After finally taking the time to listen to Jen, I pulled the top six shelves down out of the pantry and replaced them with deeper versions spaced further apart. Instead of spending lots of cash on new lumber, I recycled the shelves from the doctor’s exam room out on the porch, kicking off the process of remodeling that space. (strange factoid: the exam room was wallpapered with a fox hunting pattern at one point. Very, very strange.)
The original version of the pantry didn’t allow enough room for multiple stacked items, and the shelves were too shallow to hold more than a can and a half of food. The new shelves are double the depth and have two extra inches of height, so they should be able to hold anything we can think of.
Life After People, History Channel, 9PM Monday the 21st. This stuff has fascinated me for years. I know where I’ll be Monday night.
This commercial has been on for a couple of weeks now, and I am so totally considering paying $45 a head just to go bear witness to the awesomeness that is Shawn Anthony.
It’s playing across the street from the Mount Royal Tavern. Jen and I could go there before the show, get bombed, and take in the show.
Or, we could just catch his juggling act at the Ren Faire this summer.
(Check him falling out of the shower at 0:30. Jen laughs every time.)
The only things we bought last week at the DC Big Flea were very, very small. Jen stopped at a vendor who had vast plastic trays of postcards arranged on a table, categorized by location, and her eagle eye found the county my parents live in almost immediately. She picked up a small sheaf of cards and two immediately caught her attention: the church across the street from my parents’ house, and a shot of Main street in their town.
Lousy camerphone image, sorry
The helpful vendor dated them for us sometime between 1901 and 1908, when they were known as “souvenir cards”. At that time the USPS still prohibited private companies from calling them post cards, and the sender could only include a short message on the front side. In 1908 the prohibition was struck down, and anyone could publish post cards with the familiar divided back.
These two were printed in Germany, a sign of their quality, and have the location printed in script on the front (I’ve removed it to protect the innocent). At the time, it cost one US Cent to mail.
I would give anything to go back in time to turn the camera about 120° to the left for a shot of my folks’ house.
How to write a novel in two months. Handy reference for a project that’s been zinging around in my brain for years now.
Looks like I’m cleared for takeoff on a new iPhone…no new updates to the hardware, just software additions for the time being. I kind of figured they’d wait until fall to refresh it, but I wanted to be sure.
I had my first guitar lesson last Tuesday, and it was pretty humbling how much seven years of instrumental training I’ve forgotten. High school music is not a professional education, no matter how good the program (ours was pretty damn good) so I was always able to get by on a minimum of practice and a very good ear, no matter how my teachers lectured me. Plus, renting and transporting a full-size bass violin is not a simple matter, so if I was playing it was at school.
Still, I thought I should have retained more of my theory and reading ability. My teacher patiently ran through the basics with me again, and I had to stop myself from trying to be a know-it-all before I’d even started working with him. We talked about what I wanted to get out of lessons, and after first telling him I wanted to shred like Eddie Van Halen, I told him I’d be happy to learn chords and passable rhythm guitar. He told me to make a CD of some songs I wanted to learn and we’d work on them in turn, so I put together a playlist on my iPod this evening to start.
In no particular order:
| The Eagles | Peaceful Easy Feeling | I have the Eagles Anthology guitar book, so this is a no-brainer. |
| The Dandy Warhols | Boys Better | I have loved the chord progression in this song forever. |
| Weezer | The World Has Turned and Left Me Here | Again, a great chord progression. |
| Wilco | Kamera | I don’t listen to Wilco a lot, but I do like this song. |
| U2 | Until the End of the World | I figured I should try at least one U2 song. |
| The La’s | There She Goes | A classic, and a solid rhythm part too. |
| R.E.M. | Texarkana | Can’t go wrong with REM. |
| R.E.M. | Radio Free Europe | Another good REM tune, and it’s a pretty simple chord progression. |
| The Stone Roses | Love Spreads | Love me some Stone Roses. |
| Sixpence None The Richer | Kiss Me | A beautiful acoustic song |
| The Cars | Just What I Needed | Oh, hell yes. |
| Stone Temple Pilots | Interstate Love Song | I love playing this on bass, and it’s full of meaty power chords. |
| The Sundays> | Here’s Where The Story Ends | pretty one-note, now that I listen to it |
| Matthew Sweet | Girlfriend | As much as I’d like to play the lead on this, I’ll be happy to learn the rhythm. |
| The Rolling Stones | Gimme Shelter | I need to learn some Stones, and this is my favorite tune. |
| The White Stripes | Fell In Love With A Girl | This is like Punk 101—guitar and drums. |
| The The | Dogs Of Lust | Eventually I’d like to learn this whole album. |
| The Police | De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da | This may be difficult, but I want to try it. |
| Neil Young and Crazy Horse | Cinnamon Girl | More meaty power chords. |
So far, I’ve got my muscle memory trained for the basic A, G, E and D chords, and I’m working on transitioning between them all fluidly. The D chord is a disaster for my meaty fingertips, like a game of Twister with the lights out, but I’ve got it down where there’s no more buzz on the frets. This evening I worked out the first verses of Boys Better and got the chord changes almost clean—except for that damn D chord. The fingertips on my left hand have a satisfying callous and a pronounced divot.
My bride and I have a history of antiquing together. The first time I asked her out was to take a trip up to Frederick to go warehouse digging (this was before all the warehouses got turned into lofts and good, inexpensive antiques were still somewhat available). I found that we gravitated towards a lot of the same things and that our tastes in design and history were very compatible. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and later, a beautiful marriage.
So when she told me about the DC Big Flea, I was immediately interested. We dragged ourselves out of bed and got on the road as early as we could to get the “good stuff”, whatever that might be. Having never been before, we weren’t sure what to expect, but it turned out to be much better than the average local junk markets found around here. We found huge selections of furniture, pottery, collectibles and other stuff jammed into two large convention halls, stuffed to the gills with shoppers and surrounded by filled parking lots. We took a couple of hours to browse the aisles, but didn’t find anything we needed—but lots of stuff we wanted.
Flea markets like this can be overwhelming and numbing after a while, because of the sheer amount of stuff to look at. Every once in a while, something stood out among the clutter. For example: sitting upon one table was a beautiful pressed metal touring car, long and lean, designed with curves and lines from a quarter century ago. But what caught our eyes was the matching bubble trailer behind it, something that looks more like a spaceship from the era of Flash Gordon. The long nose of the car hints at a big V-12 growling under the hood, while the front windows of the trailer remind me of the Rocketeer’s helmet, a collection of curves unique to the era.
Of course, the price was prohibitive, but I was able to snap a couple of quick shots of it before moving on.
