HGTV – Malcolm's Round Table

Not that we’re addicted, but we watch several of the house hunter shows on HGTV. They’re not quite what they seem. If the rules are the same as when I last looked, those hunting for a house have to actually buy a house before they visit three potential properties on the show. One of them, they already own.

My historic preservation background makes me a bit of a purist in that I think older houses should generally not be redone so that the inside looks like an open-concept 2022 house. Well, nobody asked me, so it is as it is.

It’s hard for me to imagine looking at houses and making a list of move-in projects. Quite often, the prospective owners want to overhaul the kitchen with new paint, new appliances, removing the wall between the kitchen and dining room, new countertops, and a larger, more-spectacular island. Sometimes they ask the real estate agent how much a new kitchen would cost, and hear that it’s a mere $10,000 to $20,000.

Hell, the people are already spending a million bucks on the place, so what’s another twenty grand? It all seems so materialistic and excessive. I don’t get it. If I buy a new house with cream-colored kitchen cabinets, I’m not going into a snit to repaint them white just after we close on the house. I didn’t grow up with this kind of money and, with parents who lived through the depression and ran the household on a teacher’s salary, I’ve ended up with more of a make-do attitude than the spoilt brats buying the houses.

And here ends today’s rant.

—Malcolm

The oldest of my granddaughters starts high school this fall. In trying to learn more about the place, I visited the website. What a mistake. Seemed Greek to me from the curriculums to the clubs. We had chess club, math club, and physics club. They have clubs like Taylor Swift’s music club which sound more like Facebook groups than H.S. clubs. Sigh. Her school begins with 9th graders, the system I’m used to.
I think I read most of the novels I buy two or three times. This week it’s Kristin Hannah’s Night Road. Since it came out so recently, I thought I might remember everything that happens before it happens. But, so far, so good, even after reading this excerpt from the description: “Jude does everything to keep her kids out of harm’s way. But senior year of high school tests them all. It’s a dangerous, explosive season of drinking, driving, parties, and kids who want to let loose. And then on a hot summer’s night, one bad decision is made. In the blink of an eye, the Farraday family will be torn apart and Lexi will lose everything. In the years that follow, each must face the consequences of that single night and find a way to forget…or the courage to forgive.”
As a journalism school graduate, I found this story in the Guardian discouraging: “Broken and distrusting: why Americans are pulling away from the daily news“ This excerpt sums up the situation: “The Reuters Institute revealed last month that 42% of Americans actively avoid the news at least some of the time because it grinds them down or they just don’t believe it. Fifteen percent said they disconnected from news coverage altogether.” In short, the right thinks the news is untrustworthy and the left is overwhelmed. In recent stories about these trends, some say the growing lack of interest in local news has kicked the foundation out from under the entire medium.
When your regular shows are on hiatus, we fall into the depths of nonsense by watching HGTV where people are buying houses with price tags that sound like they belong in San Francisco and/or feature open-plan houses where the entire main floor looks like a gymnasium with little clusters of stuff that remind of my high school’s career day. Many people say they entertain a lot and seem to want a home that reminds them of a cruise ship or a nightclub. We think most of these house plans, to use a technical term, are horseshit, especially when I see that our entire house will fit in the dining room/kitchen.
If you have a cat, does it like cantaloupe? Robbie always wants to know what we have on our plates. We tend to eat off of TV trays rather than sitting in the dining room, so it’s easy for him to walk across the furniture to see what we have. He wants to drink out of our water glasses; that causes a tug of war over who gets to hold the glass. Twice lately, I had the rind of a finished cantaloupe on my plate and wondered what he’d do with it. He licked the things for ten minutes. This seems a bit odd. Cats!
You can still get a copy of my publisher’s latest anthology for free on the Thomas-Jacob Publishing website. I have two short stories in it, and the rest of the crew has some fun stories and poems in it as well. The Things We Write shows you the kinds of things we write. (Duh) And, being free, you have nothing to lose. I had so much fun with the Smokey Hollow short story, I’m not expanding it into a new novel.