Kitchen Sink

YOU CAN NEVER have enough spare parts. That is the credo of most basement-dwelling weekend repair guys, like me. It is a belief that carried me through a recent tussle with the kitchen sink. The faucet was dripping. This was not an unexpected event. The kitchen sink has a tough life. If it were a Web site, it would rank right up there with the refrigerator as the most frequently visited sites in our domestic universe. The faucet of the kitchen sink gets a lot of hits. Repairs are frequent, and over the years I have built up a stockpile of kitchen faucet parts.

Caroline Baker, in Baltimore, says "tiny black ants have shown up in my bathtub and kitchen sink ... Are they ... looking for water because the ground is so dry?" Nope. UM entomologist Mike Raupp says they're "odorous house ants," foraging for the sweet aphids hatching now. "If they find a nice supply of goodies in the kitchen, they will set up a trail and drive you nuts." Follow the trail to a food spill.

When Robert Brown of Glen Burnie pulled up at the Howard County Fairgrounds on Wednesday in his pickup truck with three beat-up lawnmowers, two bags of potting soil, a paper shredder and a 15-foot power boat on a trailer, members of the Howard County Antique Farm Machinery Club showed no surprise as they helped him unload. Over 12 years of holding its annual consignment sale, scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. tomorrow at the fairgrounds in West Friendship, "we've had just about everything you can think of," said Virginia Frank, a club member and sale organizer.

While searching for a unique fundraiser theme, the Chesapeake Cancer Alliance decided on kitchens, and convinced six homeowners to showcase designs and amenities that most people can only imagine. The charity, based in Bel Air, offers the debut of the area's first Dream Kitchens Tour from noon to 5 p.m. Saturday. "Kitchens are very popular now, with people getting into making them into efficient and attractive gathering spaces," said Kathy Welch, alliance volunteer coordinator. "They are not just work spaces anymore."

While other canny investors are waist-deep in soybeans or up to here in pork bellies, we have sunk everything into toilet-paper futures and detergent options, gone aggressively after ketchups and balanced the weak spots in our portfolio with a smattering of peanut butter and shampoo.Last week we left for the Soviet Union for three years, where my husband, Will Englund, and I will share a job as The Sun's Moscow correspondent, and where our daughters, 5 and almost-9, will live most un-Americanally without those small conveniences of life in the United States -- like toothpaste.

Allan Gallant has no idea where he's going to put an 18-hole indoor miniature golf course, but he knows a bargain when he sees one.With a bid of $1,600, Mr. Gallant bought the course that once did business -- but not much of it -- in the Brokerage, a lavish retail-restaurant project that once was the city's shining hope for the redevelopment of the eastern Inner Harbor area."

three flights up on calvert street, under my kitchen sink, a cricketdisrupts my sleep with manyan indomitable beep.becoming quiet when he hears me stirawake,he resumes his serenade with vigor,encouraged to think me the matefor whom he waits.perhaps i shall followhis tireless exampleand try for a reply:beep, beep.

Caroline Baker, in Baltimore, says "tiny black ants have shown up in my bathtub and kitchen sink ... Are they ... looking for water because the ground is so dry?" Nope. UM entomologist Mike Raupp says they're "odorous house ants," foraging for the sweet aphids hatching now. "If they find a nice supply of goodies in the kitchen, they will set up a trail and drive you nuts." Follow the trail to a food spill.

They're even selling the kitchen sink."Rodricks For Breakfast," WMAR-TV's local talk/variety show with Sun columnist Dan Rodricks, is airing its final episode Sept. 5, and the station will auction off everything in his signature interview kitchen and knotty pine club room. All moneys raised will benefit the Baltimore charities Catholic Relief Services, Johns Hopkins Children's Center, the Center for Poverty Solutions and the Enoch Pratt Free Library. The high bidder on each item will choose the charity.

"Stomp" is street percussion: push brooms in counterpoint, a tattoo on a teapot, a well-tuned team of toilet plungers."Stomp" is eight performers -- five men, three women -- banging on every kind of imaginable object, and some that aren't. And sometimes "Stomp" is softness itself, tickling the ear with a xylophone of Zippo lighters or the snap-top cap of a Snapple flavored tea played like a castanet."Stomp" is grunge clothes, pierced ears, big pants, sweat-soaked T-shirts and tank tops. Stomp is everything but the kitchen sink -- and, in one number, it is the kitchen sink.

Piled on two rolling carts: four panel doors, two cases of gray ceramic tile, two bags of grout, one white pedestal sink, still boxed, and a pail of mortar. The doors need some work. The tiles are in perfect shape: unused. The sink is in the original box. Grand total: $156, less than half the retail price. The castoffs of some homeowner or builder have become the treasures of another at the Loading Dock, a nonprofit Baltimore warehouse that sells reusable building goods and builder's seconds.

Due Considerations By John Updike Knopf / 736 pages / $32 Some writers are acquired tastes - the literary versions of anchovies and smelly cheeses. Others are staples - the bread and milk of the literary larder. John Updike is somehow both: so prolific as to be a staple, so frequently arcane as to be an acquired taste. His latest collection of essays and criticism, Due Considerations, is well over 700 pages and contains literary musings on everything but the kitchen sink (although the piece on the longevity of Coco Chanel or the one on coins vs. paper money might qualify as a metaphoric kitchen sink)

The small plaque that hangs above the kitchen sink has been there for as long as McDonogh senior Chris Agorsor can remember. It's metallic brown, 5 inches wide and long with white capital letters. It reads: "I shall pass this way but once, therefore, any good I can do or any kindness I can show let me do it for I shall not pass this way again." Agorsor once asked his mother, Glenda, if he could put it in his car so he would have it everywhere he goes, but she wouldn't budge. So his solution was to write the message on a rubber band that can be found around his wrist.

Any weekend that is free of plumbing problems is a good one. Last Sunday night, I went to bed with the cheery thought that I had made it through another weekend without having to pick up the pliers. That, it turned out, was mistaken joy. Late Sunday night, while I was sleeping, the kitchen faucet, the best faucet in the house, started spewing water from its base. My wife noticed the problem, wrapped a tea towel around the base of the faucet to soak up the water, and told me about the trouble Monday morning at breakfast.

When Robert Brown of Glen Burnie pulled up at the Howard County Fairgrounds on Wednesday in his pickup truck with three beat-up lawnmowers, two bags of potting soil, a paper shredder and a 15-foot power boat on a trailer, members of the Howard County Antique Farm Machinery Club showed no surprise as they helped him unload. Over 12 years of holding its annual consignment sale, scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. tomorrow at the fairgrounds in West Friendship, "we've had just about everything you can think of," said Virginia Frank, a club member and sale organizer.

BILL BRYSON, A HUMORIST and travel writer who has taken us on amusing journeys along the Appalachian Trail and across time and the cosmos, has turned his wit and his memory to growing up in the middle of the country, in the middle of the last century, in the middle of a delightfully dysfunctional family. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir is the latest from the author of A Walk in the Woods and A Short History of Nearly Everything. He uses that same droll, jaundiced and deadpan voice -- this time, as a child -- to recall growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1950s, a time of benign neglect, when kids were put out of the house at 8 in the morning and told not to return until dinnertime unless they were "on fire or actively bleeding."

They came by the thousands, vying for the dubious honor of having the ugliest kitchen the world has seen.In loving detail, ugly kitchen owners from Anne Arundel and the Baltimore area told the HechingerCo. of bile-colored walls, bright yellow countertops, psychedelic wallpaper and disgusting linoleum. They sent pictures of doorless cabinets, rusting metal cabinets, crooked cabinets, ancient appliances andtacky curtains."Nice people like us shouldn't have to be in a place like this," wrote one Pasadena couple, who were hoping to win a new $15,000 kitchen in a sweepstakes offered by Hechinger to promote four new "home project centers."

Saying the government has "thrown everything but the kitchen sink at me," noted con woman Deborah Kolodner appeared in court yesterday to begin fighting the latest round of criminal accusations - including mortgage flipping and enticing well-to-do men to act as swindling accomplices. But by the end of yesterday's hearing in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, in which Kolodner repeatedly objected to arguments made by her own attorney, a federal judge ordered her to undergo a mental evaluation.

If Home Depot was smaller, less expensive and sent its profits to charity, it might look something like the Renovation Station. A do-it-yourselfer's dream, the 6,000-square-foot Pasadena showroom, run by Arundel Habitat for Humanity, is packed with deeply discounted new or gently used home furnishings and remodeling supplies: brand-name windows, doors, cabinets, appliances, tables, chests and dining sets. There are boxes of ceramic tiles, tubs of caulk, bins of electrical parts and surprises around every corner, such as a beautiful marble vanity with double shell-shaped sinks.

A BIG LESSON in life - and in attempted home repairs - is knowing when to admit defeat. Raising the white flag and calling in the professional repairman may be a blow to the ego, but, generally speaking, it is a boon to the malfunctioning machine. That is what I told myself recently after battling a dishwasher afflicted with wash quality problems. That meant nasty grit was stuck on supposedly "clean" glasses. A dishwasher is one of the marvels of modern life. You load dirty dishes, push buttons and soon the machine has straightened out your mess.