Hawaiian dinnertime

Friday the girls came to pick me up from the station and we stopped for dinner in scenic Arbutus for Hawaiian barbecue. Arbutus is a two-light burgh next to the train tracks and Route 1, with its own movie theater, a pizza restaurant, three hookah bars, and not much else, so a Hawaiian restaurant is a bit of an outlier. I’d been told it was worth a try, so we gave it a shot. While the ambiance in the dining area was a bit lacking, the food didn’t disappoint, and I’ll definitely go back for their pulled chicken and pork.

Saturday we spent the day chopping and sawing and trimming and pruning. Trees encroach on our gardens, choke out our lawn, and kill our herbs, so we fight back with saw and clippers. I hauled three truckloads of brush to the dump, along with all of the pallets we used to make our mulch piles, the box our grille came in, and multiple bags of yard debris. I hung two of my old Pottery Barn shelves in Finn’s room and started on her light fixture, but started winding down after five or so. After dinner, we got a text from the neighbors to join them in the playground across the street. Originally the plan was to get some dessert, so we put the question to Finn: friends or ice cream. Her reply:

“I have a stronger heart than my love of candy.”

So we let the kids run around until dusk while we sipped beer from Solo cups on the picnic bench. Then we watched them catch fireflies in the backyard until it was way past bedtime.

Playground

My neighbor and I were discussing the large variety of varmints in our yards and he gave me a present, a cardboard tube filled with chemicals designed to make smoke and kill burrowing animals. He’s also convinced me that trapping is too slow and time consuming, and that more direct action is warranted given our situation: our backyard is like the Serengeti, with herds of bunnies migrating through packs of squirrels, accompanied by circling flocks of starlings and ravens and catbirds. So I will buy a pellet gun and lie in wait and kill these invading pests before they eat all of our herbs and Jen’s flowers and dig more holes in our shitty lawn.

Summer toes

Sunday the girls went to church while I got back to work. Finn’s fixture needed some specialty adapters so I hit the store and came back in time for a Farmer’s Market run. Then we got a text from Christi and Glenn about looking at a house on the other side of the beltway, so I drove over and looked at it with them while Finn napped.

After a strategy session with them (it’s a beautiful house), I got the light fixture hung and the lawn edged before stopping to straighten up, and then we had the neighbors over for pizza and beers and more fireflies and grape popsicles and laughing.

Things I didn’t get done today:

  • Kegging the beer
  • Spraying the yard with Cutter insect-kill-um
  • Filling the sandbox with sand
  • Humping baby gear back up into the attic
  • Spraying the driveway with Round-Up
  • Shoring up the playset with some new lumber

Fuck it. The Fourth will be what it will be, and our friends will be here. The house won’t be perfect, and that will be fine.

Date posted: June 29, 2014 | Filed under flickr, friends, house | Leave a Comment »

I so want to do kite aerial photography, but I don’t have $100 to drop on a powerful enough kite yet. I can set up the rest of the gear pretty inexpensively, and with a GoPro tripod adapter, I think I can make some other cool stuff work too…

Date posted: June 27, 2014 | Filed under photography, shortlinks | Leave a Comment »

7 Simple, Cheap Photography Hacks You Should Try Out: DAMMIT, we were just at IKEA last weekend. Now I gotta go find a revolving egg timer.

Date posted: June 27, 2014 | Filed under photography, shortlinks | Leave a Comment »

Well, this sucks: the Supreme Court rules against Aereo. I would have liked a digital TV antenna instead of a cable box. In more upbeat civil liberties news, they ruled that police must obtain a warrant before searching a cell phone.

Date posted: June 25, 2014 | Filed under shortlinks | Leave a Comment »

The Mac Pro I got a few weeks ago was having some reliability issues. I was getting about 18 hours of uptime before it would decide to crash and reboot itself, so I dug around the Console and found that the memory was throwing errors constantly. I put some new memory in this evening and we’ll see how well it performs now. I also dug out a second 2TB drive and filled the last drive slot with it, so there’s a total of 5.5 TB of space on board. Let’s see how fast that 2 fills up.

Update: Uptime is 22 hours and counting, and the scheduled sleep/wake cycle is working.

While I was fooling around with that, I wiped the drive on an old iBook I had and set it up with a clean install of OS 9.2.2 so that I can run legacy software if need be; it was a challenge to dust off the cobwebs in my brain to remember how OS X worked with Classic, and it took some research. At some point maybe I’ll dust off the old hardware and do another laptop lineup.

Laptop lineup

Sadly, all of the laptops in that picture are gone; the Powerbook 100 and the 520 died years ago, the Pismo died after about 10 years of frontline service, and the iBook was sold to help fund a 17″ MacBook Pro.

Date posted: June 24, 2014 | Filed under apple, geek | Leave a Comment »

Minus swingarm

I got tired of dealing with a swingarm that performed no function, so I broke down and pulled it off this afternoon. I had to disassemble part of the tailgate to get the license plate wire run back up to the OEM light, but once that got sorted out the rest went easy. Up until I tested the light, which doesn’t work. It was fine when I disconnected it a few years ago, so it could be the bulb is dead, or the socket isn’t grounded properly, but I ran out of time to test it. I may have to break down and buy a new one from Super Scout Specialists later in the summer.

→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.

Date posted: June 22, 2014 | Filed under Bumper, Scout | Comments Off on Minus Swingarm

Because the garden on the right side of the house turned out looking so good, we figured we’d try to get the left side done by the fourth. Or, at least, straightened up to where it doesn’t look like it was used for machine gun practice. We started out by lifting and hauling all of the concrete from the sidewalk to the side of the driveway. That took most of the morning, and after lunch we went out for two loads of topsoil to fill the channel. Between the Scout and the CR-V we hauled a half a ton of dirt back to the house in three trips.

IMG_0021

IMG_0022

Tomorrow, I’ll go back out and fill the rest of the channel with the dirt we brought in, and then we can start making the left side look as good as the right.

IMG_0025

Date posted: June 21, 2014 | Filed under flickr, house | Leave a Comment »

I think, if I had the choice, and I could choose any Ferrari to own, I’d choose the one the Ferrari snobs look down on: the 246 GTS Dino. This guy, apparently, restores them to an incredible level of detail.

Date posted: June 21, 2014 | Filed under cars, shortlinks | Leave a Comment »

Holy shit. Rian Johnson will be writing and directing the next two Star Wars movies. This is good news. Brick is a fantastic movie, and I started watching Looper on the train back from New York—I liked what I saw. The Verge has a great recap of his work for sampling.

Date posted: June 20, 2014 | Filed under geek, shortlinks | Leave a Comment »

IMG_0291

Mama found this little fellow last weekend in the greenhouse, where he had crawled up under a flowerpot for a long dirt nap. I threw some batteries in an old Canon point and shoot with a macro lens and took a bunch of shots before she moved him. It’s amazing how the skeleton is still bound together with tissue and intact; Finn was fascinated to see the structure and asked to save it so she could bring it to school. Hopefully they appreciate nature in her new Kindergarten classroom.

Date posted: June 19, 2014 | Filed under flickr | Leave a Comment »