Think about Silgranit

I've spent my whole professional life specifying stainless steel sinks but in the last few years something else has shown up on my radar.

Namely the Silgranit sink from Blanco.

Anybody who's had a stainless sink knows that having one involves ignoring scratches or buffing them out regularly. Who needs that added aggravation?

Silgranit gets rid of that hassle and gives you a stain and scratch resistant sink that you can also coordinate with your counters.

Silgranit sinks can be undermounted or dropped in and using one ensures a lifetime of trouble-free use. If you're in the market for a new kitchen sink, consider a Silgranit.

Sunday night traveler's tale

I spent the shank of last week in Costa Mesa, CA and my journey home started yesterday morning. I flew from John Wayne Airport in Irvine to Chicago for the first leg of my trip home.

Once in Chicago, I changed planes and flew home to Tampa/ St. Pete. On that second flight I met a man whose name I don't know. However what I do know was that he'd started his day in Beijing.

If you spend any time in airports, it's obvious that a lot of people fly between the US and China. This guy was different in that Beijing was his home and always had been.

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He was a businessman in his 50s and he was on the flight to Tampa so that he could go on vacation for five days in Sand Key, a beach area just south of Clearwater. Clearwater's a dump but I didn't come out and say that to him. However, Sand Key is one of the loveliest spots along this coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The beaches of Sand Key are broad and wide and the water is the emerald-clear I equate with the Florida I know and call home.

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Anyhow, I asked how someone from Beijing could decide that Sand Key was the perfect spot for some R&R and he told me that when he was young he saw a movie in China and he was completely taken with the surroundings where the movie was filmed. I have no idea which movie he was talking about but through years of research he'd figured out that it had been filmed on Sand Key.

As he navigated the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution and the upheavals attendant to China's rise to its current status, one vision guided him through it -- the beach at Sand Key. As his peers, professors and parents were "re-educated" and persecuted through the years, the idea of a white sand beach on the Gulf of Mexico was something that never left him.

Now that he'd made it in a newly ascendant China he was headed to the place that guided him like a beacon through the trials of his life.

My seatmate has no intention of leaving his homeland, he just needed to touch the place that had brought him so much solace.

I hope he finds there what he was looking for.

I'm used to seeing Chinese tourists in places like Rome, London and New York but I've never met someone who was heading to a place so close to home.

When I was a kid, we used to pray for the starving people in Red China. Over the course of the last 30 years things have changed a bit.

It's easy to rail against Chinese usurping the world stage, but it's the US's consumerist culture, one that demands forever cheaper goods, that brought modern China into being. China's willingness to buy US debt has allowed the US to engage in its constant state of low-level warfare without feeling the financial strain that normally accompanies military ventures.

The Chinese government is a human rights nightmare but how has the US fared with all of the "free" money China bankrolls? When US drones wipe out civilian populations abroad how are we any better off? The US's "War on Terror[ism]" has had us abandon the moral upper hand in the interest of national security and we've done it with Chinese money.

However, none of that matters when it comes down to having a conversation (let alone a two-and-a-half hour one) with someone who's actually Chinese.

Governments and how they behave are different from the people they purport to represent. All it takes sometimes is a flight from ORD to TPA to make that clear. My seatmate's not so different from me, as wildly different as our life stories are. But at the end of the day, the two of us want to make a buck, want to enjoy some R&R sometimes and we want to leave a legacy so our descendants will remember us once we're gone.

I used to fantasize about Pompeii and I saw it in person four years ago. My seatmate used to fantasize about Sand Key and he's seeing it in person right now.

Despite political differences, he and I are the same person and I'm a better man for having met him.

Blanco and Bosch

My involvement with Blanco has taken me all over the world and now they're taking me to Costa Mesa, California to see their new showroom. Blanco has teamed with Bosch appliances to create the kitchen showroom to end all showrooms.

Blanco makes incredible sinks and that I know all of the people on the US side of their business makes me endorse their products all the more strongly.

You cannot go wrong with Blanco.

Meet Miss Susan

My neighbors are off on some new adventure and I am left with their cat, Susan.

I've never bee a cat person but this creature somehow exceeds my notions of what a cat is. Anything that hunts down and kills palmetto bugs is OK in my book. Even though she sleeps for most of the day she's a pretty cool addition to life around here.

I doubt that I'll ever get a cat, but having Susan around is pretty enjoyable.

Out, out damned termites

The exterminator just left.

Life in a century-old, wooden structure comes at a price. Namely, drywood termites. Drywoods are one of the three kinds of termites we have in Florida. Whatever their species, they're bad news.

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There are termite species that live all over but they seem to particularly common in the sun belt. I never remember them when I lived in the Northeast. In Florida however, they are part of the scenery. Just like palmetto bugs, having termites isn't a reflection on someone's housekeeping. Even so, having them makes me feel dirty somehow.

When I first moved here, the only cure for them was to have the house tented and treated with Vikane. Vikane is sulfuryl flouride, a relatively inert gas. These days we spot treat with a product called Termidor and it promises to kill every termite in the area but at the same time be inert to me because I'm a mammal and have a spine, Termidor doesn't affect me. At least according the research Dow's done.

Back to Vikane for a sec however. Sulfuryl flouide is a greenhouse gas and its widespread use is a bad idea. In its place, spot treatments with Termidor are becoming the default mode for termites.

Part of me longs for a day when I could just eliminate everything but it makes sense to spot treat and not damage the atmosphere instead of the scorch and burn method I'd prefer.

The exterminator Steve told me that I shouldn't keep things so neat because he couldn't tell where the termites were. Pardon my hygiene. I'll start allowing dust buffaloes to form under my bed to make life easier for exterminators. Hah!

Does anybody out there have any experience with Termidor? Am I alone in living in an old structure and dealing with termites? I remember seeing termite nests in the trees in Costa Rica and Panama and being awed by them. However, seeing them in my kitchen is whole other matter. If they're in my kitchen, what are they doing to my floorboards and rafters? I need to quit thinking.

Out, out damned termites!