Jen reminded me the other day that this is the year anniversary of our move to the new house. To celebrate, I’m going to share some information with you about greenhouses that I collected last night while trying to hunt down replacement sheeting plastic. Here’s a link to 3 mil greenhouse plastic sold by the roll, which would be cheap and easy to install for the winter. Here’s another link for 4-year 6 mil plastic. Then I got to thinking about overwintering our plants and retaining the heat, so I looked into dual-wall polycarbonate sheeting | link 2 , which would take a lot more work to install (and a lot more money to buy and ship.) All this leads me to the subject of sustainable growing, something I’d love to be able to accomplish—install solar panels, collect energy, and heat the greenhouse without using outside electricity. I found a few articles on sustainable greenhouse farming. And, of course, some articles from the fringe. All of this is food for thought.
Parking Lot. Nate hosted a showing of Heavy Metal Parking Lot in his cube yesterday, and I spent the rest of the day reliving my high school days curled in the fetal position under my desk. No, I didn’t wear acid-washed jeans or Scorpions concert T-shirts, but I lived in a town full of metal-lovin’ burnouts just like the folks in this movie. Seeing the crowds of shirtless, scraggly delinquents leaning against their Novas chugging Natural Light brought me back to the confusing, illogical years between sophomore and senior year. (We had moved from a very WASPish town in Conneticut to a blue-collar town over the border in New York. The distance between the two towns, geographically only miles, could have been universes in my experience.) This was a town which, before the current boom in building, was still in the sticks, scant years beyond rolling pastureland. A town where, after the roller rink was closed (mercifully only a year or two before we moved there), the evening’s entertainment consisted of drinking and driving to the 7-11 for more beer, then hanging out in the parking lot and waiting to hear about the nearest kegger. Where the local Barney Fifes were during all this, I’ll never know.
As the member of a small, persecuted minority, I lived a pretty quiet existence, preferring to live in the fringes than invite ridicule, scorn, and pain upon my skinny body. I remember overhearing earnest, serious discussions at the lunch table over who was more “Metal”—arguing the merits of guitar speed or vocalist (usually Hammett vs. Tipton or Halford vs. Ozzy, ending with a sentence like, “Duuude, Priest RUUUUUULLEES!” punctuated with the Holy Metal Horn Salute); being threatened with bodily harm because of the Police and R.E.M. stickers on my binder cover; laughing under my breath at the gaggle of burnouts huffing Marlboros under the roofed “smoking lounge” outside the band room door; and, upon spying a magazine titled “Metal and Leather”, featuring the singer of Judas Priest, knowing the score with that dude immediately.
I can now look back on those days and laugh, because not only were most of the burnouts skinnier and in worse shape than I, but because I’ve run into some of them since those days and they haven’t changed. I’ve been through Glen Burnie—where several of the HMPL subjects called home—and they still have that same Monte Carlo. Up on blocks in their parents’ front yard. My irrational fear of them was unfounded—it would have been easier for some of them to finish a full year of school than to beat my ass. (Understand: I was 125 lbs. fully clothed in high school, so the spectre of iminent beat-down hung heavy over my head at all times.) Luckily, I got out of there and went to art school, where that group of antisocial wackos got switched with a whole new bunch. But that’s a different story. Interesting side notes: the ‘featured subjects’ in HMPL are from the suburban towns in and around Baltimore, and the only thing worse than a burnout with a proto-Brooklyn accent is a burnout with a heavy Maryland accent. Words cannot describe.
BGE can bite my skinny Irish ass. What should have taken two weeks to do, tops (consolidating two electrical meters into one, and merging two bills) has taken 11 months, four turn-off notices, four seperate promises by different CSR’s, and one bottle of Pepto-Bismol. And it’s still not done.
Tell Us A Story. Given the tons of feedback I’ve gotten around here lately, and the haphazard posting most of my online peeps have been doing, I’m going to guess you’re all having loads more fun than I am this summer. Or, your computers have crashed. Or, I’m just very dull. Well, here’s a story for you, based on a call I got from Jen yesterday about some new freelance work. She asked if I’d be interested in doing some PowerPoint for her current freelance employers.
Rewind to the spring of 2000, when I was employed at a now defunct dot-com. We were still in the rosy pre-crash days, when IPO’s were exploding across the financial pages and we all entertained thoughts of buying Ferraris with our stock options. I got called into the marketing VP’s office to look at several thick stacks of color printouts on his table.
Him: So, what do you think of these?
Me: (paging through what were obviously PowerPoint presentations) They suck. Boy, do they suck.
And damn, did they suck. Some had the slickee-boy sheen of “consulting firm” all over them—glossy, shiny graphs and charts peppered with New-Economy speak touting ROI and Time-To-Market and Synergy. Others had the beaten feel of “in-house design department”, where the dull colors swallowed dull titles set in Times New Roman, the Font Face For Desktop Publishers. It was all incomprehensible gibberish to me, and unfortunately I’d have an up close and personal relationship with it for the next four months. This was the Roadshow: a week-long caravan from city to city, organized by the underwriters to sell the IPO at the highest possible price. The PowerPoint was the glue that held the whole presentation together, and it needed to be perfect.
Him: You can do better than these, right?
Me: (still being the Good Corporate Employee) Sure!
Him: Can you make PowerPoint?
Me: (wincing at the idiocy of that sentence) Sure! (lies.)
Thus began a descent into Hell, where my life became one bar chart after another, punctuated with paragraphs of twaddle pulled from the pages of Business 2.0 and Upside magazine. I had to figure out how to fit thirty company logos into a page with a bar chart and a paragraph of text, while also making our company logo (teal green and magenta, just lovely) larger. Because the program’s charting software was so ugly, I built everything in Illustrator and imported the clean graphs. I edited and rewrote their sloppy paragraphs. I rebuilt corporate logos when I was given 30×60 pixel GIF files from the web. My job became a daily routine of tweaking, changing and modifying graphs and charts at the whim of two senior VPs, and soon I was stuck in the middle of an ego contest, creating different versions of the same slide for each person while they flung poo at each other.
I got pretty good at “making PowerPoint”, though. I also got pretty good at drinking heavily when I left work. But somewhere along the way, the stories of jetting via private plane from city to city for the roadshow gave way to anxious glancing at E-Trade accounts as the market began to tank. Sometime late that fall the plans for our IPO were scrapped, and the project died on the vine. The three IBM laptops I purchased for the roadshow sat idle in my desk drawer. As we watched the economic news get worse, I began thinking of an exit strategy, and by December I was gone. Luckily, I went to a firm where PowerPoint wasn’t on my list of projects.
Back to the present day: We’re recently married, seriously planning children, and attempting to fix everything we possibly can before the little bundles of joy start appearing on our bank statements. We’re also paying off the honeymoon, eyeing a leaky roof, and waiting for a dishwasher to materialize in our kitchen. Can I make PowerPoint? You bet your ass I can.
I spent a few long weekends last year fixing the ceiling in the sticky room and repairing the damage in the office from leaks in the roof. I enjoy working overhead about as much as I enjoy needles in my eyes—sanding a ceiling is about as hateful a job as can be imagined. So it was to my dismay that Jen pointed out the growing stains in the ceiling over her bed in the sticky room; after ignoring it for months, I finally crawled up there to find evidence of water leaks down the beams onto the insulation—nothing drastic, but water is water. Our previous experience with roofing repair consisted of several tar-stained rednecks trying to convince me to let them pull all the slate off and replace it with asphalt shingle. So today I hunted around the internet (the Yellow Pages lists nothing for “Slate Roofing”) for local shingle contractors, and found several, as well as a link to the Slate Roof bible. I left estimate requests with four companies in Baltimore, and hopefully I’ll get some replies in a few days. More on this subject to come.
More Nekkid People. Drawing went pretty well last night. I was able to slip back into the groove after having been away for a year, which made me feel good. Each drawing had its high points, but I don’t think I got one solid sketch from the whole night.
Generally, I start from the head as a reference point—the first thing they tell you not to do in drawing class—and work from there. Resolving the head correctly usually helps me tie the rest of the structure of the drawing together. My drawing style tends towards the draftsmanlike, not sketching—it’s more challenging to describe the form with line weight and simple shading than it is to use ten lines to hint at where the form should be. Using one definitive line forces me to explore the reason and shape of the form.
The neighborhood has changed a lot and not at all. 1500 Mt. Royal Ave. looks much as it did on the day my Mom and I pulled a rented station wagon up to the curb filled with all my college crap. The Fox building, of course has changed, and the old rest home is now student housing, but the streets of Bolton Hill remain little changed since my tenure there.
They finally put air conditioners—window units—in the drawing rooms of the Fox building. It’s so much nicer to concentrate not on your own stinking body but that of the model you’re attempting to draw. The proctor usually brings in tolerable music to listen to, which is a small miracle. Sometimes it’s Ella Fitzgerald, sometimes it’s Louis Armstrong, sometimes it’s Billie Holiday. Today it’s a mixture of slow jazz standards and Gershwin, but I find it hard to draw to Rhapsody in Blue. (Given all the time changes, it’s more of a painting-type composition.) iPods are definitely mandatory, considering the guy next to me mumbled along with the chorus of every song.
A year ago this evening, I took the most beautiful woman in the world to dinner on a warm spring night in Georgia. We had wonderful food, sipping cocktails together, and the rest of the world faded from view. Walking home through the historic district, we passed through misty, tree-lined squares, holding hands and laughing quietly to ourselves. Crossing through Madison Square, I took advantage of the magical night and asked her to marry me. Luckily, she said yes.
Insta-Storm-Tracker-Central. Last night the NBC weather dork claimed it would be 88° and sunny; this morning the one good digital camera, but the other one is pretty lousy and therefore not worth taking with us. Jen has a very nice Nikon SLR, I have my trusty Minolta X-700, and we sat on the couch last night wondering if we should go buy a pile of T-Max and take one of the SLR’s with us. The complicating factor is the arrival of a freelance check in our mailbox today, which means I could spend some time hunting down and buying her a good midlevel digital camera… time I don’t have at this point. (In a perfect world, we’d get something like this and start investing in lenses, but…)
Update: We’re taking Jen’s SLR with us and investigating the option of ditching our return flight in Paris to stay an extra day or three. Stay tuned.
Update Update: flying coach one-way from Paris to Baltimore, with all the connecting flights included, is prohibitively expensive ($1,200+/ea) and nullifies out any extra cash we have—and that’s not including any kind of lodging. Anybody have any ideas out there?
(in the tradition of Miss Lis‘ Thursday Three):
Make a list of common albums that every one of your girl/boyfriends owned.
For example, every one of my previous girlfriends owned these albums:
Tears For Fears, Songs From The Big Chair
Sinead O’Connor, The Lion And The Cobra
Tracy Chapman, that album with “Fast Car”
New Order, at least one album (usually Republic)
Peter Gabriel, So
U2, The Joshua Tree
Your list?
Take That, Pop Music. Mogwai, Mogwai Fear Satan. Goddamn, this is good stuff.
Reality Check. On the five-page questionaire the vet sent home with Jen, for Penn’s checkup, there’s a list of four or five questions towards the end, which go something like this:
- I am concerned about my animal’s behavior, but do not want to do anything about it.
- I am concerned about my animal’s behavior, and want to try something about it, but don’t care what happens either way (I’m paraphrasing here.)
- I’m concerned about my animal’s behavior, and want to try something; if it doesn’t work, I’m going to try something else, but I won’t give up my animal.
- I’m concerned, and if the treatment doesn’t work, I want to euthanize my animal.
Penn is a good cat at heart, but I had to check the final box. I’m no animal killer, nor PETA member, but I can’t have him hurting the other cats any more. Especially when it looks like he’s doing simply for our attention.
I went to have some bloodwork done this morning for a diagnosis (as well as a checkup—what is my cholesterol level, anyhow?) after, uh, avoiding it for a few days. I have what phlebotomists call a “dream arm”: thin and full of juicy veins close to the surface. I also have an inordinate fear of needles. Spiders, rats, bugs, gunk, blood (other people’s, mostly)—no problem. Show me a needle, and I get squirrelly. Heights above three stories and anything to do with the eye round out my trio of personal fears, but anything involving cold steel poking into my veins completely freaks me out. (Which is kind of funny, because I’ll work the whole day with a splinter sticking out of my hand, or a bloody gash, but I don’t get with the needles.) Which begs the question: What’s your worst fear? Add a comment below.
Anyhow, I left a warm caffeinated cup of pee and got blood drawn for the docs to run their tests on without passing out (about three years ago an older doctor took about a gallon of blood out of me, and I went down like a drunken prizefighter) and ran out of the building clutching my arm, happy to have it over with. We’ll see what the results say in a few days.
This is interesting news from California. Guess what other state currently uses Deibold voting machines? That’s right. Think it’s going to have any effect on voting in Maryland? I doubt it.
Housekeeping. Last night I added a list of links to the upper right there for the iTunes music store with a bunch of stuff I keep meaning to buy but don’t have the money for. I figure I’ll leave them there where they can’t get away.
Opening this website may send you back thirty years or so, to the age when public television was the place you could plop your kid in front of for an hour and expect him or her to learn Spanish with no fear of commercial shills. The opening sound totally brought me back in time, and I expect it’ll do the same for most of you—make sure you have speakers/headphones on. (via boing boing)
Another awesome link, and one that I will abuse when I have discretionary income again: American Science and Surplus. I need a surplus radiation detector. I need a collection of Pyrex beakers. I need a 90 VDC 15-amp motor.
Here’s a link to a do-it-yourself steadicam project—for $14 you can build a pretty professional camera stabilization rig and shoot DV like the pros. (via boing boing)
Whiplash. So much for moving furniture today. My neck, which was giving me aches and pains yesterday, feels like it’s going to give way completely and let the rest of my head fall off the back of my shoulders. This morning we moved the doctor’s oak desk, one file cabinet, and my IKEA table into the office before Jen (the Voice Of Reason) told me we were stopping. I don’t know what I did to myself, or why it feels so friggin’ bad right now, but I can’t turn my head in any direction without the sensation of having a ballpeen hammer hitting directly on my spine. Just great.
Flashback. One year ago today, I was on a boat bobbing in the Bahamas, diving on coral reefs for a project at work that has since been cancelled and will most likely never come back.
Today marks the beginning of the fourth year of this humble weblog. Three years ago I sat down at my desk in Washington, and, without a project to work on, wrote a brief entry about coats. Who would have known just how different life would be since then?
I posted a new picture of the office this morning. It doesn’t look all that different, but you’ll see a dramatic change in another week or so when the trim gets painted and the walls get a finish coat.
We may have a photographer for our little party in May—a friend recommended a friend whose portfolio looks very good. The decision has not been made final, but I think it would be money well spent, even if we have to put some stuff in hock to afford it.
Saturday we made about a zillion wedding-related calls, and got no callbacks (except for one email from the photographer, who we probably won’t be able to afford anyway), so we ran out to pick up paper for the invitations (which look damn good, thanks to my fiancée ) and then back to clean the house for the Big Watosh, who came up to get fitted for his tuxedo. We had a great time with him— you know you’ve got Captain Lockard, USN (Retired) in a good mood when he’s joking about trying on a pair of pink pumps at the shoe store. After a meal at the local Irish pub, we began the process of building the invitations, which involved doing battle with X-Actos —not a simple task when you consider our track record—and double-sided sticky tape.
Today Jen finished up the invites and contemplated what to do with the other 9,960 still in the box, and then wrestled with the budget. I got the office sanded and put a coat of Kilz on the walls to seal it all, then moved into the blue room to finish installing the kickplates. Finally, I started stripping the wallpaper from inside the closet in the pink room, which is about 1/2 done. I’ll update pictures tomorrow.
I guess I should also mention that I submitted a link to BoingBoing, one of my favorite aggregator sites, last Wednesday. For my birthday, they posted it: a page I put together a couple of years ago featuring some pictures Pat and I took in Oklahoma back in 1992 during a road trip westward. The link was inspired by a previous post featuring some other wacky homemade signs on a different site.
That had to be the most X-Files moment of my life; Pat was driving and I had him pull over on the shoulder so that I could shoot some film. I got about half a roll before he told me the fuzz was heading towards us, and in a rare moment of sanity we beat it on out of there. I had always wondered what that story was all about, until I found the Roadside America link which explained a little more in detail. Spooky stuff, my friends.