There’s been a lot going on around Idiot Central lately; too much to list here. Suffice it to say we’re all fine and running as fast as we can to keep up. More later, promise.
As noted elsewhere, this weekend was another milestone in Finn’s development: She moved into her own big-girl room on Friday evening, after a whirlwind installation of cardboard blackouts over the windows and frenzied crib relocation. She sat on the floor and played happily with her toys as we hustled around, moving and hauling and organizing, and seemed keenly interested in examining our pizza and beer when we finally stopped for dinner. Her first night was uneventful and quiet, and she slept through until 6:30 without an hour of talking and fussing like she’s been doing for the last several weeks.
On Saturday, Mama and I began the long and arduous task of planting asparagus in our garden. Planting asparagus sounded, at first blush, like it would be cool. It’s a native plant in Maryland, we like it grilled, and it’s good for us. This was all before we realized what a pain in the ass it is to plant asparagus. The best way I can describe this to you is that it was like burying giant prehistoric spiders in a drainage ditch.
Most of the soil beneath our ratty lawn is pure Maryland clay, so I had to dig a 12″ trench and throw the dirt/clay onto a tarp spread on the lawn. After installing the asparagus, we covered them over and watered everything heavily while Finn kept an eye on us from the comfort of her blanket.
Sunday morning we took advantage of Finn’s early breakfast schedule and hustled out to a restaurant for Bloody Marys and an anniversary breakfast before the church crowd set in; she was in a wonderful mood for our whole visit and crashed out on the car ride home.
Most of the the weekend was consumed with yardwork, from mowing the lawn for the first time in two weeks, cutting saplings down on the property line, fixing gutters, and repotting a ton of seedlings in the greenhouse. Two of my tomatoes and two of my eggplant have aphids already, so they got moved outside and away from the other plants. Four cucumber seedlings got their own tub of dirt, pepper seedlings got moved to their own pots, and the radishes (which are remarkably leggy) got placed outside so that they’ll acclimate quickly. As the sunlight dimmed and turned to stormclouds, we moved inside and began cleaning out the front porch, which was relegated to a dumping ground last year during the remodel and hasn’t been touched in months. There are about three Scoutloads of debris to be hauled to the dump next weekend, which will free up a ton of space around here.
Finn was patient and understanding throughout the entire three-day weekend, spending time on her blanket, in the backpack carrier, in her car seat, in the bouncy chair, and on the floor while we planted and weeded and mowed and cleaned and vacuumed and moved. While we were outside hauling dirt from one side of the yard to the other, she watched as I piloted the wheelbarrow back and forth, and each time I passed she smiled and held her arms out: TAKE ME FOR A RIDE. So I scooped her up off the blanket, placed her on an empty bag (and my folded up T-shirt) and she got a wheelbarrow ride around the back lawn while Mama held her hand.
Stop worrying about your children! My sister and I walked to school by ourselves when I was in the first grade, and often left the house for the entire day without having a cellphone, GPS tracking device, or RFID implant. Don’t believe the nobody-is-safe hysteria.
We’re in week 2 of the Great Deluge, and while my nose has stopped dripping, our gutters are still clogged. All this rain means I haven’t gotten a damn thing done outside on the house, or with the Scout, or in the garden, which is driving me batshit crazy. However, while feeding Her Highness the other morning, I noticed that our neighborhood currently resembles Ireland in its lush, green, foggy beauty, and that’s not a bad thing. When we are slogging through another oppressive brown August, I’ll look back and remember how vibrant all the plants looked this spring before they had the life cooked out of them, and that will make me happy until I can crawl back into the air conditioning.
We enjoyed a wonderful meal Saturday evening with Mr. and Mrs. Scout, who are possibly the only people in Maryland to have actually managed to sell their house this year, within weeks of putting it on the market, and who will be leaving the ‘Ville to move across the Bay where the traffic is slower and the sky is sunnier. Mr. Scout promises me he will be back in the area regularly, but I suspect this means we will now have to settle for long-distance bromance.
I took the time last night, in front of a roaring fire, to finally wipe my MacBook clean and install a fresh new copy of Leopard, a full year after buying the install disc. I’ve noticed a huge speed gain already, as well as access to modern conveniences I should have been enjoying months ago. The last 12 hours have been a whirlwind of new installations and digging through discs to find long-forgotten files, but overall it’s great to have a clean system for the first time since 2004 (I’ve done user migrations since 10.2, and it was getting very, very crufty under the hood).
And finally, after a month of fruitless listings, untold numbers of flaky, half-legible emails, and three no-shows, I sold my sidelined G5 iMac this evening—for exactly what I paid for it a year and a half ago.
“…one of downtown Baltimore’s main thoroughfares is filled with water after a water main burst just before 6:30 a.m. Tuesday. The break closed Lombard Streets from President to Gay streets, crippling rush-hour traffic, closing buildings, parking garages and the National Aquarium in Baltimore.”
70° days are rare in Maryland this early in March, so this weekend we tried to balance spending as much time as possible with Finn and as much time as we could outside in the fresh air. Saturday was dedicated to long-overdue yardwork, which consumed a good portion of our afternoon, but, what a beautiful afternoon to do it!
I made the mistake of wearing work jeans, and after a half an hour raking leaves off the foundation, I had to switch to shorts because I was too hot. We had five inches of snow last Monday. I am surprised I did not blind the pilots of overflying passenger jets with the sunlight bouncing off my pale knobby knees.
Anyway, while Finn slept off her second breakfast, Jen and I filled twenty bags of leaves from the back of the house, the driveway bed, and the odd area under our back porch, which seems to attract all of the loose leaves in this zipcode like a great sucking vortex.
Once that was accomplished, we three got a bite to eat, changed our diaper, brought the swing outside, and commenced to cleaning out the sad, dilapidated tangle of weeds that was our garden while Finn supervised. I cannot describe to you the sense of satisfaction it gives me to look out on that bare patch of earth and know the neighbors aren’t cursing us under their breath anymore.
While raking up the leaves, I reflected on the sad harvest we reaped last year (mainly due to the toll taken by varmints), and decided that this would be the year I modify our greenhouse to grow vegetables properly. Doing some research, I found online suppliers who sell polycarbonate glazing and ventilation systems, which will be an up-front investment and take some engineering to install, but should turn our useless sealed hothouse into a productive greenhouse.
Meanwhile, I straightened up the pots and barrels and soil and made way for seedlings.
Then, I moved out to the garage and straightened up as much as I could around the Scout without actually diving into doing something on it. I did break down and disassemble some of my new parts–but I’ll go into that elsewhere.
Sunday we got the girl up early—or is that the other way around?—and made preparations to take a long walk around a lake in Columbia before doing our grocery shopping. After her first bottle of the day, this child, who almost never stops moving, did something she’s never done with me before—she leaned her head down onto my chest, under my chin, and quietly nestled up against me for three of the longest and best moments of my life.
Once we got out onto the trail, she was fine for the first fifteen minutes or so, but soon decided she wanted to be facing forward, which meant we wound up carrying her like a football for two and a half miles. Once out of the stroller, she was her usual observant self, appraising each new passerby with a taciturn stare, careful to warn away strange ladies who, no doubt, were plotting to rush over and pinch her chubby pink cheeks. Touch my face and I will projectile vomit all over your track suit, that glare said. And it worked.
Jen and I are afraid nobody will ever see the inside Finn, the girl we get to see who is giggles and smiles and gets so happy her entire body spasms repeatedly like she’s hooked up to a car battery. When she’s around us, she’s Miss Congeniality, and when she’s out in public, she’s Steve McQueen, staring down a hostile world with those steel-blue eyes and a .44 magnum. I will show you proof that she can smile:
After our return to the car, we hightailed it over to the grocery store, where Mama stayed with her in the parking lot while I hustled around and got our shopping done. A quick trip to the health-food store, and we headed home for a three-hour nap and some more yardwork: the front hedge got cleaned out, the greenhouse got a final sweep, and the toolbench in the garage got cleaned off.
About the time I was finishing up for the day, Finn woke up for dinner: avocado and pears. MMMMMMMMM, avocado. And then it was bathtime, and as soon as she was diapered and dressed, it was time for sleep. I’m exhausted just writing about it all.
This weekend is supposed to be warm and bright, and it can’t come soon enough. The snow melted off in yesterday’s balmy weather, revealing piles of dead leaves I still have yet to rake. I’ve been ignoring the yard since last fall, and the bill has finally come due; doing some basement straightening last weekend, I found an entire box of yard waste bags just waiting to be used. I think we will also have to get Her Highness outside for an afternoon in the yard—maybe while we clean up the garden? I predict the fresh air will do us all good.
In other news, I traded some time with a long-time client for a used but shiny G4 tower that was sitting in their old production room, unused and unloved. After a five-minute drive swap last night, it replaced the ancient G3 tower we’ve been using as our music server, and now paves the way for future data storage. (The 11-year-old G3 BIOS doesn’t recognize drives over 120Gb in size, which sucks when I’ve got two 250GB drives sitting idle and in an age when terrabyte-sized drives sell for less than $100).
Finally, I’ve been obsessing over getting out into the garage and working on the Scout. I’m going to do some test runs with the wire wheel on some of the spare parts I got last weekend, vacuum the floors and bed, and take stock of what I’m working with a little better. My plan is to run up the engine for a while until the leak appears, then try to determine where it’s coming from. If it’s just the gasket, that should be easy to order and replace. If not, I’ll lay hands on a used a water pump in the next week and swap that out instead.
This morning NPR was talking about the current state of the stimulus package working its way through the Senate, and how the various factions are arguing over the best way to spend/stimulate. Somebody mentioned there was an amendment to help homeowners refinance their mortgages with federally-underwritten loans at somewhere around 4.5%, which sounded like an excellent idea to me. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest our household could be saving about $250/mo. if we qualified, which we could be putting to excellent use for important things like childcare (keeping someone else employed) or paying down debt (making our risk of foreclosure that much less).
I personally would much rather spend the money we all don’t have on shoring up the inheritors of all this debt instead of flushing it down the toilet that is the current banking system; hearing that Wells Fargo suddenly canceled a million-dollar bacchanal for its “top employees” because of the public furor just reinforces the perception that these fucknuts just don’t get it. I think it might have been more fun to let them all gather in Vegas for their frat party, and then interrupt the whole thing by busing in a couple hundred thousand laid-off Americans to crash the events. That would be some news coverage I’d love to see.
I was also happy to hear the President place limits on corporate pay for any bank who received bailout money; this obviously should have been part of the first legislation passed, but wasn’t.
Whatever the case, it’s nice to hear that this administration, in some part, actually gives a fuck about the rest of us.
At 10AM this morning, a trio of trucks descended on the house, and the driveway was quickly filled with tools. We pulled the cover from the Scout and looked over the engine compartment. There was plenty of oil, all the hoses looked reasonably clean, the wires were connected, and there was enough juice in the battery to light the brake indicator. After attempting to jump it with the Jeep (not enough power), we swapped out a battery from Mr. Clean’s pickup, cleaned the carburetor, added some gas, and cranked the engine over.
Unbelieveable.
After letting it run for a short while, Mr. Scout suggested we check the coolant level, and it was a good thing he did. The radiator was dry, so we immediately filled it with coolant and water. The next question was what condition the transmission was in. After a quick run through the gears, I put it in reverse and felt the clutch grab almost immediately, then tested first gear with the same result. After we engaged the hubs, I tried out the transfer case and found it easy to engage, even while sitting still.
While we had it running, Finn brought Jen outside to inspect.
After a short while, there was a little leakage from the water pump, so we resorted to a backwoods remedy: eggwhites in the coolant. The engine ran smoothly and a little fast, but there is no better sound than that of a big American V-8, and it was singing to us: Take me for a spin. A historic plate was -ahem- borrowed from Mr. Clean’s pickup, and we jockeyed vehicles to make room for its passage.
We took it up the side street and everyone took a turn behind the wheel except Mr. Scout, who is saving himself for the day his mistress is ready for him. First, second, and third gears all shifted smoothly, and the engine made a lovely howl through the dual exhaust.
After returning it to the driveway, we retired to the mexican restaurant down the street to enjoy some warm food and cold beer while the battery charged.
It felt good to be behind the wheel of a Scout again.
We are getting the dregs of the winter storm here in the Mid-Atlantic, which translates to rainy sleet. I went out to grab some supplies for tomorrow’s resurrection attempt and found that Mr. Scout had dropped by unannounced at some point today to put a hat on the truck.