous house, I had done so by running a wire from my hub (which is then connected to my cable/dsl router, which is connected to the cable modem) to her machine, with a long series of Cat-5 cables. However, in this house, that would have involved drills and ripping up flooring and walls, and basically looked to be a project filled with opportunities to fuck up the house. So we wanted a solution that didn't involve running cable.
I looked first at phoneline networking, where you use the existing phone lines in your house as network cables. But the technology, though available, isn't readily available, i.e. there is perhaps one brand of each item involved in the purchase. And since what I wanted was really just two bridges, since I already had the network, and the phoneline bridges were expensive, I looked elsewhere.
I briefly considered wireless. But firstly, it's expensive, and secondly, it's trendy. Anything the industry is pushing so hard I don't trust. Plus I don't want to see University of Maryland (less than a mile away) geeks parking outside my house to use my Internet access.
Yes, I know I can secure the network. But I'm crotchety, so I don't care.
So that left this really rather zany technology called powerline, where you use the electrical wiring in your house as a network. And I could buy two Netgear powerline bridges from Dell online for a total of $116. Which I did. They got here two days after I ordered them (despite my having used standard shipping), and were the most plug and play item I've ever seen. Plug them into the wall outlets, plug in the network cords, and everything is go. Worked like a charm within 5 minutes of receiving the box.
I still need to secure them, actually. Currently, if anyone else buys a Netgear powerline bridge within five or ten houses away on the electrical grid, they could plug it in and my router would happily assign them a DHCP address. But then, I don't see that happening before I finally get off my ass and spend the three minutes necessary to change the bridges' passwords. And I like the fact that I can buy as many $60 bridges as I have computers, and everything that has power has network. The throughput is listed at 14Mbps, and when tested by CNet actually averaged about 3.4Mbps. So it's not Cat-5, but then my cable modem isn't getting more than 1.5Mbps, making it a moot point.
So. Those are some of the places where my money is going. Pleasantly, I can recommend any of them. Though the jury is still out on the house painting. Looks good so far.
- Sun Ra