My intention was to get a ton of stuff done this weekend: Do my grading, bottle some beer, brew another batch, fix the leaky keg in the kegerator, put the soft top on the Scout, maybe make a recycling run. Of all that, I got my grading 95% complete. The rest of the weekend was kind of a lazy wash.
Our third yard sale morning was somewhat beneficial. Finn and I got up late Saturday morning, wolfed down some breakfast, and hit the east side of town where a couple of community sales were happening. We came upon a man with some hand tools for sale, and I passed up all but three Craftsman metric wrenches because the sockets he had were all duplicates of ones I’ve got. Further down the road we came upon an unused smoker for $20, which I snapped up quickly, and Finn found a tiny luggage key and some good books for herself.
The pickings were pretty slim up the road, so we headed back home and farted around in the yard for a while. Then I stopped over to Finn’s old daycare to finish up training on the website I built for them back in October. After returning home for a shower and a shave, we picked up sushi and beer and went to visit Bear Gebler and his parents to get our baby on. NOM NOM NOM GIVE ME BABY TO HOLD. He was sacked out when we got there, slept through dinner, woke up to pee, had some milk, and promptly passed right back out again. Nice to see you, kid.
Sunday I got up and started work formulating a complicated spreadsheet to sort out my grading, which made no sense until my second cup of coffee. Then I went back and looked over my students’ midterm work and grades, compared it to their final work, factored in attendance and completion, and got my final numbers in order. With a few small exceptions I think it fits with what I was expecting very closely.
I’ve become a shoe guy. There, I’ve said it. I’m not Imelda Marcos with that shit, but I like to have a good classic pair of brown and black shoes for work. I’ve had a brown pair of Dr. Marten 1461’s since 1997 that I’ll never part with. I bought them with my ex at Nordstroms, and spent a lot of money on them, but they’re the original Made in England Docs, and they were made for my feet the day I tried them on. Those are the kind of shoes I like.
I’ve needed a black pair of casual dress shoes for forever; I also need another brown shoe to mix things up. And the trick has been finding something I like. I’ve been buying and returning black semi casual shoes from Zappos since the end of March, with no success. I started with Börn, which looked good online but wore like barges in person. Then a pair of Steve Maddens, which felt like I’d strapped cramped wooden blocks to my feet. Then I tried two styles of pricy Fryes, which looked great but suffered from crepe soles, which are made of snot and apparently turn black with age. For $250, snotty black shoes? No thanks.
With that backstory, we headed down to DSW to return a pair of shoes I’d bought last weekend which turned out to be torturously small in practice (how can that be when I tried them on at 4:30PM?). This was my second attempt at Steve Maddens–never again, no matter how lovely they look. Today I found Penguins, which feel great and look about the way I want them to. Unfortunately, they were out of black. So I got dark brown to replace a pair of $40 Target chukka boots I’ve worn the soles out of. (While I was there I tried a pair of Clark’s desert boots on, and OH MY GOD what crap shoes those were. I felt like I was lacing two sides of misshapen buffalo hide to my feet. What the fuck is that?) I then found another pair of casual dress shoes in the Clearance section for peanuts, so I grabbed those while I was at it; they’re a deep brown and could pass for black until I can find black. Who knew it was so hard to find the right shoe?
Having a little fun with a GoPro and the U-Haul I rented last weekend. There’s no sound, because it’s just wind noise.
This goofy guy is my grandfather, William Dugan Jr. I share a couple of things with him besides my name, my physique, and my DNA. His name is Bill, but I have always known him as Grampy.
He was born in April of 1915, the same month as Muddy Waters and Billie Holiday. Woodrow Wilson was the the President of the United States. The Allies were landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula in one of the largest and most useless campaigns of the First World War. Charlie Chaplin had just released The Tramp. A month later, the Lusitania would be sunk off the Irish coast, helping focus America’s attention on the war in Europe.
He married my grandmother, Ruth, in 1938, and shortly afterwards my father was born. The worried looking baby he’s holding in this picture is most likely my Dad.
The notes I have on this photo say it was taken in Jersey City. They lived there until 1953 before buying a run-down farm in Upstate New York.
After moving the family north, he supported them by driving across the state each Sunday night to be in New York City by Monday morning, painting houses and hanging wallpaper through the week, and leaving for home Friday evening. Then he would spend all weekend working on the house, adding insulation and central plumbing.
This series of photos is from a larger group that I scanned in 2006. I borrowed a video camera from a friend and filmed my grandfather talking about and identifying all of the people in these pictures before he forgot who they were and the information was lost forever. I have the footage (the original MiniDV tapes are in our fireproof safe) and keep meaning to organize and catalog it all, but work, child, and life have made it difficult to finish the project.
He’s going to be 100 years old tomorrow. Until just a few years ago, he was living in his own house, in complete control of his own faculties. At last count, he has eight children, eighteen grandchildren, and seventeen great grandchildren. I’m not even half his age, and I can’t imagine experiencing all the things he has in the span of his life.
This is the Grampy I remember. A pair of loud shorts, those thick glasses, and a white undershirt. And dogs. Always dogs. I think the shepherd in the front might be Pumpkin, but I could be off by a decade.
I’m not positive, but I think this one dates back to 1974 at my aunt Mary’s wedding. That’s some tuxedo he’s rocking.
This is from a family reunion sometime in the mid-80’s. There are other better shots from this series, but I like the informal candidness of this picture.
This is from about 2000, with his brother Tom.
We’re going to have a celebration for him tomorrow and on Saturday, and a bunch of the family is coming into town. I can’t think of anything better to say other than that I love this guy and I’m proud to share his name. Happy birthday, Grampy.
As you might have guessed from my pictures, the weekend was short on work and long on fun. We were invited to a backyard barbecue on Friday night, where food was eaten, drinks were drank, and Christmas trees were burned in spectacular fashion. Saturday we made a quick morning run to the store for more mulch and then jetted off to an afternoon backyard party. That evening we took in a showing of Epic in the neighbors’ yard, where we all filled up on movie candy and tried to stay warm; after the first half-hour I had Finn nestled on my lap sharing her Jujyfruit and Twizzlers.
Sunday was more relaxed, with a stop at church, a haircut for me, and then a steel band recital for the ladies in the afternoon. I puttered around in the garage to stay out of the wind. The tree service I called last week finally came out to estimate the cedar and greenhouse treeline, which came in about $250 less than I had budgeted for. Next I’ve got to price out a hauling service who can remove all the concrete next to the drive.
Amazon has been offering “unlimited” photo storage through their Prime account for a while, but for some reason I haven’t noticed it until today. I’m a little unclear as to what “unlimited” means–I think it tops out at 1TB, which is a lot of space, but, then, we have a lot of photos and video files. I’m doing a test upload of images from work today, and I’ll see what kind of options it has for organization–so far the interface looks pretty basic, and I like to organize by YYYY/MM so that I know where to start looking (when you shoot digital seriously, it’s easy to flip the counter on filenames, which means there are multiple instances of IMG_4453.jpg over the years). There is a Cloud Drive app available, which is nice, and apparently there is a way to automatically sync photos taken with iPhones to the service. More info on this as I get it.
Update: I’ve uploaded everything from 1999-2005 so far, about ~19GB of data. Amazon uploads work best through Chrome, which supports folder structures. Because a lot of the file and EXIF structures have been written and rewritten (or processed out), a lot of the early photos get categorized by their modification date, which means there’s stuff from 1999 showing up in 2014. But, it’s offsite, which is nice; now I have to do some testing with recovery and download.
I bought those lenses the other night; the price was too good to pass up. They’re not top-of-the-line metal bayonet mount lenses, but for the price they were a bargain. I did a little finagling here at work and took possession of a spare Nikon D80 body with a battery charger, so when I go north in April I’m going to bring my Dad an entry-level DSLR kit to replace his ancient Coolpix 4500. He was the one who got me into photography back in the day, and bought me my first SLR for college. I’m hoping he’ll enjoy an upgrade to something more flexible and powerful.
This year, I was on it. Three weeks ago, I started contacting babysitters to see if anyone could watch Finn for us, and I struck out everywhere. I decided fuck it, I’d make dinner for my girls and we’d share Valentine’s Day together, and they seemed happy with that. I hit the store this morning and got caught up in the pre-Valentine/pre-snow rush, but made it out with the fixings for Shrimp Creole and some brownies. At home, I worked on the Scout a little bit, worked on cleaning up the basement a little bit, and took the dishwasher apart to clean out the drain. Then I got to cooking. Usually my attempts at cooking are panicky and uncoordinated. I have problems getting everything on the table at the same time in the correct order, and I leave chaos in the kitchen. Tonight went smoothly, and everything timed perfectly. After setting the table and uncorking some alcohol-free wine, I lit candles and served the ladies while gentle snow fell outside. Finn was excited to drink wine with us and even more when I brought out brownies decorated with hearts in red sparkly icing. I can’t remember a better Valentine’s Day.
This is an awesome bit of brand elevation:
