E-Mails Flying today: Questions abound.

Gas Dryer or Electric?
Buried electric lines or overground?
Front Door. With glass or solid?
Is Contractor adding costs for assumed covered items?
3 Zone heating (for a one zone house) necessary?
Gas connected to BBQ grill?
Vaulted ceilings?

My fellow drifters are busy beavers and far more plugged in to all the details regarding all the above and more.
Been putting my two cents in wherever I think it might do some good without causing unnecessary bottleneck.
Woody and Karen are still more than a little pre-occupied with family and parent care/health issues, so I tip my hat to them (once again) for their ability to juggle so many wobbling plates. Forgot again to download pix, so maybe next post if I remember. Work still chugging along with multiple big projects in orbit and in danger of colliding...but been there before and somehow it will all get done without the world ending.

Skip the following if you have anything better to do than read about what I'm thinking about what I'm reading...

Been reading Freud's Civilization and its Discontents on the train and reminded of how he was a pretty imaginative writer with a poet's capacity for apt metaphor despite the obligation he must have felt to remain clinical and precise. But then every once in a while he goes off on tangents that remind you that he had some serious issues of his own...

In one section he talks about key events and stages in development of civilization.

"If we go back far enough, we find that the first acts of civilization were the use of tools, the gaining of power over fire, and the construction of dwellings. Among these the acquisition of power over fire stands out as a quite exceptional achievement, without a prototype."

This is his footnote to the above:

Psycho-analytic material, as yet incomplete and not capable of unequivocal interpretation, nevertheless admits of a surmise——which sounds fantastic enough—— about the origin of this human feat. It is as if primitive man had had the impulse, when he came in contact with fire, to gratify an infantile pleasure in respect of it and put it out with a stream of urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt that flames shooting upwards like tongues were originally felt to have a phallic sense. Putting out fire by urinating—— which is also introduced in the later fables of Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais’’s Gargantua——therefore represented a sexual act with a man, an enjoyment of masculine potency in homosexual rivalry. Whoever was the first to deny himself this pleasure and spare the fire was able to take it with him and break it in to his own service. By curbing the fire of his own sexual passion, he was able to tame fire as a force of nature. This great cultural victory was thus a reward for re framing from gratification of an instinct. Further, it is as if man had placed woman by the hearth as the guardian of the fire he had taken captive, because her anatomy makes it impossible for her to yield to such a temptation. It is remarkable how regularly analytic findings testify to the close connection between the ideas of ambition, fire, and urethral erotism.

Wow. Puts the pyromania of my youth in a whole new light...and next time I hear a gay guy exclaim " Ooh, that guy is hot!",
I'll be able to explain to him what he really means.