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<\/a>In the old days, armed with my well-worn Reader’s Digest Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual<\/em>, I would have shut off the water and taken apart the regulator to see if I could clean it out myself and save us some bucks.\u00a0 But here is where a few decades of life pays its rewards.\u00a0 It is more likely I would have taken the thing apart only to have some piece crumble in my hands, and then the hardware store would have no replacement part because the manufacturer went out of business, and meanwhile we have no water and someone is now standing in front of me asking when I’m going to turn on the water because someone has to get a shower and leave for an appointment in an hour.\u00a0 Intuiting that, present-day me decides to call a plumber.\u00a0 Experience has a way of teaching things that do-it-yourself books and videos never cover.<\/p>\n\u2022 I make a mean tossed salad, I really do.\u00a0 Invite me for dinner someday and I will raid your produce drawer, and probably a few other places in your pantry, and if given enough warning I will bring other fresh goodies with me (maybe even radishes) and then I will make excellent salads for all of us, custom-prepared so that Person A can have her broccoli and bleu cheese while Person B enjoys his black olives and ranch.\u00a0 I may not cook worth a damn but I could have had a stellar career as a greens-tender, if such a position existed.<\/p>\n
\u2022 I really thought there were still a few absolutes in life, some things that, even in these fractured times, every rational person can agree on.\u00a0 For example, though I do not share their passion, I understand why nature-lovers object to bear traps<\/a>.\u00a0 And while I think the alt-educated people who refuse to vaccinate their children are supremely misguided and negligent, the damage caused by their selfishness is, for now, limited.\u00a0 But I draw the line at mosquito activists<\/a>.\u00a0 Mosquito activists!<\/p>\n \u2022 What would it be like if we had no heritage?\u00a0 By that I mean, what would we<\/em> be like, what would our cultures be like, if we lived our lives based on what we personally experienced and not the dusty heritages that our parents and relatives drummed into us, defining and confining our actions and reactions?\u00a0 It may be that most of us, the world over, adopt and cultivate our own heritage-brand that we then operate under, carving out our narratives from our kindred’s experiences while acting as if we experienced their events ourselves.<\/p>\n Here are a few examples I found (with my definitions) that I am sure amused only me:<\/p>\n Needless to say, none of these words were accepted.<\/p>\n \u2022 P.S.\u00a0 A quick update on our water supply pressure regulator.\u00a0 The plumber replaced it.\u00a0 Pressure and performance is back to normal.\u00a0 Cost: $300.\u00a0 Makes me think I should have at least tried to clean or replace it myself — could have saved a few bucks.\u00a0 I’ll never learn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2022 I recently noticed that the water pressure in our shower was low and that the flow rate dropped when another faucet opened or a toilet was flushed.\u00a0 This never used to happen.\u00a0 So I looked at the situation and … Continue reading <\/a>\u2022 Last fall, my friend Eric introduced me to the Spelling Bee<\/a> game in the New York Times and I am now hooked.\u00a0 It’s a game that doesn’t last more than a day, one can leave it and pick it up at will, and while it offers more challenge than an everyday word-search, one is spared all the weightiness of solving the crossword puzzle<\/em>.\u00a0 And for me, the Spelling Bee also offers a meta-level of amusement arising from my attempts to find longer, compound words hiding among the seven letters provided that day.<\/p>\n\n