that's just super, 11.20.03
Let’s all hear it for Mr. Active Roof Leak, everyone! Thanks.
Album of the Day. The Roots‘ Phrenology. Lots of juicy good tracks on here. I’m not a huge hip-hop or rap fan, although my tastes do run to the DJ genre (see Shadow, RJD2, Cut Chemist, et. al.), but I enjoy the Roots’ sound. In the year 2003 these guys still care about the production and the words; I think the fact that the band acually plays each track is central to the quality of the music.
This morning I posted a bunch of pictures of the rooms that have been stained; in no particular order, here are the pink room, ocean room, and the office. Additionally, I stained the floor in the cream room this morning before leaving for work, because we have a forecast of 60+ degree weather through Monday. Pictures of that room to come tomorrow.
sage and his mama (this looks light on a Mac, I swear), 11.14.03
I’m Feeling Much Better Now, Thanks. I woke up at seven this morning (OK, 7:15) and made Jen some breakfast; after she left I put on my kneepads and started staining the floors. By 9:15 I had three rooms done and sealed the upstairs in plastic like a hermetic bubble. I made it into work and told Todd that when I pass out and begin twitching under my desk to inform the paramedics that I’ve been huffing glue all morning.
I’m getting some pretty good visuals here.
Yesterday I tore the built-in shelves out of the office so that we could sand the floors underneath; there was no good way to pull selected parts off without ripping out the whole damn thing. Luckily the shelves behind the doors were less difficult and I didn’t have to demolish them. As of tonight, the pink, blue and office floors are palm-sanded, cleaned, and ready to be stained tomorrow morning. Jen and I agreed on pecan for the color, so we picked up a gallon of it this morning. I’ll rise early tomorrow and see if I can’t get all three rooms done before work.
Found via the mighty Metafilter this evening: The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were.
I have 10.3 running on Jen’s Powerbook; it got the original 12GB drive from my machine with a clean install. Jen’s going to be moving to OSX at some point at work and I want her to be familiar with it as soon as she can be so the IT idiots there don’t get involved. It looks and runs very well on a 400Mhz G3, which is a good sign.
A few things, found via one of my new favorite design sites: Interrobang Letterpress. Tasty and sweet. Also, a racy bit of non-worksafe fun: Motel Fetish.
Grumble Grumble. So last night I got home and the power was out. Again. This makes the third time since we’ve moved in—admittedly the first time was during the hurricane, but this is frickin’ high wind. Everybody else in Catonsville had power, for crying out loud.
So we drove to Kelsey’s Irish pub and had some warm food while the Maryland game played in the background; when the longhaired 40-year-old band began setting up in the corner, we beat feet back to the ice chest. Jen put seventy blankets on the bed while I stoked the fire; our sleep was interrupted repeatedly by the cats, who became punting targets as they jumped on the bed. (try sleeping with five blankets and four cats on one bed. It’s kind of like being covered in warm cement.) Around 4:30 the lights came back on, and the heat slowly returned, thank god.
I’ve learned a couple of new things about the house; apparently the front porch holds absolutely no heat, the chimney damper definitely needs to be fixed, and we are in the market for a generator. Also, there’s a radiator behind the inside front door.
Looks like the class isn’t tonight. I’m hoping to hell I didn’t mess up the schedule, but the letter they sent me says November 11, 7pm in big letters.
Higher Education. I’m sitting in a lobby area of the Bunting center, which formerly was the AAA building with the cheap cafeteria on the basement level. The whole outside of MICA has changed dramatically since I was here last; the big glass sail thing overwhelms the Fox building and Mt. Royal Avenue, and there’s a frickin’ fountain where the parking lot used to be. All the kids look the same though (funny how dreadlocks are still so art school), and the air still smells of turpentine and Patchouli oil. I’m not sure where I have to go or what room this class is in because the visual communication in the Visual Communication department blows. More on that later.
Dust In The Wind. I got the rest of the upstairs edged with the hand sander this afternoon; with the exception of the areas under the built-in shelves in the office, the floor is clear of varnish. I have to finish sand the Pink room and the edges I tore up today, but otherwise all is ready for stain.
Everything Must Go. To our neighbors, the renters across the street: Thanks for parking your broke-down Dodge Diplomat on the front lawn with the For Sale sign in the window. That’s great. I’m gonna put on my plaid suit and go inflate the giant pumpkin on my lawn.
What’s The Frequency, Kenneth? Unable to sleep last night, I started researching the Griffin iTrip, the little add-on to the iPod that broadcasts your songlist to FM radio. Jason told me he had read bad reviews about it, so I looked at a few message boards and found that there’s a lot of negative feedback, especially in metro radio markets saturated with FM stations. So the iTrip is off my Christmas list, and instead I’ll have to find an aftermarket car radio with a line-in plug. Sigh.
Jen is now (12:25PM) in the middle of shopping for a weding dress. her mother stayed with us last night, and we had a fantastic dinner with her, sipping wine and talking. After the dishes, I was able to make a fire in the fireplace and keep it going; the damper in the flue is gone, so all the air in the house is drawn to the chimney and past the fire, which gets too much oxygen and smolders itself out. I closed the glass doors built onto the front of the hearth and found that the fire burned brightly and well that way. We’ll have to have somebody come out to replace the missing damper so we can enjoy both the heat and the light from the flames.
I don’t know what’s happening with the weather patterns over Baltimore here, but if you ever told me I would be wearing shorts on November 4th, I would have laughed in your face. This is heaven on earth, and I don’t want it to end.
Finished (for now.) 10:20PM, and the hallway, Pink, Blue, and Office rooms are sanded to 100 grit; the pink room is at 80 but the sander began to leak water (???) when I tipped it to change out a belt. I decided not to tempt the gods by continuing.
Tomorrow I get to rise at the ungodly hour of 6:30 to meet a bunch of folks at the park and ride for a meeting in DC that I’m less than enthused about; I’m going to need a triple shot of coffee to stay awake, I’m sure. Whoopee. Thankfully, there should be a shiny present on my desk when I get back to the office.
The Halloween Report. I ran home after work, made sure Jen was OK and got her some dinner, lit the candles, turned the lights on, and waited for the deluge. The night started slowly, with a young fairy princess and her dad (dressed like an escaped prisoner—when he shook my hand, his cuffs banged me on my elbow), a brother and sister (Yu-Gi-Oh and a spider) and another young boy (Power Ranger. Who knew they were still in?) A half-hour later we got a swarm of six kids, who were half entranced by the bowl of candy and half by the cats, who were nervously eyeing the front door. About an hour after that, we got a group of thirteen year-olds, who liked my pumpkin. And that was it. We have, by my estimation, about two years’ worth of candy left. It’s going to take a container ship to offload all this stuff.
Well, except for the Kit-Kats. You can’t take those.
“This Isn’t Fun Anymore.” Sunday we lured our friend Dave back over to the house with the promise of potato leek soup and stuck him in a room in front of a floor sander; I don’t know if he knew what he was getting into. Saturday I had pulled all the baseboards in the bedrooms, so we went nuts on the floors and got three of them down to the bare wood. The century-old polyurethane did not want to give up easily, and it took multiple sanding belt changes to get down to the wood. (Apparently the rental business is much like the razor business: the tools are cheap but the belts are ridiculously expensive.) Personally, I found the standing floor sander kind of fun, once I learned how to use it, but using the handheld edger was sort of like wrestling a greased badger on a tile floor. The home office is the only room left to finish, and I need to edge that and the hallway this week.
Thanks again, Dave, and we owe you big-time.
The first year I lived in Bolton Hill, my two roommates and I decided it would be great fun to drink National Bohemians, sit on our front stoop and hand out candy to the kids in the neighborhood. After a half hour, we realized what a drag that was, because all the kids that came to our door neglected to dress in costume, preferring to just grab a handful of candy and then… grab another handful of candy. Even more charming were the thirty-year-old people who were getting candy for their “brother who’s home sick in bed.” After hearing that same story five or six times, we stopped filling the bowl, unscrewed the light bulb in the foyer, and walked down to the Tavern for drinks.
This year is a totally different experience, and I’m looking forward to a new start. The house is kind of spooky on its own (without outdoor lights in the driveway, it’s very dark) but with the lights on it’s more cheerful. I went to the Target this afternoon and dropped $20 on ten pounds of candy, and hopefully I can throw together some kind of spooky costume tomorrow. Kids? Bring ’em on. I got yer candy right here.
In other news, I have found that it’s impossible to purchase a standard Humanitarian Daily Ration (what they’ve been dropping by the thousands in vacation spots like Iraq and Afghanistan) unless you have recently had the crap bombed out of you. I’ve been on the phone—thanks again for that VoIP phone, John— all day, and the most success I got back was a polite but firm no way. I’m going to have to figure out another way to describe this to my class.
So this morning Jen and I are cleaning up both the Pink room (now minus all hint of pink) and the Anxious room (now with a coat of Martha Stewart’s Kitchen Ceiling Blue, which is really more green than blue in our world, thank you), and from outside we heard a strange noise. We looked out at the Presbyterian church across the street and saw a fellow in a kilt playing the bagpipes for the people arriving for 10AM mass. We sat outside on the front steps with our coffee and listened to him run through some slower tunes, through a few Highland jigs, and then walk inside for the service. After the service was over we ran across the street to see if we could talk to him about a wedding. Turns out he’s done it before and he’s for hire; he’s a little quiet but he has a great repertoire. We’ve got his number, and we have a dream for our service: walking back to the house from the church behind a Scot (well, he’s actually Polish) playing the pipes.
Grumble Grumble. I’m sick. I have this cold where it feels like there’s a circus weightlifter standing on my chest, someone is pouring molasses down the back of my throat, the quick-dry cement in my skull is expanding as it sets, and my nose is running like a leaky hose spigot. I hate being sick.
Would you look at the work this guy is putting into his house? I am totally in awe.
Happiness Is A Warm Guitar. Here’s a new list for you: Favorite guitar breaks from rock songs. I brained on this one while listening to a copy of Dark Side Of The Moon (the 5.1 re-release that I don’t have the hardware to appreciate. Philistine); David Gilmour’s break in the middle of Time is brilliant and always sends a shiver up my spine. So here’s a preliminary list (in no particular order):
- David Gilmour, Time (Dark Side Of The Moon)
- Robert Quine, Girlfriend (Girlfriend)
- J Mascis, Start Choppin (Where You been)
- Dave Navarro, Three Days (Ritual De Lo Habitual)
- Hillel Slovak, Behind The Sun (Uplift Mofo Party Plan)
- Paul Westerberg, Alex Chilton (Pleased To Meet Me)
- Alex Lifeson, Red Barchetta (Moving Pictures)
- Billy Corgan, I Am One (Gish)
Renie adds:
- David Gilmour, Let’s Get Metaphysical (About Face)
Todd adds:
- J. Page, Communication Breakdown (Led Zeppelin I)
- Cesar Rosas (second break), Don’t Worry Baby (Will the Wolf Survive)
- Ken Bethea, Dressing Room Wall (Wreck Your Life)
- East Bay Ray, Let’s Lynch the Landlord (Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables)
- Joey Santiago, Isla de Encanta, (Surfer Rosa)
- James Honeyman Scott, Tattooed Love Boys (Pretenders)
- Johnny Marr, How Soon is Now? (Meat Is Murder)
- Jon Ganelli, The Lipstick Game (The Lipstick Game)
- Dan “Thunder” Bolton, She’s My Bitch (La Mano Cornuda)
- Frank Zappa, Watermelon in Easter Hay (Joe’s Garage, Acts II & III)
Got one of your own? One that stops you in the middle of a phone call, or gets you windmilling your air guitar? Let me know.
That’s Sick. My throat is currently feeling rough and gravelly, and my stupid nose won’t stop running. Every time the faucet turns off, I work up a sneeze and the whole thing starts over again. Luckily the company stocks OJ in the fridge, so I’m hosing down the germs with vitamin C from concentrate. Take that, bugs!
Happiness Is A Deposited Check. Ahh, another long-awaited freelance check in the bank. That should help Jen tide over until she gets her first paycheck, and begin to plug up the slow leak in my oh-shit fund. Yee-hah.