I could use a little luck this week. Keep your fingers crossed for me.
August has been a marathon, so I haven’t been writing much around here. I’m dealing with a lack of time and anything very important to say, sadly. You wouldn’t know it from the hackneyed sentences and dangling conclusions of my posts, but I do spend a lot of time trying to make sense of the voices in my head and then write down what they say in a logical fashion. This means I’ve got a pile of half-finished entries from the last few weeks, most of which you will probably never see. The other problem is that because I’m either hunched over my keyboard or sanding something on the porch, I don’t get out much, so I don’t have anything exciting to talk about other than the same three subjects.
Some things I am interested in, in no particular order:
The Nikon D90 is a prosumer-level DSLR with a full-size 12.3 MP chip (something only found in the pro grade camera bodies), high/lo ISO performance, 3 inch LCD, and HD Video. MSRP is $1000 for the body, and we’ll have to see what it retails for, but it looks like I’ve found the successor to my D70.
I love the final shirt in the Venture Brothers Shirt Of The Week Club, featuring the steely visage of (now deceased) Henchman 24. Money is tight, though, so I will probably pass on it.
Based on a comment left in a BoingBoing Gadgets post, I am once again using Remote Desktop to control my music server, in the basement, from my iMac, on the third floor. I didn’t realize all the functionality of the Remote Desktop application was built into OS 10.5 and compatible with 10.4. So what does all of this mean? I can now add ratings and playlists to the machine downstairs from my desk, making life a little more random and a lot less difficult.
Oh, and there’s this:
What I’m trying to do is apologize for sounding like a hamster on a wheel. I promise I’ll make it up to you in the coming months.
File this under You’ve Been Warned: Eight reasons even the innocent shouldn’t talk to the police. The upshot: don’t let Pembleton get you in the box without your lawyer.
Sage, it turns out, has small-cell carcinoma, another way of saying “lung cancer”. They give him 3 to 6 months.
Ever since I’ve known my wife, I’ve been content to be the number two man in her life. Her first love, her true love, is a 76-year-old Texan with a white whisker, bad breath, an the sweetest disposition of anyone I’ve ever met. His name is Sage, and we were told this evening that he has advanced-stage cancer, spreading from his chest into his lungs. We looked at the X-rays of his long, lean body stretched across the film, the doctor pointing out the masses here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, and each tap of her finger made my throat get tighter. This isn’t fair. The tough little bastard beat diabetes, for Christ’s sake. That bitch cancer took one good cat away, and now she’s come for another.
He spent the night at the cat hospital down the road, where an internist is going to perform an ultrasound this morning to confirm and isolate each of the masses. Hopefully then he can perform a biopsy and tell us exactly what Sage is dealing with.
I got a call early Sunday from my neighbor, who recently purchased a pretty green Defender 90, a Land Rover variant with a short and cloudy history here in the U.S. He’d just gotten wind of a Land Rover meetup in Columbia and asked if I’d like to ride along.
Well, duh!
We found a line of Rovers in a restaurant parking lot and walked around, chatting up the other folks in attendance; in comparison to the Scout aficionados I used to meet with, these were generally older, wealthier people with an affinity for offroading and the horrors of English electronics. Over a barbecue lunch, we swapped stories ad tips with some of the other owners, and I was tempted sorely by several people who tried to win me over to the dark side (I was wearing a Scout T-shirt). I told them it really wouldn’t be that hard—if I didn’t have a Scout, I’d have an old series Rover for certain. And, of course, there was an example present that made me a little misty:
This is an absolutely cherry Series 1, an exceptionally early example, done up in a paint scheme and soft top color that took my breath away, because it reminded me of an old friend:
I miss my old girl.
Working in the backyard on Sunday morning, Jen came to me and asked if I’d seen the instrument case hidden behind the neighbor’s garage that abuts our yard. I went to investigate and found a full-size cello case laying on its side in a pile of brush behind our mulch piles, not a place I’d prefer to see a stringed wooden instrument stored. Fearing someone had stashed it there for nefarious reasons, I placed it upright and we left it there for the day to see if someone came to claim it.
At dusk, I went back out and swapped it for a small note taped to the wall of the garage: “We didn’t want your friend getting wet. Ring the bell at the blue house.” (It was threatening to rain last night). Inside the case is a full-size student cello, made last year, in great shape save a cracked neck arch.
Something about this is very wrong; the house behind us is occupied by a single woman with no children. The garage itself is locked, but there’s a canvas awning to the side where the cello could have been stored out of the weather and eyesight. And why not the back porch of the house? If a child was locked out of the house, only to come back later, why not just leave it up there? This smells fishy to me, like someone stole it and stashed it.
So what should I do if someone actually does come to claim it? My respect for stringed instruments (I played upright bass for eight years) says I shouldn’t on easy on the punk who left it outside; it’s going to depend on who rings the bell, I suppose. If it’s a concerned parent, it’s a no-brainer. If it’s a nervous kid, do I call their folks? If it’s a tweaker, I ask them to describe it and see how they do, but what then? Ideas?
You had the misfortune of finding your way into the most unfriendly house possible, and paid for it with your life. We’re really a bird-loving house, if you can believe that; the fact that we have four cats does not diminish our respect for your beauty or abilities. When my pregnant wife brought you out to me, a look of focused concern on her face, I knew things weren’t good for you, even before I saw the blood on your breast. You were fighting to hold on, even though every nerve in your body was screaming FLY AWAY DAMMIT, but we could tell your back was most likely broken and all the wires were crossed. Instead, you laid in her small hand and defiantly stared at us with one dark eye, all three of us knowing what was coming and powerless to stop it.
In death you look less like a warrior and more like a disheveled pile of feathers, earthbound and cold. I apologize for not being skilled enough to capture your real essence: master of the sky, weightless and free, the way we all wish to live.
Remember when we were kids, and we’d play games out in the street or in someone’s backyard, and we’d call a do-over? Somebody’d kick the ball into a bush, or a car would come down the road right in the middle of an important play, and it was universally understood that things would just rewind a couple of minutes and start again, like erasing a videotape. Well, I’d like a do-over for most of yesterday, please.
It started out on an upbeat note; Mr. Scout brought over the window regulator for the Jeep and we tore the door down to put it in; unfortunately, the part was not a match to the one in my Jeep, and there seemed to be no way to use parts from the replacement to fix the broken unit.
We then decided to take advantage of the weather and go back to the pick & pull yard to hunt more Jeeps. It seems that parts (and part vehicles) are more plentiful for Grand Cherokees than for the regular model, both online and in the junkyard, and my particular model (2-door, second generation, power window) is even rarer than the 4-door. We did however find a junked PT Cruiser, which featured luxurious bucket seats that are supposed to be bolt-in replacements for Scout seats. Eight bolts later, we were walking up to the pay area with the seats on our heads, but not before making a detour to a section of the yard we hadn’t seen before, featuring some ancient Detroit iron: a three-porthole Buick, a rounded early 50’s Ford, and a pair of Opels, among other things. I shot about ten pictures, and we were on our way. As we got up to the counter, the redneck in charge of shoplifting told me they have a strict no-camera policy, and made me erase my memory card after giving me some bullshit about smashing lenses.
Returning to the Scout we’d found last week, we pulled a lot of plastic and other rare parts, having no luck pulling the hubs or the seat bases. It was about this time I checked my phone and found this lovely sight:
I don’t know when or how it happened, but it was enough to ruin my day right there. Strangely, I can still call in and out, and the touchscreen still works on the damaged areas. I’m going to visit the Apple store to see if there’s some kind of repair they can make; if not, it looks like I’ll be purchasing a 3G iPhone earlier than I planned.
My afternoon was spent working on an illustration; I decided to experiment with an idea I’d had a few months ago to see what results I’d get, using the negative space instead of the positive. The results were a lot less than I’d hoped for.
The linework looks cheaper, like a quick marker drawing, and not expressive like I’d imagined. It also could be because I’ve been having problems getting my cutting nibs to vary line weights properly—they seem to get dull very quickly, which is not what I’m used to. If I could regulate line weight better, I’d be happier with the results.
I took the same sketch and started making a traditional cut, and about three-quarters of the way through I realized the initial sketch, while reasonably good, did not capture McCain the way it should, and the resulting piece looks like someone else (Jen says it’s Ed McMahon). His head is not as long as I’d made it here, and his distinguishing features aren’t represented well enough.
There were several highlights from yesterday, so it’s not like I was constantly followed by a black stormcloud: we have Andersen 400-series windows officially on order for the front porch. Jen had a great client meeting on a new project, and we got our second delivery from the organic farm (I don’t know how we’re going to eat all this lettuce, chard, and spinach). I was just hoping to produce a success of my own, something I’m sure everyone can understand.
So it’s back to the drawing board for Jeep, phone, and scratchboard.
Update: One trip to the Apple Store, my choices were thus:
1. Continue to use the busted phone and guess at everything on the left side of the screen.
2. Wait until July and buy a new 3G iPhone for $200, but take an additional $10/mo. hit on my data plan.
3. Spend $250 to replace my iPhone with another 1st gen model.
I chose 3, because I’d love to have the 3G but I don’t want to pay AT&T an additional $120/mo. for features I may not even use. As it was, when the Genius rang me out, he told me happily they’d just reduced the replacement cost from $250 to $199, so I “saved” a little more money.
Upon inspection of the iPhone cases available at the store, only a select few might have protected my phone from catastrophic screen damage, and they tended to be the ugliest offerings on the shelf. (Imitation calfskin? stitched black leather? I don’t think so).
So where exactly is the refund check that lying squinty-eyed fuck mortgaged my future for?