scot hacker's foobar blog

Received the call tonight I’ve been expecting for 15 years: At 103, Grandma Hastings has passed away. My last remaining grandparent, Vada was born in Castena, Iowa more than a century ago, 100 years before my son. A schoolteacher who lived through the Great Depression, the popularization of cars, radio, television, the internet, two world wars, men walking on the moon, and disco, Vada was the mother of seven children, steadfastly unreligious and politically neutral, a good samaritan, a lifelong gardener, a masterful embroiderer, famous for Sunday waffles and the most amazing rhubarb pie you ever tasted (always homegrown and lovingly baked). Wife of a boxer and carpenter, never allowed to get a driver’s license or own a pet, unflinching in the face of adversity, never had a harsh word for anyone. In retrospect, she was a Classic American Grandmother, though I’ve never identified her that way before. She was just plain old Grandma to us.

Vada stayed healthy and alert until her late 90s. Only in recent years did she become bedridden, and begin to lose her eyesight and hearing. Every year for the last two decades, the refrain has been “Better come to Grandma’s birthday – it could be her last.” But it never was. She never seemed to get sick, never suffered any of the ailments common to such advanced age. She just. Slowed. Down. And eventually, inevitably, faded to zero, winked out, as all humans do, in one way or another.

I did a video interview with her in 2000. Now wanting to dig that up, hear her once again reflecting on her amazing century. May we all have such a ride.

Setbacks.

The light we selected for the bathroom originally arrived scratched, and had to be sent back. The lighting store promptly lost the order, and it took weeks to get a replacement. Finally got that installed, only to discover it was too dim, even with max wattage fluorescent bulbs. I had had reservations about its brightness when we first saw it near the beginning of summer, but was assured that our senses were being thrown by all the other lights in the store. Nope. Should have trusted first instinct. I also hadn’t had a good feeling about the color temperature of fluorescents. Even with warmest available tube type, the light feels cold. So after everything, the “Forecast” went back to the store and we went back to the drawing board, focused on glass and halogen this time.

Yesterday finally cleared time to install the tub/shower fixture set. Halfway through reading the directions, the “should have been obvious” dawned on me – you can’t install a full shower fixture set without ripping existing tile and backer board off the wall — there’s no way to connect supply pipes to the pressure regulator unless you can get your hands inside the wall. I think I had approached this problem like most plumbing — thought that I could just install new handle, spout, and showerhead over some kind of standard valve. But it doesn’t work that way. If you don’t want to rip up the wall, you can buy just a “trim kit” to change the look of an existing set (thanks baald), but of course the range of trim kits available for your existing valve is much more limited. Now grappling with whether to go for it and rip out some shower wall, or live with a lesser choice. At this point, very eager to just have the job over and done with. But it would also suck to spend all summer on a project like this and have such a visible detail stuck in the 80s.

For the past couple of months, Miles’ standard rejoinder to questions about why he just did something has been “Because I’m curious.” Example: “Miles, it seems like you spilled that orange juice on purpose. Why did you do that?” “Because I’m curious.” Yesterday I finally managed to get an alternate response out of him.

“Miles, what would you like to have for dinner?”

“Daddy, I want to have breakfast for dinner!”

“OK, what would you like to have for breakfast?”

“Fish!”

“Have you had fish before? Do you like fish?”

“No, Daddy.”

“Then how do you know you don’t like it?”

“Because I’m curious.”

“But if you’re curious then it means you like to try new things.”

[pause]

“I mean because I’m NOT curious, Daddy.”