That’s water coming out of those taps! The plumbing under the sink is 95% complete; both drains are assembled and functional. The left side drain has a slow leak I need to sort out, but both are working. All of the drawer pulls are now installed, so we can actually open and close the cabinets, and I told Jen we’re OK to start moving stuff from the hallway linen closet into the new bathroom. I stained both of the thresholds and put them in place, and when I go to the cabinet dealer this week to pick up two pieces of trim I can knock off some more of the little elements that are left on the to-do list.
When we had Sam, our landscaping guy, do the drains out back, we had him level off the slope while he was out there, and when he was done he seeded it all. That seed developed into lush green grass, and in the last week it suddenly shot up six inches into a thick jungle in the middle of the lawn. I fired up our lawnmower on Saturday morning and slowly chopped it back down, eventually moving three heavy wheelbarrows of clippings to the mulch pile out back. It makes a huge difference out there, and I’m looking forward to having him seed and cultivate the rest of the lawn to match. Now if the dog would just stop digging holes everywhere…
I also used the second half of the afternoon to organize the garage, which had become a dumping ground and forgotten since September or so. Now that the old compressor is out from under the workbench, I decided to reclaim some of that lost space and installed a shelf underneath, which helps with a lot of the stuff that was floating around on the floor. I lifted a bunch of larger elements up into the rafters, reorganized the far wall, and made a better place for the compressor and refrigerator to live.
A giant box was delivered via FedEx on Friday, containing a kit with everything I’d need to digitize slides. I ordered the baseline gear required: a Nikon D500, a 40mm macro lens, and the slide carrier kit, and set it up in the den on Friday night to start fooling around with it.
In about five minutes I was oriented with the camera and set up live view with the viewfinder, but on the first night I stuck with autofocus to see how good it would be. The results were OK; I’d say about one half of what I shot was in clear focus, but the other half was not. The color varies from slide to slide, mostly because Dad was switching film stock pretty regularly—the Kodachrome stuff is rich and clear, some of the Fuji is washed out or shifts to yellow/green on the color wheel, and there are other nonbranded film stocks that veer towards muddy grays and blues.
This makes processing it challenging, because my intent is to always bring each photo back to a normal white balance and exposure—and with Dad shooting a manual camera, the exposure could be all over the place. It’s amazing what kinds of detail I can pull out of a dark slide transfer when it’s shot in RAW format; I’ve been able to resurrect some shots that would ordinarily be past saving. In the 80’s, before he bought a newer Minolta, he was having problems with the light meter on his Konica, and I remember him grumbling about some of the slides we got back before he got it fixed. And, his insistence on either using a giant blinding light bar or facing subjects directly into the sun messed up some otherwise good pictures.
Sharpness is also a challenge, so last night I switched to shooting using manual focus and Live View on the camera to zoom in and correct the shot before hitting the shutter. This resulted in better, clearer pictures, and they were much sharper that was I was getting applying software fixes in post processing. The shots are all 20MP in size, which gives me plenty of data to clean up dust and scratches—and some of these are in rough shape.
I’ve made it through four carousels and a binder so far. I’d estimate that’s about 600 slides of an estimated 4,000, and I’m going to redo half of the 600 now that I’ve got a better focusing system in place. I have to adjust the lighting as well—I’ve got a better, brighter photo bulb I can use to bring out more detail.
“Dr. Redfield,” she said, “you don’t need to do any work to ‘operationalize.’ You need to make a commitment to the American people so they come in to get tested. You can operationalize the payment structure tomorrow.”
And with that, the doctor waved a white flag.
“I think you’re an excellent questioner,” he said, “so my answer is yes.”
“Excellent,” Porter responded. “Everybody in America hear that? You are eligible to go get tested for coronavirus and have that covered regardless of insurance.”
Rep. Katie Porter grilled the head of the Centers for Disease Control until he agreed to provide free Coronavirus testing for all Americans. This shit happened yesterday and the first time I’m seeing it appear anywhere in the mainstream news is this morning. Instead, I had to read about how they shut down pro basketball and that Tom Hanks has the virus. Of course, there’s no word on how that free testing will actually happen; Trump disbanded the NSC’s global health security team two years ago, and the CDC has been pretty fucking useless to this point.
Mainstream news is still our only check against an increasingly amoral and unequal government, but they are blowing it. And while our elected representatives have our best interests in mind for roughly 3% of their day, it’s somewhat heartwarming to know there are still a few out there fighting for us.
As of this afternoon, there’s one reported case of Coronavirus in Baltimore County. They cancelled the St. Patrick’s Day parade in town. I’m working from home indefinitely. Maryland is shutting schools down for two weeks beginning Monday, which means we will be dealing with a bored, lonely daughter who does not understand the meaning of the word QUARANTINE but knows exactly where all the emo anime cartoons are on Netflix.
I’m also scheduled for a cancer checkup on the 23rd, so I’ve contacted the hospital to find out what my best course of action should be. They moved the oncology center into its own building two years ago, so my chances of coming into contact with infected patients is lower than it would have been, but I’d really like to avoid this.
Working from home has been pretty seamless so far. We’re using a mixture of technologies to videoconference—Skype for Business, Zoom, Slack, and Teams. SfB is a giant steaming pile of shit, but to its credit we had a conference this morning with 80+ people connected and it worked pretty well. It spins up the CPU on my MacBook like a jet engine and sometimes the audio kicks in and out, but it didn’t crash. Zoom works much better but I don’t trust the company after their shitty software opened a backdoor to malware last year. Slack is slick and the sound is 100% better than SfB but it only works amongst the people in your channels. And I used Teams with my CTO last week and it looked and sounded great—something I never would have expected from that company.
Because the work I do is spread out amongst many groups, vendors, and internal clients, I have to manage many different channels of communication on a daily basis. There’s email, where many things go to die in my inbox. I have a WRI Gmail address because I can’t stand Sharepoint, which is Microsoft’s asinine answer to Google Docs. There’s Skype, which has a chat function several people in my company use, but I don’t leave running because it’s a CPU hog. My team and several others use Slack, which just works, and is full of animated Simpsons gifs. We use Asana for project management, which has the ability to send email alerts. There’s Basecamp, another project management system which several vendors use, that also triggers email alerts. The company is going to move to Microsoft Teams and away from Skype for Business, which is good because SfB is, as mentioned above, shit, but bad because Slack works just fine.
As a result I’ve been scrambling to keep up with all of the ongoing projects, requests, and responsibilities all filed haphazardly across ten different software environments. Ten years ago I used to bitch about email, but these days, if that was the only place I needed to go to stay in communication and find the things I needed, I’d piss myself with happiness.
Sink fixtures are in place upstairs, but the hardware I bought to connect the drain to the wall pipe didn’t reach. On the way back from Sylvan Finn and I bought some extra hardware to make that happen over the weekend. Once the drain pipes are sorted out I can hook up the water leads, and we’ll have working sinks up there.
Seen on the way to snowboarding last week: Darth Maul really wants me to pray on the subject of facial tattoos and long-haul trucking, apparently.
Thus begins Day Three of self-imposed quarantine at home. Normally I would pooh-pooh the hand waving and sensationalist headlines and continue on with life as normal, but because my blood cell counts are still below normal we’re not taking any chances. We’re stocked up on perishable goods and supplies for a two-week shut in, but we’ll wait and see how long this thing drags on. WRI has been awesome in supporting our individual decisions on remote work, and I’ve been making ample use of teleconferencing software to join meetings. I’m also trying to get the Annual Report laid out between meetings, which is much easier to do when I’m not at my desk and being pulled away for this or that.
PetaPixel just ran an article about digitizing slides and film with the Nikon adapter I’ve been looking at, and it got me to thinking: I’m trapped at home, what better time to try this out? I’m not going to shoot all 4,000 of the slides we’ve got, but I know 1 in 4 are probably worth digitizing. So I set up a rental for a 7-day span starting over the weekend to get to work.
Among other errands, we went to Lowe’s and Home Depot this weekend to scout out hardware for the bathroom. It took two trips to find faucets we liked, and we bought several different pulls before we settled on the ones that worked best in the space. I was able to get a bunch of them installed before I had to kick off for the day, and I’m really happy with how they’re looking. The countertop installers are coming back out tomorrow afternoon to drill holes for the faucets, and then I can put the drains together and hook up water.
Here it is, your 2020 Minnesota State High School All Hockey Hair Team. So much salad. For reference: 2019, 2018, 2017, and 2016. Magnificent.
The installation folks showed up on Friday morning and put in two counters in the bathroom that match the seat and ledge in the shower, and it looks fantastic so far. We chose white round undermount bowls for the sinks, and due to some scheduling mixups we didn’t have the faucets purchased, so we’re looking at those and they’ll come back out next week to drill the holes. Then it should be a not-so-simple matter of setting up the drains (I’m not looking forward to that bit of under-counter gymnastics) and hooking up the water supply, and we’ll be able to use everything in there.
Finley and I took a drive into Baltimore to hit the MICA Bookstore for some art supplies in the afternoon. She was making linoleum cuts in art class at at school and decided she wanted to make a T-shirt design of her own, so we needed to find clean linoleum to work with. I figured I’d look and see what kind of scratchboard supplies they still carried, as it’s been forever since I’ve picked up the pen and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much I miss it, and whether I could get similar results from an iPad Pro. The store is in a building directly across the street from my first Baltimore apartment, and I told Finley that my roommate and I used to throw frisbee in the parking lot (and under passing buses on Mt. Royal Avenue) out in front of it.
We found her supplies quickly and then split up to check out the rest of the store. I found scratchboard in the back, manufactured by a different company (I used to use Essdee exclusively, this is made by Ampersand), picked up some new nibs, and then found Finn a pin in the student goods section. Then I took her on a quick tour of the neighborhood and showed her some of my old apartments.
At home we set up a craft work area at the dining room table and she worked on her design for the rest of the afternoon while I tested out the scratchboard. I wasn’t going to overthink things so I just transferred a picture of the truck and started working with it, and found that I really like it. It has a good feel—the last few sheets of Essdee I used had a harder surface, harder to work with, and didn’t make clean marks. This cut cleanly and felt good under the nib, and after a lot of initial hesitation (oh, I remember that feeling clearly) I started to work out what I was doing and lost myself in the image. We broke for dinner after a test print of her design, and when we were done I pulled out my silkscreen inks and we printed her design on a blank shirt, then ran off several Scout shirts for Brian. (Linda, I still owe you several shirts).
I sold my old compressor on Saturday afternoon, and made back 75% of the money I spent on the new one. While we were out for some supplies in the morning I picked up fittings, hose, and a water filter, and installed them while I was waiting for the guy to show up. It’s going to take some serious reorganization, but when I’m done I think the garage will be much easier to use.
I’ve been on a Stephen King binge for the last two weeks after watching It: Chapter Two, which involved reading the book over again and listening to a companion podcast that discusses the book by section. It was one of his books I enjoyed the most, and it’s been decades since I read it last. There’s so much I appreciate about his style of storytelling, and apart from the problematic section toward the end, the story is as good as I remember. Listening to the podcast was a fun way to dive deeper and think about stuff I hadn’t considered when I was reading it (the perfect introvert’s book club, really).
The movie was better than the reviews would have made us believe; I don’t know who was complaining about the length or the lack of scares, but I could have stood for another half hour (or honestly, if they’d blown this out to a 6- or 8-episode Netflix series, which would have captured all of the detail better). The casting was spot-on, except, I think, for James MacAvoy, who I like, but wasn’t Bill Denbrough in my mind.
Petapixel had an article on a Kickstarter project that’s building a tiny light meter for film cameras, small enough to clip into the hotshoe and stay out of the way, while providing immediate info for shooting. It’s a little under $100 at the time of writing, but I think I’m going to keep an eye on it for the future—this would be exceptionally handy to have.
I’ve been promising both Finn and Zachary we’d go snowboarding for two years now. Last year was a bust for a couple of different reasons, but I wanted to make good on it so they didn’t think I was a complete loser. I planned out a Tuesday night dropoff with Karean so we could hit the road early on Wednesday and be at the slopes by 10. In a rare display of foresight, I prebought the tickets online and downloaded rental forms so that they’d be pre-filled when we walked in to the shop.
Our drive up was uneventful, and we were in the parking lot by 10:10. At 10:30 we were sitting on benches in the rental barn putting on boots and zipping up snowpants. They issued us boards and we walked out to the bunny slope to wait for our instructor, an amiable fellow whose name I forgot, who ended every sentence with “Word.” Nobody else was there, so we had Word all to ourselves, and he took us up the Magic Carpet to the halfway point on the bunny slope and he showed the kids the basics. Finn has been through this twice but still hadn’t mastered stopping without falling, so we worked on that while Word helped Zachary get his basics down.
We moseyed to the bottom of the hill and then climbed on the chair lift to the top of the bunny slope, and wade our way down from the top again. I let Word work with Zachary while I tried to get Finn to stay upright, and she began to get real frustrated. At the point where our patience for each other was running out, Word and I switched and I asked him to help her with stopping. By the time we all made it down the mountain, she was stopping in complete control and Zachary was in control of his board.
We agreed to stop and get some lunch, so we thanked Word and headed into the lodge. After they downed a pizza and a burger they were ready to hit the hill again. We used the magic carpet for the rest of the day (I didn’t want to leave one of them to ride the chair lift alone) and Finn did three runs on her own without falling down once, practicing her stopping on her heel edge. I helped Zachary with his control and we worked on braking as well.
Finley, whose outright fear of the Magic Carpet kept us from riding it the entire second half of our last trip, was so confident in herself that she rode it alone several times, as did Zachary. We stayed out on the bunny slope for two and a half hours, practicing our control, and I showed Finn how to turn into her right foot and brake on her toe side.
By 3:30 we were all a little tired, and Zachary had fallen on his butt one too many times, so we packed up our stuff and headed home.
There was a point in the day where I was sitting on the slope in the sunshine, watching the two of them push off and glide down the hill, turning into the board or away from it, pushing out with their feet, and stopping upright, smiles on their faces, and it about made my heart explode with pride and joy for the both of them. And I was glad to be here, on this earth, under that warm sun, with a body that still works, strapped to a board so that I could stand on two feet and glide down behind them and tell them how fucking good they were doing.