Jen, in her loving, special way, decided she would try to make me some meatloaf this week. (Actually, she has been planning to bring the cow for about a week now, but took sick last Thursday.) She looked at Martha’s site and found a recipe that sounded good and looked easy. Now, let me just clarify here: She hates meatloaf. As with tacos, eggs, ham, water, and practically any other recipe, her mother has burned, undercooked, or otherwise wrung the enjoyment out of meatloaf for her to this very day. So it was with a sense of destiny and great foreboding that she mixed the ingredients and placed it in the oven. I got home, gave her a kiss, and told her that it smelled really good (it did); we waited for the required hour, and pulled it out.
It was not done. It was still pretty loose; it smelled good but had a gooshy texture, so we upped the temperature and put it back in. And we waited.
45 minutes later, the top was black, but the insides still fell apart like loose ground beef. it did not look like the example in the picture. I tried to console Jen, telling her it was because the recipe was bad, and I think she agreed with me, but she has vowed to never make meatloaf again.
Which, upon reflection, isn’t really a bad thing anyway.
Call Me. Looks like AT&T Wireless is putting itself on the block for sale. Considering Jen and I both have AT&T as our cell carriers, it should be interesting to see who buys them and what happens after that. I’m still trying to find the time to research other cell plans and decide who to go with.
Random Fun Links. Yesterday I updated both the Pink and the Blue room pages with some boring shots of wiring.
I called one of our real estate agents last week and got the name of a roofer she recommended; he stopped by this morning to give us a quote on repairing the roof leak. I’ve had people guess how much they think the repairs will cost, and their answers confirm my anxiety—I was thinking this was gonna be at least a grand or so. So when the roofer stopped back in and gave me a price of $100, my jaw hit the floor. For $200 he’s going to repair the leak and a couple of other slates further down, and I couldn’t be more relieved.
Wow. I’ve loved Gary Panter for years—he’s an artist/illustrator who has an extremely raw style and unique voice in the world of commercial illustration. Anybody who can stay as true to his craft as this guy, and become as well-known, is a hero to me. (Anybody that will coat cicada shells in latex and sell them to the public, while cheerfully warning you not to eat them, is a genius.) Turns out he’s selling custom drawings for $125 based on a couple of keywords you send him; I think this is a bargain and a unique opportunity reminicent of Howard Finster‘s ads in the back of Rolling Stone. (Sidebar: Our old boss at Cidera, a mild-mannered manager who suffered some of the worst paint-peeling halitosis known to Man, had answered one of the ads in the early 80’s and had an original Finster. I was envious.) I don’t have a whole lot of money right now, but I’m seriously considering this.
The idea of owning a newly-constructed house has never really appealed to me, for many reasons. The lack of soul in any recently built dwelling has been enough to put me off, really—there’s a line I draw between ‘Modern’, (loosely defined as ‘simply designed for elegant living’, and translating into ‘you don’t have enough money to live this cool’) and ‘Cheaply Built’. Cheaply Built apes the easy parts of Modern, in that there are little or no finishing touches—not because the builder was consciously making a design decision, but because the carpenter was doing time for drug possession that week. (My experience has shown the three groups of people who are always holding are carpenters, painters and waiters.) Cheaply Built means that there are no trees within thirty feet of the house. It’s a lot like government contracting—the people who built your house were the lowest bidders. Walk into any new condo or McMansion and you will see great swaths of bare wall offset with little tiny strips of molded wood shavings which are called ‘finishing’. The floors will be wood laminate or linoleum in some hateful pattern, and the siding will be vinyl in a pastel color. And you will be lucky to have ten feet between your neighbor’s bedroom window and your own.
All that having been said, owning an older home presents its own set of problems. That charming slate roof, which should last 100 years, is now 85 and dropping shingles like dandruff. The mature trees surrounding our house, which add so much character, were in dire need of a pruning five years ago. The wiring throughout the house, which was installed in fits and starts with each passing decade by electricians of questionable license, now resembles a handful of cooked spaghetti. There’s no way to explain why the piping for the heating system is routed under the front porch, or why the linen closet was once painted metallic silver. And the idea of more than one full bathroom is madness, unless the prior owners decided to add an extension.
All this doesn’t faze me, though, because I grew up in a variety of different houses over the years. My parents owned everything from a 60’s tract home to a prewar Cape Cod where they built a master bedroom out of the attic. I’m used to mysterious cold drafts, unheated rooms, balky furnaces the size of luxury sedans, flooded sump pumps, ancient wiring, carcinogenic insulation, hot pink bathroom tile, and barely functional appliances. I’ve had a 50-year-old used tampon fall out of the ceiling on my head while demoing a basement. (Don’t ask.)
We’ve had a family joke for years that says that the Dugan Way is to buy a house, spend a number of years fixing it up, and the minute it’s finished, sell it and start over again. We spent years helping my Dad shingle roofs, hang drywall, sweat pipes, run wiring, fix cars, and landscape yards. If you had asked me at age 13 if I enjoyed any of that, I would have denied it, because given the choice I’d rather have been riding my bike than digging a hole in the backyard for a pool, but I see the value in it now. I grew up in awe of my Dad, because the guy could do anything. Having seen him cut holes in the roof, or mix concrete, or build an entire bathroom from scratch, I grew up learning how to do stuff, and more importantly, without fear of doing it myself. I don’t think I could have been given a better gift than that.
I’m also thankful that I found a woman who will put up with having all her laundry out on a subzero porch, or inches of plaster dust on all flat surfaces, or living six months without a proper bedroom. She has the vision thing, which means she can see past the cracking plaster, moldering carpet, dying shrubbery, and leaky basement into the future, when we have happy children playing in a clean, painted, updated house.
I have to admit, though, that the kitchen floor has been freezing the last couple of weeks, and I’m kind of tired of that.
The scene: the express (10 items or less!!!) line at the Hunt Valley Giant. The players: handsome early 60’s male patron, smartly dressed, no wedding ring. Attractive late 50’s female clerk, requisite Giant uniform, nice hair, no wedding ring. The exchange:
Man: Helloo there!
Woman: Hi. (Checking items.)
Man: So, how did your football teams do this weekend?
Woman: (Barely perceptible pause) Oh, I don’t follow football.
Man: (Who’s got nothing) Awww, what are you, some kind of… (panic setting in) non…sports…liking…person?
Woman: (Not looking up) …
Man: (Grabbing for anything at this point) …Well, college basketball is really my thing.
I could only stand behind this poor sap and shake my head quietly as his ass caught fire and plunged into the ground. I’m no playa like Engelbert Humperdink, but I understand that A. it’s not smart to include sports in your opening line. Unless you’re hitting on a woman you’re playing sports with, leave the football chatter at home. B. have a follow-up line to your line. Chances are you’ll get shot down, and sometimes it’s better to have a good comeback—women like the chase, and if you’re interesting, you may get a second chance. C. Don’t follow a brush-off with an insult. Duh. D. Enough about you. What does she like? Why don’t you ask her, genius? She doesn’t give a crap about whether or not you like college basketball.
All of these things I wanted to explain to this poor guy, who may or may not have been trying to git some, but I figured he was already shamed enough as it was.
Yesterday afternoon I continued the Blue room demolition and reached the point where I can start snaking wire. While I made noise and yanked plaster down, Jen bundled up on the bed and drank TheraFlu to try and ward off the evil nasties. Outside, the freezing rain made an icy shell on top of the snow we got Saturday night.
Movie Review. Underworld was an entertaining, if not derivative movie about vampires and werewolves; the chick from Pearl Harbor ran around shooting guns trying to save the singer dude from Creed. “Romance story” this movie ain’t, but I can see how people could get “sexy” from the sheer amount of leather pants worn in the film. Thankfully, kung-fu was kept to an absolute minimum in favor of gunplay. But yeah, you’ve seen this movie before.
In addition to the wire work done last night, I got down below the pantry this morning, fighting the wind and a 5×5′ sheet of plastic (that was fun) to seal up the insulation I put in the other night. This project was prompted by the newscast last night where they said that New Hampshire got down to frickin’ 98 below zero.
Random Fun Links. Disney sells Celebration community. It’s a Small World! (via dominey) Get your Mars on. Right On. I only wish this guy had some better merchandise, ’cause I’d buy it. (via boing boing) iPod sound quality. I should be encoding in AAC at 160kb/s…
The anticipated “1-3 inches of snow, with the possibility of 2-4 during Thursday” translated to a slight dusting. The state of Maryland continued its long tradition of freaking out and dumping millions of dollars worth of salt on clear roads, putting schools on 2-hour delays, and excercising “Snow Emergency Plans.” I remain unimpressed. So much for getting snowed in with my baby.
This evening I dropped $100—gulp—on cable at the Home Depot. $100 got me 1,000 feet of Cat 5e network cable and 500 feet of coax cable, enough wire to wrap around my house about a hundred times or start my own copper mine. I got the rest of the wire run from the Pink room to the basement and began to cut out the baseboards for the outlets. Hopefully by tomorrow night I can have the pink room finished and start on the blue room next.
Random Fun Links. Quicktime 3-D view of Mars, put together from NASA photgraphs. That’s compelling stuff.
Actually, I misspoke yesterday. The mini-headphone-to-RCA plug does work, it’s just that the input level to the receiver is very low. So I have to crank the receiver up to high volume to hear the output from the iPod. The S-Video cable still doesn’t work, and the main issue there is that my TV is old and only has a coax input. At some point I will need to buy a TV with S or Component video inputs to get the whole enchilada.
This Old House, Part 2. So I got the insulation installed under the pantry last night. It was actually pretty easy to do—cutting down the stringers was easy with the compound miter saw, and actually putting the insulation in was a snap. Unfortunately, the kitchen is still pretty cold because the radiator is barely alive. So, no quick fix.
Legion of Boom by the Crystal Method is a disappointment. Not as melodic as Vegas (“Busy Child”, “Trip Like I Do”) or compelling as Tweekend (“Name of the Game”, “Roll It Up”), none of the tracks on this album stand out, make me want to do kung-fu, shoot people up, or drive cars fast. And that is the standard by which I judge all my big-beat electronica. “Weapons of Mass Distortion” and “Broken Glass” come close to the old-skool soundtrack for ass-whuppin’, but this is pretty uninspiring stuff.
Missing. Todd just reminded me that Spalding Gray is missing and presumed bumming; apparently he was in a bad car wreck back in ’01 and has not been right ever since. My friend Martha and I both went to see Gray’s Anatomy at Center Stage back in ’94 or so; it turns out that Todd could have been there the same night (and, based on our particular brand of shared coincidence, I would put money on it) and we all enjoyed the show. God bless, man, and I hope you’re OK.
Random Fun Links. Heavy rotation this morning: Pete Yorn’s Musicforthemorningafter, specifically “On Your Side”. Beautiful stuff. This could be very cool. Provided I can get it to work. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass. This translates, in Industry-speak, as “Get out, you loser.” (this has direct bearing on a certain project I was working on last year.)
The cover for the couch came yesterday, and while I waited for Jen to get home, I figured out how to put the thing on the couch. It fits really well, but $200 is pretty steep for the thin material it’s made of, but I guess that’s in line with the four hundred percent markup Pottery Barn charges.
This Old House. Our kitchen is small by contemporary standards, but it’s functional for us, largely in part because there’s a 5’x5′ pantry off the back of the house. It’s suspended off the ground about four feet by two concrete pillars, and the underside is finished off with tar paper. The kitchen is also the coldest room in the house, in part because the radiator there is the last one on the chain, and in part because the pantry is poorly insulated. I took a look under there this morning and found that the tar paper is holding in a layer of blown fiberglas insulation, but I can’t be sure how old, thick or even it is. I’m going to buy a couple of 2’x4’s and a roll of pink insulation today and see if I can’t seal it up a bit better before the temperatures plunge again.
Oh, and those two cables I bought at the Best Buy last week? Neither of them work.
Random Link Fun. 100 Mowst mispelled werds. Know it. Learn it. Live it. Clean your 1st gen iPod. Gonna try this one tonight. VoIP hiccup. Doesn’t apply to my IP phone though… Dead iPod? Follow those instructions. Also, Helpful iPod support.
4:55 PM. Apparently a whole swath of I-95 is on fire or something, not too far from Catonsville. A tanker truck did a header off an overpass onto two other tanker trucks. What are the chances of that? This should make the evening commute a pleasant one. I think I may wind up staying late at work this evening.
duckpin bowling, hillendale lanes, 1.12.04
The wedding dress search has been sort of a Crusade for Jen over the last few months. Between pushy sales staff, incompatible schedules, stacks of bridal magazines, unpredictable sisters, and a mother with more conflicting opinions than a Sunday Fox News show, she has been laying awake each night dreading each attempt to buy something. This Friday we hosted her mother and sister, taking them out for Thai at our favorite local restaurant, in preparation for another skirmish on Saturday. The good news is that they found a dress. The bad news is that all joy, confidence, and self-esteem Jen had in the dress was smacked out of her on the car ride home by her mother, who is now banished from any further wedding planning.
Meanwhile, I forcibly removed all the skin from my knuckles while running wire through the Pink room. There are enough loops for seven outlets, which should be enough plugs to power an entire branch of Circuit City. Sunday, I got the wire down through the wall in the dining room and through the basement to the panel, a production about as complicated (and pleasant) as trying to ski blindfolded through a minefield. In addition, I put another electrical line in the wall for the future bathroom, and one of two planned data cables.
Saturday night Jen had plans, so I went duckpin bowling with Jason and his friends Heather, Sharon, and Dave at the Hillendale bowling center, a quaint facility north of the city that dates back to the Eisenhower administration. Duckpin bowling is an odd Baltimore tradition, where the ball and pins are about a quarter the normal size, and about five times as hard to knock over. The good thing is that you can really whip that little ball down the lane. The bad thing is that unless you hit the pins just so, you’ll take out two pins and leave the rest standing. I’m ashamed to admit that my old neighborhood featured a duckpin bowling center, the venerable Patterson Bowling Center, and in the six years I lived there I didn’t make it over for a game. I’m also ashamed to admit that I’m a poor duckpin bowler, and that I ranked dead last in the competition.
Hold On To Your Lunch.
No, really, Hold on to your lunch.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Dan, our underpaid and under appreciated IT god around here, just hooked up a new HP network printer that my Mac can see. Apparently the old one was networked but you had to open a port to it or some such bullshit, and it wasn’t PostScript, so it was worthless and invisible to Rendezvous.
In other news, I got the rest of the plaster and lathe down in the Pink room last night and began the process of drilling through the studs to start fishing wire. In some cases there are some roadblocks—the closet corner is framed in such a way that I don’t have clearance for a shovelhead drillbit, or even the drill, so I’m going to have to get jiggy with it. The area in the front corner behind the radiator is the main trouble spot though, because the kickplate still won’t come out. There’s not enough room to maneuver behind it, plus I can’t get at the nails that hold it in place. I am, however, in love with my loaner Sawzall. I’ve forgotten just how much fun a 12 amp motor connected to a 4″ metal blade can be. It reminds me of the remarkably un-PC Joe Piscopo line from Johnny Dangerously, the one where he holds up the 88 Magnum: “It shoots through schools.”
I should also give a shout-out to my pops (not to be confused with my peeps) for the super-science laser level he gave me for Christmas. I put some batteries in this thing and turned it on the other night, and it immediately pointed out the fact that the house is out of level in five dimensions, at which time it radioed Sears Central and called in backup from the Craftsman Emergency Response Team. I’m going to need a degree in geometry to square out my house, and this thing will make life much easier. Plus, the included red-lens glasses make me look like Devo when I wear them. Thanks, Dad.
Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit Of Consumer Goods. Tuesday I broke down and bought a present for our 8-year-old IKEA Varnamo couch (the one they don’t sell anymore). Over the years this poor couch has been slept, dripped, stood, scratched, snoozed, fought, laughed, cried, played, drank, eaten, and jumped on; it’s really showing its age at this point. With $200 I don’t really have to spend, I got a Pottery Barn slipcover on clearance, which will be great news for our friends who are allergic to the five square feet of cat fur embedded in the upholstery.
Random Link Fun. Here’s an interesting site on the Curta hand calculator, sort of a mechanical adding machine. (via Slashdot). An Awesome illustration site. (via Boing Boing). And finally an Awesome poster site. Cheap, too. (via Coudal).