Otaku No Zoku

athrooms.

Do you have a sexy bathroom?

Is your bathroom hot or not?

I’ve never had my bathroom described as sexy before.

Things that I keep in my pants I’ve had described as sexy. Even elegant. Men and women lust after the things I keep there.*

But never my bathroom.

My room-mate, who still believes she is a college student** is not known as the neatest person in the world. When we hosted a BBQ the weekend before the July 4th weekend – a strategic move to avoid competing with everyone else’s BBQ – I made sure, in the name of common decency, modesty and public decorum to have the guests use my bathroom, not hers.

The general consensus amongst the females in attendance was that my bathroom was really sexy.

Dead sexy.

Super sexy.

I don’t think they were mocking me either.

Many oohs, ahhs and much goggling was made of the simple décor. Many was the opinion of what precisely made it sexy.

Was it the artful black & white scenes of Paris, France vertically framing the walls?

Was it the freshly laundered, neatly stacked, properly ironed, tri-folded (not lazily two folded like everyone else), dove white, hand towels and flannels (wash cloths to the uncouth Americans in the audience) that lined the wash area?

Was it the fact that there exists pure as driven snow bath towels, stacked so high and so neatly with the corners squared off you have to use a step ladder to reach them to avoid being crushed in an avalanche of soft, fuzzy terry toweling?

Was it the deep shag, terry toweling, large loop floor mat carefully folded and placed ready for use when you shower?

Was it the overly luxurious white bathrobe hanging from the brushed aluminium hooks on the back of the door?

Was it the properly installed, heated towel racks warming the towels to a temperature that was the same as the shower you just stepped out of, ready to envelope you in their warm, fuzzy embrace?

Was it the brushed aluminium soap dish (no soap scum), soap dispensers (full), tooth brush holder (clean), toilet brush holder (sanitized), and toilet plunger (choad free)?

Was it the arranged and categorised personal grooming accessories in the vanity cabinet?

Was it the impressive range of shower gels, facial scrubs, shaving gel and hair products arranged on cherry wood shelves?

Was it the glass shelves holding dozens of white candles? The mirrored sconce reflecting warm candle light into the room?

Was it the lush tropical yellow orchids complementing the off-white walls?

Was it the over-hanging palm tree fronds shading the bathroom door as you enter?

Was it the whicker baskets to hold spare toiletries and non-emergency medicinal items?

Was it the clean tile floor?

Was it the glass & brushed metal weighing scale tucked discretely in to one corner?

Was it the over-sized, made for two (nudge, nudge), squeaky clean, glass shower stall? ***

Was it the deluxe, over-sized custom installed massaging shower head?

Was it the large full wall mirrors?

Was it the clean sink, mirrors and wash area and toilet bowl?

Was it, maybe, like stepping in to a spotlessly clean five star deluxe hotel bathroom on the day you just rented your room?

Was it that the bathroom was clean and the toilet didn’t have piss stains around the base and all down the cistern?

I’ll never know. But it was one more element that made the BBQ a raging success.

* My Sony CLIE, my Sony Ericsson Cell Phone, my Prada wallet, etc.

** Actually, she is a college student, studying for something like her fourth or fifth degree. Just make up your damn mind about what career you want, woman.

*** This week it needs a clean but that’s only because I’ve been too busy with a mediocre emergency that had me scraping pots, pans & most of the walls of our kitchen clean of five pints of dried out mashed potato, but that is an entirely different story.

Game Developer Magazine will soon publish my review of SlickEdit v10 and I thought it timely that I add the older review to my sample portfolio.

I’m known for sending out funny party invites and putting as much time in to the invite as I do in to the party itself. A couple of my friends asked me to post the party invite for our pre-July 4th party that took place last week so they could show it off to their friends. Names and addresses have been obscured to protect the guilty.

Even though it is generally considered by people other than those related to me that I am a“hell of a nice guy”* in my own way there are days when I’m just downright mean. My latest escapade involved CostCo, a seemingly abandoned shopping trolley, and a gadgety item I desperately lusted after.

See, at a shop calledOrganized Living(their web site is completely pointless so I’m not even bothering to link to it, and I just read onYahoo! Financial news that they’ve filed for bankruptcy) they have ahand truck that collapses completely flat.

It’s really neat.

You can put it in the car boot and pull it out when you have a 50lb bag of cat litter to carry in to the house that you just purchased at CostCo.

AtOrganized Livingthis very hand truck, available in aluminium with blue wheels costs on the order of $150 plus tax. Shyeah! Right! I like shopping there and their prices can be a little steep but that’s outrageous.

Okay, so I’m at CostCo on Friday of last week shopping for all the beverages & comestibles my room mate and I will require for a BBQ we’re hosting. I’m wandering around methodically looking at items I don’t need, don’t have room for, and this month, don’t have the budget for - you know, those essential items like stainless steel side-by-side refrigerators with accompanying glass fronted, refrigerated, one gross of bottles, wine “cellar” that require a four digit delivery & installation charge.

There’s another shopping trolley in the way. It’s positioned like so many carelessly left trollies are. Right in the middle, at the most akward angle to make it impossible to pass without clanging it loudly with your own trolley. It’s just parked there, occupying space, and nobody else is in the aisle.

Unusual for 6PM on a Friday evening, don’t you think? Almost like… Fate.

Maybe nobody else purchases stainless steel side-by-side refrigerators & wine “cellars” on a Friday and they just stock one for when I’ll suddenly need an emergency refrigerator.

There’s three items in that aggravatingly positioned trolley, and one of those items is a black version of the collapsible hand truck they have atOrganized Living. “Wow! CostCo sell those? I have to see how much they are. Less than fifty bucks and and I’m getting one. Okay, I’ll go to sixty bucks, but not twenty dollars more than that.”

And so begins my spiral downwards in to the pits of evilness and avarice.

I wander every aisle. Up and down. From the front of CostCo to the back where the cooks stuff interesting vegetables inside of chickens that you can watch through a glass window and then purchase said chicken & interesting vegetable to take home for the family dinner. I even scout through the books & videos & summer garden furniture just in case it’s hidden there. This entire quest takes at least 20 minutes. Twice I come back by the trolley, and twice it’s still there.

Okay, steal it or be nice to the “owner” of the shopping trolley and leave it alone?

Okay, let’s be nice. Let’s go ask an assistant for help. Easier said than done. It must be casual Friday because all of the assistants are wearing plain clothes and cleverly hiding their name tags. Perhaps I’m getting the people who work here confused with the ones at Target who wear obvious uniforms.

So after a little misunderstanding on what I mean by “collapsible hand truck” — Okay, I realise that English is your first language and there may be some communications difficulty speaking with someone who grew up with a Mother who, at one time was an English teacher but could you try a little harder to listen to what I’m saying and not mumble and turn your head away when you reply to me — the assistant does their thing with the inventory computer. You know, enter a 12 character password so they can hit two keys to browse the inventory. And I’m sure CostCo management would be very interested to know you used profanity in your password too, you one keypress every two seconds typist.

And lo, there appears to be a single collapsible hand truck in stock. Just one. It is Fate. I am being toyed with. Some days the Universe is out to thwart me, and some days the Universe is out to tempt me.

I’m informed it is the end of the line for that item as they weren’t selling. Most of the other CostCo locations are sold out. Original list price on the item, $99.99 (of course it wouldn’t bloody selling, you want a hundred bucks for what amounts to $2 of aluminium, plastic & rubber). Reduced price: $23.99.

Ah! Now that’s more like it. The CostCo assistant opines that the item wasn’t selling but now it is and if only someone knew why it hadn’t sold when they originally stocked them. Yeah, okay, so maybe you need to take an introductory course in economics.

So on the walk back to my own shopping trolley I make up my mind, if the “abandoned” trolley is still there I’m swiping the collapsible hand truck. Total time is about 30 minutes from first discovery to when I return. And the damn trolley is still there. So I hang out casually around the trolley staring at spare car batteries that tower 30 feet above me on the CostCo shelves. You know, just hanging out. Casually, for about 2 minutes. Look left. Look right. Move coveted gadget to my trolley. Stroll off nonchalantly over to the DVD & book section and pick up five new Williams-Sonoma cooking books that are on sale (yes, the Universe really is out to tempt me today) and a pair of jeans. So the shopping trolley has been abandoned for almost 45 minutes now.

Look over to where the nefarious deed was done and I see someone stroll up to the abandoned shopping trolley, now with only two items in it, and push it off in to the CostCo crowds.

Of course, he might just have been a CostCo employee collecting the abandoned trollies and returning items to the shelves.

But I’ll never know.

And I don’t care…

I got my collapsible hand truck for $23.99 + tax and about 17 seconds of guilt.

*That page originally ranked #1 on Google when you entered the search phrase “hell of a nice guy” (without the quotes) right up until around the end of 2003. So Google made it official.