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Archive for February, 2007

February 27th, 2007 No comments

Things with the high school show (“Thoroughly Modern Millie,” Mar 15-17, 7pm, Brandywine High, come check it as it will be RAD) are ramping up rapidly, so we’re heck of busy with that. Still, a few things worth sharing:

Our friends Brian and Karen got married over the weekend; check out a few choice photographz here. Everybody was HOT.

I also put up some new pictures over at CharlesHearn.com. They are so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend checking them out.

Categories: artsy fartsy, dear diary Tags:

February 23rd, 2007 No comments

I’ve had my Sanyo Katana for almost four months now, so I figure it’s time a little review, so I can let you know whether or not it’s awesome or Teh Suczk.

You may recall my short post a few months ago when I bought it and alerted the world that you could actually call me (the previous phone had been broken for a while). At the time, I was totally enamored with my new little flip-phone, and now that the initial puppy love has dissipated, it’s time to take a hard look at the pros and cons, yo.

Pros:

  • It’s super-slim. Seriously, it’s like a half-inch thick. It would fit comfortably in the rear pocket of my jeans, even with my gigundous black girl booty, if I wasn’t afraid of sitting on it and crushing it with Teh Fatne$$.
  • I can hear people on it, and they can hear me. This may seem like a basic thing, but after the problems I had with the last phone, this is a major improvement.
  • HUGE screen. For websurfing it’s still a tad small, but I was able to download Google Maps’ free mobile client for it, and now I never get lost! Which is teh sweet.

Cons:

  • You can use it as a wireless broadband device, which is pretty cool, but Sprint wants you to pay $40 a month for the service. With Sarah’s phone, which is a bit older, you can do it for free. What a gyp. $40 a month, which is about what I pay for 3Mb/s cable modem access, for something no faster than about a 38400-baud modem. No thanks, losers.
  • The ringtones are too soft. All the ringers are too soft, in my opinion. Most of the time, that’s good, since I don’t need the thing playing the theme from “The Greatest American Hero” (Sarah’s personal ringtone) at 110 decibels while I’m at, say, the proctologist, but when I’m driving in my car and singing along with “My Sweet Escape” by Gwen Stefani, I usually can’t hear it. Which of course is when wives, when they are pregnant, go into labor. (Note: HW is NOT currently pregnant, for which she thanks Baby Jesus.)
  • This is a biggie: the stupid side button keyguard is set up in the most ridiculous possible way. The phone, like many others, has little buttons on the side that perform a variety of tasks, like controlling volume, scrolling through the phonebook, and, while the phone is closed, activating the speaker phone and dialing the most recent number. Since I keep my phone in my pocket, and since I wear very, very tight pants, this is bad, because if I don’t turn on the keyguard the phone continually dials people, the end result of which is my father-in-law saying “hello? hello?” over and over again to my junk.

    Not cool.

    You’d think you could just set the keyguard and not have a problem, but get this: you can disable the keyguard by just holding the button down long enough. Which happens at least twice a week because, as I mentioned, I WEAR TIGHT PANTS. (Everything’s tight when you are 45% ass.) This is the major flaw in the phone, in my opinion; I’m hoping they issue a firmware patch that allows you to completely disable the side buttons when the phone is closed.

Final verdict? A solid B+, which is far better than any other phone I’ve had. (The last phone probably started out a B and ended up as an F———— because by the end it didn’t actually function as a phone; it was more like a $30 a month pocket watch.)

Categories: dear diary, techno Tags:

February 21st, 2007 1 comment

Walking through my local Acme on Monday, I discovered that, of all things, they were selling Ducklings. 5 pounders. On sale for $1.99 a pound. I was like, whaaaaaaa?
I have a more or less permanent craving for duck, and have always wanted to make it myself, but never found a place that sold it (I guess I could check a local butcher, but there’s not one that’s at all convenient). I consider it rather a gourmet item, so finding it Acme seemed incongruous; I half expected to find, I dunno, bricks of foie gras or something nearby.

Anyway, I grabbed me one and brought it home. Sarah was out with Charles, having dinner with friends, so I had plenty of time; I made a nice brine, pulled all the giblets out of the bird, and threw that puppy in there for a good soak. Mmmm…sugar salt water. While that sat outside in the snow to keep things from getting too bacteria-y, I worked in the garage building a custom-sized baby gate for our main staircase, which is only 5 steps high but 48″ wide, and all the pre-made gates that fit that size and were hinged were going to run us $60 and I said HA HA to that. HA.

After a couple hours, I covered the bird in salt and pepper, sliced up the skin a bit to promote rendering and tasty browning, and threw it into a 400 degree oven to try and get me a nice crispy skin. After about 20 minutes, the skin was sort of bubbling, but not yet brown; I lowered the temperature a bit and put my probe thermometer in the thigh.

After an hour or so, it started beeping. I was like, wait what? I thought this thing would take 2, maybe three hours. Nay nay, apparently. The skin was still kinda squishy, but I’m not terribly picky, so I cut in, and was nearly bathed in dark red liquid. Ummm…yeah, done my fat pink booty. Back into the oven it went, and I upped the temperature to 500 to try and crispify things.

5 minutes later….beep beep beep! What the hell. I got out my instant-read thermometer, though, and everything said 165, which admittedly is lower than the 180 demanded by the government, but if I did everything the government said I’d have a lot fewer hobo bodies under my floorboards. There was still red liquid, but I said to myself, hey, this is duck. Not nasty salmonella-y chicken. I’m gonna eat it.

And I did. And I’m still alive! It was delicious, although the skin needed way more crispitude. Next time: I’m just gonna let that bastard broil.

Categories: dear diary, foodieness Tags:

February 16th, 2007 1 comment

Just a few short notes for today:

  • They still haven’t plowed my neighborhood, and so now the ice has sublimated and refrozen and is perfectly slick. I basically sledded out to the main highway today. Note that the 1998 Mazda Protege is NOT equipped with runners. I’d make some calls, but you know me, I don’t like to create a fuss. Plus I have a sneaking suspicion the guy in our neighborhood who is in charge of such things has probably taken 37 calls on the subject and might strangle me through the phone if I call him up and employ Sarcasm. So I’m gonna let it slide. For now. Unless I’m driving home with my son and I slide into a parked car at 5mph.
  • My homeskillets Ped and Andy have started themselves a blog in which they intend to ridicule all things artsy. I fully support this, and not just because I’ve known the two of them for like 8,000 years.

    In fact, it’s an odd story, woven through the millenia: I knew Ped when I was like 8 or something, in public school. I think we ran across each other in Math League every year all through middle school and high school. Andrew I knew because we were in band in high school, but he also may have done dorky science and math stuff with me before then. And then we were all in the Ychromes together in college. Delaware is a small place.

    Anyway, check out their site, it’s highly amusing.

  • I’m setting myself up for a serious amount of abuse here, but on the advice of my attorney Josh, I have invested in a neti pot. The idea, and this is really gross, is that you make a saline solution, and then you pour it into one nostril while it drains out of the other one. Then you switch nostrils. It’s very new age. It cleans out your sinuses, and then you get to spend a few minutes spraying water out of your snozz and spitting out nasty wet loogies.

    It’s almost as fun as it sounds, but I can report that my sinuses are so clear it’s disturbing. I’ve used it twice a day for about 3 days (although not this morning, ’cause I was in a hurry, yo) and have achieved major awesome results. There are downsides, however:

    1. The sensation of water pouring into your sinuses and back out the other nostril is pretty disturbing. It goes against all my principles of “avoiding sinus burn in the pool.” Doesn’t burn a bit, though, unless you’re an idiot and double the amount of salt in the solution.
    2. Sometimes the saline gets sort of trapped in your sinuses, and you can’t really feel it in there, then later on, you bend over for some reason, such as to kiss your wife, and salt water pours out of your nose all over, say, your wife’s face. Her response to this may be unpleasant.

    Still, it’s given me a reasonably clear schnozz for the last few days, and I’m looking forward to finding out if it improves my singing noticeably.

Categories: anger, dear diary, tmi, wtf Tags:

February 15th, 2007 No comments

Man, local civic associations are AWESOME!

Wait, did I say awesome? I meant POINTLESS, ANNOYING, AND LAME.

We have a nice neighborhood civic association to whom we give twenty bucks a year, in exchange for which they operate some kind of community watch and send out monthly letters begging deadbeats to send in their dues. (They’ve actually started publishing the addresses of folks who don’t send in the cash, which I find greatly amusing; so far my block has been pretty good about paying up, because the monthly flyers seem to imply I’m expected to join a roving band of vigilantes to walk up to miscreant households and torch them to the ground.)

From these monies they also pay for mowing of the community park areas, and snow plowing in the winter. Which would be great if the plowing was done. It ain’t gettin’ done, son. You may have noticed on Wednesday that we had a pretty significant snow/sleet/freezing rain “event,” resulting in 2-4 inches (depending on where you measure it) of rock-hard ice on our streets and lawns. My wife spent about an hour yesterday chipping it off of our cars. (I would have helped, but it was HECK of cold out there.)

Now it’s been sitting for a day, and is thusly not going to melt until August, so we get the joy of driving over it for a few months. AWESOME! Er, LAME!

Okay, sure, the community watch does seem to deter crime; we haven’t had a murder in our neighborhood in 2 or 3 years (true story). And I do approve of them getting the grass mowed rather than, you know, letting it overgrow the jungle gym. Now if they could just find a way to prevent my across-the-street neighbors from parking all their crappy cars in front of my house. (Sadly, it turns out it’s illegal to slash their tires! Who knew?)

Categories: anger, musings Tags:

February 12th, 2007 No comments

I didn’t watch the Grammys (Grammies? I personally despise making it plural via adding an apostrophe (as in, “Grammy’s”) because that makes Baby Jesus cry) last night, so I don’t really have anything important to say. Apparently the Police got back together, which is pretty awesome, but I missed it because I was asleep, because I had a DEVASTATING WEEKEND OF FUN. More on that later. What’s important is that the Police played, but Juliet Huddy reported on FOX this morning that it seemed kinda boring, and we listen to everything she says because she is hot.

Re: weekend of fun: I was hella busy all weekend. I covered oncall Friday night, and then Saturday morning rode with Craig down to DC to meet Some Boyz for a Bachelor Fiesta! We started out at the ESPN Zone, or rather most of us did; Kyle and I trotted over to the Verizon nee MCI center to see about hockey tickets. They had none cheaper than $90, so we laughed heartily and said, dang. So much for hockey.

BUT! Kyle, being heck of inventive, called his wife, and got her out of the shower to get online and search for tickets for us. She found some via a place called StubHub, which turned out to have a location very near the arena, so she put the tickets on Kyle’s credit card and all was gravy. After Kyle got off the phone with her, he turned to me and said:

“I’m pretty sure she bought those tickets while naked.”

“I’m going to be thinking about that all game. Thanks!”

“Me too, man.”

I’m glad we were able to get seats, since our backup plan was to get tickets to the International Spy Museum, which was also nearby. Instead, we went back to the ESPN Zone and watched sports for roughly 4 hours while I drank martinis. THEN: To the arena!

I’ve been to many hockey arenas in my time (okay, 4) and I’ve never yet come across one that sells anything but overpriced beer, but let me tell you, The Verizon nee MCI Center has a bar. That sells gin. So I bought two. I’ve never been so happy at a sporting event since, and this is a hilarious story that I like to tell, I was at a Virginia Tech @ Rutgers football game with Kyle and Hiz Crew O’ Mizfitz, and I bought 4 large hot dogs. I got to my seat, ate two hot dogs, and then they played the national anthem so I stood up and removed my hat, then sat back down on the bleacher and watched the first few minutes of the game. After a little while, I said, “Man, those hot dogs were good. I wish I had more.” Only then did I remember that I had NOT eaten them all, and in fact had two more sitting immediately to my right. It was like Baby Jesus had shown a bright light of love down on me, in the middle of all that chaos.

Buying gin at a hockey game is very similar. Cost me $8 per drink, but that wasn’t much worse than the beers (I later paid $14 for two Michelob Ultras, which are notable for two things:

  1. They are somewhat low carb (although not much lower than Miller Lite, to be honest), and
  2. They have a taste that is surprisingly reminiscent of what the water from your well would taste like if your septic system started leaking into it.)

The game wasn’t memorable; there were a couple of fights, which is always fun, but it was hard to see what was happening since we were in the absolute last row of the place. Seriously. I’ve never been so far away from a sporting event and still had to pay $40 to see it. The Capitals lost.

Then we went back to Barrett’s (the emphasis is on the first syllable, which is much more manly than if he’d been named after a hair clip) for poker, at which I won everybody’s money. This was doubly frustrating for Kyle because

  • I am not known for my poker-playing prowess, because I have all the patience of a fat kid in a chocolate factory, and
  • I was WILDLY inebriated.

Then Craig drove me home, which was kind of him since I fell asleep once he was safely on the interstate.

The next day I got up, on about 4 hours of sleep, and had to go to church, then play in a piano recital for schoolchildren (it wasn’t a COMPLETE embarrassment), and then sing a short concert to benefit a Quaker school.

Then I came home and played with my son for a while because he was driving Sarah insane; he can now crawl rather expertly, and his desire to put the entire world in his mouth is unabated. This results in us having to grab him every 10 minutes and pull things out of his mouth, things like paper, foam torn from the upholstery of an old chair, cat fur, cat tails, wires (oh, how he loves electrical wires), cat food, carpet fibers, and Sarah’s toes. Sarah had been doing this, with small breaks for sleep, for 36 hours, and so I took over for a while so that she’d stop making her head spin around like she does. (She’s been fighting a flu/cold combination for about a week now and the pressure is starting to tell.)

And then I slept for about 11 straight hours, which might have been the highlight of the weekend if I hadn’t had to go to work in the morning.

February 9th, 2007 No comments

Okay, so uh, what’s in the news? Apparently that girl Anna Nicole Smith died, but I joked about that yesterday. (Was it too soon? The response I got from the interwebs was cold, to say the least.) There’s some banshee crazy astronaut ho that drove from Texas to Florida in DIAPERS to kidnap and likely kill her romantic rival. Apparently she wore diapers so she wouldn’t have to make unnecessary stops, but here’s the thing:

Distance she drove: about 950 miles.

Distance most cars can go before they need to stop for refueling: 350 miles.

So she had to stop AT least twice to get gas; would it be that out of the question to maybe take 5 minutes to whiz while the gas is pumping? Here’s the lesson I have learned: women are crazy.

What else? The weather has been making up for lost time; it hasn’t been above freezing, as far as I can tell, in like 6 days. I can’t say I’m sad about it, since I enjoy me some cold weather, but I’d like to have a good dose of 8″ of snow to go along with it and make it impossible for me to drive to work. They say we’re supposed to get snow on Tuesday, we’ll see how it goes.

I’m low-carbing it again, but it doesn’t appear to be working as well this time, probably because I’m screwing it up. It’s not my fault! People keep making me pies! I need to get on my bike some more and see if that helps force the old belly into “ketosis,” which apparently is what they call it when your body starts burning your fat for energy. I fully support the burning of fat; I am, at last check, roughly 85% fat myself. Maybe self-immolation is the answer…I’ll look into it.

Speaking of death-wishes, Charles has been crawling for a few weeks now, and has developed quite an interest in flinging himself down the steps into the foyer. So far I’ve caught him before he does so, but we need gates; a friend of ours is going to lend us some, but I’ve yet to go pick them up, so I guess I’d better do that. You know, before my son lands nose-first on cold, unforgiving ceramic tile.

As you can probably tell, I really don’t have anything of any interest to share with you, so I’ll just point you to Vinegar Man-Douche and let you have your own fun.

February 8th, 2007 No comments

Hi y’all…I was going to post something more substantive today, but I just don’t have it in me. My world is shattered.

Categories: anger, link day, wtf Tags:

February 6th, 2007 No comments

I love cars. Also, I hate cars. Or rather, I love cars that work or can be easily diagnosed and fixed, and hate cars that defy all attempts to repair them. At the moment, my Bomb@ZZ whip, the venerable Izzy B, has but one functioning brake light. The one in the rear-view window. I guess that’s better than none, but try to tell that to the guys at the Motor Vehicle Inspection Lanes. I did. They weren’t terribly amused. I’m assuming all the carbon monoxide has destroyed their senses of humor.

Anyway, I went to Pep Boys to get new bulbs for the brake lights. But Pep Boys had none. So I went to ANOTHER Pep Boys, which had them. I installed them. No change. So I bought some new fuses and tried those. No change. So I kicked the car and threatened to bring wrath upon it. No change.

I gave up after that, but the long and short of it is that I have a car with fewer then the recommended number of brake lights and my registration expires in three weeks. CAN MATT GET THE CAR REPAIRED IN THREE WEEKS, GIVEN HIS BUSY SCHEDULE? STAY TUNED!

Oh, and go here and check out a bunch of crappy pictures I took of Ye Olde Newe Castlee last month.

Categories: anger, artsy fartsy, dear diary Tags:

February 5th, 2007 No comments

Okay, we’re back to a more normal schedule, I think. There were much goings-on over the weekend, particularly a cold-weather golf tournament (our second year!) of which I have many pictures, some of Milo‘s backswing, some that Milo took of my butt. I’ll get all that stuff posted probably tomorrowish, or Wednesday, or probably some time before 2008.

In the meanwhile, I started a gallery where I can upload my various efforts at photography, which so far contains just the one album of recent shots. I plan to get most of the New Castle shots up ins if I can figure out a way to batch process them (they start out as 3MB photos and I need to chop them down to 1MB or so before uploading, or the gallery prog won’t be able to handle them, and also I’d wipe out my online webspace in a matter of days; the problem is that there are over 200 of them and I’d like to shrink them in one big process rather than loading each picture into photoshop, resizing and saving it, etc.).

I also uploaded some new stuff to Charles’s site last week, make sure you don’t miss that.

USELESS NOTE: I am aware that the general form of my page is still Christmasy. I shall endeavour to update it this evening.

Categories: artsy fartsy, dear diary Tags: