lakewood halloween display, 10.9
I deposited a hefty freelance check in the bank this morning that will then be used to pay off about 90% of my credit card debt tomorrow. God, what a great feeling that is. Although my mind regards the credit card debt as a liability, for some reason I don’t think of it that way- it sort of floats off on the side as a bill I just continually pay. Hopefully my 2002 policy of NEVER using the credit card will carry through and I won’t creep the balance back up on it like I did two years ago. (I did exactly the same thing last year—a freelance job paid off the balance, and within six months there was $1K on it again. Grrr.)
The living room is red. Very red. I painted the wall going up the stairs a deep shade of red last night, and it has changed the whole mood of the house. I’m not sure how I feel about it yet, because I didn’t get the chance to cut the edges in or even out the application, so I’ll reserve comments until that’s done.
It’s because of companies—and CEOs like this—that the current investor does not trust the market. This company’s board should kick the two brothers out the door on their asses and keep the money. The employee made a great point. It’s too bad the only reason he knew he could say anything was because he was already leaving.
So we got the credenza into the house (no small feat) and I put it where the IKEA TV cart was. Once the TV goes downstairs and the stereo comes down from the office, (and the green wall is painted red) it’ll look real nice in the living room.
I also got my film for the 620 cameras yesterday, so I’m loading two of them up tonight for Jen and I to use. We’re going to test each out to see how well they work and we’ll use the two best for taking B/W pictures. I’m excited to use the Duaflex and the Ansco, and I think the Brownie will take real clean shots too.
OK, so I believe that Ray Fiennes is a casting coup for the role of Francis Dolarhyde in Red Dragon. However, Harvey Keitel as Jack Crawford is about as good as Marilyn Monroe as Lady MacBeth. And no matter what you say, William Peterson is still the best Will Graham, CSI or not. It will be interesting to see how well Ed Norton does in that role, and which movie is better. What’s your favorite?
I added my home workspace to the workspace exhibit at somebodydial911. Penn is happy that he’s a star on the web, too.
Zeldman comments on experiences loading, fighting with, and de-installing OSX on his machine, and offers a ton of helpful links to different sites claiming to know how to intall it the correct way. For the record, I was able to get it running just fine. The only problem I had with software were the fatal exception and core dump errors in my brain.
I spent a good portion of last night alternately getting a backup Mac server up and running, and listing the CD’s I own so that I can A. figure out how many I have, and B. start trading stuff with my friend Rob to augment our individual collections. I now need to figure out how to share the Mac out through my DSL line– I’m going to give this a whirl again tonight.
Work is going steadily on the freelance project, and we have business cards, letterhead, advertising, a sellsheet, and a ton of other materials. I’m thinking that the official rollout will be sometime in the next few months, and for that I’m happy. There’s other stuff in the works that I need to jump on tonight, as well as some possible stuff down the road.
The trellis is up and secured in place, so now I get to the part I’ve been dreading- drilling a plate into the sill of the house under the back door for the stair platform. I’m trying to decide whether I should do that or just build a support and anchor it to the ground. Either way, I’m going to have to cut off the vinyl siding under the door, and I will be able to see what color the brick is behind my house for the first time in 5 years.
I’ll Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It Dept.: John Cusack and two other producers have spent the last year or two scraping funding together for a movie about the young Hitler in Munich, exploring who he was as a man before the Third Reich. One quote from the article really was interesting: “Walter Benjamin said when you fuse aesthetics with politics, you get fascism.”
The three producers interviewed all share a strong interest in the subject and have researched the subject extensively. Also interesting was the reaction Cusack got from Maureen Dowd of the Times— she had never seen the movie but came out against it. Personally, I’m interested in seeing it.
I found a link to the work of Adrian Tomine, who writes some very good comics. I’m going to look into finding this one up at Atomic Books sometime.
Browsing through some friends’ sites today, I found a travelogue on my old work buddy Jason’s site. He took an Aprilia across the country with a digital camera and documented his travels, then posted it all when he got back home. Yeah, his spelling is bad, but the writing is fun and the pictures are gorgeous. It makes me wish I had the time/money combination to do the same thing.
I also found out via Mike that MICA finally updated their site, after a long, confusing, 404-laden six years.
I was able, after waiting three days for them to dry out properly, to raise the first three crossbeams for the trellis last night. Last saturday I got the two 4×4 side posts permanently anchored to the wall, levelled, notched, and hung the beam between them. Now I’m slowly getting the crossbeams up; this afternoon when the sun is at about a 60 degree angle I’ll be able to see just how much of a sunbreak it creates. I have to return to Home Depot this evening to buy four more 2×6’s, and hopefully they will already be dry.
I was looking through some old drives last night in preparation to donate a couple of old Macs, and I found a bunch of Cidera-era pictures on a storage drive. With those I also found a real interesting picture of the backyard before I started on the work, and a nice shot of the lake back in 2000. Along with these I have a bunch of staff and event photos from that time, about 8 months before the company imploded.
Lesson 362 on how not to run a website: Long and Foster has listings for houses in Baltimore; you plug in your information and do a search. They return a page with a small picture, a basic description, and no other information. No address, no lot information, no size info. I sent an email to the listed agent and got a bounceback to another agent, referring me to a phone number. Sorry, you lose. Make me jump through hoops, and withhold basic purchasing information from me? No thanks.
On another front, the house across from me that was rehabbed last year and is still on the market is listed for $214K.
Whew. Well, this morning I was able to get the support installed on the north wall for the sunbreak, and the side support for the stair platform. This is going to be difficult, because it gets so damn hot by noontime, it’s impossible to work out there. Hopefully I’ll get the OK from my other neighbor to drill into their wall so I don’t have to engineer posts and support columns, and I can put up the sunbreak in another morning or two. That will make the deck go a lot smoother.
Meanwhile, the irrigation system is working perfectly; my only complaint is that I can’t adjust the valve for anything lower than 15 minutes’ time—at the tenth minute or so there’s a stream of runoff out the back alley down to the drain, and I hate to waste that water. But at least the drainage is working correctly in all the planters!
BTW, the tires in that picture are now gone, along with the Peavey 40-watt bass amp my dad bought me when I was 15. Both went before 11am at the Route 90 sale, and I made $100! (Sad tip of the hat to that amp. Rock on, old friend…)
Well, I cleaned up a lot of loose ends yesterday; one of the major things is that I called the guy about the Wyoming Scout and let him know I have the cash ready; I was thinking about taking a week or so after the game is done and driving out to see the truck, but he mentioned that he’s heading out there in two weeks. What I think I’m going to do is send him out there with a handful of disposable cameras to take pictures of all the areas I want.
I also have a pretty good idea of how I’m going to work out the deck in the backyard; instead of just nailing a sill to the back of the house and attaching stairs, I’m going to build a platform off the sill about 3′ deep, and then attach the stairs to that. I think I have the other sections figured out too; there were some questions about how to anchor the supports to the ground, but there are some very simple galvanized steel standoffs made for 4’x4’s. I also know how I’m going to set up the stair down to the brick (when the deck is made level to account for the slope, the top of the support at the brick will be one foot off the ground.)
They started leveling the Superfresh by my house yesterday- it’s totally demolished and now they’re in the process of hauling the debris away.
I’ve been reading Don’t Make Me Think and getting a lot of very useful information out of it, along with some other links to places I’ve found in the last two weeks. I’m thinking that I’m going to test my family on the 10-20 system and see how they react to it, take notes, and write up a report for John when I get back. I know there are a number of improvements I already want to make on the interface and in the writing; going to Jakob Nielsen’s site and reading through the writing sections has me thinking. I also need to dig out my copy of The Elements of Style from the basement boxes.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Some new pictures of the backyard, from 6.11.
On my way to work this morning, I had the windows down (it was about 60 degrees this morning, but due to rise into the 90’s by noon) and took my customary route out of Canton to get to I-83 north. On my drive, I had the pleasure of smelling, in sequence, the salty air blowing off the harbor, fresh bread from the H&H bakery in Fell’s Point, followed closely by bacon, waffles and syrup from a restaurant with its doors open. When I got to the onramp, I smelled freshly cut, damp grass from the wide median downtown. I got onto 83 and all the smells blended together as I got up to speed.
Found out that we’re getting paid ½ our paycheck this month. Yay.
I found a great utility called snapGallery for posting online pics; it’s a free VBS script (boo- no Mac support) but it works very well, and obviously was designed by somebody who posts pictures frequently. I think we will use this from now on.
The past few days have been an attempt to remember 4 years of Quark Xpress that I thought I had forgotten. It’s actually pretty funny how much I do remember, considering I’ve learned and forgotten X number of programs before and since then. Nevertheless, I remember why I do not enjoy print work, and long for the days when I can work the web again.
No joy on the digital camera yet either. It supposedly shipped Priority Mail on Monday, so I’m hopeful the dang thing will be here tomorrow.
One bright spot in the last few weeks has been the backyard and its progress; unfortunately I can’t post pictures of it yet. The list looks like this:
- The brick is down on the ground in a basketweave pattern; it stetches from the old garage wall lip to the back wall.
- The south side planter is down and installed 4 bricks high.
- The north side planter is installed except for the third level half-circle in the main area.
- There is about 1/8 of a bag of sand in the front south corner between the bricks; i couldn’t help myself and brushed some of it in, and it looks great.
Still to do (concrete projects):
- Finish off the half-cirle in the center and point in the outer walls of the planters that are sloppy.
- Point the edges of the floor brick to seal in the sand
- Drill drainage holes in both planters
- Haul in some rock, mulch or other base and dump it in the planters
- Haul in the soil and water
- Haul in a few bags of sand and sweep into the brick
- Buy some half-brick and finish off the area on the north wall by the gate (over the drainage pipe.)
Oh, good god, I am tired beyond belief. What a productive, but exhausting, weekend.
Jen and I mixed about 500 lbs. of concrete, moved and laid about 600 bricks, and generally wore ourselves right out. The back patio is complete save the north side planter; we were able to get everything down and cured by Sunday afternoon at 5. The new brick looks and feels really good. It went in a lot cleaner and smoother than the old brick would have, plus it looks better to have the older, more weathered brick on the planters.
We also had a really great time being with each other, from walking the neighborhood for breakfast to getting a dozen crabs Sunday night (yum!) She taught me the St. Mary’s County method of opening crabs and I dropped an eight-foot 2×4 on her knee. So it equaled out perfectly.
At some point in the next few days I’ll hopefully have some pictures of the in-progress work to post online; I’m waiting for my camera to show up in the mail so that I can post more quickly. Until then, I took shots with the 35-millimeter and we’ll wait until they get developed.
It’s an odd feeling to have no fingerprints: after handling the brick for three days straight, two without gloves, the pads of my fingertips were worn down to bare, smooth skin. Now they are wrinkled over with scar tissue, and the tactile feeling is not unlike that of dried Elmer’s glue on your thumb, the cheap false skin we used to make in third grade. It does feel righteous and good to have worn, pitted, rough skin on my hands again.