By now you may know that Jen’s Mom, who has been battling various forms of cancer for the better part of a decade, is in pretty rough shape in the ICU. She went in for another round of chemo a few days ago and what was supposed to be a slow decent into side-effect hell turned out to be an express train. Throw some love down L-P City way, and hope for the best.
Wow. My cube neighbor Tim picked up a copy of Doom3 last night, and a whole group of people crowded around his machine to look at it before we left work. The game is absolutely beautiful. It’s terrifying fun—think of the movie Aliens, and you’re inside that environment. The setting is perfectly realized, the lighting is absolutely intense, and then attention to detail is stunning. If I had a good PC, I’d consider buying a copy, but I don’t have anything near the system requirements.
How to be creative. Yeah, I know, some of it is common sense, but some of it is good reality-check content. Keep the dream alive, my friends.
We’re back from the lake. The trip was blessedly cool, calm, and refreshing, but way too short. We spent Friday previewing the Route 90 Sale north of my parents’ house, where Jen and I picked up a pair of 30’s era New York license plates and an old-time folding ruler. (A brief explanation: The Route 90 Sale is a yearly communal yard sale where everybody along the road empties their basements, attics, and storage sheds onto the front lawn, hoping someone will buy something. It’s become a Central New York State tradition, bringing throngs of rubbernecking dealers, tourists, rednecks, and space aliens into the area to rifle through piles of junk.)
Saturday we helped my family set up tables in front of the house, and then hit the road for an afternoon of picking through glassware, toys, glassware, old clothes, glassware, and junk. We actually made out alright in some departments—for a grand total of about $25, we picked up a wheelbarrow, seeder, cordless weed whacker, three milk glass vases, and a red glass “exit” sign. (There would be pictures linked right about here, but it rained off and on all day.) Saturday evening my folks hosted a very informal barbecue on the porch where we got to visit with a bunch of family and tell stories, which is always a highlight of any visit.
Sunday we helped set up the ½-price sale and set out for Baltimore. Halfway out of the county we spied two wooden bedframes on the side of the road and picked them both up for $30—antique sizes which don’t quite fit a full and are too big for a twin. We’ll have to do some finagling with them to make them work.
Meanwhile, somewhere below Wilkes-Barre, we started noticing people lined up on highway overpasses as we traveled south, waving at cars. Further down the road, we saw people lining the onramps and clogging the rest areas, sitting contentedly on lawn chairs facing the road. After some discussion, Jen correctly guessed that there was a NASCAR event nearby and that the locals, who had nothing better to do, were waving at the team trucks as they drove out of the state to the next event.
Dear People of the State of Pennsylvannia:
I have to drive through your huge, boring state to get to my parents’ house. Could you please get off your beer-drinking, NASCAR-watching asses and fix your damn roads? I mean, seriously, there are potholes large enough to swallow my Jeep up there. We cross the state line from New York and it’s like we’ve driven straight into Beirut. And, not to notpick on you here, but when you do work on them, could you do it quickly? there’s a stretch of I-83 that’s been “under construction” since Eisenhower, and the Jersey-wall bobsled hamster cage thing is getting old.
Love, Bill.
My Monday drawing class was nothing to write about, but last night’s session went off a lot better.
On Tuesday evening, I finished cleaning up the inside of the linen closet in the upstairs hall. When we moved in, it was filled with creaky, overpainted wooden shelves and the obligatory wire rack screwed to the back of the door (I think the good Doctor bought these in bulk.) I stripped everything and pulled the wallpaper out to find uneven, cracked plaster walls over a crudely sawn hole in the floor—for plumbing access. After we had Ben hook up the wiring I installed this spring, we threw a bunch of blankets in there on top of a tupperware and forgot about the whole thing. Because of the rain this past two weeks, I’ve been able to tackle some of the interior projects, and I finally got around to mudding and taping the interior of the closet. It’s amazing how much better the first skim coat makes it look, even if it’s still not dry—gotta love 90% humidity. Strange house quirk #74: At one time, the inside of the closet door was painted metallic silver. Yeah, you heard right. Then again, these are the folks that put carpet over linoleum over the hardwood floors…
Tonight Jen and I are driving north to see my family for the weekend. I’m looking forward to some recharge time by the lake, and I hope the weather is kinder up there than it’s been down here. We’re bringing the Holy Box Of Wedding Photos for them to see, as well as the second half of my Dad’s ladder, which I’ve been holding hostage for three years. If I don’t post anything here in the next couple of days, enjoy your weekend, friends.
‘Birfday to you,
‘Birfday to you,
‘Birfday dear Renie,
‘Birfday to you.
(actually, it’s tomorrow, but she won’t read this on Saturday.)
Yet Another Geek Update. It turns out that error correction is only available in the DVD-R format (that little minus sign is the important part) and I was using DVD+R. So today I picked up a couple of DVD-R discs today to rip the iDVD movie I’ve got prepared for the slide show tomorrow night. I also re-encoded a bunch of movies I shot with the camera and included them on the disc; I’m excited to see how the whole thing turns out.
It’s looking like another intensive painting weekend is in the cards for me. The weather is supposed to be upper 80’s, and hopefully the humidity will stay down below 40%. I’m going to try to get the back side of the house done, which includes the funky area by the atrium, and a bit of ladderwork around the power/telephone cabling. If it goes as smoothly as the side did, I should be able to punch most of it out by Saturday evening (primer and paint.) Wish me luck.
You may have read over on my dear fiancee’s blog about her mother reminding Jen that it’s not too late to back out of this little wedding thing we’re planning. While I’m thankful that she’s so concerned for her daughter’s well-being, I’m still trying to recall the reasons we decided against eloping. Jesus Fucking Christ. Maybe we can get on the plane to Italy tonight…?
Last night I copied some code from somebody else’s site and added the Google search down there on the left, so if you’re so inclined, you can plug in funny words and see if they show up on bill dugan dot com. (Much handier than leafing through months of log entries to look for that one link…)
Random Fun Links. For all those folks who are too scared to actually live in the city. (via the morning news) Fix your Pismo. (via slashdot)
daffodils and sky, 4.19.04
With a small flourish, and little fanfare, Ben the electrician threw the breakers on three of the bedrooms Saturday afternoon. Now hooked in to the main panel are the pink, blue, and office rooms, as well as the linen closet in the hall. I can’t tell you how happy this makes us. There were a few moments of worry when the pink room’s breaker kept blowing (I had nightmare visions of ripping out half the baseboards to find a nail had shredded the wire), but Ben traced it down to a pinched connection in one of the boxes. A nicer guy you could not ask for—he did a great job.
Meanwhile, Jen spent the better part of the weekend herding family all over creation, putting about a thousand miles on her car in ten hours. Thankfully, all three sisters have now been fitted for their dresses, the bridal gown is in for alterations, the veil situation has been addressed, and everybody made their plane home.
Other highlights of the weekend include a trip to Mango Grove on Friday night, a garden in full bloom for the whole weekend, a visit from Dave, 80° weather, and a peaceful Sunday night in front of Kill Bill with fresh guacamole and vodka tonics.
Jen has been running all over creation this weekend in preparation for the wedding. Her sisters have been air-dropping in like the Special Forces since Thursday, getting their bridesmaid’s dresses fitted and altered, which is not unlike keeping control of a flock of third-grade students—their attention span is about as long. Hopefully, all will go well this morning, they will say their goodbyes, and she will be able to sit quietly in the backyard with a tall vodka tonic.
Meanwhile, I’m preparing for Ben the electrician, who will be hooking up all four thousand of the outlets I installed upstairs and wiring them into the panel. If all goes well, by lunchtime we’ll have electricity in three of the four bedrooms. This afternoon, depending on how my neck feels, I’m planning on resurrecting the lawnmower and taking a swipe at our yard, which looks like a science experiment gone wrong.
My wonderful fianceé did a good turn and helped her mother buy a plane ticket to Florida last week. Considering we live about ten minutes from the dropoff lane of the airport, it makes sense to put her up at our house for an 8:30am departure, and drop her off at the gate. No problem. She arrived yesterday morning and settled in on the couch with five happy cats to keep her company while we went to work.
I returned home with the groceries to find a familiar but unwelcome car parked out front. it turned out that the prodigal daughter knew her mother was staying with us and decided to ‘just drop by’. Given the case history there, Jen and I are about as comfortable having her in our house as we are with elective brain surgery. I invited her to stay for dinner, figuring that it was better to keep her under watch than let her leave with our stereo in her trunk. Jen got home a little while after I did, and when she looked at me, her eyes had the “Oh my (expletive, expletive, expletive) God, who let her in here?” look. Followed closely by a look that spelled H-O-T-W-H-I-T-E-D-E-A-T-H, something that lowers the temperature of surrounding counties by twenty degrees.
We sat and had a peaceful, quiet dinner, and she left after helping her mom do the dishes. As far as we can tell, everything is still where it should be, and no blood was shed. But we decided that’s the last time she sets foot in our house without us being there.
Todd will appreciate this link: Jay-Zeezer: The Black and Blue Album. It’s not too bad, actually.
Monterrey (thx again pop), 3.16.04
Hello, It’s You. (Part 2.) A few years ago, I was lucky enough to meet a wonderful woman who
shared a number of things in common with me. We would sit and write
to each other during work, and I found myself constantly waiting for
her next email. She wrote long, insightful messages laced with wit,
hard-knock experience, and cutting sarcasm which intrigued me.
Luckily, she later became my girlfriend, and then my fiancee. Now
that I get to see her every day, and we don’t work for the same
permissive internet startup anymore, our emails have become more
succinct and matter-of-fact. I miss her writing, though, and I often
wish we were back in that VC-funded Eden where lunchbreaks lasted
three hours, candy was free, and we had eight hours a day to write
what we couldn’t say.
She’s been secretly blogging on the down-low for a while now, and
after a tumultuous year with Blogspot, she bought a subscription to
Typepad. She’s been writing there off and on for about a month now,
and recently decided to come out into the open. Please welcome Jen
into our online circle of friends. |
As much as I would love one of these to drag around behind the Scout, the price is just a little steep for my blood. Also, check out this link: Mocoloco—yummy industrial design to warm the heart and empty the pocketbook.
settlement check
Update: Jen called me on the way back from the printer to tell me the invitations came out looking pretty good. Even though she told the printer three times which direction to run the job on the paper, they still f’d up the RSVP card, but considering we’re getting the job run for free, we can deal with it.
This weekend we’re heading down to the L-P City to take in the Hollywood Volunteer Fireman’s Stuffed Ham & Oyster dinner (a peculiar southern Maryland delicacy which sounds gross but is actually delicious) and put in some face-time with Jen’s folks. Hopefully some more bridesmaid issues will be resolved and peace will reign over the land, but I’m going to be wearing my steel underpants just in case.
We’re also taking delivery of a used 400mhz G4 tower from our friend Jason, who has taken mercy on us with a generous payment schedule in light of our soon-to-be tight budget. I’m hopeful that Jen will find new employment quickly— it sounds like the local market is a lot busier than last summer, which was deader than Abe Lincoln.
Today I looked at a free comment service called HaloScan and signed up for a membership. It seems to be pretty easy to use; the code is clean and doesn’t muck anything up on the page, so I’m going to test it out over the next few weeks to see how I like it. So let me hear what you think, people! If I write something stupid on here, tell me about it. If I write something good, let me know. You’ll see a small ‘Comment’ link at the end of a post if I’m interested in hearing feedback—but I probably won’t be adding one for each.
Fambly. This Christmas my Mom asked me if I could scan and retouch a picture for her; in a story involving a Coach purse, some guilt, a picture frame, and an anniversary, she’s hoping I can take a beat-up Polaroid of my late grandfather and clean it up to the point where we get some new prints made. I scanned the picture in at 400dpi, cleaned and sharpened it, and looked at the results. The resolution was not up to snuff, so I rescanned at 800dpi and enlarged by 200%, hoping the extra information would be enough to extrapolate good pixels from bad. This time I got better results, and I’m almost done cleaning to the point of cropping. (Mom, I’m going with the one you don’t favor, because your father is actually smiling in this one.) Once I’m done, I’m going to import it into iPhoto and send out for prints, probably tonight.
I don’t have a whole lot of information about my biological grandfather, only short anecdotal stories; I know that he was a stonemason his whole life, supporting his family at a very early age, and he built his own house. He had big hands, and played the piano. He didn’t like having his picture taken, which is why this is a big deal. He died a month before I was born. Maybe my Mom will write me with some more information about him that I can share here.
Oh, Well. The ice storm that was supposed to shut the mid-atlantic area down never materialized; it’s raining outside but of course they shut every school system down within a 100-mile radius. I’m considering home schooling for our future children, because it seems that the local public school systems will cancel classes for a strong breeze. Jen and I were hunkered down last night rubbing our rabbits’ feet, hoping we could make some inclement weather happen; she was hoping for a day to catch up on sleep and I was looking forward to a solid day to concentrate upstairs. As it was, she was asleep by 10:15 and I got a bunch of drywall installed in the Blue room. It’s going to be a long slog to repair the plaster, because it’s been beaten on enough that it’s brittle, but I think the Pink room will go a lot quicker—the plaster in there came off a lot cleaner.
I have not seen one bottle of Pepsi in this area featuring this promotion. I’d drink yer damn Pepsi if I could just find a bottle.