Grandma’s In Town!
Metric, Fantasies
I’m currently listening to Metric, Fantasies (iTunes link). I’m a sucker for indie electro-pop with female vocals (no, not Britney; think Ladytron) and this fills the bill perfectly.
Giving up my iPod for a Walkman
Giving up my iPod for a Walkman.
“It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape.”
Noble Intentions.
Jen and I joke that every year we make a list to do a certain number of specific things to make ready for the parade, and every year we wind up doing something completely unrelated to that list, and then scramble at the last minute to complete everything we originally intended to do. (Sometimes this is entirely my doing, but sometimes we are co-conspirators), This year, we decided to re-arrange the office around a new shelving unit, which meant moving a heavy three-drawer file cabinet and two bulky flat files to the other side of the office.
Preceding any completion of housework, I filled up the Scout Saturday morning with a final load of yard waste and construction debris and narrowly skirted self-immolation courtesy of a leaky gas tank (more on that here). Once that drama was over, we continued cleaning around the house until the girl awoke from her nap, and then it was time to run to the IKEA in White Marsh to purchase a shelving unit. Finn was content to bounce around in the backpack for one half of the trip, and then she rode in the cart through the Marketplace, flirting with the other customers and making friends while we browsed the as-is section and wrestled 150 lbs. of shelf onto a dolly.
Once home, we put her to bed and grilled some kabobs before doing battle with the allen wrench. We (well, I) failed to properly read the assembly directions for the shelves and made an hour’s worth of work into three. Sorry, Jen.
Sunday morning, after making some adjustments and leveling off the unit, we filled the shelves with three tons of printed material previously stored in various areas around the house, thus consolidating 90% of our design resources in one place.
I then cut a leftover piece of sanded birch plywood down and made a custom tabletop for the flat files with a beveled edge.
Sunday afternoon we were invited to a family crab feast (thanks, guys!), and Finn played happily on the floor while we got elbow-deep in Old Bay and Harpoon Summer Ale. I would share pictures here, but they came out all blurry.
Scouting the City.
This morning I screwed up my courage and drove the Scout into work because the forecast is 90° and sunny. I haven’t had time to change the fluids or replace plugs and wires, so she still runs rich and stinky, but she runs and that’s good enough for me. I had a brief moment of fear when I drove up to the “maximum height” sign at the entrance to the garage and realized I could touch it with my fingers, but the windshield cleared it with about six inches to spare.
Veteran Loses Donated Home.
Nonprofit reverses plan to give injured veteran a home. Friends of ours spearheaded the effort to build and donate a house to an amputee veteran. But it turns out he and his family own two other houses and had a third built for them by volunteers in Georgia. What a sad, demoralizing story.
iPhone 3.0 phone comparison
Here’s a handy chart from Apple detailing what iPhone 3.0 software features work with which phone.
The Short and the Long.
Saturday we treated Finn to her first IKEA visit, venturing down to College Park in search of picture frames and some other minor items. Even though she was disappointed at the lack of merchandise in the downstairs marketplace (they’re remodeling, so there’s about 1/20th of the usual stuff available) she bounced up and down excitedly in the cart and flirted with everyone she saw.
Sunday I took her shopping with me right after her morning nap, and we hit a grand total of five stores before it was time to head home. We shopped for gel repellent to combat the infestation of tiny ants we’ve had since the rain started, bought some small items at the Home Depot, hit two different auto parts stores to find a fuel hose for the Scout, and the grocery store. Everywhere we went, she got smiles and laughs and waves, and she was content to bounce in the backpack, sit on my shoulders (and eat my hair), or simply ride on my hip while I took care of business.
Our garden is coming along nicely. We’ve got three healthy broccoli plants bearing fruit, our cukes are all flowering and climbing, and we’ve got tomatoes coming in. The asparagus seems to be doing well, although the first trench we dug is flooded completely. We took some time last week to pinch the tomato plants back drastically in the hopes that they won’t get leggy and grow out of control as in years past, and it seems to be working. We also took some time last night to wrap the grape arbor in netting to prevent the birds from feasting; it looks like we’ll have another bumper crop of grapes this year.
In the afternoon, I replaced the aforementioned fuel filler hose on the Scout. After some wrangling with a balky hose clamp, I got the new one in place and took it for a test fill in the afternoon sunshine: success.
Follow-Up.
I’ve not been around here much lately, because I may or may not have had something to do with this sign in New York City.
More info here.
Out for a walk in Easton
Here’s a picture from two weekends ago with Finn and I in Easton. This was about 7:30 AM, after we’d covered a couple of miles in a fruitless search for coffee on a Sunday.
I’m Still Here.
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.
the power of twitter
One of my Flickr photos suddenly jumped from 5 hits a week to 1,000+ in a day. A little sleuthing, and I found the reason: PostSecret linked to the photo group on its Twitter feed..
Reverse-mount a prime lens
Reverse Mounting Your Prime Lenses for Affordable Macro Photography Wow, this is awesome. i had no idea a reverse-mount even existed. This is a $12 future purchase to be sure.
Deadwood recap.
The Onion A.V. Club started a TV Recap series on Deadwood. Let the time-wasting begin!
Unreasonable Expectations.
Wow. So we had a couple of people inquire about internships here at the office this summer, and apparently they were vetted and culled down to a few likely candidates. I heard yesterday that all of them have withdrawn, which isn’t all that surprising, but the story that gave me pause was the candidate who found out the internship wasn’t paid, and thus dropped out.
At the risk of sounding ancient, internships during my college years were always unpaid, and usually somewhere distant, which meant we had to drive to D.C. on our own dime (or catch a ride in someone else’s rattletrap car) to reorganize someone’s flat files or clean out a utility closet and find a way to eat Ramen noodles quietly in the back room without messing up one of two good dress shirts. Nobody I knew was actually designing anything. The whole point was to make connections and get a foot in the door somewhere, anywhere.
We’re in the middle of a recession, you dumbass. You’re not getting paid to be here.
Now get off my lawn.
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