From Can’t Get Much Higher newsletter, a list of the 18 best Podcasts About Music. This is basically a Venn diagram of my favorite things. Many of these I’ve never heard before and am excited to dive into; some of these I’m already familiar with (Reply All, Heavyweight, 60 Songs that Explain the ’90’s) but demand a repeat listen.
I loaded iDVD last night and played around with it last night for a few hours—I’m going to burn a DVD and send it up to my folks. It takes some time to get used to the UI, but once I began to grasp the concept behind the layout, it made sense. One nifty feature is the drag-and-drop flexibility between iTunes, iPhoto and iDVD. I created an iPhoto album of all the honeymoon shots, a song playlist in iTunes, and dragged them both into iDVD: Bam. Instant slideshow on DVD, with all the image source files included so that my parents can pull them off the disc and print them if they like. I also re-encoded a Quicktime movie and included that on the disc, but I haven’t tried re-encoding the video clips from my camera yet. Another good resource to look at (if you have four zillion photos, like me) is this article on O’Reilly, which covers backing up your iPhoto library with optical media.

Before: ugly grayish mildew-stained siding After: blue-gray paint applied (except over that damn bush)
1. This morning Jen called me from home with news of a package from the Matejowskys; Lorie took the time to send up some good classical music: Shuggie Otis and Big Star for our enjoyment. Besides being the most photogenic family we’ve ever met, Lorie also made us a beautiful quilt for our wedding present, so they get awarded the Musical Quilting Superhero Trophy. 2. We’re meeting Linda, another friend from Houston, at BWI this evening to catch dinner and a few drinks, which we’re all looking forward to.
I, however, get the loser award for not having called my Dad last night.
This weekend was a busy one. Friday night Todd and Heather had us over for steak and sangria; the meal, company, and booze were all excellent. Plans are afoot. Saturday Jen and I got to work on the house—she worked on the inside while I started painting the outside. After settling on a different color (the new one is less blue and more gray, called “Pelican Bay“) I got the front siding painted. Everything was going great until a wasp stung me on the knuckle of my ring finger, which hurt like a bitch. Suddenly, I turned five-years-old and ran downstairs clutching my swelling finger, saying, “guess what just happpened.” Jen calmly applied a paste of baking soda and waited for me to stop grimacing. We celebrated with a tasty homemade stir-fry and relaxed for the rest of the evening.
Today we met up with Shannon, our wedding photographer, to look at pictures in Takoma Park at a tasty cafe during brunch. Again, I can’t say enough good things about Shannon and her husband Ganes. The pictures are all phenomenal; minus the obligatory 10% of eyes-closed/stupid face/blurry shots, there are a good 200 star-quality candids in there. Beyond that, there are another 200 that I’d be proud to call my own on a great day. She handed off a beautiful handmade box with prints from each roll archived alphabetically, and an envelope stuffed full of negatives, plus a CD of high-res digital shots. Wow. I’m going to borrow the scanner from work tomorrow and begin the long process of culling and scanning all these good shots.
Getting back to the house after a Target detour, I finished up the front of the house and we relaxed with Friday night’s leftovers (yum). There’s also two bits of news I’m not going to jinx by mentioning just yet, but I think they are a good sign.
I have no firsthand experience with this product, but I’m curious to try it out: the Fresh² bulb, which is one of those compact flourescent bulbs coated with a titanium dioxide coating, which creats oxidizers to neutralize odors. It’s $20 for two bulbs, so I may not get around to buying them anytime soon, but… (via cool tools)
I avoided spending $200 on a ladder yesterday, deciding to wait until I need it—I’m going to be painting the front of the house first, and I can reach everything I need to out there with the section of ladder I do have (thanks, Dad—I’m going to bring it back, I promise.) We are a go on the color choice, and I’m looking forward to this job. I think it’ll make a dramatic difference with the front of the house. We also have tentative plans to see our wedding pictures on Sunday. I’m nervous (I photograph poorly, unlike my wife) but excited. Also, I got the Superdrive installed last night in five minutes: open case, two screws, disconnect cables, attach new drive, two screws, close case. Toast immediately saw the drive, although I haven’t loaded iDVD yet—I’m going to try the Ken Burns thing on our honeymoon photos and send my folks a disc.
Uh-Oh.There’s a guy up in New Jersey selling off his entire collection of Scout parts. He has fenders, hoods and windshields for $150 each. This could be dangerous. I’ll know more later.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Has anybody thought to ask one of these kids running around with the trucker hats that say Von Dutch if they actually know what Von Dutch is? Corollary: Has anybody other than me seen the new rage in car window decals—Calvin kneeling in front of a big huge cross? I bet Bill Watterson is slashing his wrists over that one.
The Superdrive came this morning, so I have a date with the guts of our Sawtooth tonight for some upgrading. Not much else to report right now—this week has been a blur of work, dinner, freelance, and sleep. On the down side, Jen called me from downtown Ellicott City last night to report that some jackass stole the rear license plate (and bracket) from the back of her car in broad daylight. Thanks. So she has a date with the friendly drones at the MVA tomorrow to sort that mess out.
Thanks to the recently transplanted Jason, I’ve got two more albums crossed off the list at right. Thanks, brutha. It also looks like we have the thank-you cards done, so folks should be seeing them in the mail shortly. (Would you believe we still have the gifts piled high on the dining room table? We haven’t had time to put them away yet.) This evening I also applied a test coat of paint to the siding on the porch. It’s called “cloudless sky”, and it’s a light, slightly muted blue (we were originally thinking darker, but given the amount of sun this house sees, it’s probably better to stick with a lighter color) which should offset the white trim very well. I’m looking forward to getting this on the house. Next stop: Home Depot, for a 32′ aluminum ladder.
Rome Update. I posted the second half of Tuesday’s travelogue and most of Wednesday’s return trip on the honeymoon page.
There’s a big huge tent on our front lawn; it’s surrounded in mesh and fabric, and it lights up at night. There’s a pile of Andy Nelson’s Barbecue in our fridge for the rehearsal dinner. I have seven hours of dance music on the iPod for our enjoyment, from gypsy swing to Motown dance classics. We’ve hidden a trashbag full of cicada carcasses as far from the house as it will get, and hosed off the back porch three times in the last three days. (They keep coming back.) The cooler on the back porch is filled with cold beer. Jen’s bridal gown is hanging in her room with the door closed, and I have a crisp tuxedo waiting in mine (with some of the funkiest rubber/patent-leather shoes I’ve ever worn.)
The stage has been set, and when the rehearsal party has been fed, responsibility for everything will pass quietly out of our hands and into that of a higher power. Pray to whomever you like that there’s no driving thunderstorms like the one we had this morning; no sudden infestation of cicadas into the—knock, knock—otherwise clean tent out front (and give thanks that the tent guy convinced us that the backyard was a bad idea); no last-minute disaster that we’ve lain awake at night and not forseen.
Most importantly, pray that I don’t step on my beautiful bride’s neatly pedicured toes with my big rubber patent-leather paddle feet during our first dance (which as been changed to Louis Armstrong’s A Kiss To Build A Dream On).
A year ago this evening, I took the most beautiful woman in the world to dinner on a warm spring night in Georgia. We had wonderful food, sipping cocktails together, and the rest of the world faded from view. Walking home through the historic district, we passed through misty, tree-lined squares, holding hands and laughing quietly to ourselves. Crossing through Madison Square, I took advantage of the magical night and asked her to marry me. Luckily, she said yes.
Insta-Storm-Tracker-Central. Last night the NBC weather dork claimed it would be 88° and sunny; this morning the one good digital camera, but the other one is pretty lousy and therefore not worth taking with us. Jen has a very nice Nikon SLR, I have my trusty Minolta X-700, and we sat on the couch last night wondering if we should go buy a pile of T-Max and take one of the SLR’s with us. The complicating factor is the arrival of a freelance check in our mailbox today, which means I could spend some time hunting down and buying her a good midlevel digital camera… time I don’t have at this point. (In a perfect world, we’d get something like this and start investing in lenses, but…)
Update: We’re taking Jen’s SLR with us and investigating the option of ditching our return flight in Paris to stay an extra day or three. Stay tuned.
Update Update: flying coach one-way from Paris to Baltimore, with all the connecting flights included, is prohibitively expensive ($1,200+/ea) and nullifies out any extra cash we have—and that’s not including any kind of lodging. Anybody have any ideas out there?
You may be wondering if this is one of those boring posts where I complain about being tired. The answer would be no, my snarky friend; this is where I complain about being really fucking tired. Three weeks of getting up at 7:15 to freelance for two hours, getting in to work and crunching through the world’s most over-complicated game, and returning to the house to pit my scrawny back against a long list of physical labor (why, oh why did I think I could get both the dining room and living room painted in one day? Stupid Dugan) until the beginning of Late Night has got your humble host fighting to keep his eyes open. There are many reasons I’m pushing this hard, one of which is the promise of a Big Fat Check waiting on our return from Italy to help pay for the trip (Memo to self: upon return, transfer balance on credit card with ridiculously high interest rate to competing card with 6-month intro rate.)
We got the seating list made up last night, which was one of those tasks we were avoiding like VD; I think we were able to wrestle all 58 people onto 6 tables without leaving anybody stranded. For a while it looked like there was one table that was going to be a large dead space (I took the opportunity to draw a skull and crossbones above it on Jen’s diagram) but we broke it up to where each table should be evened out and everyone should have a good time.
The next iteration of the music list is live, although iTunes on my Pismo was hiccuping to the point where I had to trash the prefs file and rebuild the whole thing. All is better now. Thanks for all your suggestions! Also, thanks to Rob for the first music struck off the list on the right. The Shins are excellent, and it’s great to have some Smithereens again.
Random Fun Links. This is brilliant: Daily Reason to Dispatch Bush. | A size-based aggregator for Google news.
As you might have guessed about the weekend before our wedding, we ran around like idiots trying to get as much done as possible. Saturday was a blur of Lockard women, paint, lobster bisque, and cigar smoke. While the hedges were being weeded and trimmed out front, I was able to get 3/4 of the living room and half of the dining room painted—20 years of cigarettes and general dust gave way to bright white. At 7 my best man Rob stopped over to pick me up for an evening out with the boys. We had a fantastic dinner at Louisiana in Fell’s Point, then stopped across the street for drinks and cigars, courtesy of Brizzi, and then capped it off with more drinks on Rob’s roof deck.
Sunday morning I woke with a pounding hangover—the problem with excellent vodka is that you don’t know just how much you’ve had until you’re flagged and falling off the barstool. We had 11am reservations for brunch at Little Havana with a bunch of people, so I scraped the carpet off my tongue and poured my carcass into the car. I’ll have you know that I was OK until the first bloody mary hit my stomach, and then I realized that hair of the dog was a Very Bad Thing. It was the fried plantains that flipped the switch, but after quietly vacating my stomach I felt much better. The rest of the day was punctuated by frequent glasses of cool water.
Wedding Tunes. I posted a new page with the expanded and updated wedding tune playlist; again, I’ve set it up with comments so you can suggest a song.
Tortoise Update: The ATF fluid is helping, but it looks like I’m going to need to disregard the “DO NOT ADD BEYOND THIS LINE” warning and add some more. She shifted and stopped fine, but the final 1/2 mile of lights and turns brought out some unwelcome lurching.