Hiss! Pfffft!

Seven years ago right now, my now-ex and I were embroiled in an epic war launched by our downstairs neighbors whose delicate constitutions were incompatible with the deafening pitter-pats of eight velvety kitten paws touching our floors. The neighbors retaliated by blaring explosion-filled video games on their TV speakers non-stop and filing a noise complaint with our condo board—after pissing off the board president by putting a passive-aggressive note on his windshield because they were unable to tolerate the way he parked within the lines of his own parking spot. I responded to their complaint with a full-artillery manifesto destroying everything about them so blisteringly that they literally broke their lease and moved out within a month. (I must find that manifesto and post it here in the spirit of lingering pettiness. If I remember correctly, it’s quite a masterpiece of laser-focused vitriol.) But as a lovely benefit from all this drama, to show my due diligence in attempting to quell the deafening pitter-pats of eight velvety kitten paws thundering through our floors, I bought us this gorgeous pitter-pat-silencing rug:

A fond remembrance of our old delicate-fucking-lotus-blossom neighbors

Five years ago right now, my now-ex and I were embroiled in an epic war launched by our downstairs neighbors whose delicate constitutions were incompatible with the deafening pitter-pats of the eight velvety kitten paws touching our floors. The neighbors retaliated by blaring explosion-filled video games on their TV speakers non-stop and filing a noise complaint with our condo board. I responded in kind with a manifesto destroying everything about them so blisteringly that they literally broke their lease and moved out within a month. (I must find that manifesto and post it here in the spirit of lingering pettiness. If I remember correctly, it’s quite a masterpiece of laser-focused vitriol.) 

Plus — in my benevolent due diligence — I bought us this gorgeous new kitten-silencing rug:

Ode to Spode

Facebook memories tells me that apparently I post an annual photo of our profligate collection of Spode tableware after I (artfully, natch) set the table for our Norwegian Christmas Eve feast. So here’s this year’s submission of tableservice documentation, along with my clever location concept for our stockings — with mine closest to the door and therefore the first to be encountered by Santa when he enters our chimneyless condo so I get the biggest haul of solar panels since they’re more efficient than coal.

Melting the cat

Do you see that metal thing sticking out from under Bitch Kitty's ample butt? That's a little sliver of the end of the heat vent in our guest room, which is at the moment our de facto gift room, which is also at the moment FREEZING because Bitch Kitty has completely obliterated the only heat vent in the room with her selfish, bag-of-pudding body. I hope the metal partitions on the heat vent are not only uncomfortable for her but they also sear scarlet-letter lines in her selfish Bitch Kitty belly like grill marks on a tuna steak.

Fun fact: My mother, my sister and I--without conferring amongst ourselves--all picked that same celery color when we painted various rooms in our houses: the front hall in my sister's house, the ensuite (which was really an elfin bathroom at the end of a 5/8th scale Barbie(R) Dream Bedroom but ensuite makes it sound palatial and glamorous) in my Chicago condo, and the private cat sauna in my parents' condo.

Things that separate us from the animals

Digital toasters. With the numbers in blue. Because blue goes well with our eyes:

Nice dishes. In neutral colors so as not to frighten the food. And a coordinated Barbra-themed mug to keep everything classy:

Bathroom magazine racks. So we don't trip over our bathroom reading like they do in prison:

Clever, relevant, thoughtful advertising. Exactly like this ad is not:
A model is supposed to do one of three things in an ad: Be someone you relate to, be someone you aspire to be, or be someone you want to get to know better. Ahem.

This chick is wearing semi-opaque pantyhose with a shorty-short romper. Who wears pantyhose with a romper? Who wears pantyhose? She's dressed too much like a slutty church secretary to be someone any thinking person can relate to. She's dressed too clownlike to be someone any self-respecting person could aspire to be. And unless you like your archy-backed porn starlets encased in tight nylon so you can't get to the good china, she's dressed too cluelessly to be someone any desperate person could want to get to know better.

And how exactly is she supposed to make me want to get an Android? Or even help me make the mental connection between her archy-backed pantyhoseness and the post-industrial aesthetic of all the rest of the Android advertising in the world?

With all the checks and balances my agency has in place to prevent bad ideas from seeing the light of day even for lowly billing inserts, how on earth did an agency with an obviously massive budget and a contract with a highly visible national brand get the corporate approval to stick this shitty stock photo into an enormous outdoor campaign? And why do I have to look at this stupid ad in every fucking bus stop in Chicago?

Advertising FAIL.

Getting up to speed

The state of the bathroom
The shower is finally grouted and double-caulked, the fancy waffle-knit spa-like shower curtain (with matching liner! just like in an adult bathroom!) is hung, a few pieces of decorative crap have been attached to the walls, and from the looks of things the bathroom renovation is done:
But! There’s still no water in the sink. Because I still can’t bring myself to admit defeat over some leaky water supply hoses that can’t be replaced without epic levels of runaround from random Home Depot employees and the faucet manufacturer. So I continue to sit and stew. And then I go wash my hands in the other bathroom.

But I’ve posted reviews of the products I bought on homedepot.com. And somewhere along the line I must have responded to a satisfaction survey from the site because this week I got an email from a homedepot.com representative offering me financial compensation for my frustration. Without me even asking! It’s only $75—and of course it’s in Home Depot gift cards, which are pretty worthless after I’m done spending $2,500 on the bathroom—but the fact remains that they asked and they listened and they responded. And, of course, there will always be another reason to go to Home Depot.

Speaking of gift cards …
The dramatic black-and-red-and-slightly-Southwest-inspired ceramic dishes that I’d brought into the marriage but the domestic partner had never truly loved the way he should as a stepfather had grown chipped and broken and it was about time to buy replacement pieces or scrap everything and start over.

And while I loved my dishes when I bought them for my old condo, they had a rustic heaviness that never really worked in our ultra-sleek, space-needle-like kitchen or our French-blue-exact-replica-of-Versailles-if-you-squint-and-you’ve-never-actually-been-to-Versailles dining room. Plus so many plates and bowls were cracked that we could only host dinner parties for five, assuming we could find five people who thought dramatic black-and-red-and-slightly-Southwest-inspired ceramic dishes actually looked good—chipped or not—in a French-blue-exact-replica-of-Versailles-if-you-squint-and-you’ve-never-actually-been-to-Versailles dining room.

Plus the plates were so big that they interfered with the little spinning water jet thingie mounted on the underside of our top dishwasher rack.

So we decided to pull the trigger and buy all new dishes that were small enough to fit in the dishwasher, durable enough not to get cracked by our clumsy kitchen help, and classically beautiful enough to look at home in our ultra-sleek, space-needle-like kitchen, the charming French bistro we’re opening in our living room and all the formal state dinners we host in our French-blue-exact-replica-of-Versailles-if-you-squint-and-you’ve-never-actually-been-to-Versailles dining room.

Plus! As I was digging around in our junk drawer last month for my trusty see-through ruler so I could more easily tape off the stripes I stenciled in our Art Nouveau/Art Deco old-timey apothecary-themed bathroom, I found four long-forgotten Crate&Barrel gift cards … and they were worth $160!

So I trolled through the dinnerware section of crateandbarrel.com and found these reasonably sized, reasonably priced classic beauties:
And after stopping by the store to discover that I loved them in person as much as I loved them online, I placed my order Sunday night. And by last night, I had my first ceremonial peanut butter and jelly sandwich on my first reasonably sized, reasonably priced classic beauty of a salad plate:

While we had our credit cards out …
Like many vintage Chicago courtyard-building condos, ours has an impossible-to-decorate length of hallway that just cries out for some kind of drama. But I have no interest in installing vaulted ceilings or a soothing water feature. So we planned to do the next best thing: install four-way dimmers on the lights. Of course, we talked about it for four years but never did anything about it. But a couple months ago our friend Rob heard us mention it and he recommended installing spotlight bulbs as well so we could cast dramatic pools of light down our runway. And last weekend, I finally did:
Of course, no project in our condo is without its dramatic setbacks, and last Saturday night found me on the 24-hour helpline with the dimmer manufacturer trying to figure out why I couldn’t get the lights to work. Turns out—and are you ready for this?—the developer of our condo labeled the wiring wrong. I know! Crazy! And they’ve been so spot-on with all their other efforts to burn down our building. But the dude on the phone—after repeated expressions of amazement at the clusterfuck of mislabeled wires I found spurting out of my junction boxes—managed to help me figure out what went where … and how to label it all correctly for the next person who goes digging around in our walls. And now we have a dramatic hallway runway fit for a couple dramatic queens. Ahem.

It Gets Better Project
While four of the 26 tapes we made in our epic taping marathon on October 3 got edited and posted online within a week, the company that volunteered to edit everything else overestimated the availability of its resources and nothing else has been edited or posted since then. But! They’ve found me someone else who says she can finish everything for me. (Those lesbians can fix anything.) And! The Chicago Tribune ran a pretty spectacular piece on us in its prominent Page 2 location on Monday. You can read it HERE.

Brian Cory
My first job out of college—aside from waiting tables at an Italian restaurant with fabulous breadsticks and even fabulouser gilded crown moldings—was crunching marketing numbers at Telecom*USA, a now-defunct Iowa phone book publisher that was a direct descendant of the epic 1984 Ma Bell divestiture. I worked there from 1991 until I found my first advertising job in 1992, and the only people I remember from the company are two fun young newlyweds who soon moved to Nebraska and disappeared off the grid and continue to elude my periodic Google and Facebook attempts to search for any sign of them.

And apparently there was also some dude there named Brian Cory. I have no recollection of ever working with someone named Brian Cory. And since it was my first job out of college and my first step up the ladder to international fame and fortune, I certainly have no recollection of developing any level of feel-free-to-joke-with-each-other-inappropriately relationship with any coworker from that company.

And yet this Brian Cory dude recently found me on LinkedIn and sent me THIS little gem of a note to mark our first communication in almost 20 years (assuming I had any memory of him):
His Palinesque command of English honestly makes it impossible for me to tell whether he’s a douchebag homophobe or just an epic loser with the judgment and sense of humor of a nine-year-old. Either way, I can't think of anyone I haven't seen for 20 years I would address this way as my first attempt at re-initiating communication. LinkedIn doesn’t offer an option for me to flag his note to me as offensive, so I’m doing the next best thing: posting it on my blog with his name repeated in the HTML text enough times that it might rise to the top of any Google search a future employer or potential boyfriend might do of his name. Brian Cory!

Renovation Porn: The Saga Continues

At the conclusion of our last breathtaking cliffhanger, the bathroom stripes were stenciled, the chandelier was hung and the toilet was re-installed, if for no other reason than to put an end to the constant stream of water running out of the supply valve that wouldn’t completely shut off.

But the vanity top hadn’t yet arrived. So the sink and the plumbing and the backsplash and the medicine cabinet and the new wall lighting were all waiting in limbo.

The vanity top had been promised to be delivered in 3-5 business days. But it ended up sitting 8 days in a Tennessee warehouse—where it was no doubt thoroughly indoctrinated in the cerebral political theories of Sarah Palin—before it finally showed up at our door.

And I was so excited to see its awesome white-marble-with-old-timey-veins-of-gray awesomeness that I ripped the packaging open to gaze upon its … endless, relentless diaper-gruel beigeness.

Which means that once again, homedepot.com had shipped me a huge box of frustration and disappointment.

But I’d put the bathroom on hold—and held the entire house hostage to its renovation clutter—for way too long. So goodbye, gray-marble-and-polished-chrome-old-timey-apothecary-themed bathroom dream! And hello, diaper-gruel-colored-1986-suburban-Holiday-Inn-employee-breakroom bathroom depression!

But just like a parent who discovers his child prefers Webber over Sondheim, I stoically shifted gears, embraced my new diaper-gruel color story and set about making my new not-white-and-gray-marble-themed bathroom the best little bathroom it could be.

But not until I’d fake-assembled my new multi-drawered-storage-addict's-dream vanity and diaper-gruel vanity top and shiny polished chrome faucet in the living room just to get an idea what it would all eventually look like:

We’d planned to use cool frosted-green glass tile for our backsplash, but I couldn’t even find a clear glass option at the tile store that went with diaper gruel. But I did find a cool onyx mosaic tile that included the greens of the walls, the grays and whites of the vanity top we thought we were buying, and the diaper gruels of the vanity top we’re stuck with. And once I got it up, I was actually pretty happy with it:

And a creamy filling of snow-white grout made its colors kinda shimmer and dance with each other, but never in a vulgar way. Though the setting sun sure gives it a theatrical sense of drama here, no?

Once the grout was cleaned up, I was a little more at peace with my diaper-gruel color story. Dramatic little tiles can improve any grueling (ahem) setback:
See that notch in the top row of tiles? That’s for the brace that holds up the medicine cabinet. It’s off center so the screw holes in the brace can line up with the wall studs. Normally I can find these studs just by knocking along the wall with my knuckle and listening for what I think is a pretty obvious change in sound when I’m knocking on drywall with a stud behind it. The change in sound in this wall was almost imperceptible, though. And when I cut a hole in the drywall to fish the electrical wires up to their new escape hole over the new medicine cabinet, I discovered why: THERE ARE NO STUDS. The drywall is just attached to thin strips of lathe.

And that’s just one of many appalling surprises I’ve found as I’ve renovated our condo. The original grout was installed by squirrels. The drywall joints are as straight—and attractive—as a televangelist. There are rarely junction boxes for the lights. The electrical wires are only sometimes encased in conduit. I opened one junction box for an electrical outlet to discover that all its wires were sheathed in yellow. (Usually one wire is white and one wire is black or yellow or red or some other non-white color so you know which wire is hot and which wire is neutral—and what the gauge is if that’s important to know for a specific fixture—so your wire connections don’t burn your fucking house down.)

Where was I? Oh, yes: diaper gruel. And there’s no better way to wash it away than with a fabulous polished chrome Victorian/Art Nouveau faucet, which would look extra-fabulous on a white and gray marble vanity top, but what can you do:

And what makes a faucet even better? When you hook up the plumbing and you make water come out of it!

And what would make you suddenly hate your faucet more than you hate the thought that Christine O’Donnell has even one follower who isn’t a toddler with a drinking problem? Water supply lines that drip and drip and drip and never fucking stop dripping:

Unlike most faucets that come in one solid hunk of metal, the one I bought (unbeknownst to me) comes as two separate handles and one separate spout that are all connected by flexible hoses. Unfortunately, those hoses don’t have that “watertight” quality that the kids are all into these days … even when you take them apart and re-assemble them seven fucking times with seven fucking ways of incorporating or not incorporating plumbers’ tape to see if that makes a difference, which it doesn’t. Even more unfortunately, you can’t buy replacement hoses at your friendly neighborhood Home Depot. No! You have to special order them from the faucet manufacturer. Which is the exact opposite of what you want to do when you’d rather rip the faucet out of the sink and throw its drippy worthlessness at the nearest Home Depot employee. Even more unfortunately, buying a whole new style of non-dripping faucet would be even more work than you care to think about because you’ve already bought and installed the matching toilet paper holder:

So as of this writing, the sink and faucet are completely installed, but the water supply lines are shut off until I can calm down and decide what the fuck to do about them.

But! The fabulous mirrored (even on the inside!) medicine cabinet is installed with super-gay under-cabinet lighting to give my dancing backsplash tiles even more drama … even though I made the backsplash probably a bit too high in an attempt to make sure my freakishly tall husband can see all of his handsome mug when he looks in the mirror. Plus in this picture (where I’m sitting on a stool so don’t think I made the backsplash like six miles too high or anything) you can totally see how abso-freaking awesome our chandelier looks … along with the tape marks reminding me to touch up the paint on the door frame:

For some reason, my trusty iPhone was blinded by our ultra-mega-awesome Art Nouveau/Art Deco dramatic-upsweep wall light that doesn’t make you have to look at bare lightbulbs (and everyone knows how much I hate to see bare lightbulbs) so I had to turn it off to take a picture of it for you, which also includes a reflection of parts of my tall handsome husband in the doorway:

Which brings us to the reason we started the bathroom renovation in the first place: The grout in our bathtub/shower had started to crack this summer and I was worried that since it’s on an outside wall the cracks would lead to water damage as the wall contracted this winter. So even though I started the renovation project merely by scraping cracked old grout, I waited until I’d done seven million other things in the bathroom before I filled my scrapings with fresh new grout:

Those of you who’ve worked with grout know that it cures in stages. You mix it. You wait 10 minutes. You mix it again. You wait again. You apply it to the walls. You wait. You squeegee it flat. You … probably see the pattern by now. But all that waiting is the perfect opportunity to take everything out of your nearby closet, get rid of the embarrassing stuff and reassemble everything in orderly stacks:
(middle shelf, left to right: solid T-shirts, casual T-shirts, more casual T-shirts, sleeveless shirts for the gym, tank tops, nicer T-shirts, patterned polo shirts, solid polo shirts (not shown))

And what porn-labeled blog post would be complete without a discussion of how I purged my unwanted shoes (which is like getting rid of your unwanted children … but harder)? But one giant bag of 18 forlorn, destined-for-a-lifetime-of-abandonment-issues-and-therapy shoes later, I can finally say that each pair of my wanted and loved and worthy shoes now has its own home:

And that’s all any proud parent could ever want … aside from children who prefer Sondheim over Webber … and alcohol poisoning over Christine O’Donnell.

Renovation porn

So I took Friday off and spent a full three days (minus a 12-mile run, a trip to Home Depot, an hour drooling over Pat Tillman’s foul-mouthed brother on Bill Maher and an hour finally catching up on Glee, which also involved drooling over the new blond dude) working on our bathroom.

But the old-timey marble vanity top I ordered seven days ago has been sitting in a fucking warehouse in fucking Tennessee for six fucking days:

And without a vanity top, there’s a ripple effect on all the things I still can’t accomplish:
• I don’t want to buy the backsplash tile until I can match it to the marble in the vanity top.
• I can’t install the backsplash tile anyway until I have the vanity top installed.
• I can’t install the medicine cabinet until the backsplash tile is installed.
• I can’t install the medicine cabinet lighting until the medicine cabinet is installed.
• BONUS FRUSTRATION! The vanity top purportedly has an 8" spread for a faucet, which is a relatively uncommon faucet size for a bathroom … especially on a vanity top that’s only 31" wide. Since I bought the towel bar and toilet paper holder that match the 8" faucet I found (which is mega-cool in an old-timey French apothecary kind of way so I’m actually excited about it) I don’t want to install them until I see the actual holes in the vanity top to confirm that the specs on the Home Depot web site aren’t a bunch of hooey.

But!

I did get a lot of other important bathroom stuff accomplished in my 72-hour bathroom-renovation marathon, though most of it was the non-sexy important bathroom stuff like patching holes and waterproofing the window in the shower and squirting endless ropes of painter’s caulk in corners and cracks and crevices to make the walls and the moldings as smooth and professional-looking as the exact opposite of Bristol Palin’s dancing.

And!

I got a shit-ton of painting done, including the mega-hella-awesome semi-opaque silver-and-snow-white stencil that anchors our weirdly proportioned bathroom with an Art Deco sense of color and structure and moxie (which is Art Deco-era slang for mega-hella-awesomeness). The stencil is an inch-wide stripe that runs up the edge of each wall, across the ceiling and back down the opposite wall, intersecting in the ceiling corners to create a frame of silver that adds elegance, sophistication and a shiny distraction from my not-amazingly-professional-looking repairs to the bubbly ceiling drywall.

And of course I took pictures. Lots of pictures. Too many pictures, in fact, to get the idea across. But I’m going to post them anyway.

Here are our newly painted ceiling (in Sherwin-Williams “ancient marble”) and walls (in Sherwin-Williams “svelte sage,” which in a freakishly random coincidence is the same color my sister painted her front hallway and my mom painted her guest bedroom) taped off after hours and hours of painstaking measuring and swearing so it’s ready for stenciling:
Even though it’s just a blue-taped-off negative of the eventual stencil at this point, I got totally excited about the relentless Art Deco verticalness of it all when the taping was finally done.

Here’s the corner with the door, which blocks most of one of the wall stripes, which means less stenciling for me:

Here’s one of the corners of the shower (see what I mean about too many pictures?), which blocks off most of two of the wall stripes, which means even less stenciling for me:

Here’s part of the stencil finished and un-taped because I was too excited to wait to do all the stenciling before pulling off the tape:
Little-known fact: Stenciling a ceiling is a bodybuilder-grade deltoid workout. At this writing, it’s been about 30 hours since I finished stenciling—which, for the non-crafty among you, involves distrubuting a thick, oily, uncooperative paste of color onto a wall or ceiling using a stiff, short-bristled brush using an aggressive swirling motion—and my damn shoulder is still twitching.

And here’s one corner completely done:
The stripes look pretty straight in this picture, but since they follow the shoddy edges of the shoddily installed drywall by the shoddy contractors who did the shoddy rehab of the condo before we bought it, the stripes are as straight as a mega-church pastor who campaigns against marriage equality. But since they’re a muted silver, they’re not even half as faggy.

As you may recall, the water supply for the toilet wouldn’t shut completely off when I removed the toilet so I could repair all the cracked grout from the shoddy floor tile installation, so I was forced to rig an improvised bridge-and-funnel connection between the drippy wall plumbing and the poop hole in the floor.

And since that forced me to leave the poop hole unplugged, sewer gasses were escaping into the house. And the lonely candle I left burning next to the hole wasn’t enough to burn off the smell, so I was in an understandable hurry to get the stripes stenciled in the toilet corner so I could re-install the toilet—taking a moment to savor the almost-never-in-a-lifetime thrill of squishing a toilet down on a fresh wax ring—and get the house back to its usual eau de sweaty gym clothes and wet running socks. I have never been so happy to see a toilet installed on its poop hole in my life:
Note the white square on the wall next to the toilet. Since the new white vanity doesn’t have a back on it, I taped off and whitewashed the wall that will be the back of the vanity cupboard when you open the doors. It’s details like that that separate the humans from the McCains.

And!

I also installed my new favorite part of our soon-to be-awesomist-bathroom-on-the-planet bathroom: a crystal-beaded, bordello-inspired, patina-distressed bathroom chandelier:

And the only thing gayer than a crystal-beaded, bordello-inspired, patina-distressed bathroom chandelier is a crystal-beaded, bordello-inspired, patina-distressed bathroom chandelier on a dimmer. Seriously. How much do you love this chandelier? It has crystals and beads. It has olde-worlde charm. It has swirly S shapes and faux-melty candle bases for the bulbs. Its leaden patina nicely complements the semi-opaque silver-and-snow-white stencil in the background. Its leaden patina probably also leaches lead into the atmosphere. And I put it on a dimmer, giving our bathroom infinite levels of dramatic lighting opportunities for all the dramatic teeth-brushing and showering and pooping we do.

And we gays can’t do anything without drama. Just ask the fucking vanity top that’s been sitting in a warehouse in fucking Tennessee for six fucking days and fucking up my entire renovation schedule.

Guy Stuff

Cubs game!
So the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus sang the National Anthem at the Cubs game on Tuesday … after more than an hour of delays and false starts as a monsoon worked its way across Chicago. Naturally, the game was against San Francisco. GET IT? And naturally, they had us wait by a Wrigley Field side entrance labeled Gate Q. GET IT?

But once we got the all-clear, we walked onto the field (taking great care not to step on the chalk lines, which are apparently more delicate than the lingering gossamer vestiges of John McCain’s integrity) and then smiled into the crashing waves of cheers when we were introduced. The chorus is now positioning itself as Chicago’s Most Colorful Chorus (don’t get me started) so we all wore black pants and randomly distributed jewel-tone polo shirts as we proudly thundered our way through the National Anthem of a country that still won’t allow us to serve and defend it honestly and openly. But judging by the cheers and whoops and high-fives we got both before and after we sang, the stubborn, irrational bigotry that still dominates the opinions and actions of our public servants will wither, dry up and die when they finally summon the decency to do the same.

Home renovation!
Because of the Cubs game on Tuesday and our tickets to a bloated-but-potentially-charming-if-they-do-some-serious-editing production of Candide at the Goodman Theatre on Wednesday, I’ve made little progress on the bathroom this week. But! I did manage to scrape out all the cracked, discolored floor grout and replace it with fresh, monochromatic grout on Monday (which the domestic partner got flattered into cleaning up when he was home all day on Tuesday):

And if you think living with only one functioning bathroom isn’t enough to make me devote this entire weekend to assembling our fabulous new Art-Nouveau-glam-meets-Craftsman-practical-meets-New-Orleans-shabby-fabulous-meets-French-fin-de-siècle-apothecary master bath, having a living room ripped straight from an episode of Hoarders puts me way over the top:

Gym shoes!
For those of you dying to see more of my new hella-awesome-for-the-gym-and-mega-cool-for-the-office shoe wardrobe, here you go … and you’re welcome:

If there is one benefit to taking a 6:00 bus to the gym every morning, it’s that I can take pictures of my shoes without 1) looking eccentric, 2) causing suspicion, 3) irritating strangers or 4) ruining my composition with errant bus riders in the background. Plus, it allows me to make my blog posts even longer … giving you more value for your blog dollar. It’s the free market at work, and it all starts with a trip to the shoe store.

Oh say, can you see?

I am on your tee vee!

Well, I might be. I'll be singing the National Anthem at tonight's Cubs game (7:05 pm CT) with the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus. We've sung every year, but we've been televised only once. So far. So if you're the type to tune into sports on television—or even go to an actual Cubs game—be sure to tune in/get there early enough to watch us tonight. Can I get a HELL YEAH?

In equally butch news, I've ripped apart the last room in our Two Bedroomed Two Bathroomed One Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo®. The last of the builder's special monstrosities that came with the condo are about to disappear forever, this time from the master bathroom. For now, though, the stuff we're replacing is currently heaped in our living room in its cheap particleboard and lucite-handled plumbing shame.

So as of now, this is what our bathroom looks like:

Note the disposable paint tray where the toilet usually sits. It's not there because I'm about to paint. It's there because the damn water supply won't completely shut off. And it's leaking at the rate of one oversized plastic souvenir college-logoed drinking cup per hour. (Never mind that it's from the college where I went to ... um ... show choir camp when I was in junior high school. Because that detail would totally undermine the unmistakable machismo of this post.)

Since we're not in the habit of getting up every hour to empty a damn cup, I had to think of a better plan to keep the water from getting all over the floor between now and this weekend when the painting should be done and the classy-fixture installation will commence. Thankfully, I'm a clever man. And thankfully, when I was searching the kitchen for something huge and flat to catch water, I noticed the used paint tray waiting patiently in our recycling bin. And with a crude hole cut out of one corner, it made the perfect bridge-and-funnel between the drippy water supply and the poop chute in the floor that the toilet sits over:

It's held in place by hope and the residual goo from the wax ring around the poop chute. So it should stay in place. It will be hard to work around as we replace the cracked grout between the floor tiles and paint the baseboards, but I guess it's better than waterlogged floor joists and no renovation glitches to bitch about in a blog post.

And stay tuned for the pictures of what I intend to be our Victorian/Art Nouveau/French bistro/Big Easy-inspired bathroom getaway.

The stench of evil

It’s always the most efficient to replace major appliances in groups so you deplete as much of your financial reserves as possible in the shortest amount of time. Which is why we scheduled our washer/dryer and our refrigerator/freezer appliance meltdowns within a couple months of each other last winter.

And everything was going fine with our shiny new appliances until about a month ago when we realized there was something dead or dying in our shiny new refrigerator. And it wasn't old-milk dead or Mel-Gibson's-career dead. It was stabbed-hooker dead. It was my-ass-after-a-marathon dead. It was Rush-Limbaugh's-fourth-wife's-wedding-night-yeast-infection-because-she-is-his-fourth-fucking-wife dead. And the stench was enough to curl the eyelashes off a buzzard on a shitwagon.

What's weird is we're not the kind of people who keep food in our refrigerator long enough to go bad. We shovel food down faster than Newt Gingrich processes divorce paperwork. And we replace it with trips to the grocery store every three or four days. Granted, we eat mostly preservative-free stuff like real fruit and organic cottage cheese, so our food isn't likely to stay fresh and lifelike as long as a box of Twinkies or a belief that gays are some kind of threat to heterosexual marriage.

In any case, we had no idea what was festering in our frost-free Freon fixture and assaulting our olfactory orifices every time we reached in to grab a Greek yogurt or a ... um ... Gripe peach.

So two weeks ago, the domestic partner took everything out of the fridge, sniffed it carefully for eau de morgue, found no evidence of rotten food or rotting corpses, wiped the refrigerator walls and shelves and all the packaging around all the food with bleach water, and put everything back in the hopes that whatever ghosts were haunting our fancy new refrigerator had been exorcised.

But not so much.

My parents visited us a week ago and the smell was just as bad as ever. My mom thought that maybe something (mouse? cat? Michele Bachmann's crazy eye?) had gotten into the space between the inside and outside refrigerator walls and had started to rot. We weren't sure what to do about that possibility, but their visit was all about being tourists (Grant Park Music Festival! Chicago History Museum! Navy Pier! Ravinia!) so we didn't pull the fridge apart looking for death while they were here.

Then this weekend we had a party celebrating the fact that I've lived in Chicago for 10 years. (Yay me!) And at our parties, our friends know they're welcome to poke around in our fridge for anything they may be hungry or thirsty for ... even if they don't realize they're going to get a noseful of death in the process. As with all my party planning, in the weeks leading up to the festivities I make mental notes about things I need to do (make sure we have enough paper plates, get fresh flowers for our fancy-ass vase, rid the refrigerator of Adolfo Pirelli's festering corpse before any relatives come poking around looking for him) and then four hours before the guests are due to arrive I realize there's no food or ice or liquor in the house and race to the store to get ready ... always forgetting to de-corpse the refrigerator in the process.

So this weekend as I was scrambling to dice vegetables for homemade lemon-feta pasta salad, scoop out avocados for homemade guacamole and slice peaches for homemade peach-raspberry cobbler (I'm really just writing this sentence to brag about all the yummy food I made) I barely noticed that the smell had disappeared somewhere between oh shit we have no food and add two tablespoons of olive oil. And by the time the door buzzed to herald the arrival the first guests I'd been so distracted that I'd pretty much forgotten we probably had a dead hooker trapped in the condenser. But when the first guest reached for the fridge to find mixers for his vodka drink, I leaned in to intercept him before he discovered our shameful secret ... and finally noticed that we no longer had a shameful secret.

I don't know if the street gang that stashed the body behind the condiments finally came back to claim it or if rotting field mice really do have a short half life, but the stench is miraculously gone, as though it had never been there. Like the pope's relevance. In any case, we can now entertain without suspicious guests calling in Seeley Booth (rats!) and we can enjoy fresh peaches without being forced to ponder the creepy fact that both peaches and rotting humans are covered in something called flesh.

And now when we have leftover shepherd's pie in the fridge, we never have to worry if it's peppered with actual shepherd on top.

Adventures in unplanned retail

Behold our new refrigerator/freezer:

It actually makes cold! Unlike our old refrigerator/freezer, which stopped accomplishing cold-related tasks a week ago … just in time to ruin the Easter aspic. Which we didn’t make because we don’t celebrate Easter and I’m not even entirely sure what’s in aspic. But if we were Easter aspic eaters our non-cold-making refrigerator/freezer would have left us in a fine how-do-you-do.

Now avert your gaze from its fine shiny surface long enough to notice how it sits nestled next to a wall. (A wall covered in artifacts of my Norwegian heritage, which makes it a cool wall. But that’s not the point of this paragraph.) Now try to picture our old side-by-side refrigerator/freezer sitting next to that wall. Now try to picture us opening the left side-by-side door about a quarter of the way for three freaking years because that’s as far as it would open because that’s what happens when you’re a moron developer who designs a kitchen in such a way that you put a side-by-side refrigerator/freezer right next to a goddamn wall.

Thankfully, the moron developer installed a cheap-ass side-by-side refrigerator/freezer that lasted a whopping six years before it had to be replaced by a sturdy, EnergyStar-rated, non-side-by-side refrigerator. So though we hadn’t really wanted to drop more than a thousand dollars on appliances in the week before we drop a couple thousand dollars on a whirlwind Sondheim festival on Broadway—we leave in the morning!—we can at least open our goddamned freezer when we get back.

You may remember that we also had to buy a fancy new washer/dryer in February when the cheap-ass one from the cheap-ass developer stopped making motion and heat. And nobody wants to buy just one unplanned, unbudgeted-for major appliance in a three-month period. Nobody. Thankfully, we bought them from the same place. And thankfully and the domestic partner has the kind of balls I lack—the kind of balls that get you a sizeable discount on your second major appliance purchase in three months when you remind the lady on the phone that you bought the first one at full price.

So we leave for our Anyone Can Whistle/A Little Night Music/Sondheim on Sondheim tour secure in the knowledge that the milk will probably still be cold and the meat will probably still be pink when we get back. Even though the credit cards will still be very, very warm.

Top 10 reasons I haven't updated my blog in decades

1. I’ve been kickin’ it old skool
I have no idea what that actually means, but it sounds younger and hipper than I’ve been lollygagging around.

2. I’ve discovered Words with Friends
It’s the iPhone version of Scrabulous, which was Facebook’s legally-squashed-by-Hasbro version of Scrabble. And it is now my #1 favorite way to be unproductive. I usually have 10 to 15 games going at a time, most of which I play on the bus to and from work (which is where I used to read Time, Newsweek and The New Yorker so I’m now so far behind on my current events that I ask you to let me know the moment Lincoln gets home from the theater). It’s also been a really good way to tune out Judge Judy, the #1 home-TV-watching guilty pleasure of a certain domestic partner who shall not be named here. If you want to play with me, open a game against NofoJake … and send me a message to let me know who you are!

3. We’ve been cleaning house
And by “cleaning house” I mean vacuuming up colonies of dust bunnies that literally looked like mountains of pillow stuffing under our bed, schlepping entire carloads of clothes, furniture and electronics to the Brown Elephant, and sorting through mountains of paperwork from banks, investments, insurance companies and our many ceramic figurine collector clubs.

4. I have spring allergies
Speaking of dust bunnies, my spring allergies have kicked my ass this year like a bully on a gayground. They knocked me out so hard this weekend I took a four-hour nap on Saturday and a six-hour nap on Sunday in addition to the eight hours of sleep I got every night. And I’m still stuffy and sleepy and cranky and about eleven other potential dwarf names. But I just took a Claritin so I’m on my way to being Claritin Clear™! At least I should be at some unspecified time that is presumably in the near future, according to the vague promise on the packaging.

5. I’m shaving my legs
As my trainer inches me closer and closer to my giant-bodybuilder vanity fantasies, I have actually started piling on some measurable muscle mass. (Alliteration runs rampant!) I’m currently up to 205 pounds (from the 195 base weight I’ve maintained for the last 10ish years, give or take the months on either side of a marathon). Most of my new weight seems to be in my legs, which are actually so big I can’t wear two of my favorite jeans anymore. Woot! And now that I feel like I’m actually getting big, I’m further feeding into my giant-bodybuilder vanity fantasies by shaving my legs like all the big kids do at the gym. And shaving meaty legs takes a freakishly huge amount of time. Plus when you’re naturally hairy you have to maintain your shave virtually every day. Plus when you’re naturally pasty you have to slather on self-tanner all the time so you don’t scare children and interfere with the light refraction on the Hubble Telescope.

6. We’ve been tackling long-overdue home projects
There were so many not-quite-dones on our unofficial to-do list that I finally typed everything in a two-page document, organized it by the rooms in our house and taped it on the kitchen cabinet were we can be reminded of our self-imposed obligations every time we feel the urge to collapse unproductively on the couch with a jar of marshmallow fluff and a spoon. By my unofficial count, we’re a good 5% through the list, but that’s farther than we’d be if we didn’t have a list. Our biggest accomplishment this weekend: We finally hung the curtains in our guest bedroom, which will be occupied by my family when they come to stay with us for my birthday.

7. I’m turning twice the legal drinking age
Speaking of my birthday, I’ll be a whopping 42 in less than two weeks. Which means I’m too old and tired to deal with newfangled things like “blogs” and “technology” and “jazz” and “Sarah Palin.”

8. I keep getting blood tests
One of the fun parts of getting older is watching your body slowly fall apart. My body’s newest trick: low thyroid output and high prolactin output. Which means new medications. And endless blood tests to monitor how the medications are (or aren’t) working. I’m so full of needle punctures I’m holier than the pope! Especially because I don’t help priests fuck little kids!

9. I’m planning a birthday party
If you live in Chicago, come to show tunes at Sidetrack on April 18 and look for us near the Liza cake in the south bar. We’re starting around 4:00 and going until we’re all jittery from carbs, sugar, fat and Dreamgirls clips. But be warned: This is a show-tune birthday, which requires show-tune flair. So to show respect for my age, you need to show up in your Cats T-shirt or your Les Miz button or your Damn Yankees cap or your A Chorus Line legwarmers or you can simply re-create Barbra's orange-and-fur “Don't Rain on My Parade” ensemble. Or if you want to go low-key, just show up with your best friend Stephen Sondheim.

10. I’m a tranny hot mess
Again, I have no idea what that means. But it sounds younger and hipper than I’m too gender-confused, sweaty and rumpled to write in my blog.

Our new baby

Here's what happens when your hamper gets full

and you have a guest-bathroom tub that’s not being used anyway:

The halfway decent washing machine installed by the halfway decent developer of our totally-awesome-because-we-fixed-it-up Two-Bathroomed, One-Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo only six years ago died two weeks ago. And the not-even-halfway-on-time repairman we called said the transmission was shot (who knew washing machines had transmissions?) and wasn’t worth fixing. Once he eventually showed up and looked at it, that is.

So we went online to research stackable washer/dryer units and discovered that 1) there really aren’t many of them on the market and 2) only one of them (front loading!) is Energy Star rated. At least of the models available at the stores where we can afford to shop. Normally I give myself a couple days to make a decision about a big expensive purchase, but it looked like we had exactly one choice so I just bought it on the spot. Online. I never even had to talk to a human! The Internets are made of the awesome.

Anyway! The delivery couldn’t happen until today. And in the mean time we kept wearing clothes. And they were spilling out of the hamper to the extent they were impeding our walking about the totally-awesome-because-we-fixed-it-up Two-Bathroomed, One-Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo. So the domestic partner had the genius idea to start dumping them in the tub. And I had the genius idea to take a picture. After hiding all but apparently one pair of underwear.

On the plus side through all the waiting, our closets were totally easy to pick through because they weren’t bursting with clothes. On the minus side, the stuff we had to pick through wasn’t the favorite stuff we usually wear. So we’ve been looking kind of 2007-y this last week. Please don’t laugh.

But now! We have our tub back! Oh, and we have a new Energy Star-rated stackable washer/dryer (front loading!). And the domestic partner has been home all day playing catch-up on our laundry. And as soon as I get home tonight, I’m totally gonna start dressing like it’s 2010.

New year's resolution: Stop spending money

Especially on stuff. We have plenty of stuff. Too much stuff. We don’t need more stuff. Besides, our addiction to gym memberships and personal trainers is quickly slimming down our financial reserves while it slowly (oh, so slowly) bulks up our vanity muscles. But we’re not about to abandon our dreams of being huge, so we’re gonna slash the budgets for our other household departments. Like our bloated Department of Stuff.

Corollary: Drink up all the half-finished buckets of protein shake powder in our Cupboard of Delusions before we buy any more:
I’m amazed how quickly we’ve managed to accumulate so many not-quite-empty buckets of protein shake powder. You’d think we’d finish one, then buy another, finish it, then buy another, etc. ad nauseam. But you’d be wrong. Because ad nauseam is not just a hard-to-spell-correctly Latin expression. No matter how delicious (or revolting) we find a certain flavor or brand of protein shake, it eventually makes us gag. So we move on to something different for a while. Etc. Ad nauseam. And all that nausea eventually leads us to ad more buckets of half-finished protein shake powder to our collection. Ad! Nauseam!

Corollary: Use up all the lotions and soaps and other tools of our ablutions that are accumulating in our little medicine cabinet before we buy any more:
This accumulation is more insidious than the protein shakes. When you’re a gay man of a certain age, people buy you fancy soaps and lotions as gifts. Or you get them free when you make large purchases of soaps and lotions—which we all do—at fancy soaps and lotions stores. Or you simply steal them from hotels. And so the pile grows. But! It’s currently dry skin season, so my dirty, thirsty dermis will be absorbing the stuff in our cupboard with unprecedented levels of greed over the next few months. And I should emerge on the other side of winter with cleaner, softer skin and way more storage in our bathroom.

Caveat: Buy more stuff. I made a list of all the stuff I still intend to buy in the new year. And it’s not pretty. And quite a bit of it is not terribly optional. To wit:

• Fireplace mantle
• Gas fireplace insert
• Living room valances
• Living room rug
• Four dimmer switches
• Front door soundproofing
• Door knocker that doesn’t look like a dog penis
• Tattoo that doesn't look like Newt Gingrich*
  
• Master bedroom valances
• Master bedroom dresser
• Master bathroom renovation
• Guest bedroom stencils
• Guest bedroom curtains
• Guest bedroom nightstand
• Guest bedroom stripper pole*
• Dining room curtains
• Dining room chair upholstery
• Kitchen sink disposal
• Kitchen sink water heater
• MacBook Pro
• iPhone
• Your grandma’s underpants*
• Wiper blades for my car
• Airfare/hotel for the cruise
• 13.1 Marathon registration
• Rock ’n’ Roll Half Marathon registration
• Chicago Half Marathon registration
• New York City Marathon registration
• Airfare/hotel for New York City Marathon
• Six gallons of premium cookies ’n’ cream ice cream, one giant spoon and a hammer to beat away anyone who wants to share*

* I just put that in to see if you were still reading

We got a new toy on Black Friday!

While I officially have a visceral loathing for the term Black Friday, I have a newfound love for the magical savings it brings me!

We've had a TV sitting in front of our fireplace—which is really the only place for the TV in our living room—since we moved into our Two-Bedroomed, Two-Bathroomed, One-Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo three years ago. We've been meaning to replace our embarrassingly old-school, 2002-era TV with a giant flat-screen TV that would free up our fireplace for actual fireplace-type activities like providing burning-wood-based warmth and ambiance, but the flat-screen TVs we'd been admiring were all in the $1,500 price range. Until Black Friday! My mom found a 42" baby on sale for $600 in, of all places, her grocery store in Iowa. So we bought it, lugged it back to Chicago today in an upright position—just like the box instructed us, though it meant pushing our seats so far forward that our knees were in our armpits, turning our four-plus-hour drive into an extended BigWheel-in-the-driveway flashback—and spent the entire evening—along with 17 buckets of swear words—mounting it over the fireplace.

It turns out you need an advanced degree in aviation engineering to install a flat-screen TV, but we finished our degree online in only one night and got the whole thing attached to the wall and plugged in ... and it actually works!

Unfortunately, we still need to find a place to stash the cable box. And bury the cables in the wall. And install a mantle. And buy a new DVD player. And (ahem) hook up the VCR. Because we still have a few favorite shows on tape. And we just spent a ton of money on a flat-screen TV so it's not like we can afford to replace them with DVDs right now. Do not judge us.

But in the mean time, we have some shows to watch. And crackling fires to light. And ambiance to enjoy. And bills to pay. But we don't want to think about that part right now.

How to feel popular

1. Have your blog readers vote on your home decorating.
Your comment numbers will shoot higher than a pair of “ex gay” legs in a church basement. (A word about the stencils, though: Stencils are highly period-appropriate for a home as old as ours. As long as they’re muted and respectable. You stencil haters who weighed in are obviously survivors of kountry kraft geese-with-bonnets-and-neck-bows decorating massacres. And my heart aches for you and what you’ve been through. I assure you, though, that the stencil samples in my last post would never appear in our home in the grotesque peacockery of colors you see below. We are not calico-housedress people. We do not wear pantyhose with our sandals. We do not pepper our conversations with breathless descriptions of truck rallies, remonstrations on the scourge of volunteer corn, shouts of Amen! or conjectures about the physical prowess of John Cena (unless he is appearing in all-male cinema). And we do NOT decorate our home in garish stencils that pull focus. Especially a stencil of a napping gnome, which was included below solely for his sheer absurdity. You know I love you people. I really do. But gnomes?)

2. Discover during an innocent sitemeter search that you’ve been nominated for three blog awards!
Seriously. I was poking around sitemeter a couple days ago to see how many more people had found my blog by searching for pictures of foot tattoos (my top source of new readers! and I don’t even have a foot tattoo!) or information about peeing trouble (which makes me feel genuinely bad—can you imagine searching for medical help about a distressing problem and instead stumbling on my inane ramblings … especially my “trouble peeing” blog post, which is about as clever and entertaining as a roomful of farts?).

Anyway, one of the sitemeter links didn’t come from the usual sitemeter litany of blogs and google searches. And imagine my surprise when I clicked on it and found this:

I used to have an all-consuming crush on a Kurt from Indiana, but he was always waaaaay too busy being stunning to notice me. So I’m sure in the five-plus years since I last saw him he hasn’t found the time in all his being-stunning obligations to remember not noticing me. Or to stumble on my blog. Or to read it. Or to nominate it for an award. I mean three awards. So this award-nominating Kurt is a complete stranger to me. As far as I know. But I can tell he’s an erudite sophisticate of high culture and rare breeding with exquisitely refined reading tastes. Though he occasionally laughs at fart jokes. But he did nominate me for three awards. So he’s good people. Just like all of you!

So! Remember how I said I love you people? I really meant it! Even though some of you thought I was serious about the napping gnome. But there’s still time to make restitution! Just click on these three links and all will be forgiven. Plus I might make some more fart jokes!