Begging for campaign money

Pol Dept.: my college bud Jose Cisneros is running for Treasurer of San Francisco -- he's not really a political type and this will be his first election, so if you have any excess cash and can make a contribution to his campaign before the first reporting deadline Dec 31st, it's a big help in getting his campaign going. You can donate via credit card at his web site: http://www.josecisneros.com.

I love the smell of granite dust in the morning

The kitchen guys arrived this morning with the granite countertops on their truck. They've put up plastic sheets to keep the dust out of the house, but the grinding and the sawing sounds are making it hard to concentrate. I'd rather go watch them at work, but it would probably make them nervous (it would me.)

German truck delivers Saudi Arabian granite so Mexican-American laborers can use Japanese hand tools to install American-fabricated counters in a California kitchen with Italian floor tiles and Chinese bamboo floors. World trade comes home.

Sink suckage

The countertops are mostly in and look nice. Unfortunately Ruben(the main man) discovered the American Standard sink I had had a defect -- one of the glued-on (!) flanges had come loose, so it was not installable. I'll have to take that one back later, but we needed an installable sink today, so I went to a contractor's plumbing supply place (the Kitchen and Bath Showplace) that Ruben suggested.

It was the kind of place where you have a line of employees sitting behind a long desk with supply catalogs and computers at hand. A black gentleman with a flashy diamond ring (which set off alarms already) "helped" me: no, they did not have the sink I wanted in stock. No, they did not have any American Standard sinks of that size (standard 25x 22) in stock. He fumbled away 20 minutes looking through his catalogs for Elkay sinks; when he called the warehouse, they didn't have what the computer said they had, but they did have something "similar." This turned out to be a $50-quality sink in an opened box that was not what the box said it contained, which he offered to sell me for $400. I left in disgust and ended up at Home Depot, where $100 got me a sink that wasn't as good as the American Standard, but at least was acceptable, and more importantly was available for installation today.

So I'm grumpy and I may not make it to the gym....