a sink-to-garden hose adapter and Irving Howe
This morning, I've been going back and forth between my computer, the bathroom sink, and a room that we kindly call "the study." I will explain why all this moving around is happening.
A few weeks ago, we planted a 4x4-foot garden in the yard outside our house, but there are two inconvenient aspects to keeping this garden watered: (1) There is no water outlet on the outside of our house, so nowhere to attach a garden hose. (2) We occupy the second and third floors of a house, meaning that in order to get water to our garden, we have lug buckets of water filled from our bathtub tap down twenty-five stairs to reach our yard, and that's getting old, really fast.
Our study contains hundreds of books, in itself not a problem, but many of them are very old mass market paperbacks that we have either owned for decades or picked up in recent years from used book stores. Old mass market paperbacks are not made of the best paper, so they begin to disintegrate and smell like old clothes, which makes sense because the paper was often made from old clothes that were pulped and somehow transformed into paper. Many of these books are out of print, so we cannot buy new copies of them, and even if we were to buy different copies, they would likely also be old and smelly. Bottom line: Our study smells like old mass market paperbacks, and we want it to stop.
These issues have led me to the Internet. I am looking for a good sink-to-garden hose adapter that we can screw onto our bathroom sink tap, attach a very long hose to it, lead the hose through a window that is at least on the same side of the house as our garden, and thereby be able to water our garden without having to carry all those buckets of water downstairs. I've found a few listed as available, but if any of you out there have a suggestion for a specific adapter, let me know.
A few minutes ago, I grabbed the first smelly mass market paperback that I saw and brought it to the living room, where I have my Toshiba laptop opened up. Indeed, the old Mentor edition of Jewish American Stories edited by Irving Howe (who can be described as the Bernie Sanders of American literature, i.e. a crotchety old Jewish socialist with strong opinions and a love of public attention), is long out of print, and the only copies shown as available are very much used, not counting "new" copies that cannot be truly "new" because they were printed a very long time ago. (I love Bernie Sanders, by the way, and will gladly vote for him to be our president.) I haven't started looking yet to see whether or not the book might be available digitally, but it's not listed as such on Amazon. I'd love to have it on my Kindle because it includes a lot of great stories by Bellow, Elkin, Malamud, and other great Jewish American writers, and it would be terrific to be able to open it up without the book disintegrating in my hand and making me sneeze.
A few weeks ago, we planted a 4x4-foot garden in the yard outside our house, but there are two inconvenient aspects to keeping this garden watered: (1) There is no water outlet on the outside of our house, so nowhere to attach a garden hose. (2) We occupy the second and third floors of a house, meaning that in order to get water to our garden, we have lug buckets of water filled from our bathtub tap down twenty-five stairs to reach our yard, and that's getting old, really fast.
Our study contains hundreds of books, in itself not a problem, but many of them are very old mass market paperbacks that we have either owned for decades or picked up in recent years from used book stores. Old mass market paperbacks are not made of the best paper, so they begin to disintegrate and smell like old clothes, which makes sense because the paper was often made from old clothes that were pulped and somehow transformed into paper. Many of these books are out of print, so we cannot buy new copies of them, and even if we were to buy different copies, they would likely also be old and smelly. Bottom line: Our study smells like old mass market paperbacks, and we want it to stop.
These issues have led me to the Internet. I am looking for a good sink-to-garden hose adapter that we can screw onto our bathroom sink tap, attach a very long hose to it, lead the hose through a window that is at least on the same side of the house as our garden, and thereby be able to water our garden without having to carry all those buckets of water downstairs. I've found a few listed as available, but if any of you out there have a suggestion for a specific adapter, let me know.
A few minutes ago, I grabbed the first smelly mass market paperback that I saw and brought it to the living room, where I have my Toshiba laptop opened up. Indeed, the old Mentor edition of Jewish American Stories edited by Irving Howe (who can be described as the Bernie Sanders of American literature, i.e. a crotchety old Jewish socialist with strong opinions and a love of public attention), is long out of print, and the only copies shown as available are very much used, not counting "new" copies that cannot be truly "new" because they were printed a very long time ago. (I love Bernie Sanders, by the way, and will gladly vote for him to be our president.) I haven't started looking yet to see whether or not the book might be available digitally, but it's not listed as such on Amazon. I'd love to have it on my Kindle because it includes a lot of great stories by Bellow, Elkin, Malamud, and other great Jewish American writers, and it would be terrific to be able to open it up without the book disintegrating in my hand and making me sneeze.