I'm still in a post-election euphoria here, but my cabin-dwelling backside has compelled me to a more practical, down-to-earth consideration: the state of my new outhouse.
As is the fashion in my neck of the Goldstream Valley, I've already strung Christmas tree lights in the black spruce so that visitors can find it in the dark.
It was
shocking amusing how grossed out some of my Lower 48 friends were by the poopsicle post. Grossed out, as in, they actually remembered some of the things myself and others wrote about frozen poop. But where one takes cares of business, and in what degree of comfort, is as important as the whole eating thing, really. You eat every day and correspondingly, you visit the loo every day as well. Cycle of life, the human machine at work, blah blah blah.*
But digressing, again.
So, the new outhouse, while as fine an example of carpentry as the new cabin and
not yet plagued by the dread poopsicle,
has no blue foam. It's just wood. What was the previous tenant thinking?? As the temperatures have begun to dip down,** soon, I'm gonna freeze my ass off. So I'm headed to Home Despot today.
And all of this is old hat, scarcely worthy of mention in the water-challenged circles in which I socialize. But I happened to be reading
The New York Times this morning and came across an article on interior decorating that is such a world away from my blue foam concerns that I felt compelled
to share it with y'all. It seems that there are people in the world that have weightier concerns at their residences than mine. Indeed, Joan Rivers and a number of very posh folk have to worry about decorating disasters:
There is a giddy intoxication that can overtake the traveler, and that is a good thing — nature’s way of inuring one to $350-a-night hotel prices. The savvy decorator, however, must always be vigilant; remembering that however delightful those scrap-metal Haitian sculptures look in Port-au-Prince, it may be quite another thing when you get them back to your apartment.
Such was the case with Jeffrey Podolsky, a New York journalist. Visiting Buenos Aires, he found himself in a leather-goods neighborhood, where he fell hard for a $1,000 black and white pony rug. It would have gone very well in a monochromatic living room, Mr. Podolsky said, but the apartment he shares with Milly de Cabrol, an interior designer, is more exotic, with oranges and deep pinks and touches of green and red. He did not realize the magnitude of his error until Ms. de Cabrol, seeing the rug, screamed.
Let's just say that the decorating issues at the CabinDwelling Compound differ. With a wood, wood, and wood motif, coupled with some Very Ugly Carpet***, and an eclectic mixture of couches and action packers, we are so far beyond "good taste" that nothing we can do is really a disaster at this point.
*I am reminded of a certain pair of businesses in Nome owned by the same couple: Fat Freddie's Restaurant and Suck N Shine. Fat Freddies restaurant serves a variety of tasty, cholesterol-bomb foods and Suck N Shine traffics in sewage. As the t-shirt they commissioned boasts, "Serving both ends of Nome's alimentary canal." I am not making this up.
**I can't say it's cold because Good God people, it's only getting down to -15 at night.
***Whitish, and formerly the primary habitat of a scruffy terrier mix named Murray. Murray and his owner have moved on, but Murray's hair keeps turning up no matter how many times we vacuum.
