Well, fuck. The Brewer’s Art, a mainstay of Mt. Vernon, and host of one of the best basement bars in all of Baltimore (RIP Wroten’s), abruptly announced its closure on Monday, citing over $150K in debt. I don’t know what would have happened there—it was always busy—but this is a loss for Baltimore’s nightlife scene. I spent many an evening tucked away in a corner of the basement nursing an OZZY or four (Fuck you Sharon, it’ll always be OZZY to me), and have a special place in my heart for it.
I was headed back from the auto parts store this weekend and took a route I rarely every drive; while passing a local auto body shop I spied a peculiar shape among the rows of modern appliances and quickly reversed to take a closer look.
This is a Porsche 356, and even though I could see down to the ground between the rocker panels, there’s obviously no engine, and every panel is covered in bondo, rust, and regret, this shell is probably worth $30K as it sits. Double that if whoever owns it has the engine stored away somewhere.
I think vintage Porsche pricing has come down a bit in the last decade, but air-cooled examples like this are still worth a mortgage, if you have the money for it.
She Drives Me Crazy, by the Fine Young Cannibals. This song has taken up residence in my brain after I listened to a podcast about the quick life and death of this band, who made two albums and split up in the late 80’s. I wasn’t a huge fan back in the day but now I have more respect for the production and craft, and it’s catchy as hell. Bonus trivia: the guitarist and bassist were both from The English Beat, another favorite band of mine from the early 80’s.
Thursday morning at about 4AM, Hazel and I awoke to the odd sound of water dripping somewhere in the bedroom. I got up and followed the noise to the radiator, which was leaking at the relief valve onto the floor. I threw some old T-shirts over it and on the floor, and crawled back into bed until the alarm rang. After making some coffee I checked the basement to find water running freely from the relief valve on the top of the boiler, and on further inspection found that the other radiators were leaking the same way.
After shutting the boiler and main water valve off, a very nice plumber named Youssef came out and between us we got the boiler separated from the water line, the major leaks stopped, and the remainder of the water drained out of the system. I got an estimate to repair the existing boiler and one to replace it, and after picking my chin up off the floor, we opted to repair the unit we’ve got. It’s about 40 years old and will need to be replaced at some point soon, but I wasn’t budgeting for that this year. I had been stockpiling cash to pay for some other stuff, and had just paid off my credit card, so we’ve got enough left over to pay for this out of pocket. But it seems like every time we get some cash assembled to do something we want to do, some other thing breaks and the money goes to that thing.
This pretty watch showed up in my Marketplace feed the other day, and it caught my eye enough to set up an alert on WatchPatrol. It’s a Vostok Amphibia Sniper, a Russian brand making watches since 1941. They sell new models but longtime readers know I’m a sucker for old beat-up antiques. I’ll be on the lookout for a similar model for a lower price. I really dig the balance of the dial face to the crown, the shapes of the dial letters, and the design of the three hands.
I read a random review for an animated series on Adult Swim called Primal, which is written and directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, the man behind Samurai Jack and a bunch of other animated properties you’ve probably heard of. This series follows the story of Fang and Spear, a dinosaur and a caveman (yes, I know) who come to reluctantly bond through shared experience. Because it stars a dinosaur and a caveman, there is no dialogue—much like Samurai Jack—but it is instantly compelling, and his skill in conveying emotion through expression and movement is still unmatched. There are three seasons so far and I’m doing everything I can not to binge them all; this is made easier by the fact that you can’t just listen to it like you would a podcast, although the sound design is gorgeous: it demands your full attention. It’s a visual treat to watch due to the things I’ve already mentioned plus the lush, vibrant landscapes in every frame. Highly recommended.
We hit a huge milestone last year that I neglected to celebrate: our house officially turned 100 years old. Erected sometime in 1925, it’s seen two world wars, 17 presidents, three families, and six color changes (that I can identify). For the last couple of months I’ve been keeping a list of things that need to be addressed. I haven’t really had to do much on it in the last few years, but as with every house, this one needs constant attention. Here are the things I want to take care of that I don’t need to call outside experts in for:
- The master bathroom punchlist. There are a number of small finishing touches that need to be done in the master bathroom,, and these are these should be relatively easy to knock out on a rainy day. The only thing that’s going to be a challenge is fixing a small area of grout on the floor, where the cats knocked over some PVC pipe primer that stained the grout. When I looked into it a few years ago, the grout was only available in a $70/5-gallon bucket—all I need is a half a cup.
- Scrape and paint the windows. I painted the house 5 years ago and did all the windows while I was up on the cherry picker, but it’s about that time when the paint starts to peel, and I’ve got to redo sections of it. Thankfully, I don’t think I need to do any of the eaves, it’s mostly the south-facing windows that need help.
- Replace the kitchen window. There are two rooms in the house that were updated before we moved in with vinyl windows: The original full bathroom and the kitchen. Both replacements were pieces of shit when we moved in. The locks are broken and they leak profusely, so they both need to be swapped out for new units. This will probably be the biggest undertaking.
- Fix the aluminum siding outside the attic window. During the last big windstorm, one section of our aluminum siding was torn off the side of the house. I’ve got a box of replacement siding in the eaves of the garage, so this should be relatively easy to do.
- Clear out the attic. Jen cleared out a bunch of stuff last year, but the fiber ceiling tiles the doctor put up in the 60’s have all fallen down. I had them tested for asbestos and they are free, which is a huge relief, but they all need to be bagged up and hauled out of there. I’m looking into what to put up in their place to keep heat in the house. And there’s a bunch of crap up there that I need to get rid of.
- Fix the greenhouse. I redid the plastic 7 years ago, but whatever I bought this last time didn’t hold up as well as the stuff I got in 2005. There are two places along the top spines where the plastic has split, so I need to redo those sections.
Back in November somebody charged $370 to my debit card to a vendor I didn’t recognize, so I immediately disputed the charges with Bank of America. It disappeared into their system until this Friday, when I got a letter detailing the purchase: a Garmin watch bought from eBay and delivered to a rental house in Severn, MD, with an obviously fake Yahoo email address. Their automated robot decided the charges were legit based on eBay’s garbage information and told me they were going to debit my account.
I got on the phone this morning and spoke with a woman in the Fraud department, who listened to my explanation and reversed the charges again; given the details it’s pretty clear this is fraud. eBay is famously abysmal for customer service; there is no phone number to call or email address to contact, and their chatbot points to a page that throws a 500 Internal Server Error, so it makes total sense that some waiter double-swiped my card at a restaurant and used them to get himself a shiny new watch.
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Meanwhile, I ordered a new set of safety glasses two weeks ago from a storefront I’d used successfully in 2021. I never got a confirmation email or tracking number in reply, but they sure as shit charged my card. This was two weeks ago and I still don’t have any glasses; their customer service options are as useful as eBay’s. I’ve sent them some nastygrams this morning promising a reversal of charges if I don’t hear anything by COB.
Update: my flurry of bitchy emails spurred a flurry of return emails and, suddenly, magically, a shipment notification!
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I just learned that we are only 7 miles, as the crow flies, from a NIKE missile base that was active from 1954 until 1974, which protected the west side of Baltimore from incoming Soviet bombers within a 25-mile radius. Given the destructive range and potential of Soviet nuclear weapons in this time period, this was yet another expensive exercise in pissing in the wind. Apparently the local Civil Air Patrol has been slowly refurbishing the base, which sat abandoned for decades after the government shut it down.
At what point is it enough, America? At what point do we call a racist a racist and actually do something about it?
One thing we didn’t consider when we adopted Hazel was the fact that, as a black dog, her nails are also black. I don’t think I had ever considered a dog’s nails in my life, even after having grown up with three of them, but Hazel, as always, is an outlier in everything she does. Her nails grow at the speed of an F1 car, so she so she sounds like someone typing on a mechanical keyboard when walking on a hardwood floor. Her nails can get so long that when she stands up normally, they twist her toes in weird directions. In normal circumstances, the length of her nails are kept in check by daily walks and her guiding instinct to pull on the leash like a sled dog, but with the frigid snow conditions of the last two weeks, she has only gone outside to do her business and come back inside as quickly as possible, retiring to the couch to wait until warmer weather appears. So they’ve gotten very long.
She’s been to the vet to have them clipped before, and they’ve given us drugs to administer two hours before the appointment. The last time we did this, it didn’t go well, and the vet tech seemed to be pissed at us. We followed your directions, dude. I made an appointment yesterday to bring her in to get them trimmed again, and they upped her dose at our request. She seemed a little spacey on the way there, and was a bit out of sorts in the waiting room. Thankfully, it only took them ten minutes to actually do the work, and she came back out to the waiting room, anxious to leave. When she got home, she was even more gloopy and passed out under Jen’s desk as we worked, her pupils as big as dinnerplates. Overnight, she splayed out in the middle of the bed like a pile of wet towels and lay in the same position all night, forcing me to teeter at the edge of the bed. This morning, she went outside for her customary walk, came back inside and immediately laid on the couch, completely uninterested in driving to school with the girls—an integral part of her normal routine. As a creature of habit, it’s very strange for her not to want to take a ride. But when it came time to meet our neighbor for the first dog walk in two weeks, she was happy to get outside, back to her normal self.
In December, I bought a TIG welder on deep Christmas discount with honorarium money made from a gig at MICA. After a ton of research, I settled on a basic unit from Eastwood, branded Rockwood, which seems to be their entry-level gear. It sat in the garage until this weekend, when I had the jungle site deliver a bottle of 100% argon for about $250 less than if I’d purchased it locally. While freezing my ass off working on the trucks outside, I had the little space heater in the garage warm it up in there. When I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore I retreated back inside, restored the sensation in my hands, and set up the unit.
It’s been four years since my welding class, so my memory of running a TIG unit is very hazy. I’d watched a bunch of setup videos and read the manual, but predictably the printed material was lean on detail. After several minutes with no spark I remembered that I had to ground the workpiece, and after that I was quickly laying beads down. Getting used to the footpedal, which regulates the heat, feeding the welding rod at the right intervals, and keeping the tip of the tungsten out of the pool took some time, but I got into a groove and figured out how to keep the welds from blowing through the metal or just sitting on top of it.
It’s going to take a lot of practice (and a lot of argon) to master, but I’m excited to keep working on it. TIG is really good for doing delicate sheet metal work as well as aluminum, and it’s the latter that I’m really interested in. I’ve got a plan for building a roof rack for the Travelall, and Brian included my metal with an order he put in for the EV project. I’d like to tackle that sometime this summer when I can lay it out in the driveway and assemble the whole thing.