what i did over vaca

Right. I'm going to tried to draw on my olden mind and cover what I've done since, well, since, then.

We've moved into the house. That was December 31st after closing on December 23rd.

We hired a gentleman who I'll call "Shaun Witt" to patch our floors, sand-stain-finish, patch walls, tear down a small closet, smooth out some weird stucco ceilings, and generally do work. He didn't. He tore down a closet, patched half the floor (poorly, after Corey did half), did a shitty job on the ceiling and dry wall, and fucked up the floors. He did manage to tear down a closet. Well done.

We paid another huge hunk of money to have some professionals come in and strip the floor down to bare wood, again. They stained and poly'd and it looks fantastic. The evidence is above. The dark, hot fudge, jackassery you see is Mr. Witt's skills on display - that's the finished "it looks good" room. The professional wood finish is, well, the professionals. (Nothing has been doctored and no animals were hurt in the making of that photo.)

I'm in my last quarter at school. My final exhibition show is in March at the National Building Museum in D.C. (Graduation is June at the same locale, but I won't be attending.) I'm finished the day I walk out of the museum in March. It's been a good program, overall. Some real high points, lots of middle-of-the-road stuff, and some real low points - mostly due one horrid instructor. Horrid. Regardless, 25 classes, 24 A's and one B+.

I saw a woman at the bus stop the other night with an actual Discman. She was changing CDs. Wow. This isn't horribly important I'd just thought I'd add it for texture.

How about that GOP race?

My work is stilling going well. I really like what I do even if I had a week or two where I had to simply destroy (or attempt to destroy) people for incompetence. I try, I really do. What I've learned is that as a contractor I actually am not suppose to do that - I'm there to just play along. I hate that. Regardless, everything is going fine.

We've booked the summer vacation already for Stowe in last July. It cannot get here soon enough.

About three weeks ago I decided I wanted to take my music off my iPhone and use an older iPod for music. I don't have to explain myself. Anyway, I plugged in my external harddrive (who knows why...you see what's coming), 'selected' the music folder on my 'phone', selected all, and hit delete. "Do you want to delete all?" my computer asks. Hell yes! (click). (Enter the sound of my external harddrive that holds all my music clicking, zipping, and smoking.) It seemed like hours as I panicked and tried to stop what I had wrought...I finally yanked out all the cords. It was about 40 seconds, at best, but everything was gone (daddy gone). I stared at nothing. 25 years of my CDs which I don't have anymore. Loads of memories of good times and bad - gone. For about an hour I just consoled myself by saying that I'd just start anew from this point - not regathering the music...just new music. It's okay, right? I finally called my computer dude in Arlington, explained the situation, and he simply said, "Well, I can get that back, no problem." What?!? I'm not going to explain the process and how computers work, suffice it to say that he did recover it. It cost me a few bills, plus a new external harddrive, but it's back. 16,000 songs that somewhat track my life.

(As an aside, and sort of in my defense, the first album on both my iPhone and my music library were the same - Adele [zip it!]. So, as I was looking at my 'phone' and saw Adele, I assumed I'd selected the phone and not the entire 65 Gbs of my library.)

Christmas was nice. We had the Northerners down to celebrate and help pack out the old house. Phil, somewhere in his vast past, packed homes as some type of Johnny Tremain apprenticeship, so he instructed everyone (mostly Laurel) in proper wrapping and packing techniques. He claimed he'd never had a broken glass - and he's still 100% since nothing we had was damaged. Ms. M packed like a...packer, and cleaned, and cooked, and entertained. It would have been a nightmare without that help. Corey ripped out walls, patched floors, and Kt ran the drum sander (how badass is that?) to get the floors ready for Shaun's eventual fuck up. With three movers hired on the 31st, Corey came over and between the five of us we managed to get everything from point A to point B by about 4pm. X and L cleaned the entirety of the old house and we escaped by about 11pm.

I've been reading Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis, and The Long Walk by Sławomir Rawicz. I can't seem to do only one book - makes progress slower but what can we do? I've gone completely to the Nook tablet since before the new year. The Times and New Yorker are up-and-running with good software so I can unburden myself of most print items.

I saw Holly Twyford (again) in Time Stands Still at Studio Theatre. Excellent, as always.

We've run the birthday gauntlet since January 1st. Henry turned 16 (dinner at Greek Taverna with Cuban cake...go figure), Amy turned '18' with a visit to the Textile Museum and then drinks and dinner in D.C. Everyone took me for my 21st to Sunflower Cafe...very nice.

Nothing new on the music front.

Cats are well - and adjusted to the new place. No fighting required since the new 'hood doesn't appear to have any other cats.

I'm vaguely obsessed with Breaking Bad.

X and I have started lifting weights at the gym on weekends. One good session every week makes quite a difference. She's calling squats this week. She seems frail-ish sometimes; she's not.

book it

The Eleven had a discussion about bookstores at almost the same moment that Manjoo (or David Plotz) hit the ‘post this article’ button at Slate. Within days of our discussion, and not directly related, X commented on the overall crappiness of Amazon’s recommendations engine, particularly for books. If you gather nothing else from my input, know this: Manjoo is so wrong about the quality of Amazon’s ability to recommend to me another book based on my previous searches or purchases.

I remember trying to relate to X the parallel between what I heard from a local bike shop owner years ago, and the super bookstores (Border’s and B&N). What drew this attempt was a conversation between a good friend of mine and the ‘wrench’/owner of a higher end bike shop in Omaha. That conversation was driven by my friend’s observation that there were quite a few more quality bike shops that had opened in town over the last decade, and that there must be a load more people riding bikes. Said owner pointed out, based on his 30 years in town, that there were no more people actually riding bikes than there were ten years ago – more shops didn’t indicate more riders. Now, I don’t know why people were opening more shops if the size of the pie wasn’t growing, but I might put forth that there was a growth in the visibility of cycling (they’d just opened a wonderful city-wide set of bike paths) and entrepreneurs wanted to get in on the initial rush of excitement. The big bookstores strike me as a similar phenom: they overran the landscape because they felt there were more people reading (why? I’m not sure). Regardless, I never felt people were reading more books post-Border’s/B&N building explosion than they were prior. I’d bet that most of us can see that in ourselves, probably in our families, and if you ask around at work or your friends, the amount of book reading is probably way down across the country.

Amazon, bookwise, is simply another step up the accessibility ladder for book buying – a new rung, but not an actual representation of an increase in reading (any more than digital music delivery indicates that person A actually listens to more music). They no doubt have data that show an increase in book buying, though I’d be curious to really have someone get deeper access to the data’s “who” and “what”, before I’d be totally convinced that reading has exploded. Even with the Kindle and/or Nook, I don’t actually buy the premise that people who don’t read will suddenly become bookworms because of electronic access. Most people don’t even have the time or desire to read long-form journalism; and what of books? Probably not. Access doesn’t necessarily correlate to doing. I also wonder if Amazon’s other businesses props up the bookstore portion of their revenue.

Now, independents. I’ve long missed the local record store, and this is pretty much the same path, different medium. As we decided during our talk about independent bookstores, we both like havening those people that love books to do some of the filtering for us. If it’s a store that doesn’t fit our style we can always go to a different local. That filtering is far better, at least for me, than trying to maze my way through Amazon in search of a nugget that might appeal to me. On a trip to Richmond earlier this year I bought four books at two different shops that were are all excellent, and I didn’t know anything about them prior to grabbing them from the shelves. But, that’s not the biggest plus for me. What I miss from record stores and smaller bookshops is actual human gathering – even if we don’t ‘talk’ to each other, the engagement with the clerk, or some other person, is far preferable to an online live. And for that, I’m willing to pay more.

As David Plotz aptly pointed out while discussing this on the podcast, if your position is that Amazon does it for cheaper, delivers to your house, and ‘picks’ books for you, then fine – they win hands down. I have no argument. But, when I think about books I will always choose to hang around the old Olsson’s books in D.C., Kramarbooks, or a Powell’s before a Barnes and Noble, or shopping via Amazon.

stolen from an andrew sullivan reader

"I appreciate the comparison you highlighted between the gay vet who confronted Mitt Romney and the black veterans in history observed by Ta-Nehisi. I am a former soldier, having served in the US Army from 1985 until 1989 before being discharged after a witch hunt. My sister is a retired soldier and my son is currently serving. We have a tradition of military service going back to at least the Second World War. It is my father, who fought with the storied 761st Tank Battalion (the Black Panthers) and his generation for black soldiers and airmen that I want to talk about briefly.

On my mother’s side, there were three Tuskegee Airmen.

My father, as I said, was a tanker. Before WWII, both my father and my uncles had lived every day of their lives in either Louisiana or Alabama, respectively. My father joined the Army the week following the attack on Pearl Harbor because the Army would let him fight as either infantry or a tanker but the Navy would have had him shining shoes or being a cook. My father wanted to fight.

He spent four years in the Army, was decorated with the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. When he came home at the end of the war, he went to college where he met my mother, who had spent the war building airplanes as a ‘Rosie’. Because my father served, he and my uncles got the GI Bill that allowed them to go to college. World War II made my father who he was.

My parents stayed in Alabama, where I was born, until 1968 when they moved us to California. The 1968 election was the first time my father ever cast a vote in the nation he had fought and bled for. When I joined the Army my father was very opposed to it - partially because my sister had joined four years earlier, partly because of his memories of serving in a segregated military. To convince him that my reasons were good, I told him that it takes a special kind of man to go and fight for a country that does not consider him enough of a human being to go to school where he wishes, to vote in elections, to live where he can afford and to work in any job he is qualified for. That generation of black men who signed up and served knowing that they would return home and not be able to vote were very special men.

When I think of the generations of gays and lesbians who served in our military, I think that whether the likes of Romney (or a non-trivial swath of the GOP for that matter) realize it or not, they are in the debt of these folks and are in the presence of the very best of America.

I am not trying to blow my own horn. This is not about my service. I went in because I felt that I had grown up in a nation that did consider me an actual citizen and if my father could put on the uniform when he was, at best, a second-class citizen I could do no less. I just want us, as Americans, to acknowledge that gays and lesbians have served and continue to do so and that these are the very best of our nation. They get up and they do their duty knowing that the man or woman they love back home is not considered their actual, wedded spouse and yet they do it anyway. We should honor them as the exceptional Americans they are."

music

Dawes with Mumford & Sons - When My Time Comes from WXPN FM on Vimeo.

a deed, indeed

I’m going to be more positive. I think my blog can often whine.

We’ve done the deed and purchased a house. Contact is accepted, a bunch of paperwork is being done, money is changing hands. The American economy is strong.

It’s a two-level place with seven (yes, seven) bedrooms as currently configured. Corey is going to rip out the walls downstairs that create three bedrooms, and we’ll turn that level into a large, open living room and big dining room. The upstairs will keep four bedrooms with a full bath and master bath to follow. We got a very good price on a place this size while staying in the same school district for the kids – a primary goal. The commutes for us won’t change, time or distance, but the boys will have a longer bus ride to school. X did a load of the work on this, and I played the role of agreeable co-dependent. We’re very happy to have our own place with no limits on what we can do to it over the next few years – the longer view being 7-8 more years in this area. I can’t imagine what the gardens will look like in three or four years. The picture above is the backyard. The front of the house picture at the Web site isn’t the best so I’ll hold off on more photos until we get in and sorted.

I’m allegedly heading back to school in January to finish up the degree. I have three more classes – they weren’t offered at night this quarter so I was out of luck – and should be done in late March. From there, I still have one year of GI Bill benefits so I may move to community college and take some courses of interest to me. Or, as X asks, “why don’t you get certified as a massage therapist?” I think I see where she might be going on this one. Food. Massages. Maybe I can go to housekeeping college.

All the kids are home and healthy. The cats are fine. We’re doing great.

The move will be a very sudden evacuation between Christmas Day and New Year’s. We should close on the 23rd of December with nine days to sort out the place. Based on the just-completed military operations call from CINC-house, I’m responsible for victuals three-times-per-day from the 23rd to the 29th while they rip out walls and carpet (new, ugly white…anyone need 1000 sq. ft of carpet?), patch the wood floor, sand and re-varnish. 30th and 31st will be actual moving from The Hilltop. This has all been dubbed Christine’s Happy Holiday Moving Blast. We’ll keep a solid audio, video, and photographic blog of the festivities. I may have to set-up a field kitchen in that back shed.

Love to all.

t

is that a stick in my eye? i hope so

I would be horribly remiss in my duties if I didn’t get one story off my chest, posthaste.
We made the one-day motoring trip from Brattleboro to the D.C. area yesterday; the Eleven and the Fifty. It ran about 11 hours, but a full two hours of that was passed by things you might consider screwing around: stopping at one bakery/sandwich shop, another deli, trying to find a Barnes and Noble, putting oil in the car (?!?), getting gas, finding a Barnes and Noble, and grabbing a bite to eat at the Panera in the B&N strip mall parking lot area. The Panera was my idea, and it’s the heart-and-soul of this vignette.

We walked in about 7:45pm, into a place manned (womaned?) by four teens who couldn’t possibly manage to lead actual lives that involve actual things. Yes, it was my idea to amble over to Panera from B&N – it seemed like such a grand idea. L. ordered a chicken Caesar salad, and we ordered two mozzarella and tomato Paninis, to go. Smooth. Done. Case closed. We are the only folks in there since they are closing at 8p; well, us and the woman and child ordering ahead of us – an order that took FOREVER to be completed. An order that included two bakery items. I should have known. We eventually get our bag of stuff and headed to the car, disregarding everything that Joe Pesci taught us about drive thrus and/or takeaway. L. has no chicken on her sorry looking salad, X starts to eat her Panini before ripping it open to see what looks like ½ a cherry tomato and an area the might have once seen mozzarella. We turn around. The smooth brains ‘working’ in the place have locked the doors by now and began ‘cleaning’ up for the night. We knock, wave, and eventually get let back in to the scene of the crime. Each and every one of the girls is totally confused by the situation as presented, one that involves bread, tomatoes, cheese, and salad. They continue cleaning while debating ciabatta and baguette, cheese and tomato, salad and salad. Eventually the manager is brought into the movie from his cubicle in the back of the restaurant – the bar is very, very low to be a manager. He looks at the sandwiches, says “those are all wrong”, and slowly begins the task of actually doing something. The girls are rallied, actual tomatoes are gotten, cheese is secured, and he manages to somehow make two new sandwiches. As for the missing chicken, one of the wedges pulls a little baggy of chicken from below the counter and shakes it out on L’s salad. Classy as fuck. L. decided she didn’t want the salad anymore. I tell manager-man that we’ll just take a refund on the salad. There are two rounds of questioning on the salad before he gives up. Two rounds before I pull my ServSafe qualification/culinary card and point out a few items. First, the chicken is clearly delivered pre-cooked in little baggies. Even with that, I don’t want to see the chicken disgorged from said bag onto the salad. Take the salad down off the counter, do your thing, and re-deliver it. I think there’s some old saying about sausage and making. Second, the minute we walked back in with a food issue, and there was a determination and agreement to make us some new stuff, you need to get the fucking minions to stop cleaning the counters, leaving the cleansing buckets and cleaners on the counters, and take care of us before going back to cleaning. Nope. Not these geniuses: scrubbing away, nasty sanitation buckets on the counter near the chicken – pretty bad. I understand they were in a hurry to close on a Sunday night and get home in time for Kickin’ it with the Kardashians, but really? It was probably the worst encounter ever in a food place. I don’t say that lightly. But, the good that comes from it all is that I’m even less likely to eat ‘out’ then I already have been of late. I’d like to thank the good folks at Panera Break, near 84 S 32nd ST, Camp Hill, Pennsylvania.

p.s. Don’t think me sexist. All the employees just happened to be girls. I’m sure we would have had the same outcome with dudes.

capital offense

As expected, at least in my house, the Capitals fired Bruce Boudreau this morning. I didn’t think he’d make it through Thanksgiving weekend, but he did…barely. The Caps lost their last two games 6-3 and 5-1; games I didn’t watch, but the box scores told the story. Truthfully, Boudreau did some amazing stuff in his four years and three days as manager: he unleashed the offense, he then strangled the offense in order to focus on defense when the playoffs became an issue (and was successful until the team quit vs. Tampa last year), he won 200+ games. For what skills Boudreau has, he used them all. Now, here’s where the screw turns.

Ovechkin. His decline from top of the league to a minus-4 vs. Buffalo over the weekend has more than likely sealed his fate as a flash that’s burnt out over the last two years. You don’t get a minus-4 in a 5-1 loss unless you are actively sabotaging your team on the ice. You see minus-4 only rarely in hockey; even on off nights when you’re team loses 7-1, you won’t see minus-4’s on the score sheet. In order to ever be a considered a great in any team sport you can’t ever sacrifice the game on the ice or field. Ever. To finally be tabbed a coach killer, and make no mistake, Ovechkin is now a coach killer, is generally the final mark against a player in team sports. You can hate your coach, actively want him gone, talk to the press, etc., but when you quit on the ice then your hatred (or ego) moves you into territory from which you’ll never recover. Even though I say it’s been two years, it’s actually been a bit longer – that nearly two years marks the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

In the 2009 Stanley Cup playoffs (about seven months prior to the Olympics), the Capitals lost game 7 at home to the Penguins in the Eastern Conference semi-finals. The final was score was 5-2 and the Penguins went on to win the Cup; Ovechkin and the Capitals began a long swoon to where we sit now. I left that game with about ten minutes to go in the third, obstensibly to beat traffic, but even then I saw the writing. They Caps quit in that game the moment Ovechkin failed to score on a breakaway with the score at either 0-0, or 1-0. The flood gates opened and the Pens built the led to something like 4-1 or 5-1 before I gave up. That was waypoint 1 on the journey. Waypoint 2 was the horrid Russian performance at the Olympics. Waypoint 3 was the loss to the Canadiens in the first round of the 2010 playoffs. Waypoint 4, and one far worse from a leadership point-of-view than the loss to Montreal, was the 4-0 sweep by Tampa in last year’s second round. Tampa was better than most thought, but they weren’t that good, comparatively. After losing the first two at home, the Capitals quit. The final destination is today. Two days after posting a minus-4 on the ice, Ovechkin gets what he wanted: a new coach. Problem is, #8 hasn’t shown any inkling to grow as a player and I don’t see it happening now. New coach Dale Hunter is walking into a locker room that’s been poisoned by at least two full years of refusing to play a team game. That poison has seeped so far into the team that you can see the rest of the players simply falling in line with the lack of will that Alex has exhibited since missing that breakaway in 2009. His path, and this team’s, is littered with failure after failure when the rubber hits the road. There’s a common denominator in the math: Ovechkin.

I don’t know if Hunter is the cure – I doubt it. A few things need to happen to right the ship. First and foremost, strip Ovechkin on the captaincy. He never should have been made captain, and after his performance in the last two games, he never should wear it again. If Dale Hunter is the badass everyone thinks he is, he needs to walk in the room, take the “C”, and tell Alex, in front of the team and the hockey gods, that’ll he’ll never wear it again after what he pulled the Buffalo game. If anyone else has any questions about winning, they’ll keep them to themselves. The result is that Ovechkin goes into a funk (could it be worse than this?), or he answers the bell. Choices. His career from this point forward is either a Steve Yzerman resurgence or a steeper fall into mediocrity.

Time tells.

i hate those people

I have a winner. I've often babbled about how much I hate people in grocery stores; in this day-and-age of no courtesy clerks (my title at Albertson's in Omaha back in 1983 - a bagger). I'm at Balducci's the other night - a problem in and of itself - and I'm behind the worst....ever. She's standing at the register reading a magazine. As the cashier scans and bags her one bag of groceries, she does nothing. When done, the old bat then walks back 15 feet to the front of the register to replace the magazine she's reading. Really? Then, back at the point-of-sale, she pulls out her store card for discount, waits, waits, waits....and then goes for her money. Sllllllllllllllllooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwww. Finally, it appears the transaction is complete, but old bat doesn't like the fact that her smallish order, "with two bottles of wine", isn't double bagged. She attempts to put the already packed bag into another bag (won't work) while I wait and hope I don't slash her neck. The clerk lets her know that the maneuver she's attempting won't work, to which she belts out, "There are two bottles in here, I need it double bagged!"

1. Shut up
2. If you were watching, you would have caught this earlier
3. It doesn't need to be double bagged, you're an ass clown
4. You're an ass clown
5. I hate

Moving along.

I've been weaning myself from sport for a few years, believe it or not. I'm down to Capitals' hockey, but even those days are numbered. It's a bit like how I got off golf about 10 years ago - I don't have the time or energy to focus on hours-long stuff that somehow misses what I'm looking to accomplish. Nothing against golf, it's quite enjoyable. Within that discussion has long been a position that college sports - and certainly athletic scholarships - should be eliminated. Truth be told, nothing good ever comes from college athletics - as a program within a university. Competition is good, sport is good, the system isn't. The NCAA should have been abolished decades ago, colleges need to refocus on what they are suppose to be doing, and the idea of anyone attending college based on athletic prowess is comical on its face. There isn't any other valid position.

One more thing: the next person who uses the "you don't know what you would have done" in a given situation, as some sort of defense, gets the same treatment as the shitty, non-bagging lady.

I'm really a nice person. Really.