The Frank Funny Farm

i'm in a hurry, so yes i was too lazy to rotate the bottom picture and yes this will be short. it's from the 70s some time, so it's got the hi-fi action and oh my sweet lord does it sound GOOD. you can see the radio there and then all those other fancy knobs are for controlling bass, treble and mid-ranges so it can sound extra good as tailored to your personal ears. due to the aforementioned hurry, i'll leave you with this image: that cabinet up there is about 5 inches longer than the back of my rodeo with the seats down. so we wedged it in diagonally and bungy-corded the back door almost closed and the back window up. then we proceeded on the long, interstate-eschewing drive down white bride road in west nashville alllllll the way until it turned into woodmont and finally thompson and had mini-panic attacks at every pothole. and since this is nashville, those were about every 3 feet.

Tags: 1970s record player, KICKASS BIRTHDAY PRESENT, my husband rules, sounds so pretty!!, stereo cabinet, vinyl sweet vinyl

you may or may not be aware, but ben and i have a very special talent. we possess the remarkable ability to make any task more complicated and take at least three times as long as it should, simply by being present. the force is strong with us. the best example of this is probably the great toilet replacement of '08, in which a simple remove-old-toilet-put-in-new-toilet job that should've taken a couple hours tops required no less than 4 trips to home depot and no less than EIGHT hours. you'd think we'd have to be idiots and spectacular screw-ups to make that happen, but oh no, my friends. such is the power of the frank factor; we didn't do anything wrong. the first problem was that when we finally got the gross old toilet to surrender it's grip on the floor, it took half the flange with it. fine. we'll go get a new one, unscrew the old one, screw in the new one, bada-bing-bada-boom. except that the old one was welded into the pipe in the floor and not coming off ever at all ever. i suppose here we could've investigated and tried to unscrew it before going to the store, but since it was ya know, kinda poop covered and who in the ham sandwich would weld the frickin' thing to the pipe in the first place, we did not. argh. home depot again, returning with a flange repair kit, which is essentially the top metal ring part that screws through whatever parts left of the old flange and into the floor. swell, we're on the way now. except that the screws are no match AT ALL for the bathroom floor. the go a little way in, then bend, or don't really go at all. one goes in about halfway, just enough to make us hopeful, then breaks off in the floor. in the floor. right under the hole. there was much cursing. home depot. mammoth, concrete devouring screws (for real this time) acquired, angrily drilled into floor, except in that one spot of course. huzzah! all we have to do is put on the waxy goo and put on the new toilet and we are free to poop! except. our new toilet is (as any good newer model should be) a bit more slim in the bottom it seems and lacks the extra space required by the repair kit flange top. use your imagination, fill in the very blue blanks and then multiply it times ten. we remove the lovely new toilet and stare in a manner than would make any redneck who likes to look at car engines proud. then, true to that redneck heritage, i mutter something along the lines of "fuckit" and grab the hammer, giving the flange the nips and tuck it needed. then we put the bloody toilet down and muscled it into place in a way certainly unbecoming of a lady and caulked that bastared to the floor. i applied a little more redneck ingenuity to the levelling process that i'll leave out of the blog since we do want to sell the house at some point and it might freak some people out. we then noticed it was 8 o'clock-ish and wondered how we had spent an entire saturday doing something so simple.

yesterday, the frank factor showed that even the internet is no match for it if it's angry enough. we went and got a shiny new battery charger for our lawn mower battery sos we could make it go mow. upon examining the battery, we couldn't find any indication as to the voltage. no worries, i memorized the model number of the mower real quick-like and went inside to use the google. not so helpful, as it turns out. we could find part numbers, diagrams of the various systems and even a manual, but none of these things simply said "12V battery." we looked up the battery number on the battery maker's site, and while they were happy to sell it to us, they didn't seem to think we needed to know the voltage. we'd found some indication that it was likely a 12V battery, but nothing really definitive, and since we could fry the thing if we set the charger to 12 and it was on some off chance a 6V, we weren't too comfortable with it. somewhere in the middle of the process we realized it'd be much faster to just call the man down the street who sold it to us and ask, so we did, but no one was home. finally, after trying every possible search combination known to man, some obscure thing came up to verfiy that it was, in fact, a 12-volt battery. that's right, it took us a little over half an hour to be able to hook our lawn mower battery up to the charger. it's a gift. sadly a non-returnable one. sigh.

and then halfway through the mowing process the blade belt came off and once we got it back on we couldn't get it to tighten enough to turn on. we stared at it for a while, jiggled things, then it got too dark to really see anything, so we gave up and our front yard has a lovely haircut now. i was talking to my dad last night and he had a suggestion, so hopefully that'll work when i get home tonight and i can take care of the silly looking yard and then ben and i can have the satisfied, accomplished feeling that makes the beer taste better and the gas-and-grass  perfume smell more pleasing. we were robbed last night, man. stupid frank factor.

Tags: lawn mower battery, lawn mower woes, murhpy's law is no match for us, toilet replacement fun, we're special

i took my french final yesterday; all done, yay!! so i just have classes left at this point really. there are probably a few tweaks to be done to the portfolio, and i have to take the graduate exam thingy in a couple of weeks, but since i can't really conceive of any way to study for it, it's nothing to worry about ahead of time. that means i just have my classes and the papers and presentations and stuff within them to worry about. it's kind of weird, because as work goes from here on out, this semester will be pretty light compared to the inundations i've had in the past. i think i might have a minute to breathe every now and then. that, or the 'i really don't care any more' zen has completely kicked in. i guess i'll know for sure when i finally force myself to start that blasted literacy paper that's due on the 31st. it's so frustrating how much that class SUCKS in every possible way. i can't wait until we get to the review at the end; i think i'm gonna need to take mine home to have enough time to get it all in. and aside from the facts that the class is nothing like the description given at registration, 97% of the reading says basically the same thing, falling into categories of "assinine," "duh," or "elitist white bastards" and that none of it seems to have any sort of point,  the professor clearly should've taught some more undergrad classes before jumping into a graduate class, or at least taken a very basic public speaking seminar or something. she's my age, or maybe younger, just finished her doctorate this summer; none of that would i hold against her. i DO hold against her the gum smacking, the constant "like, um, um, um... you know what i mean?" NO we do not know what you mean because you talk in circles and say nothing, occasionally interspersed with charming anecdotes about celebrity gossip or how swell junior high was, which you clearly remember because it was probably about 3 years ago. if she were thin and blonde i would be forced to refer to her as professor barbie. add to that the fact that the class is at least half-populated by idiots, some of whom don't speak with proper grammar and one of whom says "like" about every third word and you get the few of us who want to kill ourselves every tuesday night and have to struggle to talk ourselves into showing up in the first damn place. UG.

i try to console myself with the fact that the reading list for the children's lit class is so much fun it's stupid and that the other two people in the class with me, are in fact, intelligent women. the actual class time itself is unfortunately painful, because the professor likes to talk. a lot. a LOT. we have to interupt, often futilely, to get a syllable in edgewise. she's also one of those people who gets so excited when she's talking about this stuff (which she's excited about and really into, hence the talk-at-thons) that she loses CONTROL of the voLUME of heR VOICE, which is especially ear-tiring because there are only four of us, so we're usually pretty close together. and i've found that i just stop listening to her, which proves tricky on those rare moments she asks what we think, though not that tricky, since one of us only has to say a phrase or two for her to take off on that point. but, again, the reading list makes it kind of like cheating, and i need some sort of happy feeling about school, so i'm super-gluing a mental smile on my brain about that one. but seriously, i'm just ready for it to be done already. i have the senior-itis, as the kids say. i'm really eager to get on to um, unemployment and student loan repayment. yeah!

k. i suppose since the little one is napping i should read a book or something. for my stupid literacy writing & identity class. i have hopes for this one though, it actually looks interesting. fingers crossed. oh, and HAPPY BASKETBALL TIME!!

Tags: no more french woohoo!, professor barbie and the idiot brigade, senior-itis is itchy, stupid waste-of-time class

we had much fun this weekend and we were even a bit productive. who knew? we also pretty much ate our way through the weekend, which was very much tasty. really, ben should be blogging about the foods because he, of course, took pictures of all of it, because that's what he does. friday night the ryan came over and we made greek lamb/beef burgers and sweet potato fries and snap beans. they was delicious. there was half a burger left, so saturday morning it went into omelets with spinach, mushrooms and feta. very much yum. saturday night was jared's birthday extravaganza which means gathering around a giant hibachi at mikado and watching our tasty dinner being made with flair and pyrotechnics, then going to (where else?) wilhagan's. sunday, in a stellar feat of wasting no foods, we grilled some chicken rubbed with the same gyro spices we used in the burgers, then used the rest of the tzatziki sauce we'd made as the sauce for pita pizzas with mushrooms and feta and parmesan and zuchinni and tomato for ben (and the chicken of course). the rest of the mint shall be taken care of tonight in some pesto-ish sauce for pasta. win!

after we had those scrumptious pizzas (brilliant idea i had there, i must say), we went downtown to war memorial auditorium to see ryan adams and the cardinals. the show was great, would've probably been awesomely fantastic had there been more vocals in the mix. alas. still, the band was super tight, i don't think i've heard them or any ryan adams band sound that good. i was kind of interested in how the show would be, because he's been clean for a while, but he also got married within the last few weeks, so he's (hopefully anyway) been happy and healthy and stuff, the combination of which i'm pretty sure is unprecedented. but, he is of course, still weird and goofy and geeky so it was great. at one point when the house lights were on, he noticed a guy standing up in the balcony was wearing the same shirt as neal casal, the guitarist and back-up singer. so he proceeded to improve a ridiculous song about it. hilarity. he also played a surprising mix of songs, all in the trademark faster rawkin' live version he tends to do. if you have heartbreaker, then you know the song "lucy." last night, he played a straight up punk version of it, which was clearly the way that song was meant to be done. glad he figured that out. he played for just about 3 hours, which was awesome, but also not, because it was sunday night and the show started at 8:30. very late going to bed for ben who had to get up at 6 this morning to go to the gym and me who should've gotten up at 7:20 to be at work at 8:30. don't tell anyone, but i didn't shower this morning. tiiiiiired. sleep and relaxation weren't completely on the agenda this weekend, though we did sleep in saturday a bit i suppose. it was a good spring break wrap-up weekend and hopefully a good "last weekend" for ben. they have a huge project at work, so apparently i won't see him until june. sad.

Tags: greek food weekend, i'm going to need lots of coffee today, ryan adams is still a badass, ryan adams yay!, we like food a lot

two days ago the high was 80 degrees. i took the dogs and wandered through the woods at edwin warner, wearing a T-shirt and capri pants. this morning i went to my car to find a good half-inch of little round ice balls piled upon it, the very same ones falling from the sky. dear nashville, this is bullshit. love, meg

Tags: i hate cold, it shouldn't be sleeting in mid-march, nashville weather blows