Spouse is a great guy. Among other features, he is the best roommate I’ve ever had. Love him and all that. But now that I’m spending more time managing the homestead, there’s a habit of his that’s making me just a little bit crazypants in my headholes.

When he uses a dish, he takes it to the sink, fills it with water and leaves it there full to the brim. Tea cup, salad plate, ice cream bowl, stew pot, roasting pan, baby bottle… whatever. He says he does this “so they can soak.” Which is patent bullshit and obfuscation. That glass had water in it, Spouse. How do you soak water off of a glass?

So, I’ve asked him nicely several times to please not leave me a sink full of dishes full of water.

And I come home to this.

I mean, seriously. It would be one thing to place a dish in the sink, wait for a few to accumulate, then do a big rinse and put them all in the dishwasher. No big. But if you’re going to fill them carefully and line them up? This is the maximum amount of effort one can expend while still not actually doing the dishes. This makes no sense to me.

To use the sink at all, I have to move these offerings, and always get my hands covered with dirty dishwater, so I have to wash my hands, so I may as well just fill the dishwasher… hey, wait a minute.

But I’m not sure Spouse even knows he’s doing it now. I think that I’ve now put a bug in his ear about “dishes full of water,” and subconsciously he’s trying to oblige. It’s all so tidy. That lineup on the right? Four baby bottles full of water, and four baby bottle caps also full of water. WTF?

How do I make it stop?

When I was in college, there was much discussion of the Dish Fairy. “What do you think? There’s some dish fairy that comes and cleans up after you?” Signs posted in the kitchens my friends shared with a cadre of house- and roommates were sometimes signed by this elusive dish fairy, and begged, cajoled or threatened the reader with bodily harm if they left dirty dishes in the sink.

I don’t think he’d respond well to notes from the dish fairy, so I’m going to try something I read about a couple of years ago. While researching a book about a school for animal trainers, this author learned a lot about positive reinforcement techniques. She tried them on her husband to get him to pick up his dirty socks, to great success. Her article in the New York Times was enormously popular (I remember it making quite a splash when it came out), and was the cause of much conversation around the office.

• Read “What Shamu Taught Me About A Happy Marriage”

Wish me luck.

While pulling some weeds in the neglected part of my yard (read: any part of it), I saw this perfectly good machete lying on the ground yesterday. At least I assume it is perfectly good. I have not tested its goodness, and I don’t have on tap a machete evaluation schema. But this machete appears to be in working order, and was just hanging out innocently enough near the fence at the very back. Out in the open. Under a tree. Minding its own business.

Spouse disavows knowledge of this machete, saying “All of my machetes are accounted for.”

Sigh.

Ignoring that for the moment, I don’t know where it came from or what it was up to before I found it. I’d ask my neighbors, but… that would involve speaking to my neighbors and this is something I avoid as a matter of policy.

And that’s really all I have to say about it.

Er… have a great week.

I read some terrible news yesterday about the family of someone I know and admire. While mom was already in the middle of a battle with cancer (and you know how I feel about cancer), one of their children fell suddenly and extraordinarily ill.

That part’s not my story to tell, so I’ll stop there. I invite them to link to it in the comments here, though they’ve certainly got bigger fish to fry.

As a new parent, blah, blah, blah

Let’s not even humor me with that line. It’s just horrible when bad things happen, but extra insultingly, gut-wrenchingly, tear-makingly shattering when it happens to a child. I can’t even imagine what they’re going through, and they’ve been much on my mind.

An impotent, but hopefully poignant gesture

I want to do something for them. But there isn’t even a disease named yet I can throw money at to assuage myself. They’re extraordinarily well covered colleague, family and friend-wise, and I’m kind of beyond peripheral to this story in most ways anyway, and don’t want to intrude on them during this horrible time. I promised that I’d put a penny in every fountain I passed. What they don’t know is that my neighborhood has a lot of fountains.

This morning, after sending my own daughter off to daycare with extra kisses, I took a spin through the neighborhood and chucked a penny into every fountain I could think of.

Here they are. 16 fountains. 16 pennies. Thousands of good wishes being sent in your direction, folks.

I invite anyone to add fountains and locations.

The Internets can be fickle. Social media is so in that it’s now a big yawn. The shark has been jumped, Twitter has been twa… er… tweeted, and nothing against all of you foursquare fans, but I know nothing about foursquare and still cannot stand it. I’m not even interested in where I am most of the time.

My pocketbook is smarter than me

But as we all stare ever more raptly into the tiny screens we carry around, I’ve been thinking about how isolating it all really is. We don’t talk to people on the metro (though honestly, that’s kind of a blessing), we don’t ask for directions, we can get book recommendations at the tap of a finger, find out how much that house cost, compare prices around the world with the flick of a thumb, and tighten our tether to e-mail and work all in the name of convenience. What I haven’t seen, though, is a really good implementation that combines social media, the Internets and the big, bad, real world.

The other week I was invited to try out the goSmithsonian Trek scavenger hunt across the Smithsonian Institution museums and – to be honest – I thought “Ugh. Trying to navigate the real world with new technology. How annoying is this going to be?” I was wrong. It was actually pretty fun, even going it alone.

• Read more about the Trek on the Around the Mall blog

Basically, you download the SCVNGR app to your iPhone or Droid (because you are a nerd) and it takes you on kind of a guided tour of several of the museums. You are invited to answer a series of questions or “challenges,” featuring trivia from the exhibits, and earn points for correct answers. It’s kind of addictive, and I found myself plowing through school groups and dashing up stairways to find the answers.

Dodging tourists and photographing elephant butts

One of the things you’re encouraged to do in each museum is snap a photo to share. Here’s mine from Natural History. I’m also not entirely proud of the way I behaved in the Wright Brothers exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum, where I tried to move quickly through lolly gagging families to efficiently complete one challenge before moving on to the next.

I think the Trek has great applications. As a DC native, I’ve long seen school groups going on pen-and-paper scavenger hunts in the museums. This takes it digital and really makes it work with the technology that’s already in your pocket. I could totally picture going on this Trek with a bunch of kids (assuming a bunch of kids each have iPhones or Droids or whatever) and setting them loose to conduct the challenge. Or maybe as a group activity. DC is riddled with bright-eyed young things who love organized fun. And curmudgeons (such as myself) can also learn a thing or two. Even those (also such as myself) who used to work at Smithsonian Enterprises.

To fulfill the challenges, I actually looked around the Smithsonian Castle for the first time in years, saw the crypt where are kept the remains of James Smithson, the man who donated the bags of gold (literally) to found an “Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge” in a country he never visited during his life. This is just one of the amazing things to know about this amazing place.

Focus on experience, not interface.

As I said, I was pretty reluctant to try this thing out. I’m no luddite, but am congenitally cranky. It would be the easiest thing in the world to make the interface either too complicated or the activity dangerously dull. They’ve managed to make a really simple-to-use tool to guide users through what is at heart a much more complex activity. And keep the focus on the content, and the experience rather than on navigating the freaking phone. Strong work, guys.

But don’t take my word for it – feel free to download the free SCVNGR app yourself and head to the national mall. And don’t forget to drink plenty of water, it’s appalling out.

Plans for the future

I just spoke to the charming Beth Py-Lieberman, the editor of goSmithsonian who managed this whole shebang. She said that they’d love to take it further after this one-month trial is up. Maybe monthly treks, since the exhibits (particularly in the art museums) change so frequently.

“One of the takeaway lessons for me,” said Beth, “is that some of the visitors are going to have to be challenged more. We’re going to have to make them work hard for the answers, and get them into the back corners of the Smithsonian where the great stuff is.” I somehow failed to mention that I just couldn’t get one of the answers from the Hall of Oceans, so I may be in big trouble if they smart it up too much.

But it takes a lot of work to put one of these together. The one that’s live now? Beth says they started development during the DeathSnow and launched it during the heat wave, and that is something of a time commitment. It went through a lot of rounds of edits, a couple because the exhibits changed and threw the trek out of whack with reality, and one round Beth called “riddle-fying,” which is where they made lots of the questions rhyming and/or funny, which is pretty cute. No one asked me, but this all seems rather perfectly in line with the Institution’s stated goal of taking the whole of the Smithsonian digital, a project that is so exciting and of such appalling scope I can’t even get my brain around it. Maybe my pocketbook can.

• Check out the Smithsonian Commons prototype

Disclosure: I used to be an employee of  Smithsonian Enterprises. I have not been paid, compensated, bribed, cajoled or threatened to try this trek or write this post.

Read more about the goSmithsonian Trek from these fine bloggers:

Going places and completing challenges with the goSmithsonian Trek mobile app

Winning an iPad from the Smithsonian!

You all totally rock! Thanks to you, I’ve just sent a not insignificant $32.76 to the American Cancer Society to support cancer research! When I started this project a few months ago I had no idea that it would have such longevity. I am enormously touched by the fact that these donations keep coming in.

A little reminder of why I’m doing this: Because cancer was a total asshole to my rockstar Grandma.

Grandma really wanted to meet my daughter, and fought balls-out to stick around long enough. In fact, she fought this stupid disease for years – taking every indignity, every side effect, every inconvenience, and every ounce of pain with determination and a great attitude. She was in chemotherapy for about three years, if you can imagine that. Since the effects are often cumulative, she had at one point or another every side effect on the books, including some that her nurses hadn’t heard of. How’d she do it for so long? She had great doctors. But also her love for life and her will were indomitable. Well, nearly. She didn’t quite make it to meet her great-granddaughter, and that is only one of the things that totally blows about what she went through.

And it’s hardly unique. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been touched by this assaholic disease. I have a friend who said that – for her – the final and incontrovertible proof that God doesn’t exist is the fact that the profession “pediatric oncologist” does. It’s hyperbolic, sure, but I think we all know how she feels.

And now, without further ado – here is this month’s paperwork:

See? Here’s the Amazon.com payment to me from your purchases through the links on this site.

And here – as promised – is my receipt from the American Cancer Society.

How you can tell Cancer that it’s an Asshole:

1. Click through to Amazon from any Amazon link on this site. I have a few links to Amazon products and stuff on this site, including the book club selection on the left side. And This Amazon Link Here.
2. Buy anything, and your transaction will be flagged as coming from here.
3. At no charge to you, Amazon sends a small percentage of your total purchase to me.
4. I donate EVERY CENT of that sweet Amazon cash to the American Cancer Society, and post my receipts here. If anyone wants additional proof, just drop me a note (thea [at] nutgraf dot net) and we’ll figure out how I can satisfy your curiosity.

So, see? You just buy the stuff you’re going to buy online anyway, the ACS gets a little money and cancer gets the finger. It’s like making a donation for free – what’s not to like?

You ever get that feeling on a Sunday night?

Spouse and I have been planning to buy a new (to us) car for the last few months. Phase 1 has been recently completed – namely, selling our lesser car. Spouse met with success via eBay, where a lovely young man from Pennsylvania found himself the proud new owner of an 18-year-old convertible that has served us well and provided Spouse with countless hours of entertainment lying on his back in the driveway beneath it.

So we’ve been discussing our qualifications for the prospective new car, including an elaborate comparative feature hierarchy, and realized today – during an otherwise pleasant walk through the neighborhood – that I no longer knew precisely what models we’re looking at, or how we’d arrived there.

It turned out that he’d been having a series of conversations with me that were only hampered by the fact that I wasn’t actually there at the time. See, as he considered options, he also considered my possible responses to them and drew several conclusions, some of which were accurate, but none of which I knew about.

Warning: Do not try this at home. This is advanced projection and a great way to start a fight with your significant other. We are professionals.

As we are wont to do, Spouse and I broke it down way too far and got deeply involved in both of our product comparison mental mapping techniques.

Spouse: The Punch Card Model

Pretend you have a series of trays each marked into a grid. Each tray has holes in various positions on the grid. When you stack the trays, there will be just a few spots through which you can see daylight. In Spouse’s mind these are the “finalists,” or models that possess all of the attributes we’re seeking.

Me: The Calder Model

Alexander Calder was an accomplished sculptor known – at least in part – for his incredible mobiles. I see our decision-making process as an elaborate system of weights and counterweights. Each feature has a value relative to the others – and is weighted. For example, my price spectrum is directly correlated to the feature set, and within that feature set, items may have different values. All-wheel-drive may take my “acceptable mileage” range up 5k, but only if the model year is X.

To summarize, Spouse is a physics nerd and I’m all Liberal Arts. And no, we still don’t know precisely what car we’re zeroing in on. But it got me thinking about how weird it is when people understand one another at all. You never know what’s going on in someone else’s head. Which is why have to give one another the benefit of the doubt and not take mental shortcuts.

Though it’s way more fun to jump to conclusions.

Woo hoo! Thanks to your efforts, I’ve just sent another $38.60 to the American Cancer Society to support cancer research! We’ve all been touched by cancer, that asshole, and this is one way to give cancer a little kick in the nuts.

Why I’m doing this: Because cancer was a total asshole to my rockstar Grandma.

See? Here’s the Amazon.com payment to me from your purchases through the links on this site.

And here – as promised – is my receipt from the American Cancer Society.

Jenn’s Racing for the Cure

Friend Jenn is participating in the Susan G. Komen Global Race for the Cure® on June 5, 2010, in Washington, DC. I know a lot of people who’s lives have been impacted by breast cancer in particular – some currently fighting, some triumphant conquerors, and some not so lucky. Jenn is a long-time warrior, and has been participating in the Race for the Cure for years. She also happens to be a great lady. If you’re interested in punching breast cancer in the neck, Komen is the place to go and Jenn’s Fundraising Page is a nice way to do it. I’ve just put my money where my mouth is and made a donation myself.

How you can participate in Cancer is an Asshole:

If you buy anything through an Amazon.com banner or store link on this site (like the banner below), a small percentage of your total purchase will be kicked back to Cancer is an Asshole. I will donate EVERY CENT of that sweet Amazon cash to the American Cancer Society. And I’ll post a full accounting here – like the one above. So you just buy the stuff you’re going to buy online anyway, and the ACS gets a little money. It’s like making a donation for free – what’s not to like?

A sweet way to give cancer the finger

I was out walking the baby around, and decided to treat myself and Spouse to some cupcakes to kick off the weekend right. I stopped by Georgetown Cupcake in Bethesda, and was happily surprised to see a display of Komen Cupcakes, or Cupcakes for the Cure – I’m not sure what they’re calling them. These treats were marked that 100% of the proceeds are donated to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, and I think they are going to be available for a while. I think this because I asked how long they’d be available, and the lady behind the counter said “for a while.” So you get an awesome cupcake and Komen gets a little bump in the bank account.

As if the book weren’t exciting enough, on June 2nd, I’m going to see John Waters speak at the Smithsonian as part of their fantastic Resident Associates program. Check out John Waters: An Unconventional Self-Portrait.

John Waters is a cult icon. In his new book, Role Models, Waters discusses some of the entertainers, murderers, fashion designers, artists, strippers, deviants, and pornographers that he admires for various reasons. Running themes seem to be honesty and clarity of vision. Waters cheerfully calls his heroes on their bullshit and shows them off in their unvarnished glory. Would you expect anything less?

In a chapter about former Manson follower and current convicted murderer Leslie Van Houten, Waters describes first his morbid interest in the Manson family and then the development of an unlikely and enduring friendship with Van Houten that has spanned her decades in prison. It seems like his long experience with the grotesque has prepared him well to see and acknowledge the circus of horror and cut straight to the humanity. What we’re left with is a portrait of Van Houten that is clear-eyed and not cloying. Full with regret, but not asking for the favor of forgiveness because, well, would it really be right for her to ask for favors? He says she has the patience, “not to find religious fanaticism that would forgive her instantly and take away responsibilities for her actions.” Isn’t that beautiful? That’s not a statement one jots down lightly – Waters has given this a lot of thought.

He also answers one of my favorite questions for people who are in the public eye and so get a lot of stupid questions – “what question do you hate and hope to never have to answer again?” For Waters, this question seems to be “Do you have a hobby?” His all caps reply: “DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING DABBLER?!” Love it. Of course, he also mentions loathing the Great Dog Shit Question of All Time

At the end of the book, when I was racing downhill to the end zone, Waters speculates about what a perfume with his name would smell like. He mentions “Odorama” cards – which I actually remember, and were my first Waters experience. My parents went out on a rare date night “to see Polyester. When they got home, they showed us kids the cards. We were accustomed to scratch and sniff books with scents like “peppermint,” and “grape.” Imagine our surprise.

It’s honest, gleeful, benefits from a short attention span, and is generally awesome. He writes about the art he collects (describing the artists as his roommates), and the heroes who made him nervous. He describes with relish seeking out the scariest bars I’ve ever heard of, and how he nurtures his trademark mustache. It’s squalid and filthy and gorgeous – kind of like the clothes by his favorite designer.

• An excerpt on The Huffington Post – Leslie Van Houten: A Friendship
• An interview with Waters on Kansascity.com
• A review of Role Models on Bookforum.com
• The Education of John Waters – Baltimore Sun

• Would love to know what you’re reading. Please feel free to comment below or e-mail me at thea [at] nutgraf dot net.
• Join BookGraf on Facebook: Good books? Great company? No effort? What’s not to like?

Spouse started today with another winner.

“I had one of those moments when I was thinking: ‘If I were preserved in amber right now, I would be gravely misunderstood by scientists in a million years.’”

We all have moments when we really hope the spy cameras are looking elsewhere. If you’re a parent or host to animals in your home (though we all know that if you have cats you are merely a tenant in their home), you have these often due to the fact that you are intimately, unavoidably and frequently involved with their bodily functions.

But it made me think (and I do hate to think) about how that is totally right. Context is king. And the concept of cultural relativism – which we studied in anthropology 101 – is applicable all over our daily life.

• When someone overhears only part of your conversation.
• When you tell a story without enough background.
• When you assume someone else is starting from the same experience as yourself.
• When you write an e-mail that’s just a little bit too glib.

Would someone from Mars understand what’s going on from a snapshot of this scene? I’m going to start calling it The Amber Standard.

And then I had a long talk with a dear friend over the Intertubes using Skype. And she is kind of a High Profile Authority on Social Media in a lot of ways and we got to talking about how frustrating it would be if you had something big (and perhaps unpleasant) going on in your life and you just can’t tweet about it because then you’ll have all of your followers all up in your business trying to be helpful, or now knowing too much about you and feeling very free to comment on it.

And when did we have to tweet about things to validate our lives, anyway? What is up with that?

Some people, though, chose to let it all hang out – scars, scabs, snot and all. I’m not going to get into whether that’s brave, bold or needy (me? I think it’s a combo). But they also get some great encouragement from their audience, who get to watch, criticize and goad from the security of the other side of the screen.

But this was supposed to be a funny light post about cleaning poo and hoping that the aliens don’t come for me when I’ve got a pissed off cat under my arm and am holding her ass under the tap in the bathtub. Poor thing – she just never learns that spiders don’t agree with her.