Home theatre dreaming …
I’m considering getting an entirely new home theatre set-up, and this is where I’m saving my research/exploration findings.
Television
I’m thinking of a 42″ Panasonic Plasma (at JR.com): TH-42PX60U. It’s extremely high-rated, great looking, and fits in the space I have.
Price: $1299 US, $1500 CAD
Receiver
Panasonic SA-XR57S (also at JR). I’ll be able to run everything into here and then run 1 HDMI cable into the TV. I’ll use my existing 5.1 speaker system.
Price: $279 US, $315 CAD
Upconverting DVD player
Panasonic DVD-S52S (JR). I figure I might as well pick up everything from one company - hopefully everything will play nicer together. This DVD player does the 720p output to make my current DVDs look great.
Price: $89 US, $100 CAD
TV programming
No point having an HD TV and standard definition signal, so I’ve got to ante up for the HD receiver, and I’m thinking StarChoice is a good choice. StarChoice PVR system. I could cheap out and just get the receiver without the PVR, saving $500, but then I’d have to get a VCR anyways and have an extra piece hanging around.
Price: $700
Other costs
Shipping: $200
Tax for taking into Canada: $140-280
Assorted cables, HDMI etc.: $200 (if I can get a good deal somewhere)
Total price
About $3200.
Ouch. Not sure yet if/when I’ll bite the bullet.
So-called porfolio diversification
In case you didn’t realize it, having to work two jobs in order to pay the rent is now referred to as “portfolio diversification:”
Firefighters who want to live in high-priced cities can work two jobs, said W. Michael Cox, chief economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “I think it’s great,� he said. “It gives you portfolio diversification in your income.� Pay for essential workers like plumbers and cabdrivers will tend to go up, he said.
… from an article in the NY Times about the declining availability of affordable middle class homes in large US cities. Canadian cities are no different.
One more soundbite:
But middle-class city dwellers across the country are being squeezed.
This time, they are being squeezed out by the rich as much, or more so, as by the poor — a casualty of high housing costs and the thinning out of the country’s once broad economic middle. The percentage of middle-income neighborhoods in metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington has dropped since 1970, according to a recent Brookings Institution report.
The percentage of higher-income neighborhoods in many places has gone up. In New York, the supply of apartments considered affordable to households with incomes like those earned by starting firefighters or police officers plunged by a whopping 205,000 in just three years, between 2002 and 2005.
Personally, I think we’re losing something if families can’t afford to live in cities any more. Am I the only one who feels that something is missing in neighborhoods without children? Can you really call it a community if it’s all 20-30-40-something married-to-their-career types?
Tags: city, children, housing, affordability, middle class, NY Times, john koetsier
H2O
Teresa and I were out shopping this afternoon … our main floor bathroom is about to get blown up and redone.
High time, too …
We saw this sand-blasted glass sink and faucet - beautiful. Unfortunately, due to irritating facets of reality (namely, pipes, placement of, and bathroom, dimensions of) it just won’t work for us.
We await our next home, which we will build, and which will be perfect in every detail.
. . .
. . .
(Remember how you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.)
Tons of kids
I’m finally home from traveling 3 out of the last 4 weeks.
I remember seeing an interesting tutorial a couple of months ago on multiplying people in photographs, and we had a bit of time for fun, so I thought I’d celebrate being home by increasing the number of kids in our home.
Here are Gabrielle and Ethan, 5 times over:
A camera in every (Houston) kitchen
Houston police chief Harold Hurrt wants to put surveillance cameras in all kinds of private spaces … including homes.
“I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?” Chief Harold Hurtt told reporters Wednesday at a regular briefing.
That’s the same stupid argument almost all proponents of invasive law enforcement actions state. It puts the burden of proof on the wrong party. It presupposes guilt instead of innocence. It makes the innocent feel guilty for not allowing the state to see whatever the state wants to see.
Most importantly, here’s the critical answer to Hurrt’s question:
Because one day, you might change the definition of what’s wrong!
New washer and dryer odyssey …
For over a decade, Teresa and I (mostly Teresa) survived life dryer-less. That sounds shocking to a lot of people, but we just never bought a dryer.
When we were just starting out, we spent $800 on a Maytag washer, and there wasn’t any cash left over - or at least none that we really wanted to part with - for a dryer. Air-drying’s better anyways, we said.
And over the past few years, what was the point? We couldn’t get a matching one now, after all.
Well, finally Teresa got tired of hanging laundry to dry, and a couple of weeks ago we bought a Frigidaire front-loading washer-dryer set.
But getting the set and getting it set up were two different things.
Marmoleum flooring getting hot
I keep hearing more about marmoleum as a cool new flooring option.
Looks like a very neat eco-friendly option other than hardwood or tile. Feet-friendly, too.
Architectural design on Mac OS X
I’m sort of in the market for a design tool that will let me have some fun with home design and architecture, and there are two tools that appear interesting right now.
One is Microspot Interiors. Looks very cool - you see it in action via a demo movie. A bit pricy, perhaps, at about 120 Euros.
The other is much more an architectural imagineering app. Sketchup is an extremely powerful tool to create and manipulate incredibly detailed 3-D mock-ups. Once you’ve made it, you can fly through it in a QuickTime movie, see shadows at various times of the day, and much more. It’s also not cheap, but since I’m a student (getting my Master’s part-time) I can pick it up for $50.
As I try these two apps out, I’ll post more impressions.
Square nails: a little piece of history
Last summer, I spent a day helping my dad refinish his basement. It’s in the house I grew up in; my parents have owned it for almost 40 years.
The house itself is well over a hundred years old. I was born and raised in New Westminster - the oldest city (and former capital city) of British Columbia. And my parents’ house is one of the big old houses of the late 1800s.
Down in the basement, there’s a massive brick central column, meant to catch the ash from the fireplace above, and transfer some of the heat down. The wooden beams that spiral out from it are huge, ancient, and of varying sizes and shapes, locked together with enormous cast-iron plates and screws.
As we were cleaning up the basement, I found an odd, old nail:
I can’t find a ton of information online about square nails, but they’re certainly old. One company claims to have been making them continuously since 1780.
I love old stuff, and I love having even a tiny piece of the house I grew up in.
Corrie
Cornelia Rinsche Hartog was born January 2, 1924, in Holland. More than that, I don’t know. Somehow, the city of Rotterdam rings a bell, but I honestly don’t know.
I always knew her as Corrie. Not that I ever called her that, of course. She was my then-girlfriend’s Oma, grandmother. But that’s the name that Rienk, her husband, always used. I can still hear him calling her now.
Old pictures have a way of captivating me. Probably you, too. Black and white. Grainy. Sometimes sepia-toned, always indefinably but unmistakably old.
And always the knowledge, the background bittersweetness, the nostalgia and the mute vague anger that here is a person, here is a human being, a soul at some stage in a life: alive, real, feeling, touching, hoping, dreaming, laughing … whose heart no longer beats. Whose breath is stilled. Who you cannot touch anymore.
A picture is a stolen moment. Stolen from us and … stolen from them.
On April 24, 1996, Corrie died of cancer in Langley Memorial Hospital. As she died, so did her husband Rienk, in a sense. He outlived her by 9 years, but in truth became only a shell of his former self.
I hardly knew her. She served us drinks and snacks, lunch. Asked questions, laughed. Said “yah, yah,” with a shake of the head in the good old-fashioned Dutch immigrant way. Always dressed up: hat, jewelry, shoes. Proper, but not stiff.
Someone - was it her father - made her that toy wheelbarrow. Maybe an uncle. The shovel that rests in it. Look at the thing - cross-bracing, handles. They knew how to make toys back then, toys that didn’t break the day after Sinterklaas. This one was love frozen into wood and metal.
See how blond she is, the prototypical Dutch girl. How artless her arms and fingers fall to her sides. How her white sleeves puck up at the edges. Her square-toed child’s shoes, with little white socks slumping down over the latches.
What is she - four, five? She was tall as an adult; probably tall as a child as well. She looks well-fed, but in just a decade and a half she would live through WWII and know both hunger and sorrow.
She’s already developed a child’s reserve - you can see it in the mouth, the cheeks, the slightly off-kilter stance. Perhaps this was the genesis of the dignity that I saw, 60 years later.
You look at her and you wonder: this girl was involved in the resistance. A brother died fighting the Germans. Her future husband helped the Canadian troops who were liberating the Netherlands. How could she know what was coming?
And after the war: marriage, immigration to Canada. A new life, a new house - many houses - throughout British Columbia. Years slipped into decades. Children - three, a teacher, a doctor, a musician. A community, a church. A home. A life.
And now a memory and a photography.
But more than that. Corrie was a Christian. That’s someone who knows a heavenly father. Someone who trusts a Savior.
And someone we’ll see again - in the fullness of time.
. . .
. . .
PS: We keep a birthday calendar in our house. I saw the scrawled “Oma” with a cross beside it about a week ago, and have been wanting to post something in her memory ever since.
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Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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