I like old-fashioned stain, the kind you brush on and wipe off, leaving whatever has soaked into the wood. There are tinted varnishes but they're tricky and unforgiving. There are stains that have varnish included, but I don't trust those either.

Somewhere I've misplaced all my painting stuff. So I'm applying the stain with an old sock. Note how I'm using nitril gloves. When I was younger (a year or two ago) I used to do this bare-handed. Now I'm an old fuddy-duddy who looks after his nails.

The desk has been chemically stripped and sanded as clean and bare as I can get it. It doesn't get rid of all the old color (there's some dark color in the grain and some of the dents) but enough that the new finish will look good.

They call this tiger oak or quarter-sawed oak because it's cut on an angle to bring out those cool stripes. For the plywood, the veneer was also cut at the quarter angle and glued in strips.

The stain gets slopped on and spread around. It has to sit 5-15 minutes and then I wipe it off. Here you can see blemishes of the old stain, like age spots.

The end result looks quite different from the bare wood, and lighter and more even than the original finish.

In a couple of days when it's good and dry, I'll varnish it with oil-based polyurethane. My one experiment with water-based poly was a disaster.

Here's what the desk bases look like. They're darker because they seemed to have a darker original finish than the top, and it was really hard to strip them down to bare wood. It will still look good, I think.

I have become convinced that all social networking media are ephemeral.

When I was young, I wrote letters all the time. I had shoeboxes full of them. Now I get bills and catalogs because I'm old-school and don't like paying my bills online.

Remember when e-mail was the thing? I mainly get advertising and missionary newsletters now.

Everyone was a-twitter about Twitter but my kids have stopped using their accounts or following their favorite celebrities.

Facebook has degenerated into 80% reposted junk, and many formerly active users don't post anymore including high school/college age kids.

My daughter is into Tumblr now, but it's entertainment rather than social networking, from what I can see.

When I first got Skype, I immediately got a dozen contact requests. Only two or three of those contacts log into Skype anymore.

Texting is still widespread and growing, although not quite as fast as before from what I can see in the statistics. It will stay around because it's essential, like phone calls.

Does speed-dating still happen? Never tried that.

Xanga was THE place for high school kids in the mid-2000s, and now it's just a bunch of us middle-aged folks who can't let go.

I don't think it was Xanga's technical stagnation that has led so many people to leave in recent years. It was a cultural phase. The kids have moved on to whatever the current fad is, many of the adults got bored or busy. For those of us who remain, it still fills an important social function and we don't want to see it go away, but it's a ghost town like Detroit except without the violence (even the trolls have moved on).

I'm grateful for the friends I've made and the creative writing stimulus of the Scavenger Hunts. I hope to stay in touch with many of you on Facebook and the resurrected Xanga, or  Wordpress if Xanga is laid to rest. 

I created a blog here.

So far I'm not at all impressed with WordPress. It's clunky and stupid. They show you themes, and you choose a free one, and you still end up with the default plain one. The editor window doesn't have a font selector. I tried posting with photos and it told me "Unauthorized" with no explanation.

But tomorrow will be another day.

I had invitations to the beach and to a friend's house in Orlando, but I turned them both down so I could work on projects at home. You may recall that some months ago I installed a whole-house water filter.

The filter is very fine (1 micron, supposedly). The downside is that I had to replace it after two or three months because it clogged up. At $70 a pop, that's several hundred dollars a year! I know some of you spend that much for water softening anyway, but I'm a notorious tightwad.

So I bought a cheap 5 micron filter to protect it from the mud from the well. First thing to do (I thought... oh, how the memory goes after 50!) was to add a male adapter on each side.

To deal with the clogging filters, I invested in a couple of faucets to put on the In side of each filter. That way I can periodically route water around the filters and back through them to backflush the mud off.

I took the existing filter off the wall by disconnecting the two unions and lifting its bracket off its screws. The pipe will get cut to the right of the filter and on the right upright. The two faucets will go where those cuts happened.

I put the new faucets into a couple of threaded tees and laid out my handiwork. The filter will hang from the bracket... oh, the bracket! I was hasty putting those male adapters on. They're supposed to go through the bracket to attach it to the filter! Silly me...

So I undid the adapters and put the bracket on. Now we're ready to rock and... uh, no, something's still screwy here. See if you can figure it out.

Undo the bracket, put it back on right side up... I have all day...

Next comes the cut to the right of the old filter. A faucet and the new filter will go in that space.

The faucet tee goes right onto that stub. (This is the first time I've worked with blue PVC glue. It's always been gray or clear. But this is supposed to work even if the pipe is wet, so it seemed worth the extra buck. Although I wasted a couple of bucks worth by kicking it over while I was working.)

The other faucet goes on the upright, like I said. I cut 1 1/4" out of the upright pipe to make up for the length of the tee, and cut about an inch off the stub going into the adapter so that it would line up over the union. Then to assemble it and hang it on the wall. I moved the old bracket to the left to make up for the wider assembly, then marked the holes for the right one. Aaaaand the left screw holes on that bracket ended up on a mortar line. Rats. You can never tell if mortar is going to be any good for screws. Often it's just a thin line that crumbles away. Oh, well, I can use the big hole in the middle of the bracket.

Now we have a discrepancy of length for the bottom piece to attach to the left upright, since the old filter was moved. I cut the horizontal pipe (see above) and added a 9" piece using a couple of unions, and we're good to go.

Except that the new filter leaks because the adapters weren't screwed tightly the third time I put it together... Undo the unions, take everything off the wall, tighten the two adapters that go into the new filter (this involved turning the filter over once to tighten the left adapter, and the right elbow over once or twice for the right adapter).

Now it's holding water. Time for a beer. But first I'm going to load up these nifty bird feeders (purchased at Aldi) and hang them from the edge of the lanai roof.

Corona Extra. Aaah....

You know I'm not prone to post about politics, but this is the most insightful thing I've read on the current crisis in our government, written by my friend Steve Garber* of the Washington Institute:

I try pretty hard to think about politics differently. Not for difference’s sake, but because I believe that the truest truths of the universe cut deeper than the partisan divide. 

So sometimes I may look more conservative, and sometimes more liberal. But the terms themselves are deeply flawed, though I know thousands of millions of people pour themselves out in hope that they are absolutely and completely right about the way things ought to be politically, sure that being a “liberal” or a “conservative” answers all the important questions. I don’t mean this with a hard edge, but it just doesn’t seem that easy to me. 

So, where am I going? 

Reading the world the last few weeks, especially the political world of Washington, I have thought again and again of my ponderings five years ago when Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton were battling it out for the Democratic nomination. His vision intrigued me, and he was so charismatic and so eloquent. But he had never been a serious politician; in fact those most close to him in Illinois and on Capitol Hill mostly saw his ambition. He didn’t seem to really like politics at all, and often didn’t seem to like people either. He did like to campaign, and he was brilliant at it. And then he won, and another battle began, which he won again; by mid-September, for the first time in my life, we knew who would be president. The election was over, two months early. Unprecedented. 

I thought then, as I still do, that Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” was the most prescient reading of what happened that fall. Written 25 years earlier, in the middle of the Reagan years, he was not writing about Barack Obama; in fact Postman died long before that election. But what he saw about us as a people was deeply true, and it was profoundly written into what did happen. We wanted a pop star for president; we required an icon to lead us.

And Obama allowed himself to be that. Remember the iconic poster, Obama so very artfully and dramatically pictured with the word, “Hope”? And then incredibly he actually did say that the cosmos would be healed, with his presidency. He really did. All the hurts and wounds of previous years and administrations would be redeemed, with the advent of his administration. If we had ears to hear, we would have wondered….

But it is now four years later, and it is not so easy to be president after all. And in the spring of 2013 Barack Obama is in trouble. God alone knows where it will go. I have no idea. But when the critics become more than Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, and the BBC U.S. editor weighs in, and CNN’s political editor adds her critique, and the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank who is predictably partisan in defense of the political left keeps pressing the story, you know that something has changed. 

For me, one of the most damaging faces of the stories over the last weeks has been watching what it means for the twenty-somethings of the world, of America in particular. I know that I winced five years ago, watching as I was, loving them as I have and do, knowing that their eagerness and zeal for Obama could not be sustained, that his willingness to be adored would not be good for him, or the nation—especially the younger ones among us. Over time, they would become cynical, now knowing what they would come to know. 

And now they know, and that is what we are seeing.

This morning I read an essay in the Daily Beast; yes, it is actually named that. You can imagine their perspective on life and the world. “How Hope and Change Came to Spying on Our Press” is the headline. If we care, we sigh--and we groan.

*Steve Garber was my InterVarsity Christian Fellowship staffer when I was in college. 

9) I had my first girlfriend, a cute Asian-Canadian girl. She was 5'0" and I was 6'4". For two or three months, we sat together in church and youth group, I walked her home from school, we talked on the phone. I held her hand once or twice. It was heavenly. She broke up with me after church one night. I spent a delightful week moping around my dorm room listening to extremely early BeeGees and Traffic's Shootout at the Fantasy Factory. It was fun to be so miserable.

10) I was very briefly in a fight! At volleyball one afternoon, R suddenly ran onto the court, grabbed my little brother, and started pounding on him. (Fortunately his wild punches didn't connect much.) I was as shocked as everyone else, but I found myself lunging under the net and knocking R over. After a few words, he took off running to blow off his steam (turned out my brother had been tossing pebbles at him), and we went back to playing volleyball.

11) I took several of my courses by correspondence. It took me all year to get through the first semester of Algebra II, so I had to take the second semester home with me for summer vacation. Mom told me I couldn't go to summer camp until I finished it, so I worked hard on it every day and got through in just over three weeks. It was the first time I could remember math being fun and interesting (although geometry had been all right). Parabolas, graphs, logarithms, imaginary numbers... cool stuff.

12) Most of us juniors took typing, also by correspondence, using massive mechanical typewriters on which we were expected to reach 40 wpm. I still remember the speed exercises: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country." The final exam consisted of creating a complicated document with multiple carbon copies. Each mistake had to be corrected on all the copies.

13) Since I wasn't dating anyone when the spring banquet came around, I invited a girl I wasn't really interested in. We sat with R and K, who weren't a couple either but had come together. It turned out to be a lot of fun; R was good to joke with, and I liked K. I had a packet of flash paper, and periodically I would wave my hand over the candle and send up a fireball.

14) For that high school banquet, Murray and I produced a tape of songs and commercials and radio patter. I pretended to be a Chinese disk jockey named Tong Chung Lung, and spoke in a stupid accent. The commercials were amusing, although I suspect we had a lot more fun making them than the banqueters had listening to them.

15) My biggest regret of that year: I was named editor of the school yearbook. Murray took a ton of pictures, and we kicked around ideas, but I never got a team together, and eventually it was too late. So there was no yearbook that year. No one ever said anything to me about it, but in retrospect I still feel bad. (At the time I shrugged it off. That's how flaky I was.)

16) The next summer my family went to Kansas City for my sister's wedding. I got my learner's permit, and three days later took my driving test. I did a lot of driving those two or three weeks, and then helped with the drive back to Miami. We had borrowed a 1967 or 1968 Mustang with push-button gearshift, a row of buttons on the dash.

On my way home this afternoon, there was a glorious thunderstorm over Tampa. This is what it looked like from the I-275 causeway:

In my neighborhood there were lots of little limbs down. My street was blocked by a fallen tree. Fortunately it didn't hit the power lines.

It appears to have had four or five trunks starting about six feet above the ground. The wood was shattered and rotten.

This is the trunk, which broke off at ground level.

About half an hour after I got home, I heard chainsaws. When I looked, I saw that the road had been cleared and the limbs were lying in a pile. When I came back from the gym a couple of hours later, the brush trucks were there.

I enjoy a good storm, but was sobered by the devastation in Oklahoma. Heartbreaking. I've been praying since I saw the footage on the gym TV.

Things that happened when I was 16 (to give this meme a new twist):

1) My brother and I were boarding students at a mission base. The first semester we stayed with families because there were no dorm parents. I lived with an interesting Swedish-American family. He was an airplane mechanic and a great improviser, famous for standing over the engine of his finicky Cushman golf cart, shooting gas into the carb with an oil can as they careened down the dirt roads. She was a great cook. We had fresh milk and vast quantities of homemade butter. Sunday meals were bounteous and delicious, but the leftovers usually got left on the table for a couple of hours while everybody relaxed. By the time the roast got put away, it had a coat of congealed grease over it. The daughter had the bluest eyes I'd ever seen. The son had a set of several drums made by Colombian Indians. He had one rhythm he used to whack out, over and over. He had a pet toucan and a parrot. Once they got into a fight, and he ran outside and spanked the toucan.

2) My best friend Murray from childhood was with me that year after several years apart. We'd had fourth and fifth grades together, and now were together for the second half of high school. It was great having a kindred spirit, after the loneliness of tenth grade. We had many deep talks, and commiserated over our relationship problems. He was much more popular than I was, because he was friendly and outgoing and had a warm personality. We roomed together part of the year, but we were better friends than roommates. (Senior year we roomed with each other’s brothers, which worked better.)

3) School was postponed a week because the principal was in the hospital. Murray and I spent a lot of the time hanging out with others at L's house playing Dutch Blitz. I had expected to like L (she was back at the mission base after a couple of years in the US), but we didn't really hit it off. What iced it for me was one time when I was walking home, and she came by on her motorcycle. (At the missionary base, everyone ran around on little Honda 90s.) I asked for a ride, but she just whizzed on past. A couple of minutes later, she came back and apologized for being snotty and drove me to where I was going. After that I wasn't interested in her.

4) I had a pet boa constrictor named Sylvester who lived in a box in my room. Friends used to catch bats or mice to feed him. I carried him around on my head in a floppy old-fashioned golf cap. Once I put him in a teacher's desk. She freaked. When we went to KC for my sister’s wedding the next summer, I sold him to a pet store. I still regret that decision.

5) For some reason, I took a job as payroll clerk for the Colombian employees on the base. I actually enjoyed it, which is hard to believe in retrospect. I got paid minimum wage, 6 pesos, about 23 cents an hour. The best-paid employee made 440 pesos a week, at that time less than US$20. I think I held the job three months, then abruptly resigned.

6) I got my first (and only) soccer cleats. I had always played barefoot because tennis shoes were useless on damp grass and I'd never found size 12 shoes in Medellín, but F bought some cleats in Bogotá that were too big for him, so I bought them. It was nice to end games without the tops of my feet dotted with cleat marks. The cleats got wrecked when we played a game in the mud and I didn't clean them afterwards until it was too late.

7) I learned to drive during Christmas vacation on the beach at Bahía Ancón, on the north coast of Colombia. We had a 1971 Dodge 100 pickup, three-on-the-tree. Mom sat with me as I drove around and around the parking lot. When we were done with our outing, I drove back to the main road, and then Dad took over.

8) I got into shape for the first time in my life. In PE class, I once got paired against my little brother for a relay across the softball field and back. He had always been one of the fastest kids around, so he was amazed that I was right on his shoulder the whole way. We were both on the soccer team, and played volleyball a couple of times a week. I played first base in Saturday softball, and because I could hit to right field (where everyone put their weakest player), I had a good batting average. I lifted weights with Murray and B, starting out weakest but ending up strongest, maybe because of my long arms.

(This is too long, so I'll continue tomorrow.)

(Hi, Beth!)

It's easy to make mistakes when you're dealing with two languages. 

I speak excellent Spanish, but it's not as good as my English. There are areas of language with which I have limited experience, so I make mistakes, sometimes with really basic terms. It can be embarrassing.

I never had occasion to use Spanish endearments before dating Alicia, but I learned early on to sprinkle amor, cariño, mi vida, mi cielo, and similar mushy stuff into my conversations with her. 

The big problem was that 99% of my Spanish conversation was with Alicia, and I got overly accustomed to using endearments. As a result, I once called my boss mi'ja (literally 'my daughter', figuratively 'sweetie') when answering a question.

When I went to visit Alicia in Medellín, my old friend Oscar called me to catch me up on his life. He rambled away, and I politely listened and responded with the occasional appropriate "sí, uh-huh," etc. At one point, without thinking, I said, "Sí, mi vida."

My eyes went wide. I stared at Alicia, turned red, and then we both started laughing. "What's so funny?" asked Oscar, who had missed it.

Another time we were invited to dinner with my niece's birth family. As we were introduced I shook people's hand and said, "Timoteo G___, mucho gusto, ¿cómo está?" At one point I got mixed up and said, "¿Cómo está? Mucho G___."

Fortunately everyone was talking at once and no one noticed, but Alicia laughed uproariously when I told her about it. She still calls me Mucho G___ from time to time.

The granddaddy of all flubs was at a gas station. The attendant had started the gas going and was talking with a lady at another car. I needed to get his attention for something, so I called, "¡Oiga!" to no avail. Then instead of saying "¡Amigo!" I accidentally yelled, "¡Mi'jo!" which got Alicia and her sister Esperanza chuckling. I tried again, and what came out of my mouth was, "¡Amor!" Esperanza snorted, and Alicia laughed so hard she almost peed her pants.

I took Alicia to the airport very early this morning. She should be in Medellín by now. She'll be there for two months. I hope to join her at the end of June, and we'll fly back to Tampa July 17. It's going to be tough to be apart that long, but she has a lot to do.

So do I. I hope to make good use of the free evenings to finish unpacking boxes and make progress on the house and yard.

A couple of weeks ago, we found these birds in our front yard. They have curved beaks that they stick into the grass or dirt and wiggle around.  The tip of the beak is black. I think they're white ibis.

I love living in a tropical area.