This weekend was a busy one. Friday night Todd and Heather had us over for steak and sangria; the meal, company, and booze were all excellent. Plans are afoot. Saturday Jen and I got to work on the house—she worked on the inside while I started painting the outside. After settling on a different color (the new one is less blue and more gray, called “Pelican Bay“) I got the front siding painted. Everything was going great until a wasp stung me on the knuckle of my ring finger, which hurt like a bitch. Suddenly, I turned five-years-old and ran downstairs clutching my swelling finger, saying, “guess what just happpened.” Jen calmly applied a paste of baking soda and waited for me to stop grimacing. We celebrated with a tasty homemade stir-fry and relaxed for the rest of the evening.
Today we met up with Shannon, our wedding photographer, to look at pictures in Takoma Park at a tasty cafe during brunch. Again, I can’t say enough good things about Shannon and her husband Ganes. The pictures are all phenomenal; minus the obligatory 10% of eyes-closed/stupid face/blurry shots, there are a good 200 star-quality candids in there. Beyond that, there are another 200 that I’d be proud to call my own on a great day. She handed off a beautiful handmade box with prints from each roll archived alphabetically, and an envelope stuffed full of negatives, plus a CD of high-res digital shots. Wow. I’m going to borrow the scanner from work tomorrow and begin the long process of culling and scanning all these good shots.
Getting back to the house after a Target detour, I finished up the front of the house and we relaxed with Friday night’s leftovers (yum). There’s also two bits of news I’m not going to jinx by mentioning just yet, but I think they are a good sign.
I have no firsthand experience with this product, but I’m curious to try it out: the Fresh² bulb, which is one of those compact flourescent bulbs coated with a titanium dioxide coating, which creats oxidizers to neutralize odors. It’s $20 for two bulbs, so I may not get around to buying them anytime soon, but… (via cool tools)
I avoided spending $200 on a ladder yesterday, deciding to wait until I need it—I’m going to be painting the front of the house first, and I can reach everything I need to out there with the section of ladder I do have (thanks, Dad—I’m going to bring it back, I promise.) We are a go on the color choice, and I’m looking forward to this job. I think it’ll make a dramatic difference with the front of the house. We also have tentative plans to see our wedding pictures on Sunday. I’m nervous (I photograph poorly, unlike my wife) but excited. Also, I got the Superdrive installed last night in five minutes: open case, two screws, disconnect cables, attach new drive, two screws, close case. Toast immediately saw the drive, although I haven’t loaded iDVD yet—I’m going to try the Ken Burns thing on our honeymoon photos and send my folks a disc.
Uh-Oh.There’s a guy up in New Jersey selling off his entire collection of Scout parts. He has fenders, hoods and windshields for $150 each. This could be dangerous. I’ll know more later.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
You may be wondering if this is one of those boring posts where I complain about being tired. The answer would be no, my snarky friend; this is where I complain about being really fucking tired. Three weeks of getting up at 7:15 to freelance for two hours, getting in to work and crunching through the world’s most over-complicated game, and returning to the house to pit my scrawny back against a long list of physical labor (why, oh why did I think I could get both the dining room and living room painted in one day? Stupid Dugan) until the beginning of Late Night has got your humble host fighting to keep his eyes open. There are many reasons I’m pushing this hard, one of which is the promise of a Big Fat Check waiting on our return from Italy to help pay for the trip (Memo to self: upon return, transfer balance on credit card with ridiculously high interest rate to competing card with 6-month intro rate.)
We got the seating list made up last night, which was one of those tasks we were avoiding like VD; I think we were able to wrestle all 58 people onto 6 tables without leaving anybody stranded. For a while it looked like there was one table that was going to be a large dead space (I took the opportunity to draw a skull and crossbones above it on Jen’s diagram) but we broke it up to where each table should be evened out and everyone should have a good time.
The next iteration of the music list is live, although iTunes on my Pismo was hiccuping to the point where I had to trash the prefs file and rebuild the whole thing. All is better now. Thanks for all your suggestions! Also, thanks to Rob for the first music struck off the list on the right. The Shins are excellent, and it’s great to have some Smithereens again.
Random Fun Links. This is brilliant: Daily Reason to Dispatch Bush. | A size-based aggregator for Google news.
rhodedendron, front yard (pray that they will still be in bloom on the 22nd), 5.13.04
I got out of the Tortoise yesterday and was not more than a step from the driver’s door when I heard the Judge calling to me from across his yard. He came over to fill me in on the excitement; apparently between his call to 911 and our neighbor’s, the suspect was caught, taken to the lockup, and later confessed to B&E. Hopefully his buddies in the getaway car (who were not apprehended) will get the word out that Frederick Road is not an easy mark.
He also mentioned that a local antiwar group is planning a commemoration of the Catonsville 9 protest of 1969 next Monday. Being a purple-hearted ex-Marine, and firmly in favor of the ongoing conflict, he’s going to meet up with a bunch of his friends and go observe the proceedings. Tactfully, I did not mention my disapproval of the war.
Following Up. It seems that manufacturer’s claims about the some info for pruning extra fonts if you’re running OSX; Jen and I have a collection of about 1 gig of fonts, and keeping them organized is more than a little work. For anybody following along, here’s the final shot in the series of house update photos for the blue room. And finally, I added a randomizer script for the home page of this site about a month ago; if you refresh your browser you’ll get a series of four different shots (with more to be added later.)
Our neighbor’s house was broken into this afternoon, while Jen had run out to do errands; apparently some undesirable folks were casing the neighborhood and figured that the house with the unkempt yard would be an easy mark. So I’m doing research on home security companies this evening, in preparation to spend yet more money that we don’t have. All my house-owning, alarm-having peeps, let’s hear it. Who do you like, who don’t you like, and what’s your experience been?
Song Of The Day. Mogwai, Hunted By A Freak.
Our IT guy handed me a disc today and asked me if I could read it on my Mac. It’s a 12-year-old CD of sound effects from the Hanna Barbera archives, recorded in some proprietary format by a company that evolved into the folks that make ProTools. Anyway, the discs are filled with sounds any 18-45 year old kid would recognize, from Fred Flintsone’s feet making the car go to Muttley’s teeth chomping Dick Dastardly’s ass. Good fun for customizing alert sounds.
Oh, P.S. “That’s the way girls like Lynndie are raised.”
Heh. Here’s an article about something on our minds… The heck with it. We’re going to have a big fondue pot and let people pick their own hors d’oeuvres. (free registration may be required)
Well, That Helped. So Bush got on Arab TV yesterday and yammered on about how “…the people in the Middle East must understand that this was horrible.” No shit! He didn’t apologize for a goddamn thing, though, which is a fantastic lesson to teach our kids, country, and neighbors on this planet.
I spent about two hours working on some freelance last night while Jen was sleeping, and I have to say that I am extremely happy with our new office. This morning I got up early, made coffee, and sat down to another hour or so of edits. The sun was rising through the atrium windows over my desk, and the cats quietly paced around my feet; for the first time since we moved in the new house, I felt like things are coming together the way we want them to.
Last night, I started the process of centralizing the house network; after running miles of cable from the bedrooms down through the walls, I wanted to actually get some of the computers in the office on a network. So I started by splicing into a power circuit that apparently contains both doorbells, an outlet in the basement, the kitchen stove, and the hallway light in my neighbor’s house. After putting an outlet in next to the panel, I ran a new phone line to it and put connectors on the office lines. This morning I got up early to install the DSL modem and router, then ran a network line back to the dining room for the Airport base station. Thankfully, everything works.
A few thoughts about the latest good news from Iraq:
- America is doomed. We are a country of ignorant, bullying sheep.
- If Bush is re-elected this year, it will be proof that he has sold his soul to the Devil. Jen and I have decided that we will leave the country and move someplace that isn’t doomed, and raise our kids to be intelligent. (No, I’m not kidding.)
- I shudder to think of what will happen to the next American POW taken in that country.
- What kind of animal does this? And what kind of moron lets somebody take their picture while doing this? (Don’t give me that “They’re under a lot of stress” shit. This is wrong. Plain and simple.)
- Seymour Hersh wrote a fantastic article in the latest New Yorker about this—the latest in a series of fantastic reporting about the war. (For a great article about the previous Gulf War, check this out.)
- Bush is going on Arab TV today to talk about this whole thing. Like that’s going to help anything.
- Nobody in America cares about any of this. They’re all too freaked out about the last episode of “Friends”.
Last night, Dave sent me a link to a copy of Satie’s Gymnopedie No.3, performed on guitar by John Williams. Again, it’s beautiful and soothing—classical chillout music. I recommended an album to him called Selenography, by a band called Rachel’s. It’s sort of contemporary chillout classical, with drums, piano, guitar, and cello. I have yet to find the physical CD anywhere, and so will have to break down and order it online when we return from Italy. (Rubbing elbows with greatness dept.: I went to school with one of the members of the band.) Anyway, thanks, Dave!
Folks with an iTunes account, go pick this up: Gymnopedie for Piano #1, by Erik Satie. You’ve heard the melody from somewhere; Satie was an eccentric French classical composer, and the advertising weasels have used this composition to sell cars or dog food or something like that. From an excellent BBC program on the history of chillout music. (second link is Real format—sorry via boingboing)
Last night I finally got around to hanging the sad-looking lightbulb fixture in the office that Jen was so tired of bonking her head on. $7 and some new hardware later, I pulled out the old 40’s mounting hardware and replaced the box, hanger and threaded nipple; some new connectors over the old wiring and it was all set. Too bad I can’t get the white in the cable cover to come back. Flush with success, I thought I might try to splice into a line to put a plug next to the main panel (for plugging in a router, DSL modem, et. al.) but was stymied by the rat’s nest that is my basement wiring.
We got a lot of stuff done this weekend; among other things, the front porch is half-cleaned off (the waiting room side) and the boxes are arranged neatly on a new wire shelf on the high side of the basement. There are actual pieces of furniture in the bedrooms, even if we’re not using some of them; countless boxes full of foo-foo design books have been emptied and discarded, the living room has opened up with the deletion of my bed, and there are things hanging on the walls. This is progress, people.
Sunday we met with the musicians to find that we really didn’t want to use them (apparently the Wedding March doesn’t work so well on guitar, and we really didn’t want a singer), so Jen engaged the services of an organist. We are now finally registered at Target, for those folks who would like to buy us a gift (cash donations accepted as well) and I think you’ll find we tried not to break your bank—Dyson vacuum cleaner aside. (Hey, we can dream, right?) Instead of the usual plates-and-silverware list most people have, we went practical: that hose reel may not fit on the gift table, but it’ll come in handy when we have to wash out the tent the day after the party. There’s also a gag in there for the folks who appreciate such things.
We also managed to get the lawn mowed (a brief aside, if you will: I will admit to you in print, here and now, that I enjoy mowing my lawn. While my father attempts to perform CPR on himself with two bare wires from the lamp next to his computer desk, I’ll also admit that I was the worst child ever to deal with when it came to mowing lawns. Perhaps it was that our lawn mower was older and heavier than I was; perhaps it was the fact that we had five acres of lawn to mow, and that it was littered with ankle-breaking chunks of bedrock; perhaps it was just more important to me to watch that episode of Battle Of The Planets than spend six hours in the blazing heat of August pushing a government-surplus boat anchor through the weeds. In contrast, the lawn at the Lockardugan estate is a 45 minute exercise in immediate satisfaction.) and added two bags of soil to the side flowerbed. About 8pm, we called it a day, grilled some dogs, opened a cheap bottle of red wine, and fell asleep on the couch.
Freelance. From today’s Craigslist:
Freelance work a few hours a week.
Consultant position using your own equipment, setting your own schedule.
Yeah, right, that sounds like my kinda gig.
You should have and or be:
Honest and reliable
Proficient in Photoshop and 3DSmax
Moderate webdesign skills
Moderate understanding of MS office
Check, check, check, check.
Have a PC with DSL or cable connection and software
Be easy to reach by phone and or email
Have a flexible schedule
Be within 25 miles to Baltimore MD
optional: reliable transportation and ability to meet on location on rare occasions. The work can be done remotely but the ability to meet is beneficial.
OK, this is sounding more like me all the time.
We cannot respond to all inquiries/submissions, if the position has not been filled and you seem well suited for the position you will hear from us within 5 business days.
…Then I’m thinking you really shouldn’t post to Craigslist.
Compensation: $8.50/hour
??!?!?? I made more than that 15 years ago bussing tables in High School. Get bent, you jackoff.
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.