Browsing the internet at lunch today after a hugely busy morning, I found a fellow selling a disassembled 1960 MGA in Catonsville. I sent the link to Jen and she called me back to say “That’s pretty!” but that she didn’t want it if it wasn’t put together. I’m going to see if I can look at it tonight anyway.
Jen and I marshalled all our strength this weekend and made a major push to finish up about thirty projects around the house. In no particular order, we got these accomplished:
- The linen closet is finished. The door is hung, shelves installed, trim painted, and towels, bedding and excess bathroom stuff is stored neatly inside. Still to finish: finding a new carriage bolt for the antique glass knob I found in my “from-the-old-house” drawer.
- The guest room is finished. The color is on the walls, the new roman shades are hung, there’s art on the walls, and with the exception of a small section of cap molding, it’s all ready for guests.
- The bathroom has been reconfigured, cleaned up, and looks twice as big. Jen’s next job is to strip the ugly border from around the cieling.
- The Summer Work Staging Area, AKA the huge pile of tools in the atrium, has been relocated to the basement, and
- All our outside plants are repotted and living happily in the atrium.
There’s a bunch of other crap we accomplished, but it’s too boring to list here. I’ll post pictures of each room after Thanksgiving, when we do the big reveal While-You-Were-Out style. Other weekend highlights: Dropping one of the new pictures on the radiator and exchanging it for a new one at Target (me), peering at Jen’s sinus cavity CAT scans on our very own X-ray light; trying out a Chipotle burrito for the first time (synopsis: decent food, lousy menu—burrito, burrito, or…burrito?); getting Penn the Medicated out of his little house and down into the living room, where he tried to EAT THE ENTIRE SCRATCHING PAD, which was covered in catnip; visiting Stellan Heazlett and giving him his Kong In a Thong (he was unimpressed); and visiting a nursery bankruptcy sale and finding two plastic potting tables for sale at $45/ea.
Shame On A Nuh. Our friend Dave, an old college buddy, once bought an album from the Wal-Mart, that wonderful retailer that considers it its civic duty to censor albums it deems offensive. This album was the mighty debut from the Wu-Tang Clan, and he would drive around Baltimore with the album in his car, rapping along with the lyrics. It was a few years later, with great surprise, he learned that the lyrics had been altered by the Megalo-Mart to remove the racial slur, replacing it with a more “palatable” nonsense word. For years, he’d been quoting the Middle-America approved alternative. R.I.P., Dirt McGurk.
I wish I could claim that I spent my vacation day away from the computer, but I didn’t. Between a new freelance project and the house, I spent much of my day running from the basement, where I built a custom ripping jig for the table saw, to the office, where I was building a presentation for the client. Both projects were fruitful, though—the medicine cabinet door is now officially hung, and the client gets version 1.0 of the presentation at lunchtime for review. I also took time to finish cleaning up the paint job in the guest room and continued cleaning the paste off the walls in the hallway. Jen and I are enjoying the “Tuscan” effect of the stripped plaster out there—it’s oddly satisfying in a postmodern design sort of way.
Penn, Day Two. The Prozac seems to have calmed the guy down somewhat. He’s a lot mellower, and only talking when he’s really hungry.
Change Of Heart. For the past four or five weeks, while I’ve been building 3-D models, I’m very happy here at work. Which is a very, very satisfying feeling.
Our troubled orange tabby, Penn, has been dealing with anxiety issues ever since we joined the two kingdoms. He manifests his insecurities by attacking pretty much every other cat in the house, saving his special love for Geneva, the female. So we’ve had him on medication since before the wedding, and trapped in the rear atrium room away from the other cats. The first medication he was put on was Diazo-trypto something, and it made him very stoney for the first two days, then reduced his white-hot anger to a dull crank. He was mellower but still itching to bite Geneva whenever he could. With a change in doctors, a checkup, and a new prescription, we thought things might turn around for the guy. He was lonely and sad in his little castle, scratching at the window and making pitiful requests for love. The second meds (Ela-something) did nothing but dull his senses for three seconds—he burned through that stuff like a Twinkie on a hot day, and seemed more eager than ever to get into some ass-whuppin’. Today I picked up the third prescription for the little terror (he reached out and clawed the face of our new cat doctor on his first visit, the only time I’ve ever seen him attack a human)—the big gun, Prozac. Thankfully it’s generic, it’s a smaller dose, and it’s not harmful to the liver like kitty Valium, which is our last and final resort. So say a prayer tonight for Mr. Penn, and let’s all hope he calms the hell down.
Nice. This is a beautiful series of maps drawn to illustrate how misleading some of those election result maps were when they flashed them onscreen last week. I’m sure Tufte could get a whole new lecture series out of this subject, like PowerPoint.
Happiness Is. My wife calling me out of the blue to tell me she loves me.
Sadness Is. The “Check Engine” light on the Jeep lighting up this morning.
Heh, heh. This is funny. (via matt)
Gulp. As you’ve read here earlier, Jen’s Mom has been recovering from the side effects of chemotherapy for the last couple of months. Having walked right up to the edge of death a few months ago, she’s not up to cooking, cleaning and getting ready for all five children to descend on the house in December. Jen’s brother none-too-subtly suggested our house as an alternative, which was the unspoken understanding between Jen and I since July. Last night we got the official endorsement from the Boss, which means we’re hosting the dysfunction on our own turf.
This is a good thing, because even though we will be running around like mental patients for the two weeks surrounding Christmas, we will be able to crush any dissent among the rabble, make other people do the dishes, and sleep in our own bed. (The time to upgrade the Full to a Queen is upon us.)
This weekend I took advantage of the freakish warm weather and mowed the lawn for the first time in about two months. It was looking like a shag rug under a spilled box of Wheaties after the tulip tree lost its leaves, and I was ignoring it for as long as I could. After I bagged up a bunch of next year’s mulch, I grabbed a paint can and climbed out onto the roof above the atrium to paint the last street-viewable portion of white siding. Now, as far as you can tell, the whole house is blue. Meanwhile, Jen is making welcome additions to the guest bedroom—the whitewash has been covered by a cheery new color, we have designs on a rug, and it’s beginning to come together. Meanwhile, the medicine cabinet door is still in progress. After deciding that the first placement of the hinges was wrong (the door opened only about 80°, which was less than optimal), I pulled them off, filled the mortises with wood filler, and got it ready for Plan B. Stay tuned.
“There is no underwater camera system that is right for everybody.”
SSI Guide To Underwater Photography. Courtesy XLT. (I would have left this as a comment on his site, but Blogger’s comment system sucks ass.)
There’s nothing like getting in some freelance checks and depositing them, even though you know the money was already spent two months ago.
Wishing Death. On the kind individual who keeps leaving WHOLE BOXES OF GIRL SCOUT COOKIES around my office. As if the bowls of leftover Halloween candy weren’t enough of an issue, now you need to leave giant minefields of blood-sugar implosion in your wake. May your children stay up for three days straight on a Snickers binge.
To Do list:
- Donate money to the ACLU. They’re gonna need it.
- Contact the local Democratic party headquarters and volunteer.
- Get involved more in local organizations and effect change from the inside.
- Raise a family of pinko liberal hippie educated activist Democrats.
- Make, pack, and send some care packages to soldiers serving in Iraq.
Any other suggestions? I’m all ears.
Props. Special shout-outs to the following people, whom I haven’t mentioned but in passing the last few days:
- Renie, my sister, for driving six and a half hours to stand on a ladder and scrape the Oldest Wallpaper Known To Man from the plaster in our hallway. Hopefully, the lobster feast, trip to Peter’s, homemade quiche and booze made it worthwhile.
- Dave, our good friend, who dropped by to haul away a pile of dry brush from our driveway on Tuesday, and who sat through an hour of our deepening depression as the election results came in. He could not be tempted with either pizza or Hefeweizen, so we owe him something special. Chewbacca thanks you, Dave.
- Molly, for the excellent T-shirt she sent over just in time for an anniversary present. Jen looked at it and laughed, and I suggested she wear it at Christmas. We’ll see how that goes.
Updates. I went through the Lockardugan Photo Archive this morning to dig out a bunch of beginning photos of the house for comparison’s sake. I’m going to be posting them over the next day or so as I get the time- there’s a bunch of them. This should be interesting.
E-L-E-C-T-I-O-N R-E-F-O-R-M. Four more years of shite. Thanks a bunch, middle America. I’m glad, at least, that I live in a state that didn’t carry him. And, what’s all this bullshit about “moral issues”? Who gives a crap about banning gay marriage when the economy is in the toilet and we’re occupying a foreign country? Come on, people!
Ch-ch-ch-Changes. I moved the home page of the namesake site over to a CSS-based design, meaning there’s not a table to be found in it. Now, that’s not that big a deal considering it’s two images and an image map, but for some reason I can’t get the CSS equivalent of the ol’ <body align=center> tag to work correctly in Mozilla. (Nor, for that matter, do the popups in the design section work in Mozilla. Dammit.) The eventual goal is to have the whole damned thing in CSS, but that’s a ways off. Baby steps here, baby steps.
This article, on surviving IKEA, is written just like a walkthrough to DOOM, circa 1998. It will make non-gamers laugh and gamers howl. I wish I had thought of it.
Progress. This morning Jen got up at 7 to shower, and I roused myself to find the TV remote for the bad news. It wasn’t as bad as I’d hoped, but not the surprise I was praying for. Jen tried some new paint on the wall in the guest bedroom, and I made coffee, anxious to get outside and take advantage of the warm sunshine. I should back up and give props to Dave, who brought Clifford by and hauled off the pile of brush in the driveway I’ve been collecting since June. He helped clear the way for the car cover I bought from Sam’s Club a few weeks ago, which I put up in about an hour. Unfortunately, the cover isn’t rated for snow (a fact I couldn’t find on the less-than-helpful website) but with some carefully made modifications, I think I can get around that. Also missing on the website: the fact that the tent does not come with tiedowns—although the instructions helpfully note, “Caution: Once you erect your tent, it WILL become a giant kite!” Lacking any tiedowns, I decided the next best thing would be attaching the cover to the closest 3200lb. weight I could find, so I jump-started the Scout off the Jeep, backed it under the cover, and tied off the center poles to the roof rack. The overall effect is very ghetto, but considering it’s the first time Chewbacca has been under cover since 1998, I’m certainly happy.
10:45pm. Discouraged. I’m drinking every time Dan Rather busts out a Texas aphorism. Which means I’m ripped.
9:11pm. Nice to see a few things: Maryland went Democratic (no surprise there.) Barbara Mikulski looks like she’s going to win. Barack Obama crushed Alan Keyes.
Black Helicopters Dept. I went and voted this morning after waiting a while for Jen come back from giving blood; she has some kind of mystery sickness thing and they sort of threw their hands up in the air and said, “We’ll draw some blood”, which means, we’re stumped. We had romantic dreams of walking across the street hand-in-hand to vote the fascists out of office (actually, she had that dream, while mine was more like the Matrix, where I used the Crane Style Technique to clear a bloody path through the throngs of Bush supporters barring our way to the polls. It turned out that there were just four teenagers asking quietly, “Kerry for President?”) I walked over by myself and after signing the card found myself in front of one of the Deibold machines. My misgivings have been documented before, and I can see where there could be a problem; the fact that my little voter credit card thing was about as insecure a device as a blank piece of paper did not lend a sense of trust. (You sign a paper, they give you a credit card. You walk to the machine, insert the card, cast your ‘ballot’, and the card pops out. You then hand the card to the dork with the “I Voted” stickers, and who the hell knows where your vote went.)
So, for better or worse, I cast my vote for the guy I believe in. Lord help us all.
Professional. I got an email from the VP of marketing at a T-shirt company this afternoon, with the subject “Looking for creative artist”. Here is the body of the message, verbatim:
If you are interested in doing art please let me know
Now, I don’t have any idea who this guy is, or what it’s like “doing art” for him. Based on my previous experiences with T-shirt companies, there’s no way in hell I’d ever send one a sketch, let alone attempt to do business with one. But this email makes me laugh. My website is reasonably professional; my work is generally good. How does this guy expect I’m going to react to an email this impersonal? I mean, his signature took up more space than the message. Get bent, buddy.
Humor. The quiet lakeside town my parents live in is going through some growing pains lately. Some folks bought a big house across the street from them, decided they didn’t like the layout, and so picked it up and moved it off the property to an open lot, where it’s sat up on blocks for a year. Some snarky individual decided to play a Halloween prank with it this year.
A quick rundown, so I can get some work done: Renie came into town and helped us strip some wallpaper. I designed a tattoo for a friend of ours. Jen finished the dining room painting and we’re almost done with the linen closet. We had about 20 kids for Halloween this year, an increase of 20%. Every muscle in my body aches. That is all.
Smile. Submitted to the Mirror Project last week.