I’d written about a self-funded documentary on the American Motors Corporation a couple of years back, and how they were running a GoFundMe to finance the production. At that point I donated and I’ve been getting regular updates since then. The producers finished production a couple of months ago and recently announced that it was available on PBS, and would be streaming on YouTube on May 22.
The past couple of weeks have been kind of slow here at Idiot Central as well as elsewhere on the web. It’s not that there’s nothing happening and we’re lounging around in our underwear watching reruns of Dr. Phil and swilling lite beer; both Jen and I are stupidly, numbingly, unaccountably busy. It’s just that I’d like to write about something other than the color we painted the hallway last weekend, or the eggplant growing in our backyard, or what we had for dinner last night.
I realized last night that I’ve been working like an absolute retard since the end of spring and I have nothing to show for it, except a pile of debt. I’d like to say that our brief sojourn to Ireland was paid for, but the harsh fact is that it was put on credit, and I feel that credit hanging over my head like a noose. (I don’t regret going, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.) I dislike debt about as much as I dislike foreign objects in my eye, pro wrestling, and tequila hangovers, so this situation has me a little stressed out. My lovely wife listened to my worrying last night, and was remarkably understanding and calm about the whole situation. I suspect she’s just as tired, worried, and concerned about all this crap as I am, but she’s learned how to keep me from completely wigging out. Thanks, baby.
It’s not like we have a Ferrari in the driveway, or a plasma-screen TV, or closets full of clothes—I’m currently wearing a threadbare shirt I’ve owned since high school and a five-year-old pair of shorts—I’ve just been socked with dumb one-time bills ever since we got back, and it seems like I’ve been writing newer and more expensive checks every day. And that shit is getting old.
Perhaps, then, it’s fitting for me to post these pictures I took a while back of a house in Ellicott City: The owner has covered the outside with handmade signs (and some of you may know that I have a certain love in my heart for homemade signs) talking about Jeebus, his government, his neighbors, and other assorted subjects. I don’t know what the whole story is, but I present our own local oddity for your viewing and reading pleasure. Maybe this guy has the right idea.
Driving to work this morning, I passed a Ford pickup, driven by an older man with a receding hairline and a beautiful border collie in the passenger seat. Normally, that would have been enought to put a smile on my face, but there was something else. It’s very unscientific, but I’d have to say here in Maryland, about 3/4 of the pickup-driving crowd sport a big fat “W” sticker somewhere on their truck, something I find it hard to understand. So it was with great humor I noticed the bumper sticker on the back of this particular truck:
DRUNK FRATBOY DRIVES
COUNTRY INTO DITCH
Thanks for that, Pickup Truck Man.
That area above the porch roof is now blue, and the three ghetto windows have been scraped and glazed. This is the second-to-last major section of siding that needed to be painted, and these windows are probably in the worst shape compared to the rest. For some reason, there were never any storm windows installed on the atrium, so the windows took a beating. Next up is a good priming and then two coats of high gloss enamel.
For the last week, Jen and I have been dog-sitting for our neighbors up the street. Their dog Ros is a beautiful, good-natured Doberman who likes to run in the park and chase squirrels. We’ve been taking her for walks twice a day, and after the initial dread of waking up early was gone, I started looking forward to it. It took us a while to figure out her rythyms: she didn’t eat anything until Jen figured out that she liked having company. She doesn’t like walking on grass-she prefers the sidewalk. There’s a particular spot in the park that seems to agree with her delicate sense of modesty.
It’s really interesting what you notice differently about the neighborhood when you’re out waiting for your dog to finish examining the base of each telephone pole. There’s the fellow down the street with an enviable garden in his front yard. His privet hedges are immaculate. Behind that, the lawn is full of huge flowering bushes and plants, in that effortless but hugely difficult rambling-English-garden sort of way. His gladiolus are tall, healthy, and straight, blooming endlessly in multiple colors. Ours are crooked, confused drunkards who get the crap beat out of them every time it rains. I wish I knew what his secret was to gardening.
There’s the newly finished house next door, which, rumor has it, was purchased for more than we paid for our house, gutted, and rehabbed. It looks good in a bland sort of way. They replaced slanty cedar shingle with faux-shingle vinyl siding, which looks too clean for my taste. The windows are all big and new, but they’re the kind with fake mullions that are too narrow to fit the lines of the rest of the house. Strangely enough, I like the garage best—it hasn’t been altered from its original condition, and it features an old-school ‘no parking’ sign and bubble thermometer above crooked barn doors.
Up the way towards the park, the people who bought one of the larger houses in the area decided to enclose the property with one of the strangest fences I’ve seen in a while—an X pattern in wide planking, backed with green chicken wire. The house is was beautiful last year, but I’m sensing a slide into mediocrity—they saw fit to park a mildew-covered popup trailer in the front yard…wait a minute, who am I to be casting stones…?
Last night, we decided to lengthen our usual route by walking down the trolley path to Opie’s for some ice cream. The evening was cool, the sun was behind clouds, and the trees were filled with birdsong. Ros ranged out ahead of us, and I told Jen about my discussion with a bank regarding a home equity line of credit. From what the guy on the phone told me, our house has appreciated a lot more than I’d thought it might, and he was more than happy to extend a generous amount of money at a rate that surprised me. Depending on what two other candidates say today, we’ll be on the road to a new kitchen by Thanksgiving (Turkey Day is the yearly deadline for any Lockardugan renovation plans).
Ros sat at our feet while we contemplated the true meaning of new appliances, eating chocolate ice cream and enjoying the simple pleasures of the evening.
Does anybody else out there have the problem I have? The one where a particular song or melody gets stuck inside your head and plays on endless repeat until the next song comes around? Perhaps it’s an odd quirk of my particular A.D.D., but this has been around for as long as I can remember. For the past week, it’s been ‘Oye Como Va’, the Santana version. (We heard the Mambo Kings play it last Saturday, and it’s been stuck upstairs ever since.) Sometimes it’s wierd shit, like the aforementioned ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ (A POX ON YOU, REGINALD DWIGHT) and sometimes it’s pleasantly surprising—last week, I had some Carole King rocking my personal Wheels Of Steel—but usually it’s just annoying.
Simply listening to other music won’t erase the song. I’ve had iTunes on all week, and probably listened to a couple hundred songs since Monday. Nothing knocked it loose—I’d walk out to the car in the sweltering heat, and there it would be, ticking along happily like a busted jukebox.
This morning, I heard ‘Speed of Sound’ by Coldplay as I was flipping through channels to find CNN, and I listened to it as I collected email. I think Oye Como Va may now be gone, replaced by the warbling of Chris Martin, but I’m not sure.
Apple just updated the Mac Mini—$600 will get you 1.42GHz, Bluetooth, 512MB of RAM, Airport Extreme, and a combo drive (I’ve already got a burner in a tower.) The iBooks got pretty much the same configuration, but the 14″ model has a SuperDrive.
That right there is just a no-brainer. Now, I have to figure out which one I need worse….
This weekend’s general grind of work, work work was interrupted by two bright shining lights: Our first Netflix rental, which happened to be The Life Aquatic, and a Saturday concert at Oregon Ridge with the Mambo Kings.
I’d recommend the movie to anybody who likes the offbeat comedy. Bill Murray is fantastic, as always, and the movie is full of the strange otherworldly vibe that Wes Anderson specializes in. The touches of detail throughout the movie (look for the poster of Bill Murray running with the tigers) and goofy one-offs still have me chuckling to myself (I can still hear Willem Dafoe saying, in a German accent, “He’s got hydrogen psychosis, the crazy-eye!”)
The Mambo Kings are a quintet who play traditional Latin mambo, and for this concert they were backed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. We spent the afternoon packing a cooler full of food and drink, met up with J and M for the ride over, and staked out a spot on the hillside overlooking the bandshell. Oregon Ridge can be blisteringly hot or chillingly cold, but last Saturday it was pleasant and warm. We have to send a shout out to Laurie Lorie for the blanket quilt she made us as a wedding present—it was perfect for sipping (OK, well, guzzling) vodka tonics on the grass. Thanks! The concert was fantastic, featuring some original compositions as well as covering the theme to West Side Story, some Dave Brubeck, Tito Puente and Carlos Jobim tunes, finishing up with Gershwin under fireworks. This was an excellent way to spend a beautiful evening with my beautiful wife.
* Bringing it all back home, here’s the title reference.
Here’s one of the first of the B/W 620 pictures I had developed last week. There’s a bunch on Flickr right now (which is unfortunately pig-dog slow this morning) with more to come as I scan and clean them up. I’m thrilled with the results, although I’m hoping that they develop a little darker than they scanned. The camera did an incredible job—there’s a bit of blur around the outer edges of the frame, but that adds a little character, in my opinion.
I’ll upload more pictures as I scan them. As you might guess, it’s time-intensive, and this weekend we had our hands full.
I picked up four rolls of 620 film from the developer this afternoon. Three of the rolls are from Ireland, and one is a leftover roll from two years ago that sat in the camera until I opened the back without checking, and exposed three of the frames. Our regular developer disappeared sometime in the last two years without a trace, so we had them done at a different lab which won’t print contact sheets for large-format film. I’ve looked at them through a lightbox, and they look very pretty. I’d scan them and post them here, but HP decided to make their slide adapter fit only 35mm film, so I have to wait until I get home to use the 5-year-old UMAX scanner in the basement. Sorry, folks.
It’s funny to see pictures from the old roll—I’d loaded three different cameras with film to see which one took the cleanest pictures (the Duaflex II, hands-down) but forgotten about the final roll. It starts with two blurry shots of Geneva on Jen’s apartment deck. Apparently this camera’s lens is designed for landscape-style photography and not detailed closeup shots, which is unfortunate, because she’s really cute. Blurry, but cute. The next shot is (I think) of Lakewood Avenue during a snowstorm. Or, it could be taken during a very, vey sunny day. I can’t really tell. The road is almost black, as is the sky, and the trees are bare. What a lovely subject for a picture! (What the hell was I thinking?) After that is a shot of my back porch, with some very small plants, before I put up the wood walls. It’s amazing how ghetto the place looked before stuff actually started growing back there. (I thought it would be one of the main selling points for the house until two dumb chicks stopped to look at the house, and one said to the other, within earshot, “OOH, a backyard! You could knock that wall down and put in a parking pad! That would be great!” Memo to you, Dumb Chick: Shut your hole. I didn’t take your offer, and it was higher than the other one.) The next shot is of the Scout parked in front of the house, looking south down Lakewood Ave. Again: Ghetto. Like, West Virginia Backwoods Ghetto. Here’s a picture of my broke-down truck. Directly following that is a picture of the tree outside my front door (I must have been feling arty that day.) The final three shots are of the Pagoda in Patterson Park, taken during a walk with Jen in the springtime. These are actually kind of interesting, because they’re shots of something interesting. Unfortunately, the third one was obliterated when I opened the back of the camera.
So, don’t fear, dear readers: I’ll scan the negs this weekend and post the best ones for your perusal. There are some good ones in there. Seriously.