We took Uberbike out on her maiden voyage this evening in search of ice cream. Apart from some wobbling on startup and an occasional wander brought on by her top-heavy orientation, the bike and new seat did very well. Finn seemed to enjoy her vantage point from the rear, and tolerated her new helmet better than I’d hoped. Plus, there was ice cream!
There is no heatwave that can stand up to a bowl of fresh guacamole, a cold Corona, and a tub of cool water to play in. Mama will post pictures today, hopefully.
I was up until 2 last night working on drawings for the 9-5 gig, so I’m dragging ass today.
So apparently the child bike seat we got for free is still usable, but there seems to be a conspiracy among manufacturers to make their installation as difficult as possible. I’ve been up to Loch Raven twice in the last two weeks to measure out the rack that goes along with the seat, but I left without it because I was under the mistaken impression it would not fit. It turns out I was orienting the rack backwards and not fastening it to the seat the right way. So I have to go back (none of the shops near my office our our house carry the rack) at some point over the weekend to try one last time.
Sounds like the stock market took a scary dip yesterday, based on fears that Spain is heading the way of Greece and Portugal may not be far behind. NPR did a great piece on the problems Spain is facing, which was an eye-opener, as well as the issues Italy is dealing with in order to prop up its own crumbly finances. My question is this: Does anyone in Europe (besides Germany) pay their income taxes? Fuck’s sake, people.
Jen’s potatoes seem to be growing out-of-control crazy, which meant I needed to hit the Home Depot for more vegetable dirt. While I was in the garden section, a young couple was very earnestly asking one of the employees if bees are harmful to plants.
I’ll repeat that.
They were asking if bees were harmful to plants. Apparently there were a lot of bees flying around their flowers, and they were concerned that something might be wrong.
It’s enough to make me want to move to a survivalist compound out in the midwest somewhere so that we can teach Finn what to do when our society of ignorant morons collapses around itself.
Wow, what a busy weekend. I feel, this morning, like somebody beat me up with a baseball bat. That’s not to say it wasn’t a great weekend—in fact, it was fantastic. Saturday was our sixth wedding anniversary, and in a rare display of forward thinking, I had a day of fun planned for my bride. Finn and I woke at our usual time, went out on a hike for food, and then returned home to Mama to share breakfast. We then spent some family time in the backyard working in the garden and assembling our new adirondack chairs before Aunt Christi arrived to take over babycare duties.
Jen and I then drove out to Lisbon to have some tasty lunch at the Towne Grill (fantastic smoked barbecue and sweet potato fries, YUM) before exploring Sun Nurseries for landscaping and gardening ideas. You may laugh at our romantic idea of alone time, but it was some of the best time I’ve spent alone with her in ages. It’s also nice to carry on a conversation without interruption for more than five minutes.
In the late afternoon, we had dinner reservations downtown at Cinghale, Cindy Wolf’s newest restaurant, which is billed as authentic country-style Italian and feels open and friendly inside. Taking the opportunity to dress up like adults, we ordered cocktails, selected from the Presto Fizzo menu and had a sommelier pair a light chianti for the meal. Everything was superb, from the service to the food, and if you go, we recommend the duck.
After dinner, we had tickets to an evening with Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert at the Hippodrome theater, where we sat in an audience filled with adoring foodies and listened to the two chefs talk about food, the restaurant business, fame, and famous people. I liked Bourdain before—I’ve caught his show a couple of times over the years—but having heard him talk I think we may seek his programs a bit more in the future. (I have a general dislike for cooking shows, mainly because I can’t taste the food myself, but I like the format of No Reservations, which is a mixture of essay, travelogue, and restaurant review).
After the show we walked through the lobby, where tables were arranged with all manner of different food for tasting; as it was only 10PM, we got a drink at the bar and sampled some chocolate before meeting up with some new acquaintances of Jen’s from her yoga class. It was about this time that a woman stopped over to check our wrists for armbands… apparently there was a more expensive ticket offered which included the tasting and a meet-and-greet with the chefs that we were not invited to, so she bounced us! I guess there’s nothing like a little lawbreaking to spice up an anniversary.
Sunday morning I cruised over the Bay Bridge to wrench on trucks with Mr. Scout, who is so tantalizingly close to being finished with his project he can taste it. During the course of the afternoon, we got the passenger’s door hardware completely installed (the driver’s side regulator was broken), chased down a bad wire in the temperature gauge, mounted the license plate holder and light, mounted the Tuffy console, and a myriad of other small things I can’t remember. We even fired it up and took it for a brief spin down the block, which was fantastic! He plied us with delicious tuna steaks and homebrew, but I somehow dragged myself away to boogie home in time for the LOST finale.
Overall, I was happy with the way they wrapped things up. I don’t share the hate some people have expressed for the final church theme, and I liked how they explained the flash-sideways construct in relation to the whole mythos of the show. Each of the sideways awakenings were handled pretty well (Juliet/Sawyer was really good, as well as Claire/Charlie), and I was happy to see characters from the first seasons come back one last time. The final sequence was good too; I liked how Vincent came back to be with Jack at the very end to close the circle. It’s not often I invest heavily in a TV program, and I’ve had my moments of doubt with LOST over the years, but I’m sad to see this one end.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Last night, while watching the second-to-last episode of LOST, I decided to tear into my MacBook Pro to replace the LVDS cable: the wire that sends pretty much all of the signal to the LCD display, and what I suspect is the root cause of the issues with the lower half of the screen disappearing for the last five months or so. I found one available online for $12 last week, and figured that $12 was cheaper than $1,200 for a new MacBook, which is what I’ve been mulling over for a few months now.
Because I wasn’t able to find the exact service manual or take apart directions for the model A1151 17″ MBP, I got stumped by removal of the clutch cover, and no amount of searching at 11PM revealed anything that would help. So I reassembled the case and rebooted, which went fine, but upon logging in I found the trackpad button had become extremely sensitive, to the point of being unusable. So I’m back to considering a replacement, which is not a happy thought.
At this point, I think I’d keep the MBP on my desk at home and get something more portable, like a standard MacBook, for carting back and forth to the office. As much as I love a 17″ display, I don’t use it enough at work as a hardcore workstation to justify the extra $1,000.
I’m currently listening to a 9-year-old album by Ivy called Long Distance, which is slightly uptempo chilled francophile pop (does that make sense?) I also have the new album by Delorean on heavy rotation, which is good; I’ve been sick of all the music I have for months now, so I like having some options.
And, quickly: last night’s LOST was…good, I guess. Rushed, to be sure. I think they’re trying to wrap up two seasons’ worth of explanations and story arcs and mythos in one abbreviated season, and a lot of the action feels forced and tossed-off to me. I wasn’t expecting a “very special episode” dedicated to Jin and Sun, but their departure (while in keeping with the “rules” of the show, as explained last night) was pretty quick. I’d developed an attachment to certain characters over the last six years, and so having more than one of them disappear quickly has been a bit jarring. While I’m glad the writers didn’t resort to maudlin half-hour goodbyes, it would have been nice to get just a little more time with folks, especially since they’ve all hiked across the island seventeen zillion times just to meet up with each other.
Saturday morning, I let Finn talk quietly to herself in her crib while I snuck downstairs and got her breakfast together. Weekends are my days to wake with her while Jen sleeps, and she knows the routine well enough now that when I’m the one who opens the door, she’ll whisper, “Mama seepin” and stay quiet all the way down the stairs. While she ate her breakfast, I sipped coffee and planned out our route based on the yard sale signs that appeared Friday evening. After she’d finished and we changed her diaper, I dropped her in the backpack and we slipped out the door.
The first one was right around the corner, and it was the best of the day. For $11, I found a tricycle with a training handle, and three Melissa & Doug puzzles in fantastic shape. We ran them back home and then continued on into town for breakfast, stopping off at four more sales along the way. There were some interesting items and some total crap, but nothing we really needed, so we picked up food and turned for home. By the time we got back, an hour had passed and Mama was awake, so we sat together and enjoyed a quiet morning before the day got started.
Finn is getting more and more comfortable in the pool as the weeks go by. She tried jumping into my arms from the edge of the pool last week, and it’s now one of her favorite things to do. We try to stay in the water as much as possible, though, because they have the place chilled down to arctic temperatures for some unknown reason. Usually by the end of the session, she’s shivering even as she’s laughing, so we try to bundle her up into the locker room as quickly as possible. We’re actually going to look into switching facilities for that reason, because we don’t want to give up on swimming with her.
She passed out so completely on the car ride home that I had to scoop her up like a linguini noodle and pour her into bed without any lunch. While she slept, I joined Jen and we cleaned the house like a couple of tornadoes straightening up everything in sight for our dinner guests: S. and D., whom we haven’t seen in ages. They were kind enough to bring over a metric ton of awesome sushi, so we started pouring stoli & tonics and dug in. Finn stayed awake long enough to eat two full meals: a standard Finn dinner and an entire plateful of kid-safe sushi (cooked and vegetarian choices). After she went to sleep, we stayed up and almost killed the bottle. Thanks for a great evening, guys!
Sunday morning Finn and I repeated our quiet ritual and snuck out right at eight, hiking into town under a big umbrella to stay out of the drizzle. After picking up breakfast, we took the long way home, waiting for rainclouds to give way to blue skies. Finn chattered in my ear the whole way, making sure to say “seeyoulaterbyebye” to fire trucks, concrete trucks, pickup trucks, dogs, people, planes, flowers, and every person walking the other way. We took a new route and explored a whole area of the ‘Ville I’ve never really noticed, which was interesting.
At 11, after breakfast, we walked down to the center of Catonsville to take in the first day of the weekend Farmer’s Market with our friends J. and A., and we were pleasantly surprised by the amount of people who were there and the amount of people we knew. It was enough that for the first time, I actually felt like we were part of the community and not just people who owned a house in the neighborhood. The market itself was smaller than the weekday version, but with the turnout they had, I’m sure it’s going to grow quickly. We visited with friends, took in the stands, and picked up a wide assortment of sundries: A bison delmonico steak, six tomato seedlings (and one zucchini), a pound of organic strawberries, and one chocolate-on-chocolate gourmet cupcake.
With the new motor installed
In the afternoon, while Finn napped, we split up to attack different projects: Jen worked in the garden to plant seedlings and finish the back beds, and I started pulling the headliner out of the Saturn to get the sunroof closed. Following the directions I’d found online, I got the entire thing disassembled and down within about twenty minutes. Before I continued to page three, where it said pull eight bolts and remove the entire sunroof assembly, I decided, in a rare and uncharacteristic moment of intelligence, to plug the spare motor I’d pulled from the junkyard into the switch to see if it worked. To my surprise, it did—so I bolted it into place and closed the sunroof. At that point it was a simple matter to clip the headliner back up and bolt everything back into place.
After the tracks were down but before the glass went back in
Pleased with my success, I hurried to get everything cleaned up, then ran inside to give the newly-woken girl a snack, strapped her in the car, and hustled up 695 to the bike store to look at helmets and rear panniers before they closed for the evening. We wound up talking to the manager of the store, who was very helpful, and ordered a 1-3 y.o. helmet for the girl as well as a wicker and leather basket for the front of the tandem. We’ll have to return the pannier I bought—the whole point is that we got a free child’s bike seat at a yard sale that’s designed to snap onto a metal pannier, but the way this is constructed it won’t go on completely. So, back to the store I’ll go. (I found it hard not to be thinking about upgrades to my other two bikes while we were there, but we’ve got to get Mama something to ride first).
Dinner was quiet and delicious: leftover sushi and a garden salad, followed by our cupcake, split three ways. Finn has also learned how to clink glasses for a toast, drink a bit, then put her cup down and say, “Ahhh.”
When it was time to lay down, we wrassled on the bed in her room and made her giggle by kissing and tickling and zerberts, and then read a book until her eyes got heavy. She repeated, “Iluboo” as we closed the door and then quietly murmured herself off to sleep.
