As I wander through the house a mere month before the wedding, I make a mental list of stuff that I’d like to do or have done. Besides the obviously huge projects (central air, adding that wing off the back for the wine cellar, putting the second floor studio on the garage, fencing the yard, bulldozing the neighbors’ yard for our hedge maze), there’s a pile of smaller things I’d like to do when we get back from Italy:
- Keyed locksets for the doors. (We have more keys for this house than the Home Depot.)
- A bird feeder. (All of the feeders I’ve seen so far are crap—thin plastic, cheap-ass poles, or pitifully ugly. I want to feed the birds, not run a squirrel soup kitchen.)
- A ladder. (Our gutters are full of more gunk than a restauraunt sink drain, and we have a house’s worth of windows crying for paint. Nevermind the rest of the house.)
- A dishwasher. (Cheap by itself, but the reconfiguring of our door-tastic kitchen is going to take a lot of work.)
- Shelving for the basement. (Getting all the crap off the front porch into the basement is simply moving one mess to another location; organization is in order here.)
- A new dryer. (The Brady Bunch-era unit we use now is both useless and small, and we need some serious commercial drying muscle—as well as better energy efficiency.)
- A gas range. (Oh, my HELL, to borrow a phrase from the P.S.D.F., does our electric oven suck donkeys. I’m sure we bring down the power grid in Catonsville every time we turn on the damned thing, and it cooks as well as a heroin addict.)
Spurred on by a comment from Lis, I posted a bunch of pictures of our garden I took this weekend. For the tech-heads, I’m using a Canon G3 with a 58mm close-up lens (thanks Dad) in natural sunlight. The one on the home page is the only one I lit additionally—just a mini-maglight from underneath to brighten the center.
I also got off my ass and started up the picture-a-week thing I’ve been threatening for years; I’m going to try to post a new illustration on varying topics, and I’m going to involve you, my four loyal readers. Each Monday, I’ll take suggestions from you for an interesting editorial story, article, or biography, and choose one for an illustration, and then post it (gulp) by Friday. So, send me an interesting article you’ve seen online (please keep it under 2-3 pages) that could make for an interesting illustration, and I’ll draw you a drawering.
Jen has been running all over creation this weekend in preparation for the wedding. Her sisters have been air-dropping in like the Special Forces since Thursday, getting their bridesmaid’s dresses fitted and altered, which is not unlike keeping control of a flock of third-grade students—their attention span is about as long. Hopefully, all will go well this morning, they will say their goodbyes, and she will be able to sit quietly in the backyard with a tall vodka tonic.
Meanwhile, I’m preparing for Ben the electrician, who will be hooking up all four thousand of the outlets I installed upstairs and wiring them into the panel. If all goes well, by lunchtime we’ll have electricity in three of the four bedrooms. This afternoon, depending on how my neck feels, I’m planning on resurrecting the lawnmower and taking a swipe at our yard, which looks like a science experiment gone wrong.
So it’s about 55 degrees outside and raining. With the exception of last Friday (or, Let’s Throw Our Back Out Day) and a little on Saturday, the weather has been for crap lately. As a result, I’ve not been writing very well, or taking pretty pictures, or being creative in any fashion. So right now I have to take time out, slap myself around a little, and think about all the positives that are currently happening:
- The office and blue room, which are awaiting the attentions of Ben, the friendly helpful electrician, tomorrow night;
- Moving two people’s worth of living upstairs, and beginning to use the other half of our house;
- The waves of daffodils, tulips, and other bulbs blooming in the side garden;
- The Patron Saint of Dysfunctional Weddings, whose birthday is today, and who is fashioning the headpiece for Jen (shout-outs to you);
- Jen’s sudden promotion from a two-week freelance gig to part time work two miles from our house;
- Five weeks to the wedding and no dead bodies;
- The Federal Government, whose loan came due just in time to pay for half our honeymoon to Italy.
The weather is clearing up this weekend, by all accounts, and hopefully so will my creative block.
Taking advantage of my day off, Jen and I lugged ten bags of mulch to the front yard ($34 delivered to our driveway, courtesy of the local middle school) and raked it around our sad-looking hedges in the hopes that we can bring them back from the dead in time for the wedding. Last year, we had a growth of stringy vines infest the west side of the hedge and expand its way down the street, threatening to engulf the holly tree, small children, and passing import cars on Frederick Road. I waded into the mess and hauled out about six bags worth of leaves, vines, and debris, uncovering three rose bushes and about twenty square feet of bare earth. After eating lunch, Jen peeled off to continue her freelance work and I put a final coat of polyurethane on the floor in the office and blue rooms. Tomorrow, if the floors look dry, we may be moving furniture…!
We also appear to be back in our neighbor’s good graces after the Christmas card fiasco; the Judge appeared on our doorstep this morning with a twinkle in his eye and a covered dish of hot cross buns. Perhaps we aren’t going to hell after all.
Some bean counter at Kinko’s decided that it just doesn’t make sense to support Macs as part of their in-house systems. So they’re phasing them all out. Which means you gotta bring a Powerbook if you need to print something in color. Ain’t that just great?
Some early thoughts about Panther: God, this thing is so much faster. It’s a pleasure to use this laptop again- something I thought I’d never say after I left OS9 by the side of the road. The redraw and UI feedback are almost as quick as OS9 used to be, which is saying a lot. I’m usually about three steps ahead of the UI in terms of what I’m trying to do with the computer, so when Jaguar got slowed down figuring out how to draw this fancy transition or make that button blink, I got stuck waiting for the machine to catch up to me. Very annoying. Command-Tab for the applications menu is a fantastic addition—something from Windows that I miss on the Mac. Expose is OK but I haven’t found a real need for it just yet. (Designing on a laptop screen means you get real picky about workspace organization.) Overall, I’m impressed and very happy that I can squeeze another year out of ol’ reliable here.
Whupped. This weekend was a blur of nothing but work, work, work on the house. Pictures are here and here. That is all.
I don’t have any kind of snarky joke to play on you folks; let it be known that I would have a sense of humor if I had more time.
This is a very nice site for all my mid-century modern peeps out there: Meteor Lights features lamps and shades from the 50’s for the modern bohemian. (via Boing Boing)
Money. Jen and I have been in the middle of a bureaucratic nightmare with Baltimore Gas and Electric since we first opened the door to our new house. It involved the last vestigal traces of an operational doctor’s office after they hauled the desk, waiting room chairs, miniature skeleton, and filing cabinets out of the front rooms: two electrical meters bolted to the basement wall, clicking merrily away on commercial rates. The sellers graciously offered to have it converted to a single service, and footed the bill—a quiet man named Ben came and wrestled the rat’s nest of Eisenhower-era wiring into a single, beautiful panel with about fifteen empty slots, signed the work order, and disappeared into the warm October afternoon like Robert DeNiro in Brazil.
Since then, we’ve battled the faceless drones at BG&E to get two bills consolidated into one, which has involved repeated visits from representatives of the company, a three-month wait for somebody to hook up the outside service (while the HUGE main feed wire into the house hung loose at the bottom of the basement steps, promising swift death to anybody brushing up against it with a laundry basket), another wait for somebody to finish the job inside, then an inspection, then another inspection to make sure we aren’t using the house commercially to grow pot (that’s what the greenhouse is for), and then a call to a drone to actually consolidate the bills.
The sum of this lovely exercise came today: $675 in current and backdated charges for gas and electric. Kinda makes that check I just wrote for $1.43 for the water bill look that much better.
That’s the first time in a long time that I’ve gone the whole weekend without posting at least something, which should tell you just how busy we were. Friday afternoon we got our taxes done, and while the news was good (I’m getting some serious Federal back while Jen is only paying out a little) it’s still not gonna get us all the way to Venice. From there we met up with some of her now ex-work peeps and got some food at what could loosely be described as a Mexican restaurant—the menu said it was Mexican, and they served margaritas with it, but I’ve had better enchiladas during the stoner shift at the local Taco Bell. (Really, thank you, Casey, we had a great time.)
Saturday we hit the ground running, getting two of the four bedrooms closer to finished. The office is now painted with one coat of Restoration Hardware’s Silver Birch and the trimwork is all replaced, caulked and primed; Jen put a second coat of blue on the wall in the front bedroom and we got two coats of gloss white on the trim. It’s beginning to shape up in there.
Saturday night we met up with the Patron Saint of Bridal Sanity and the Vodka Fairy, who were kind enough to give us a bottle of Hangar 1 to quiet the voices in our heads. From their house we went to the Chameleon Café for a delicious bacon-themed meal and creme bruleé, which was divine.
Sunday morning we hit 9 o’clock mass to sample the guitarist who may be playing at our wedding…let’s just say the drumkit and bass guitar will not be getting a solo at our ceremony. We picked up our rings, which turned out beautifully, and scouted Jen’s interview for Wednesday before returning home for more housework.
Heh. Looks like Jen’s site has been blocked by our governmental friends at Lockheed Martin today; here’s their rationale:
Due to SSA policy limiting personal use of government office equipment including information technology, access to the web site you requested is restricted. Examples of sites considered inappropriate are:
– Hate sites which contain material that ridicule on basis of race, color, sex, national orientation, or sexual orientation.
– Sex sites of an adult oriented or pornographic nature
– Nudity
– Criminal behavior
– Gambling
Let’s see. Check. Check…check…check! Yep, she covered them all! </sarcasm filter> What the hell?
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.
I went on a journey yesterday to find an Irish flag to hang from the mount outside our front door: I’m Irish, my future bride is Irish, and soon our Irish kids will be running free, terrorizing the neighborhood. I thought that it would be an easy thing to find a seasonal flag on St. Patrick’s Day—surely Target or Wal-Mart would have some kind of aisle full of green plastic derby hats and paper shamrocks to decorate your bar, pub, or keg, right? Wrong. There was no recognition of this noble day, this ancient tradition of inebriation, in either store. Aisle upon aisle of sickeningly sweet pastel Easter candy, clouds of perfumed sugar sucking all the oxygen from inside the building, but nary a leprechaun to be found.
Instead of seasonal flags, or even a ‘greatest hits’ compilation of countries, there was the same pathetic collection of cutesy ‘welcome spring’ type flags, the ones which employ every primary color in a headache-inducing pattern loosely resembling a bunny, or a rainbow, or a flower. They were at most 2″ wide, which is about as welcoming as a kick in the groin—I’m looking for something that screams PRIDE, one of those magnificent rippling car sales lot flags that could cover a football field and blot out the sun.
So I consulted the phone book, and found one ‘Irish and Celtic’ store on the other side of town. I talked to a man on the phone with a thicker accent than Shane McGowan, who told me they had a flag for sale that was $25. Excitedly, I drove up there to see Mr. McGowan, figuring they would be beating the people away, this being St. Patrick’s Day, and he being the loveable, toothless frontman of the Pogues. Instead, I found two pimply-faced kids behind the counter and a quiet store—which suddenly made sense: If I were Shane McGowan and I owned a store, I would have been piss-drunk in the pub by 8:30AM and had my kids watching the place too. Handing over my debit card, I got a 3′ x 5′ nylon flag printed with orange and green. I’m not happy about this, and I’m pissed at Shane McGowan. How could a fellow Mick sell me this shite flag? For $25, I was expecting a three-panel flag sewn together, and at least twice the size. How can I be expected to show my Irish pride if I can’t stop traffic with my flag?
Progress. I’ve spent the last couple of days washing, sanding, and mudding the office ceiling, and it’s beginning to come together. I mixed a batch of plaster and replaced the huge swath of water damage from the roof last night, and rembered exactly why I hate working with plaster in the first place. The hole is patched, and the walls look less like an alley in Beirut and more like a flat surface every day. Here are the new pictures.
You know you’ve been working in your house an awful lot when you have somebody’s email address written on a chunk of 2X4 in pencil. I did get the ceiling in the office cleaned and primed last night, and began taping the edges in preparation for skimming. So progress is slow, but steady.
Hey, No Copying. Y’know those odd roadside shrines you see to dead people during your travels to and from the 7-11? Usually there’s a cross, and it’s decorated with some plastic flowers or a wreath. Sometimes they get more involved, like custom-carved names, balloons, or pictures, or sometimes the odd motorcycle helmet. Spooky, right? Anyway, I had the idea a long time ago to drive around and take artsy pictures of this strange phenomena, but somebody beat me to it.
Given that gas is getting outrageously expensive in the last few weeks, here’s a tool that might help us commuters.