Category: Uncategorized

As noted in prior posts, I’ve been sorting through what must be years of paperwork over the last few weeks, an annoying project not nearly as gratifying as actual home improvement.
The possibility of moving provided the primary impetus. I’m changing jobs and will be commuting to an area I like very much, which is further down Cape. If things look stable after a few months, I might be relocating closer to work.
With all the “stuff” in this house, it may seem stupid to spend so much time on just a few boxes of paper, but anything with account numbers, even old ones, really needs to be disposed of properly.
There’s plenty of other things that could have been done, but I lack the skill and know-how to tackle any real home improvement project, short of painting. Also, I just finished four weeks of physical therapy following a leg injury, so for most of the fall, have been avoiding heavy physical activity.

Continue reading Clean Up

An incomprehensible decision earlier this year by Superior Court Judge Kathe Tuttman, a Romney appointee who at her confirmation hearing partially justified her appointment based on her experience as president of her synagogue, is only the latest in a series of disasters for the Massachusetts judiciary.
Tuttman is the judge who overturned a district court ruling and released Daniel Tavares Jr. on personal recognizance following his assault on two guards at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center. Why was Tavares in prison? In 1991, he stabbed his mother to death with a carving knife and copped a manslaughter plea.
Tavares then moved to Washington state, where earlier this week he admitted murdering neighbors Brian and Beverly Mauck, claiming that they had “insulted” him.
Judge Tuttman’s decisions have been in the news before: it was she who denied hospital visitation rights to the mother of Haleigh Poutre, the little girl who was beaten senseless by her adoptive parents, Holli and Jason Strickland.
With this latest exercise in dubious (pardon the pun) judgment, she joins Hiller Zobel, Leila Kern, Maria Lopez, Patrick F. Brady, Walter E. Steele and others in the bumbling pantheon that has given Massachusetts a national reputation for judicial incompetence.

I love my three grandchildren dearly, but the older two’s unwillingness to venture beyond their four walls is a despair.
James, on the other hand, enjoys being outside, even if it’s just to chat with me while I do yardwork.
He has also been enjoying tagging along on the weekly transfer station runs which Peter and I have been doing for the last six years.
We frequently explore the old furniture section, and we always check out the metal pile, which is a wonder of old appliances, lawn furniture and bicycles.
Sometimes we get decent stuff from the metal pile, more often we don’t, but it’s always a treasure hunt.
Giving Emme her due, she pried herself away from her DS to go with me to a lecture at the Orleans Snow Library the other day. Afterwards, we tried to get in to see “Chatham”, but the lines were long and the evening air was cold, so we punted for now, but I still appreciated the effort.
Oh, and we’ve had snow flurries this week.

People associate the Cape Cod style house with this region, but in the early twentieth century, a group of artists and intellectuals commissioned the building of Bauhaus summer homes on the lower Cape, especially in Wellfleet and to a lesser extent, Truro.
Woods Hole has a Prairie School structure, the Harold C. Bradley House, designed by Purcell & Elmslie in 1911, but the stunning collection of post-Modernist homes on the lower and outer Cape, most of which are privately owned, were designed in the 1940’s and 1950’s by Marcel Breuer, Serge Chermayeff, Paul Weidlinger and local architects like Nathaniel Saltonstall and Oliver P. Morton.
This community was started by Jack Philips, an “acolyte” of Walter Gropius and heir to a substantial tract of coastal land. Philips sold lots to his colleagues from MIT and Harvard with the idea of creating a vacation enclave for relaxation, conversation and enjoyment of the Cape landscape.
Even more stunning than the views from these houses is the appreciation in their value. Then, land was cheap, $1,000 an acre. The houses were also pretty inexpensive to build: they are boxy, flat-roofed structures on slabs or stilts, constructed with recycled materials and sited on unlandscaped lots.
One such house is currently on the market. The asking price is $3,299,000.
For a splendid and fascinating history of the Cape’s modernist architecture, please visit Modern Cape Cod.
The title of this post is taken from the first two lines of Tom Jobim’s elegant composition “

This week, I’ve been reading online copies of legendary pitchman Elmer Wheeler’s books Tested Sentences That Sell and Sizzlemanship.
Wheeler, who coined the phrase “Sell the sizzle, not the steak”, developed his sales theories in the 1930’s and 40’s, and he’s still considered a guru today.
He came up with a simple formula for the three basic buying motives: X, or health and self-preservation; Y, or “romance”, by which he meant glamour, fun and adventure; and Z, or money, either making it or saving it.
Another of his simple rules is the A and B formula: “Tell the Benefits (A), then give them proof (B)”.
A third rule is to offer the customer a choice of goods rather than ask a yes or no question: a waitress will sell more ice cream by asking if the customer wants chocolate or vanilla on their pie than by asking if the customer wants their dessert a la mode.
Wheeler also believed strongly in treating customers with respect. He uses an example of a vacuum salesperson: if a customer asks if the vacuum cleaner is too heavy to easily operate, the salesperson replies, “It may look heavy, but see how light it is” rather than arguing with the customer that it isn’t really heavy at all (you dummy!)
Reading these 60 year old classic treatises on sales comes as a shock because the deftness and diplomacy described therein seems almost non-existent today, as inundated as we all are by hundreds of daily sales messages. I’m thinking in particular of the clumsy, almost sleazy recent attempt to sell me a timeshare as an example.
Having grown up around salespeople, I have respect for how difficult a profession it is. I also don’t enjoy heavy-handed pitches and appreciate someone who has mastered the craft, whether the sale happens in person or online.

Sometimes, I consider how fortunate I am that my soul/consciousness occupies a physical shell that’s at the top of the food chain as opposed, for example, to being in the body of a cow or a species of plankton.
I was not lucky to be born female, though.
To take away at least some of the curse of gender, I was extremely lucky to be born in the United States. While it’s not as enlightened as the Scandinavian countries, the US is a heck of a lot better for women than just about anywhere in South America, Africa or Asia, and I was lucky to beat the law of large numbers in being deposited here instead of there.
Then I think about the petites.
My son is sick of hearing this, so I’ll make this brief: petite women have the life celebrated in American song and fable about the love, money, privilege and esteem that is supposedly strewn at female feet.
Let’s just say that unless those feet are a size seven or smaller, the love/money/privilege/esteem pickin’s are slim to none.
Which is an irony and a shame: having beaten tremendous odds to be born human and American, one loses out at the last possible role of destiny’s dice.
I guess it’s true, the odds are always stacked in the house’s favor.

In its plot outline of the film “Chatham”, which is being shown in pre-release this weekend at the Cape Cinema, IMDB refers to Mariel Hemingway’s character as a “middle-aged woman”.
I noted this with astonishment, since I still think of Ms. Hemingway as an ingenue.
Turns out, she’ll be celebrating her 46th birthday this Thanksgiving. Considering that I was not a lot older than she (49) when Bob was born, I guess our girl is entitled to be cast as a mature adult.
What is even more unsettling is the age-appropriate casting of Bruce Dern, Rip Torn and David Carradine, all of whom play 70 year olds in the film.
David Carradine attained Social Security normal retirement age almost six years ago?!
I feel like Rip Van Winkle, just waking up from a long nap.

It’s a good feeling when ambitious plans work out.
The weather was so mild that I took the day off yesterday, starting out with a visit to the tailor shop at Mashpee Commons to drop off a pair of slacks that needed hemming.
I’d picked up the slacks last weekend at the new LL Bean outlet in Wareham, and the discount was substantial enough that it was worth it to “splurge” on professional tailoring.
Did a couple hours of clean-up at Edgewater, finally leveling off the stump grindings from the tree that used to be in the middle of the yard, a casualty of the Noel backlash, and tackled more leaves.

Continue reading It All Got Done

It’s expected to hit 60 degrees today, so it seems like we can enjoy one day of Indian Summer before colder air moves in. Sunny now, supposed to rain later.
Got an email from Hotwire yesterday announcing a one-day airline fare special. Without a traveling companion, though, it seemed like a waste of time to even look into it.
I like this left outer join t-shirt.
Last PT appointment is tomorrow. Attended a lecture last night by Frank Moss, the Director of the MIT Media Lab. He talked about the technologies they’re developing to help paraplegics, including an electronic ankle. It takes a tremendous amount of CPU to replicate movement in an ankle, as opposed to a knee.*
Can’t believe Thanksgiving is next Thursday.
That’s probably why things have been quiet on the recruitment front, everyone’s getting into holiday mode, or maybe scared about the impact of higher oil prices and the subprime market debacle.
Have been wondering how aggressive Bush appointee Ben Bernanke and the rest of the gang at the Federal Reserve are going to be in averting a recession this coming Presidential election year.
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*I was a little disapppointed with the lecture, which was subtitled “ushering in a new era of human adaptability”, having hoped that Dr. Moss would talk about other types of human:machine interfaces, like downloading the ability to understand foreign languages.

Today, I uprooted the tomato plants. We’ve had a couple of overnight frosts, and it was time to say good-bye.
I’ve put this off much too long, figuring I’d be depressed to see the empty planters. Instead, the bare soil is not so much a bitter ending but more of a promise for next year.
I also put fall arrangements in the flower boxes at Edgewater and even mowed just about all of the back yard. The cleanup was a lot less work than I’d figured. There’s still more to do, but at least the yard is useable in the unlikely event that my grandchildren decided they wanted to go outside to play.
James and I were joking about this the other day. He’s the only one who cares to join me when I’m doing yardwork, and we were speculating that maybe the other two stay inside because they’re scared that an elephant is going to appear out of nowhere and trample them.