snails and puppy dog tails

Nice work this morning by Jamey Newberg in breaking down the potential angles for a Roger Clemens trade. This is the stuff Newberg is particularly good at, the kind of in-depth, devil’s advocate approach often not found in the mainstream media.

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He mentions, by the way, that Clemens’ wife is an Arlington native.

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A conversation from the breakfast table this morning, after THEBOY had announced he was headed outdoors for more of his current favorite pastime, searching for bugs…

Kelli: “Ah, little boys… snails and puppy dog tails…”

THEBOY: “Mom, it’s not called a puppy dog tail. It’s called a ‘slug’.”

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We’re moving full-steam ahead towards Corsicana. We’ve gone through several variations of the timeline. Current thinking is to go down and rent a house starting ASAP. We really want to get the kids situated near the family as soon as is reasonably possible.

This means getting our house in shape for selling pretty quickly. And you know, it’s not like it’s in BAD shape… it’s just that when it comes time to show it, you realize all the little projects you’ve meant to get to: Dripping faucet, carpets in need of pro cleaning, outdated wallpaper, discolored grout, garage doors… It adds up.

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Ah, garage doors. Ours need work. I thought they’d need to be replaced. Seems Kelli backed into one some time back, bending it quite effectively. Didn’t take too long before the garage door opener’s efforts to move the misshapen door mangled it even more.

Full disclosure: I backed into it first. Only not as forcefully. I love you Kelli.

So I called a local outfit to have a look yesterday, and they sent out someone I’ll call Garage Door Guy (‘GDG”). He’s pushing 40, got a surfer haircut and talks like Jeff Spicoli.

He eyeballed our doors and made this pronouncement: “That’s a 22 gauge steel door, a classic. They don’t make ‘em any more. I’m gonna have to remove this panel, hammer it out, put a different fulcrum on there… it’s gonna be a labor of love, man, a labor of LOVE. You gotta love what you do. This door’s a classic. It’d be a shame to see you lose it…”

Works for me.

GDG was a chatty sort, and revealed that he’s a recovering alcoholic. Now… nice as he was, he gave me kind of a funny vibe. I wondered if by “recovering” he meant “soon to be hopefully recovering, after this weekend maybe…”

I could be wrong.

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Was explaining the monkey paw to this department’s resident Australian. She said there’s similar stuff from the Aborigines: If they point a bone at you, for example, you drop dead.

Remind me never to take an Aborigine to KFC.

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Moving to Corsicana to rent soon, by the way, probably works to our advantage in one respect: If we stuck with our original plan to just spend 6 months in a rent house while we build a house, I don’t know how much luck we’d have finding someone willing to accommodate us. Then we’d have to perhaps rent a house under false pretenses to get one at all… ugh.

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With so much going on, I’m still excited about building a concrete (ICF) house. We’re looking at plans, and as obsessive as we could get over this, it’s clear that we’ll need a custom design job. I’ll tell you what’s odd: It’s hard to find a home plan that does not include a formal dining area, which we don’t want. Did your parents’ house have one of those? Grandparents’ maybe? Yeah… largely it just sits there empty, unused. We’d rather have a breakfast nook and a bar. That’ll do. We don’t need a formal dining area; that square footage can best be applied somewhere else.

And you’d think it’d be easy enough to just live with a plan including one and designate it as a study or something (and we could end up doing that). But they tend to be placed right between the kitchen and the living room, and that’s not always an ideal location to put up walls to close in some space.

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Happy Friday. Take the rest of the week off, starting at 5pm…