DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

In the past 30 days I’ve bought a house, sold a house, taken a week’s vacation in Colorado, read four novels, and helped a family member survive abdominal surgery. I’ve hacked into the heart of the Monaural Jerk codebase, baked bread, and connected to the Internet via four different networks in six different locations. I’ve commuted. I’ve slept in many different beds. I’ve eaten numerous ethnicities of food in many restaurants. But I’ve spent almost no time writing content for this site, as you can tell by scrolling down the page.

Somewhere in the bottom of my laptop bag is a business card with story ideas jotted on the reverse. They’re backed up like the chunks of undigested red meat in your colon. And, like those impacted, foul-smelling blobs, they may never experience release. Such is my schedule. Such is your colon.

I plan to write more in the coming weeks. But, to be honest, I always plan to write more in the coming weeks. Sigh.

The Union Chinese restaurant in San Jose, CA, is a pretty nice place to order take-out… the stench of incense nearly masks the stench of the hostess’ BO, but the kitchen is fast so you don’t have to endure it for long. And they happily accomodate off-menu orders, or maybe they just fry up some other miscellaneous garbage and stuff it in the to-go bag, figuring the customer won’t notice until they’re too far away to complain. (I’ll find out in about 20 minutes, I guess.)

It might also be true that writing sarcastic, negative restaurant reviews while sitting in the restaurant waiting for food is a bad idea. You never know what might get stirred into the stir-fry.

My first thought was, “Damn, I’ve lost a filling!” My second thought was, “Ewww, the cook lost a filling.” But it was just a little chunk of plastic after all. There was no evidence that it came out of someone else’s body first.

When you buy a house, the day your offer is accepted is a high point. Soon after that, you hire a squad of experts to dissect the place as if it were a sack of dirty clothes, reporting back on every stain, odor, and sagging bit of elastic.

Armed with these reports, you as a buyer have the option of asking the seller to fix the problems, or asking for cash, or doing nothing. Or, technically, you can back out of the purchase altogether, although in my experience the problem would have to be huge for most people to cancel the transaction… because by the time the inspection reports come in, you’ve been in escrow for at least a week, after having come out on top of the bidding war that marks the sale of any nice property (in Northern California, anyway). You’ve toured the property two or three times, mentally put your family and furniture into the new home, imagined driving down the driveway with groceries, imagined entertaining friends on the deck, wondered how the heck you’re going to get broadband access there, given that it’s way the heck out in the sticks. In short, you’re committed, and only something devastating would break the commitment.

We endured about 10 days of pain. Buying and selling simultaneously, we had inspection reports from two properties to contend with. In both transactions, the buyers submitted “addendums” to the original purchase contract, requesting repairs, money, or both. In both cases, the sellers issued counter-addendums.

For my part, I had to scramble to get a heater repaired. The house inspector discovered that our heater was spewing carbon monoxide into the basement den. I heard his report from the buyers’ realtor, who enthused “We love the property, and the inspector said everything is in fabulous shape. There’s just the matter of the carbon monoxide from the heater; that’s the SILENT KILLER, you know. But the house is really great!”

Fortunately, a few hours’ worth of cleanup and TLC did the trick. The flue was obstructed with the grime collected over 25 years, causing insufficient draw, causing the combustion byproducts to vent into our basement. The heater expert opined that the CO levels were safe before the repair, but we’re all happier now that they’re 100% lower.

Meanwhile, three miles away, we discovered that most of our 2+ acre yard might be leachfield. Subsequent research indicated that this is probably not entirely true, but for a few days we believed that the only way we’d be able to build our new music and dance studio would be by redirecting the output line from the septic tank into the “seasonal creek,” which, by the way, is realtor-speak for “drainage ditch.”

Anyway, after way more difficulties than I expected, we pushed through terms everyone could live with. We and our buyers removed contingencies… and now it’s just a matter of time before loans fund and we move to the new house.

And, no, I really won’t have broadband way the heck out in the sticks. Fortunately there’s a local wireless co-op that’s running WiFi from peak to peak to share a big DSL pipe. But that’s a story for another time.

I often intend to assemble a summer reading list, for any of you who have travels planned and appreciate recommendations for worthy books. But then I spend my summer reading, and I never get around to writing up my reviews until too late in the year.

This is happening again. Watch for a whole mess of reviews in about six weeks’ time, just after you return from boring airplane rides and lonely ocean crossings. But don’t blame me if you end up reading some schlock grabbed in haste from the bestseller rack at the airport news concession — I have more than a year’s worth of older reviews archived on this site. (See the “Media Reviews” section of the navigation area.)

Also, I have managed to write up some recent thoughts on two excellent works of non-fiction. The stories are entertaining enough to be untrue, so don’t let the genre bother you; both these books are a lot of fun:

• In Search of Captain Zero (Allan C. Weisbecker)
• Kitchen Confidential (Anthony Bourdain)

I’m a sucker for high-tech thrillers. This is a solid example of the genre. I recommend it.

The reviews at Amazon (links below) contain plot summaries, so rather than recap the story here, I’ll just mention two aspects of this book that make it memorable.

One, the characters are great: they’re believable, complex, and quirky.

Two, Deaver executes a couple of 180-degree plot twists that would have been inconceivable a few pages earlier. I won’t spoil any details… but if you like this sort of writing, Deaver delivers.

If you are technically literate, you may be bothered by some of the skills attributed to the two hacker characters, and by some of the technical explanations. I’m probably the worst sort of audience for these writers. Suspension of disbelief is a typical requirement for escapist fiction, though. The less believable moments did not hinder my enjoyment of the story; in fact, I found that Deaver’s work is among the more plausible I’ve read.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)