- Walked down to the Farmer’s Market with the girls and the dog, and bought a thick steak for dinner as well as a frozen tri-tip for smoking, along with vegetables and other goodies.
- Knocked out a number of errands around the house, including the attic fan, finishing the refinishing of our coffee table, and assembling my new Father’s Day gift: a Weber charcoal unit.
- Got the brakes bled in the Travelall and then spilled brake fluid all over the driveway (ugh)
- Grilled the steak over charcoal. Paired with parmesan fingerling potatoes and a salad; Mama baked a blueberry cobbler for dessert. YUM
- 7500 steps, about 3.6 miles walked.
I’ve seen a couple attempts at making modern entertainment out of Dungeons & Dragons, which have all failed for various reasons. The main question is: how do you build a relatable, entertaining story out of something that is built out of the individual imagination of each of its players? The whole point of the game is to build worlds in your mind, so most adaptations wind up looking like third-rate cosplay at the Ren Faire. So I was curious about seeing whether the new D&D movie get things right. Having been written and directed by a group of comedy veterans, I would say it mostly does. There are several setpieces that clearly cost millions of dollars, but there are several emotional beats that landed with the craft and feeling of an ABC Afterschool Special. Still, we all enjoyed it, and it was great to see a movie in a theater with my family.
This weekend was my turn for driving down to Lexington Park to visit with Jen’s Dad. We’re all spreading the load out among people so that everyone gets a break, which has been super helpful for everyone’s metal health. I’m pretty much done with the bathroom job so I packed the car with tools to get the Chrysler up and running again. When last I left it, we’d gotten it to turn over and run for a few moments but I hadn’t hooked up the boat tank yet, and then we had to turn out attention to cleaning up the house. I picked up some lunch for the two of us and visited with him for an hour and a half, and then headed out to the garage.
After moving some stuff around I tightened some bolts down on the engine, set up the boat tank, and cranked over the engine a couple of times. The starter sounded sick—much worse than I remember it from last year—so I adjusted some things and squirted more gas down the carb. With no success I looked over the whole thing again and happened to put my palm down on the positive battery cable, which was warm to the touch. It’s really not supposed to feel like that. Knowing there would be no starting that day, I jacked the front of the car up and took the wheels off to look at the drums and shoes, but found that no matter how many times I whacked them with a hammer, I could not remove either brake drum. Having been thwarted there, I got under the car and drained the oil into a catchpan, taking a sample from the middle of the pour to send off to Blackstone for analysis. I put in 2.5 qt. of new oil and made a note to buy more—the Chrysler 440 takes seven quarts—and buttoned up the whole thing for the evening.
New starters aren’t expensive, and I’ve replaced Scout starters multiple times, but this one is a bit more challenging: it’s on the driver’s side under the steering column, next to the manifold dump, and hard metal lines for the transmission cooler and rear brakes are directly underneath it. So I’m going to have to do some careful wiggling under there to replace it. Super.
On Sunday we took it easy. I walked Hazel and put some Scout parts up on Marketplace to try and get them sold this year (Craigslist is a ghost town), then did some grocery shopping. When I got back I had offers on three different items; if I sell one of the windshields this Thursday like I’m planning, I’ll have made back the money I spent on the red truck. The afternoon was spent with the girls doing some errands and then tinkering on the truck in the driveway, trying to soak up as much fresh air as I could before the sun went down.
My father drank beer that would make most alcoholics throw up. I don’t actually remember him drinking beer regularly, but after a workout in black socks with his thousand-pound lawnmower, sitting by the pool on a hot August afternoon, or maybe at a pub with a burger, he’d crack a cold one and enjoy it. At home he didn’t drink that often that I remember, but when he did it was usually something domestic and lousy.
Dad drank Coors with my uncles, and Bud when we were out at a restaurant, but nothing that I remember having any flavor. Growing up I remember seeing a case of Black Label in the basement one six-pack shy. I’ve never seen that particular brand on any shelf in any liquor store in any town I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to some of the sketchiest liquor stores Baltimore City has to offer: the kind where you slide your money through a slot in a inch-thick wall of Lucite at 3 in the morning and hope that the scowling man behind it actually gives you something in return. When I got back from college, after my travels around the world sampling all the beer there was to offer, I looked down upon his choices. Why would he drink such piss? When there were stouts and IPAs and brown lagers and hefeweizens to relish? I didn’t understand. You poor man.
I’m writing this to say that I understand now. It’s become clearer to me why my uncles could down nine Coors Lights on a boat towing us on a raft all afternoon and still drive into town for dinner stone sober; why Dad had that look of satisfaction on his face when, covered in grass clippings and smelling like a draft horse, he would crack a bottle of [defunct regional pisswater] and take that first sip: It tasted like beer, but might have reached 3.5% alcohol by volume. It was like drinking Seven-Up; it was as close to near beer as they made back in the 80’s. It was refreshment.
As I’ve gotten older, I dislike beers that knock me on my ass immediately. I’ve mentioned this before; it’s the reason all my brewing equipment is for sale on Marketplace (still waiting; I think I missed my opportunity at the beginning of COVID) and why I don’t buy heavy craft beers at the store: they taste good but they don’t agree with me anymore. I love the taste but I want to be able to function tomorrow, not feel like I’ve been scraped off Hazel’s paws. I can tell when a beer isn’t going to agree with me almost immediately these days. I get to the third or fourth pull and it feels heavy. I’m not drinking beer to get fucked up, and I’m not drinking it for the vitamins. I want it to be refreshing and light, like I want the second half of my time on this Earth to be—god willing. Plus, fancy craft beer is expensive as hell. It’s great for special occasions, but for a beer with dinner on a random Tuesday, something light and inexpensive will do the trick just fine.
So I’ve stocked the beer fridge with Pacifico, a lovely Mexican lager that goes down smooth and tastes even better with some fresh lime, and my old friend and lover, National Bohemian [see: regional pisswater]. Both are light on alcohol, taste just fine, and most importantly, are refreshing. I can drop one in a YETI and sip on it for an hour, which is how I like to enjoy them—much the same way I drink coffee. I like refreshment. But I’m not mowing the lawn in black socks.
Finn got the wild idea about two weeks ago to have herself a yard sale. In typical fashion, the thought struck her on a Thursday, and she announced her plan to us to hold it the following Saturday. We quickly advised her to put it off a week for both logistical and commercial reasons: the neighborhood across the street was holding their spring yard sale this weekend, and that always gets lots of traffic.
Jen and I started making lists of stuff to drag down from the attic and up from the cellar, and by Friday night we had a sizeable stack of stuff piled on the front porch ready to go. We lucked out with good weather. I ran out to get breakfast and by 8AM we had two tables piled with goods on the front lawn flanked by furniture of all shapes and sizes. We get lots of eyeballs on Frederick Road, so the cars lined the street pretty much all morning. We said goodbye to a lot of toys, kids’ clothes, large furniture, and other stuff; Finn sold a lot of jewelry and some books. I tried to get people interested in the futon frame but nobody would bite. By 11:30 the traffic slowed so we hauled everything inside and counted our earnings: about $175 plus a ton of quarters.
As the sky got dark I went upstairs to roll a second coat of paint in the old blue room and then went down to the basement to rebuild a carburetor for the Travelall. The wind picked up and the rain came down all afternoon. Jen and I watched the first three episodes of the Mandalorian season 3 and then we all hit the hay.
At around 11:30 we heard booming and crackling very close outside, and opened a window to see one of the transformers behind our house alternately exploding in green flame and then barfing hot red lava down the side of the can. As I was looking up the I’m-not-calling-about-a-gas-leak number for BGE, our lights went out. I reported the issue and we went back to bed. In the morning our electricity wasn’t back and the estimates were saying 4PM for a return to power. Jen and I took Hazel for a long walk and then we hit the road in search of a generator.
We’ve had our fair share of electricity outages here at the Lockardugan Estate; in the first ten years we must have lost power five times. It’s been better since they replaced the transformer directly behind us (that one used to explode every time it rained) but we’ve lost an entire fridge and freezer full of food twice in the last ten years, and that shit ain’t cheap. I decided to look for a portable generator/inverter both because I didn’t want another huge object taking up space in the garage, and I also wanted something we might be able to take camping. After visiting two stores we drove to Columbia and found a nice Craftsman 2200W unit (basically a rebadged Generac) to bring home.
On the back lawn all went well until I pulled the “don’t start this without oil” tag off and looked for the manual to tell me where the oil fill was located: there was no manual. Nothing on the side of the box, and nothing on the web page for the model I’d just bought. Noting it was manufactured by Generac, I looked on their site and found what I needed. Once it was full of oil and gas it fired right up and I plugged the fridge in, and it never skipped a beat. So that’s a nice bit of insurance to have out in the garage.
I was in Lexington Park on Saturday to finish grouting my father-in-law’s bathroom floor, get the water hooked up in the sink, and replace the original-to-the-house vent fan, which involved suiting up in Tyvek and crawling around in his hot attic for an hour fighting the wiring. The pipe valves on the supply lines were original to the house so when we hooked up the sink they both immediately started leaking. Being simple compression fittings, this wasn’t surprising, but it also made their replacement with new SharkBite fittings much easier. The bathroom is about 95% complete, which is a relief, and with the end of that project, I’m going to be stepping back from major initiatives two hours away from my house. I think I’m going to refocus on getting the Chrysler started, maybe working a little bit to fix the janky deck on the back of the house, but not taking on huge remodeling projects moving forward.
Sunday morning I primed the walls in the old Blue bedroom to cover a very bright coat of red. The girls had originally picked out a beautiful shade of what we all thought was coral but showed up as a vibrant red that made our eyeballs buzz, so we had to rethink the color. They found a lighter shade containing a little more orange, and I rolled one coat of that on in the afternoon. It’s bright but not as anxious as the red was, so I think we’re going with it. It’ll be good to get the trim painted in there as well; it’s been almost twenty years since it was originally painted and so it’s getting dull and dirty.
Finn has been making noise about organizing a yard sale to generate some cash, which got me thinking about all of the crap I’ve got clogging up the basement: spare bedframes, the old sandblaster, an unused weed whacker, an old handcart, old furniture, unused electronics, and countless untold other items. The yearly community sale is happening next weekend across the street, and it wouldn’t be that hard to set up a table out front to take advantage of the extra traffic; the big issue is the forecast, which was for a solid block of rain but now seems to be moving back towards the evening.
Wow, I didn’t realize it until this morning, but this is the 6,000th post on Idiot Central here. That’s certainly some kind of milestone.
I’m sitting back at my work desk after a long weekend at Mom’s house for Easter, and the view out the window is completely different today. The trees here are just about to bloom, and the grass is growing fast and thick. I’ve been working pretty much nonstop since right after the Christmas break and our office had what they call “rest and relaxation” week, which basically means “we’re not giving you the week off, but don’t send people email or expect to get any response.” I was planning on working through most of the week but didn’t realize how much I needed time away to recharge; I’ve gotten pretty burned out since the beginning of the year. I took a couple of days to work on the truck and then drove up to Mom’s house for our first visit since last year, where Finn and Mom and I basically sat and relaxed and didn’t do much other than eat and sleep. That was lovely, and it was great to sit and visit with her and Renie and Tony.
While I was up there I brought the Yashica large-format camera and set it up on the back porch for some family photos, which we haven’t done in several years; I used my Fuji as a crude light meter to sort out the settings and then ran through a 12-frame roll with the family. I’ve got everything wrapped up in a package to thedarkroom.com for developing; hopefully it all works as advertised and I didn’t fuck anything up.
Mom sent me home with a bike her neighbor dropped off in the garage, something they couldn’t fit in their moving van, and asked me if I wanted it. It’s a Miyata 712 that dates back to 1988, which is actually the same vintage as my Trek road bike, and carries a more complete component set than the Trek (my bike has a mixture of Shimano 105 and Suntour components, while this bike has a complete set of Shimano 105 gear as well as two very nice wheels). The frame is about 3″ too tall for me, so I’ll pull the components off and trash the frame—it’s cracked at the cable routing tubes, which makes the frame worthless anyway.
The church Jen has been attending since Finn was a baby is very progressively Presbyterian, and they’ve been doing a lot of outreach with other churches and religions in the area. They recently organized an Iftar dinner with a local mosque and sent out invitations to the congregation. I haven’t been to church in a long while, as responsibilities and life have gotten in the way (and frankly, I prefer to spend my spare time elsewhere) but we were all intrigued at the idea of fellowship with members of a different religion and learning more about Ramadan.
We got cleaned up and walked across the street before sunset, and sat in the sanctuary while the Imam and our pastor gave a quick overview of Ramadan and Easter, respectively. Then we waited while the muslim congregation got up to fill their plates (as they’d been fasting since sunrise) and followed them in line. They’d set up tables with slips of colored paper next to each plate; this was designed to invite mingling of the two congregations. Jen and Finn found two seats at one table and I split off to another, where I was seated next to a couple and their brother. We listened to the call to prayer and ate delicious food. Our table got along well, and I learned about the country of Turkey, Istanbul, world architecture, and Turkish baklava—which I now prefer miles above Greek baklava—made with incredibly flavorful pistachios. I very much enjoyed our evening and we were some of the last to leave—after helping break tables and chairs down we waddled home and pretty much went right to bed.
On Saturday Jen and I ran some errands in the morning after getting breakfast with the dog, and picked up some new paint for the blue bedroom. That room has been due for a refresh for years now, and the girls picked out a shade of coral to mix things up. I put a quart up on the wall to see how it works, and everything is much brighter in there now. So I’ll finish with the wall color and then repaint all the trim, finally repair a poorly-fitted board on the threshold, and get it ready for new furniture.
Sunday I picked up my brother-in-law and drove down to Lexington Park where we were tasked with getting the bathroom closer to being finished. I brought a new medicine cabinet and light down in the car, and we installed both of those on the wall. I’d sandblasted and painted the original A/C register so we put that back in, finished off the baseplate, installed a new marble threshold, and hooked up the sink supply and drain. Both original valve bodies began leaking almost immediately, so the next time I’m down there I’ll have to replace both of those. But the whole thing is much further along and nearing completion.
It’s been a couple of years since we last had gallettes. I always look forward to Jen making them, but they are admittedly a multi-hour event since a single iron only produces a single gallette every few minutes. They are also known to those from the southwestern PA town as New Year’s Day cakes, and the time investment explains why this is usually a once a year event.
For years Jen has been using the recipe handed down from her grandmother on a stained 3 x 5 notecard, and for years she’s heard from her dad that her Aunt Louise made the best gallettes he ever tasted. Figuring that recipe had died with Aunt Louise and all the other Belgian immigrants from that area, she stuck with the recipe she’d been given.
In the last year, we’ve been through almost every inch of her Dad’s house, from the back corners of the attic to the crawlspace under the floorboards. We’ve probably read through and organized every scrap of paper in the house in an effort to organize his life again. It got so that we could speed-sort envelopes based on their color, weight and size. And the amount of paper we wound up throwing out recycling was immense. Contractor bags full of paper, boxes of books, enough to fill dumpsters—40 years of not just one life lived, but the lives of the whole family. Everything they’d collected and stored and forgotten about. We’ve boxed up the stuff worth keeping and tossed the rest.
So it was with surprise that Jen found a folded, yellowed piece of paper on top of my extension cords as she was putting something into the back of the CRV one day at her dad’s. At first she thought it had fallen out of one of the multiple tool boxes I had packed for the day’s work and nearly ignored it. The door was nearly closed when something told her that paper was worth a second look, so she picked it up to examine it and discovered a recipe for gallettes written in an unfamiliar hand. She knew immediately she’d “found” Aunt Louise’s recipe as given to her by Mrs. Bertiaux, the daughter of one of the original Belgian immigrants brought to the town to work in the glassworks. Jen said she literally looked around behind her to see who could’ve put it there.
Saturday afternoon she followed the new recipe’s increased ingredient list and more complicated instructions to create a fresh batch of galettes. And I’m here to tell you, these gallettes are amazing. So much more flavor, a lighter texture, just incredible all the way around. I’ve been trying not to sneak into the kitchen and eat them all myself, but it’s been very challenging. It’s so good I dusted off my eBay account and set up an alert for another gallette iron so we can do two at a time.
I told Jen I have no idea where that scrap of paper came from or how it got there, but I think it was meant to find its way home to our house.
(thanks to Jen for filling in the details in this post).
My brother in law and I drove down to Bob’s house on Sunday to install a new bathroom vanity, and I was glad for his help. It’s not heavy but it’s bulky, and having two people to get it up the stairs, into the bathroom and over the toilet to fit in the corner was super helpful. 1970’s bathrooms were made for hobbits, I think. We had to return the original sink that had been delivered with a giant chunk broken off the backsplash, and were able to exchange it with another off the shelf. Then we spent most of the rest of the day chasing plumbing fittings down. His house seems to be nonstandard in all the most annoying ways; by the time I had the sizing sorted out it was 5PM and the standard-sized reducer we found to go on the paint waste pipe didn’t fit the P-drain kit we’d bought—which claimed it would fit anything. Good times. So we contented ourselves to cut and fit some kickplate, swapped out the original plug with a GFCI unit, and measured for a new medicine cabinet.
Renie, you will be glad to know I’ve figured out the notification preferences out for my AirTags. There’s a handy little setting to specify not to be notified at certain locations—so I’ve got notifications off for when I leave the AirTags and all my other location-aware devices at home, for example. Down at Bob’s on Sunday, the tag I put in my messenger bag worked exactly as advertised when I left to go to the store. So I’ve got three of them activated and serving different purposes, and I have an idea for the fourth.
For the last three weeks I’ve been battling a weird form of insomnia. For my whole life I’ve been able to go to sleep almost anywhere, and make it the whole night through, even when I’d have to get up to go to the bathroom. But lately I’m waking up at 3, sometimes 4AM and I’m unable to get back to sleep. My mind is off and running, and I’m working through problems and issues from the day and I can’t calm it down to return to sleep. I might doze off and on until Finn’s alarm goes off—this morning I had a pleasant dream where Emma Watson delivered a pizza to our house, and I sat down with her and had a wonderful conversation about shooting the Harry Potter series with her even though I’d never been there or knew her—but more often than not I’m just awake. I don’t drink caffeine after 11AM anymore. I’d spent a good part of the day running up and down Bob’s stairs. The previous day I was on my feet for 14 hours straight. Something is clearly going on with my brain or my metabolism; I just haven’t figured out what.