Well, this entire week, we’ve been getting the Big Giant Finger from the sky pilot upstairs, which means the house is still two different colors. I had good intentions of finishing the back corner and moving to the west side, but stayed inside because of 70% humidity and a “chance of thunderstorms”, which never did arrive. Instead, Jen and I took a trip to Frederick and wandered around the antique malls on Saturday afternoon. She found a quartet of excellent fruit labels, and I ventured into dangerous territory by purchasing two seafoam-colored Russel Wright bowls.
Sunday, we attacked the doctor’s office, cleaning out a pile of stuff for donation (we now have a pile of hefty bags approaching critical mass in the hallway) and clearing out the room. We also cleaned up the atrium for the first time in ten months, so that one may actually walk into the room instead of tripping over paint cans. I also scrubbed the remaining wallpaper paste off the inside of the linen closet in preparation for taping and mudding. If the weather’s gonna be crappy this week, I’m going to get something done inside, darnit.
Sunday evening, we decided to drop by Nate and Kristen’s with some ice cream and check out the house (they live mere minutes away, and this is the first time we’ve made it over there). The sound of a very pregnant Kristen settling in behind a bowl of Godiva Belgian Dark Chocolate was worth the trip.
File Under Future. Given that Jen’s going to be freelancing for the forseeable future, we’re going to need some upgrades to the office. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is a large-format printer for running proofs. Last night we saw some prints from an Epson Stylus Photo 1280 at Nate’s house, which were very pretty. Doing some research this morning, I found some info on it, which was less than good. Instead, I found the Canon i9900 which is at a comparable price and which prints at a max size of 13×23 from USB and FireWire. Given my experience with Epson printers and Canon cameras, I’m sold on the Canon. Of course, it’s going to have to wait for a while.
Subject: RE: the Catonsville 4th of July Parade
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 16:18:27 -0400
From: “Mayor Martin O’Malley”
To: “Bill Dugan”
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 19 Jul 2004 20:18:27.0996 (UTC)Well, I have broad shoulders, but I always
feel bad for Katie and the kids.
Thanks for your kind words, and for your
support.
Last night I drew some more nekkid pictures at MICA. It was a pretty good evening, although I ignored my own lecture from last week and sketched a bit more than usual. By the end of the evening my mojo was fading, so I packed up a little early and went home.
Meanwhile, Jen had been busy rearranging furniture, and she came up with a fantastic floorplan for the living room which adds the oak library table we were given last year and balances out the whole space. (The living room is a long rectangle, split in the middle by the fireplace and entry arch, which makes it hard to unify both sides.) What a huge difference.
iPod update. I found this repair kit for the 1st gen iPod, so I may be able to fix Jen’s unit, but that won’t solve the busted Firewire connection. More research to follow.
dugan discount liquors, reisterstown, md, 7.16.04 (thanks baby)
Saturday Jen and I put a day of work into the crumbling pile of wood we call a house; I got 90% of the back side of the house painted while Jen waded into the gardens to wrestle the weeds into submission. I will now sing the praises of the Wagner Power Painter to the heavens, build it an altar in the living room, and raise our children to leave it offerings of tobacco and corn. What took me all day to roll by hand in front took about four hours with the sprayer, and I’d estimate that two of those hours were pure ladderwork. (The back of the house features all three main wires to the house: cable, phone, and electrical, which makes moving an aluminum ladder a sphincter-tightening proposition.) Finding the correct mixture of thinning additive to the paint took a few tries, but once I figured it out, the paint went on like butter—and evenly, too.
Saturday I experienced my first book club meeting, which was a pretty harmless good time with a new bunch of folks. Slaughterhouse-Five turned out to be a quick but interesting read, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is the next book on the list. Thankfully, the game of Risk never made it to the floor after the discussion was over, and we left in good cheer.
From four online form requests for a roofing estimate, I’ve gotten a grand total of one reply.
(Today I sent this letter to the Baltimore City Mayor, Martin O’Malley, who rode a float in the Catonsville 4th of July parade.)
Mr. Mayor:
As a new transplant from Baltimore City to the town of Catonsville, I was pretty embarrassed by the treatment your family got during the parade a few weeks ago. My wife and I recently bought a house on Frederick Road and hosted a party with bunch of other city-dwelling folks, the majority of whom I’d call O’Malley supporters. We cheered as you passed by (and, I have to admit, my wife has a crush on you. I’m glad you didn’t stop long in front of our house, for the sake of my marriage) but I’m afraid we were in the minority.
It took a lot of guts to take part in that parade, considering the pronounced Republican slant of the town, and I have to take my hat off to you, and offer an apology for the boorish behavior of the rest of the town.
I hope, at least, you and your family had fun on the rest of the day. Thanks for coming out.
-Bill Dugan
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.
Thanks again to Todd and Heather for a wonderful evening of tasty food, good folks, and a slideshow presentation on Rome—they offered to host a honeymoon show-and-tell at their place with drinks and dinner. It was great to get a cross-section of our friends together in one house and get them talking to each other; it’s funny how there’s so much overlap between each couple. I kept the DVD presentation under fifty slides and tried not to bore everybody too much, and it seemed to go over very well.
Progress. Ever since college, I’ve lived out of containers as varied as milk crates, cardboard boxes, laundry baskets, and tupperware. My laundry has been organized in free-standing piles for as long as I can remember. Currently, ¾ of it sits out in the doctor’s office, a sizeable percentage of which is laying on the exam table. It’s a drag to have all of your clothes on another floor from the bathroom, especially when it’s wintertime and the porch is about 40°. This weekend, Jen and I decided to follow one of the millions of tag sale signs around Catonsville, and it led us to a $50 mahogany dresser, with five big drawers and two small ones on top. I feel like an adult again.
Other developments: Jen reorganized the whole kitchen, which was a herculean undertaking: not only did she dispose of two garbage bags full of old/bad food from our shelves, but she was able to fit most of the crap spread throughout the room into the new pantry. There are shiny new recycling bins lined up under the shelves, the cat food is out from underfoot, and it’s now possible to see all the cans at one time (the rack on the back of the basement door is gone.) She also sorted and culled our varied collection of pots and pans without mercy—the Goodwill is gonna have a big delivery coming.
Meanwhile, I got a coat of primer on about 90% of the back of the house before the game got called on account of weather. I’ve got the formula for successful paint spraying down, and the job should go much quicker now.
Sunday night we were invited to a barbecue down the street at our neighbors’ house, where we met another! couple! under! the! age! of! thirty! After the introductions, we all stood around silently for fifteen minutes, marveling at the novelty of it all, and then got along famously. Good food, good company, and a late evening—we left at midnight and walked home, full and happy.
Monday Links. iPod resources. | Junkheap rocketship. | Morriseydance.
‘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.
In case you thought I was sitting around doing nothing all weekend, I’m going to post some boring pictures of the stuff we got done because I pulled the parade photos off the camera and left them all on the server at the house. But I should back up and talk about the party first.
chair, Catonsville, 7.3.04
Friday night Jen and I ran around cleaning and preparing for the party (which is really sort of misleading; she was cleaning all day before I even got home, and I just continued helping chase the dust around the first floor.) After finishing what we could and having some dinner, I decided that good enough wasn’t, and ripped up the dining room carpet. You see, my strategy to avoid vacuuming the carpet, the largest repository of used cat hair east of the Mississippi, was to remove it the night before we hosted twenty people at our house. Brilliant, Dugan. (Cue the sound of Jen slapping the back of my head.)
Saturday went off relatively well, considering we were running around doing all the stuff I should have done the night before as our guests were arriving. The day started warm, and made its way to hot by noon, which meant that plenty of cold beer was in order. Our friends brought all kinds of tasty foods to share, and we enjoyed the first sounds of children running around in the backyard since we’ve lived there (I could get used to that.) Making camp in the side yard, we watched as the people began to arrive on the street—by 9am the curbs were lined with chairs, and a small turf war broke out on our section; my lovely wife graciously defused the situation and made everyone feel welcome.
The parade started with a marching band, and what followed was a spectacle: fire trucks, coronet bands, Shriners in miniature Mack trucks (no ATVs this year), classic cars, politicians (two Senators, the Governor, the Baltimore City mayor, and the Attorney General), Mummers, a baffling POW-MIA float (Catonsville: Setting The Standards For Poor Taste!), our neighbor riding in a Marine humvee, and a dixieland band. We sat the kids under an umbrella at the curb and enjoyed the show—Jen was happy to see Martin’s car stop in front of our driveway for a minute—and I shot lots of pictures, none of which I can show you today.
Sunday we were stuck inside because of rain, so I tackled the job of improving the pantry shelving. The pantry itself is old-school, a 6’x8′ larder hung off the back of the house and minimally insulated. Marks on the wall show where old shelving once hung, but when we moved in, we inherited two sticky, yellowing wire racks tacked to the east wall, which had served us well for cans and boxes, and a rickety dual shelf under the window for pots and pans.
On the left: nasty wire shelves. On the right: sturdy wooden shelves.
I pulled this all out and by noon on Monday had replaced it with eight sturdy wooden shelves which wrap around the room from wall to wall. By last night I had it all primed for final paint, and hopefully we’ll be able to get all our canned goods off the dining room table by Tuesday.
After pulling up the linoleum and sanding the floor. The quarter-round on the baseboards got pulled and replaced with new stained wood.
Along the stretch of Frederick Road towards Catonsville, the lawn chairs are blooming. From lowly plastic to luscious aluminum, multicolored varieties crowd the edge of the street, marked with ribbons of tape and twine. Bright beach chairs hug the grass next to the curb, whle stately motel chairs anchor the light poles and mailboxes. Across the street from our house, in front of the rental, several dozen white molded chairs clog the edge of the lawn, blending in perfectly with the weedy landscaping ignored by the tenants. Our lawn is clear (at least as of this writing), but I’ll have to bring the $7 camping chairs out and block off a swath of our frontage before somebody else does. Saturday the front of the house will be crowded with people waiting for the parade, and we’ll have front-row seats.
1956 Oldsmobile Holiday, Oella, 6.27.04
Jen mentioned something to me the other day that got me excited—she asked if we could go to Assateague this year now that we have the Jeep. Friends, I had completely put aside the idea of camping on the beach again with the Scout off the road; somehow it had never occurred to me that we have 4-wheel-drive again, and the possibility of camping was back in our reach. This week I’m going to blow the dust off the camping gear and set up an expedition for sometime in September.
Huh. Today at work they asked me if I wanted to go to Siggraph in August, which is a surprise; not being the #1 3-D guru here, I figured I was low on the list of priority conference attendees, but somebody above me thinks it’s important to have me there. Of course this means I need to rethink some of my plan for Jen’s birthday, but the thing I had in mind was going to have to wait for the weekend either way. There are some very interesting and possibly interesting exhibits to see.
Recap. Saturday: Had the Jeep inspected—it passed. Bought a ladder, tested ladder, returned ladder and bought a taller one. Cleaned the sprayer, primed and painted the east side of the house. Cleaned out the Taurus. Got some soft serve ice cream with the Wards. Sunday: Finished painting the house, had a tasty breakfast, bought a steel motel table, two camera filters and an Emerson 550 for $21. Drove to Dave’s house and enjoyed some good conversation, Indian beer, and new music (Thanks Dave!) Returned home to a delicious meal from Jen, and planned out a budget. This Morning: Registered and titled the Jeep.
Monday Learning Links. How to Pick a Lock. | MIT open courseware. | Bootable OSX DVD how-to. | Photoshop weathering primer.
Before: ugly grayish mildew-stained siding After: blue-gray paint applied (except over that damn bush)
1. This morning Jen called me from home with news of a package from the Matejowskys; Lorie took the time to send up some good classical music: Shuggie Otis and Big Star for our enjoyment. Besides being the most photogenic family we’ve ever met, Lorie also made us a beautiful quilt for our wedding present, so they get awarded the Musical Quilting Superhero Trophy. 2. We’re meeting Linda, another friend from Houston, at BWI this evening to catch dinner and a few drinks, which we’re all looking forward to.
I, however, get the loser award for not having called my Dad last night.