Post 2 of 2: Finally, the laundry closet, before and after.

Okay, now for the fun post. I don't know how many of you have been waiting to see the finished laundry closet, but I said I'd post the pictures, so here you go.

The before...

...and the after.

My previous posts on the project are here, here, and here. I'm going to try to avoid repeating myself, so check those out for the blow-by-blow.

This is not, as you can see, an Instagram-worthy wall o' cabinetry. I didn't have the money for that. What I do have now, though, is a functional laundry space. There is room on top of the machines for my laundry basket (when it's empty, which presently it, um, isn't). I have a shelf, two drawers, and a cubby for storing supplies; for a bit of extra storage, there's also a little plastic cart from Ikea on the right side of the machines, which Ikea was more than happy to ship to me for five bucks. The stacking kit between the washer and dryer also has the pull-out shelf I wanted.

The shelf on the wall came via Etsy from a guy in Ukraine. I ordered black, but he sent me walnut. No matter -- it looks great on the wall. And the packaging alone was worth it.

Lynne Cantwell 2024

The "countertop" is another Etsy purchase. It's a melamine-covered shelf in a custom size. I've bought shelving from this guy before, so I knew I was getting good quality.

The most troublesome improvement, apart from getting the machines delivered, was that cute little pendant light. I bought it from Amazon for $50, thinking I could turn it into a plug-in swag lamp, but it came with a copper grounding wire that made it unsuitable. So I called my very expensive electrician to put it up for me -- and that's when we discovered that the back wall of that closet is concrete-filled concrete block. Which explains why the old wire shelves were falling down: the wall anchors were just sitting in the layer of drywall over the concrete. It also explains why the new shelf is on the side wall, which is a regular stud wall. I wasn't about to try to install that thing in drywall-over-concrete. Anyway, several thousand dollars later, the light is up, the walls are all patched, and I can finally see what I'm doing in there.

That style of light is called a Moravian star. It shows up a lot in Mexican interiors, and since I'm going for a Southwestern boho vibe, it works on that level. But also Moravia is a province of Czechia, and since I'm half Czech, it works that way, too. The things I do to amuse myself...

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A couple of people have asked about the countertop in the bottom left corner of the "before" photo. That's the edge of the 72-inch, two-sink vanity. I am eventually going to replace it with a shorter vanity with just one sink installed. That will allow me to get into the laundry closet without having to move Tigs's litter box. But first I need to get over the electrician's bill from the laundry closet.

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These moments of home improvement blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get out and vote!

Post 1 of 2: WaPo's non-endorsement and the state of media bias today.

Of course it's the week when I promised y'all a fun post that a Big News Thing blows up that I feel the need to comment on. Neither subject will wait, in my opinion. So for the first time in hearth/myth history, I'm releasing two blog posts on the same day. Here's the first one.

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On Friday, the Washington Post editorial staff -- reportedly under pressure from the paper's owner, multibillionaire Jeff Bezos -- declined to endorse either party's political candidate for president. Reportedly, the editors had an endorsement of Democratic nominee and sitting Vice President Kamala Harris all ready to go, but Bezos stepped in and killed it. There has been a ton of speculation as to why; while the why matters in the real world, it doesn't matter for the purposes of this post. What matters to me is the reaction of staff and subscribers.

In short, there's been a lot of outrage. The union that represents staffers at the paper issued a statement criticizing the decision:

Stolen from the dead bird app

A number of the paper's op-ed columnists issued their own, more strongly worded, statement. Former WaPo columnists have also blasted the paper for the decision not to buck Bezos. At least one editorial staffer has resigned. I've also seen whole bunch of people -- whether subscribers or general troublemakers -- call on more staffers to resign. 

A personal anecdote: As most of you know, I was a broadcast journalist, mostly in radio, from the time I graduated from college in 1979 until my last layoff, from Mutual/NBC Radio News, in 1999. In that 20-year span, I saw the business change a lot. It went from stations being owned by local folks who believed that they had a responsibility to program their stations in the public interest, convenience and necessity to those same local stations being snapped up by corporations interested only in ginning up ratings to make more money for their shareholders. That was a big reason that I decided to get out of the news business in 1999.

But another big reason was this: I had nowhere to go. If you think my options for news jobs in the nation's capital would have been unlimited, you're wrong. By the fall of 1999, network radio news outfits had dwindled to a handful, mostly staffed by a skeleton crew: the Associated Press, ABC, Mutual/NBC, CBS, and NPR. ABC had maybe ten people in DC. CBS's newsroom in DC consisted of only two or three people, and anyway, our shop at Mutual/NBC was being folded into the CBS operation in New York. NPR wanted reporters with experience in long-form programming. In short, there were no jobs. And at the time, I was a single mom with two small children. So I went back to school for a paralegal certificate and started working for lawyers.

For the past ten or 15 years, I've been watching the same thing happening to newspapers that happened to radio news: People with money have been snapping up papers, big and small, in the interest of turning a big profit for their shareholders and themselves. News staffs have been cut in the name of saving money. The practical result for journalists is that there are fewer jobs. But when journalists lose their jobs, subscribers lose, too; they lose a source of news of both their community and the wider world.

WaPo's subscribers today are angry -- understandably so -- and tens of thousands have threatened to cancel their subscriptions. It's unclear how many have actually followed through on their threats, although confirmed reports indicate the Post received 1,600 cancellations in the first three hours after the decision not to endorse anybody appeared. (I've also seen rumors that a total of 60,000 subscribers canceled, but I can't find any evidence backing that up, and frankly I think somebody pulled the number out of their ass.) Here is my problem with that line of thinking: Bezos is, as I said above, a multibillionaire. A digital subscription to the Washington Post is about $16 a month. (I know this because that's what I'm paying for mine.) Does anyone in their right mind think that depriving a multibillionaire of his cut of $16 a month is going to make a dent? Even if 60,000 subscribers did quit, that's only $960,000 a month, and he only gets part of that. That's chump change for a guy who's worth more than $200 billion.

You know who will be hurt by the paper losing subscribers, though? The journalists who work there. And at that level, there are only a handful of places they can go -- all of which will be under the same financial constraints that WaPo has been under.

Why don't people in any industry who work for shitty bosses just up and quit? Generally, it's because they can't afford to.

I've made lots of politically based decisions on where to spend my money. I don't buy Papa John's pizza because their founder is an asshole; I refuse to enter a Hobby Lobby because of their anti-LGBTQ+ stance; I avoid Home Depot like the plague; I wouldn't have a MyPillow in my house on a bet; and on and on. But I will not make a spending decision that will deprive working journalists of an income. 

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This is already pretty long, but I want to do the media bias thing, too. 

Last night, I asked friends on Facebook which news sources they rely on, given that several of them had said they were canceling their WaPo subscriptions. I didn't tell them that I was going to use their answers as fodder for this post (apologies for the subterfuge, guys).

Anyway, this afternoon, I made a little spreadsheet of the responses as of about noon my time. Then I went to the media bias chart that has made the rounds on social media from time to time and looked up as many of  the responses as I could find. (It appears the chart doesn't rate many Substack blogs, and some others weren't rated for whatever reason.)

I've boiled it down to this graphic: 

Everything above the orange "Bias" line is from my impromptu survey. Surprise! My friends all get their news from left-leaning outlets. What differentiates these news outfits is how reliable, and how biased, each one is. Tops for reliability is ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization. Least biased is the BBC; the AP is next. 

Least reliable and most biased on this list is the Meidas Touch.

The two outfits in blue got the most mentions. Heather Cox Richardson -- who I think is terrific, by the way -- is pretty reliable but not always, and her bias rating, while not terrible, definitely skews left.

I bring this up because liberals and progressives give conservatives a hard time for their news consuming habits: Fox News, Newsmax, Sinclair stations, and so on. But those of us on the left kinda live in a news silo, too -- me included. It might behoove all of us to broaden our reading and viewing habits. I'm not suggesting that we go to the dark side, but heading closer to the center line couldn't hurt.

The three outfits at the bottom of the graphic are the top rated in this iteration of the media bias chart, and all three are rated better than any of the news outlets mentioned by my Facebook friends. Two are podcasts, one from NPR and the other from (y'all are gonna hate this) the Wall Street Journal. The third is the "CBS Evening News".

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For the record, I voted by mail -- straight Democratic, thanks -- and my county clerk already has my ballot.

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These moments of media blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get out and vote!

Laundry closet progress, or: Dude, where's my dryer?

To perhaps no one's surprise but mine, the laundry closet is still not done. This project is starting to feel like the Trump administration's promises for a new health care plan: "Two weeks!"

We did make progress this week. The walls have been patched, textured, and painted, and the overhead light has been installed. And the washer is here! 

Lynne Cantwell 2024

Where, you ask, is the dryer? Welp, thereby hangs a tale.

To recap: In mid August, I ordered the new washer and dryer from Best Buy and had Habitat for Humanity retrieve the old units so I could get in there to paint the closet and redo the floor. I ordered Electrolux compact units -- a washer and ventless dryer, plus the matching stacking kit -- to make sure there would be enough room in the closet for both units with the doors closed. The original delivery date for the machines was just after Labor Day, but then Best Buy informed me that the washer wouldn't be in stock 'til mid October (which is when I bought the teeny washer).

Last week, I think it was, Best Buy told me that they didn't have the stacking kit. No worries, I said to myself, and canceled the stacking kit order; I could put the machines side by side, although it would throw a monkey wrench into my plans. The washer was delivered on Thursday as scheduled -- hooray! The dryer was supposed to come the next day. They even sent me an email with a delivery window of Friday morning. But when I received no further communication from them, I checked the app -- and discovered Best Buy was asking me to reschedule the dryer delivery, with the earliest date being October 30th. 

I was... oh, let's be nice and call it nonplussed. 

I called Best Buy. The guy in their call center apologized and said he was going to "escalate" my issue, whatever the hell that means. He said not to pick a new delivery date on the app because my case was escalated; instead, someone would contact me, maybe later that day, maybe this coming week. But I should call back if I hadn't heard by, y'know, the end of the week.

So the bottom line is that Best Buy sold me a washer and dryer they didn't have in stock and gave me bullshit estimates for delivery.

What is going on? Supply chain issues still? The pandemic shutdown was more than three years ago -- haven't we ironed out those wrinkles by now? Eh, maybe not. According to this somewhat impenetrable article, among other things, companies are beginning to wind down the improvements in inventory buffering and controls they made to get through the pandemic. So while you may be hearing about threats to international shipping like turmoil in Middle East and the dockworkers' strike (which lasted all of, what, three days?) causing today's delays, I have to wonder whether some of this mess isn't an excuse to jack up prices to protect shareholders.

As for appliances specifically, some of the delays may be down to a shortage of semiconductor chips, although that ought to be easing. Thanks to the Biden administration pushing the CHIPS and Science Act through Congress in 2022, semiconductor manufacturing is forecast to triple in the U.S. within the next ten years.

None of which gets me a new dryer in a timely manner. So on Friday, I called around. A regional appliance chain has my dryer -- and the stacking kit! -- in stock in a warehouse in Albuquerque. They're delivering it on Tuesday. And once it gets here, I will take great pleasure in calling Best Buy and canceling my order.

And then? Then I will do laundry.

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These moments of delayed bloggy gratification have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Don't forget to vote!

Dragonflies, framed.

At some point, I will probably revisit last week's post on giftedness. It did get a conversation going on Facebook, which I'm glad of. I think a lot of us smart folks learn to hide our light under a bushel basket to appear "normal", so that we aren't subjected to bullying, jealousy, and so on.

I do want to apologize for some of my terminology, though. I did not mean to denigrate people who have ADHD or are on the autism spectrum. My beef is with those who would lump everybody who's not "normal" into the same basket and offer all of them the same sorts of solutions for their "problems", when it's clear that our situations are wildly different.

Anyway, I'm sorry.

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I am hoping to be in a position to reveal the new and improved laundry closet in next week's post. There have been some setbacks over the past couple of weeks, so I'm not promising anything. But I want to focus this week on small bits of progress -- like this picture. 

Lynne Cantwell 2024

It's not actually a picture. It's a piece of Italian wrapping paper that I found at Barnes & Noble. I put it in the frame yesterday. (I also covered some in clear contact paper and glued it to a small wooden crate.) I thought the colors would go really well with the yellow walls. But the dragonflies are symbolic, too.

If you ask Mama Google "dragonfly meaning", you'll get a whole bunch of hits, most of them centering around the idea of transformation. Dragonflies start out as larvae and eventually transform into the four-winged creatures we're familiar with. When you extend that idea symbolically, you get the idea of maturing -- from a childhood state into a more evolved, more mature form. So dragonflies represent not just transformation, but also the gaining of wisdom that comes with maturity.

I've written about dragonflies before, in July of 2016. Back then, I talked about how I think of them liminal creatures because they live on land but must stay near water to lay their eggs. That connection to water also connects them to the emotions, and gods know this has been an emotional time for me. Besides all the complications with renovating a literal closet in my home (more on that next week, assuming all goes well this week), I've also been dealing with the thing in my head that I mentioned briefly in July.

What I have is an acoustic neuroma -- a benign tumor on the auditory nerve of my left ear. It's also called a vestibular schwannanoma. This type of tumor is slow growing; I first realized I had a problem in February 2021, when I was sitting at my dinette table one day, minding my own business, and suddenly the hearing in my left ear cut out and tinnitus replaced it. It tooks months to see an ENT here in Santa Fe. An MRI confirmed that the thing was in there. The protocol then was "watch and wait", plus another MRI in a year's time. After the second MRI, I was referred to an ENT specialist in Rio Rancho.

There are two treatment options besides "watch and wait": surgery, in which the surgeon literally cuts into your skull and fetches the thing out; and gamma knife radiation or gamma knife radiosurgery, in which the doctors and technicians put you in a machine and focus a whole bunch of gamma rays on the tumor. That wrecks its DNA, so that eventually it dies off and hopefully shrinks. My docs said I was a good candidate for gamma knife, so that's what I had done on October 3rd. 

The worst part was having the metal frame attached to my head. It has pins that go through your skin and anchor it to your skull in four places. The frame is then clipped into an MRI machine so they can map your brain and figure out how to target the tumor; then it's clipped into the gamma knife machine for the actual procedure. We got there at 6:30 a.m. and were done before noon.

For a couple of days after, I had a mild headache and swollen eyes. Plus the pin above my right eye hit a blood vessel, and I still have a pretty good shiner from it. I've also been more tired than usual. But that's pretty much it for side effects.

Because the tumor grows slowly, it'll take a couple of years before we know whether the procedure worked. If not, then the option of last resort is surgery. But gamma knife has a success rate above 95%, so I'm hoping this will be it. Some patients get their hearing back, but my docs say it's not gonna happen in my case. Which sucks, because I can only understand 12% of the words I hear in my left ear. 

So yeah, it's been a crazy time here. 

But coming back to the surface: Dragonflies live near water. Laundry rooms are a place where water comes into your home. And a transformation happens there: the machines remove dirt and stains from your clothes and linens, fluff them up, and dry them. Right? So if you're looking to put some symbolism in your laundry area, dragonflies are perfect. 

Plus this wrapping paper goes really well with the yellow walls. So I framed it.

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These moments of transformational blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Make sure you're registered to vote -- and then do it!