The labor day weekend is usually supposed to be a celebration of beer and barbecue in the backyard, then getting stuck in traffic on the way home. Because the Lockardugan house is a poor house, we were content to lock the doors, grill some burgers, drink cheap beer and hide out to recharge our batteries. We had grand plans to “get lots of stuff done”, which is a blanket statement that means “planning an impossibly long checklist of stuff we’d never accomplish with four friends in two weeks.” I had hoped to make serious headway on the outside windows by finishing off the front of the house and working my way over to the side. Jen had hoped to get out into the garden and battle the weeds that have taken over in her absence. Three days seemed like a blank check to have all of this done and more. What actually happened was a lot of sleeping, some lazy consumption of food until noon, halfhearted attempts to motivate into a productive phase, an early cutoff for dinner, and then more sleeping. We did get the second-floor front windows finished, and the side garden dug out. Unfortunately Jen’s ankle met with an unscheduled twist in the backyard, and we postponed our afternoon for a visit to the St. Agnes emergency room, where the diagnosis was a bad sprain. Mother and ankle are resting comfortably on the couch with warm soup and grapefruit juice.
Did anybody else realize that this dude on CSI: Miami was Slater from Dazed and Confused?
I woke up this morning with Teller the cat anxiously pawing my face for food and a splitting headache. I dozed through Jen’s shower and rose a half-hour late to make coffee, only to find she’d already done it. Two ibuprofen later, I was in a better state and paused to look at the week’s progress: one coat of primer in the linen closet, a working light, and the pipe access door mudded for sanding. The front windows are on their second coat of paint and looking for a final touch-up before I put the storm windows back and move on. Not bad for a week’s work.
Alien Pod. Since I brought my busted Airport Base Station back into work, I’ve had three different people enter the ubercle and say, “Whoa! What is that?!?” After I explain it to them, they nod approvingly and we continue our work-related issues. Single men, take note: walk your Base Station at the park this week; the chicks will stop and ask what it is, at which time you can strike up conversation and get a phone number. It’s as good as a puppy or a baby. Anyway, I decided not to order the repair kit from this “company”, as their “home page” is all broke-down and I get a suspicious vibe. I’m just going to hit Baynesville Electronics and pick up the capacitors I need on my own to repair it.
The iMac I have set up here at work as an iTunes server has been discovered by the rest of the office. Because of the five-stream limit Apple wrote in to the sharing feature of iTunes, I’m not able to listen to my own music right now.
Brief Political Statement. I’m glad I’m not in New York City. Now, why is the news media ignoring the comments of Dennis Hastert, your House Speaker, the third most powerful Republican in the country, who accused George Soros of financing his empire with drug money last Sunday? (Soros is anti-Bush, and, understandably, kinda pissed.)
Vote Democrat. Vote Independent. Vote Martian. Just get these pricks out of office, please.
Thank You. To the good people of Home Depot: You’ll let me test nailguns in the Tool Corral unsupervised. You’ll let me carry flimsy cans of highly toxic substances through your store and help me load them into my trunk. You’ll leave dangerous circular saws unattended and plugged in throughout the store. You’ll trust an 18-year-old kid to drive a forklift loaded with half a ton of drywall over my head and store it on a rack thirty feet in the air. You’ll rent me a wood chipper to grind the brush in my backyard or dispose of Steve Buscemi, whichever I choose.
Why is it, then, that you won’t let grown adults cut glass to order in your stores because of “insurance reasons?” I wasted half the evening driving across western Maryland looking for somebody who could cut me two panes of replacement glass. (For the record, Lowe’s will happily do it for you.) Unbelievable.
Also, the Airport Extreme base station is up and running without a hitch. The extra $50 or so I spent on the Apple product was worth the money.
I said before that I’d like a lampshade-style iMac, but Apple just announced the new iMac G5, which is not much bigger than a standard flat-panel monitor. I think Mrs. Lockard would find working on this machine a lot easier than her current laptop. And for $1,300, the baseline 17″ model is not a bad deal at all.
Also: Skype (VoIP software for computers) is now available, in beta, for OSX. I’ve used the alternative, a SIP-based phone made by Cisco, and while it was very cool (think of this idea: carry a phone with you wherever you go. Find an outlet and an RJ45 jack, plug it in, and call England for nothing more than the monthly fee—in my case, something like $10) it wasn’t as simple as being able to do it from my laptop, which would be sweet. If you can get past the cellphone-like lag time, it’s *almost* as good as the real deal.
Dumb House News. There is now a working light in our linen closet. I have still to do the finish sanding, but it should be ready for shelving in the next few weeks, after the bathtub access hatch is finished off. Rejoice!
I’m bored, bummed, and in a bad mood. Happy monday. In happier news, the hospital is kicking Mrs. Lockard to the curb today or tomorrow, which is a step in the right direction. She looks a million times better than last week (I spent saturday night with her.)
My Airport Extreme Base Station showed up on Saturday when nobody was at work. Thanks, guys. No word on when it will make a return appearance.
The two second-floor bedroom windows are scraped, glazed, primed and painted with gloss white. I’m going to have to hit them a second time before replacing the storm windows, but the house is looking less and less like it’s abandoned. I would have worked more yesterday but between the lack of sleep and high humidity, I made like a potato and sat on the couch for most of the evening.
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.
I took the Base Station back apart yesterday when I had a minute to spare, and got it down to its base guts: screws, motherboard, WaveLan card, wiring, case. I put it all back together and plugged it in for one final try, and seemed to work fine. Later, when I got it home and ran it for more than a half hour, it died, leading me to believe that the capacitors are, in fact, toast. (I was attempting to prove the Second Dugan Law Of Fixing Stuff, which goes like this: If you can take it apart and put it back together, there’s about a 60% chance it’ll work again, because something came loose. This is highly unscientific, of course.) I’m going to order the capacitor fix kit online and attempt to get it running again.
Phase Two. This afternoon I’m going to begin the next part of the housepainting project, which involves lots of ladderwork, removal of storm windows, hours of fun with window glazing, cursing, beer, primer and paint, more beer, and replacement of the storm windows. Today I’m going to pull as many of the storms off the front of the house as possible, mark them, and get ready for Saturday. I can’t say that I’m looking forward to this job (this involves something like 25 full-size windows, not counting the atrium) but I’ll be very happy when it’s done.
Having found the use of my 2nd-gen Kodak DC-3400 rough going, Jen left it at home to sit on the shelf. I decided that she’d take the G3 and I’d soldier on with the Kodak until we can muster the cash for a second prosumer-level camera. One drawback to this camera is its voracious battery appetite, which means that I need to invest in better rechargable batteries or buy stock in Duracell.
By the way, Avoid the Ritz Camera on Rt. 40 in Ellicott City, where they overexposed three of four rolls Jen dropped off there, effectively ruining 72 beautiful photographs of Italy she took. Worse, the bitch behind the counter claimed that Jen’s camera was bad (a nearly new Nikon N-65), we’d run them through the X-ray machine (we hadn’t), and the film was bad (all four rolls were from the same pack, bought three days before we boarded the plane.) At no time did she offer a refund or try to make us happy. Fuck Ritz Camera.
Success? After one solid year of the run-around by BG&E, it appears our problems are solved. I got a turn-off notice for an unpaid bill of $250, and called to straighten it out. After one call to their bill pay computer (which helpfully told me the balance due was $350, I called the CSR back and had her hunt the problem down. As it turned out, I have a credit of $350 on the other account—the one I kept telling them about. Oh, and the bills still weren’t merged. Of course, now that I’ve jinxed myself, I’ll probably wind up owing them money again, or the electricity will get shut off.
That’s Wrong. Did anybody happen to see the Olympics last night where they were showing Women’s Gymnastics? There was some Russian chick there who was absolutely frightening: She was about two feet taller and 50 lbs. lighter than the other women on her team, and it looked like she was going to snap in half. I had to turn my head when she landed her vault routine, because I thought she was going to break. Have a Big Mac or three, honey. (I realize I’m not the best person to be telling somebody else to gain weight, but I’m not an Olympic athlete.)
Yesterday Jen and I traveled to Georgetown Hospital to see her mother, who has been moved to the bone marrow ward (although she has no bone marrow of her own, nor white blood cells, this is the best place for her to be right now) and is still touch-and-go. She looks small, and pale, and very tired, but still has a funny sense of humor about a very bleak situation.
before/after, catonsville, 8.8.04
Today I stuck around the house to catch up on yardwork; the place had a run-down air to it after two weeks of neglected mowing. I tried out our $5 weed whacker and my $.25 clippers, taking all the trees in my reach to task. One massive pile of brush later, the yard looks much better. I also got the fourth side of the house painted, which makes the place look complete.
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.