Archive

Archive for July, 2007

July 30th, 2007 1 comment

Weird Dream Number 1: Saturday night, after hanging out with my college peeps, I dreamt one of them (Todd) was picking a fight in a diner with someone much larger than he. They went outside, and Todd tried a sneak attack in which he punched the guy in the junk three times, but it didn’t faze the big dude, and so Todd basically got his ass kicked for a while. Then some kind of clown showed up to break things up, and I ran outside to help, ending up putting the big guy in a choke hold that involved forcing his jaw open so far that I nearly cracked it. Later, the guy came into the diner, but it was a different guy (but the SAME GUY!), and he kept talking smack, so I put him in a choke hold again. Then later he kept talking about how he was going to find out where I lived and come over to hurt my family, so I held him against the wall with a butter knife to his throat and asked him what it was going to take to get him to go away.

Just then several naked women came in.

So the guy says I have to pose with two of the women (who somehow found some clothing to put on, meanwhile) while reading a note he handed me, that I can’t remember the exact wording of, but the gist of it was that since I was married, I was never going to have sex with these other women, and he videotaped it. I assume that mollified him, because after that I woke up.

Dream Number Two: I had gotten involved in some kind of massive benefit concert in which I was going to be the headlining act, except that I hadn’t rehearsed, didn’t have a band to back me up, and in fact hadn’t even picked any songs to perform. I did have all my instruments with me (not an insubstantial collection, at this point), so I set them up, and started asking around for people to play them.

The concert was to be outside, so at some point I wandered away from my stuff to inspect where the stage was, which was sort of in a big field with the stage set in the shade provided by a wooded bit. Then I went back to the main area and was alerted to the fact that the wooded stage was only for the warmup acts; the main attraction (me) was to be playing on the main stage nearby, which was already packed with like 40,000 people.

At some point Brian showed up and I recruited him to play bass or something. Then I woke up.

What’s wrong with me?

Categories: wtf Tags:

July 25th, 2007 1 comment

This may be the most rambling, disjointed post I’ve ever put on here. And that is seriously saying something.

I dreamt last night that I got my truck back. The circumstances surrounding it were vague, but for some reason I found myself at the Ford dealership, and the guy that originally sold me the truck said, “Hey you know, we have your truck outside.” And I drove off in it without having signed anything. Immediately I scratched the hood of it on some kind of post.

Anyway, I was so ecstatic to have my truck back, but I felt a great deal of guilt because somehow, despite not having signed anything, I knew it was going to cost me money that I don’t need to be wasting, since HW and I are trying to figure out how to move back up to North Wilmington. (As it turns out, most of New Castle is a cesspool. Our particular neighborhood isn’t too bad, but go 1/4 mile in any direction and the people have fewer teeth than my son. I hate to sound like a snob, but I need to move back to a place where people drive late model Camrys instead of 1993 Ford Tempos with Monza exhausts and plastic rims. Just seems like a more…intellectual environment. Plus, most of the things I do outside of work (church, drama productions, etc.) are in Wilmington, and both sets of parents are up there.) I recently got a pretty decent payraise at work, but we need to save up some serious down payment money, and also we need to prepare ourselves for the fact that our monthly mortgage+tax+insurance payment is probably going to DOUBLE.

So anyway, I felt guilty for having the truck, and was trying to figure out a way to return it. Then I found myself playing softball with a bunch of people I don’t know, and somehow I was managing them and attempting to put together a lineup card while the leadoff batter was already at the plate. At this point Sarah woke me up ’cause it was like 9:15am and I needed to get to work.

Oh, the reason I slept in until 9:15? The Brandywiners “preview night,” in which they give a bunch of tickets to current members and participants, was last night. Since they do the show in an outdoor theater at Longwood Gardens, they have to start hella late or it’s not dark enough to use the lighting system. So the show didn’t end until just after 11, and then we had to go to Applebee’s for mad delicious flava.

Oh yeah, Applebees: I used to hate that place, but now I don’t. The reason? The one by us is really really, really REALLY bad, and the one up by Longwood is less so; the Walmart-adjacent one we went to a couple times had service worse than a prison cafeteria. Plus it seems like Tyler Florence’s influence has improved the quality of the food a great deal, such that I had some kind of shrimp fettuccini and it was heck of enjoyable.

This concludes the most rambling, pointless thing I’ve typed since my 6th grade “Invent A Country” project. (Its name: “Hoyaglitchland.”)

Categories: dear diary, wtf Tags:

July 24th, 2007 2 comments

Update: I did not get to kiss John Mayer on the mouth. All is sadness. Doubly frustrating, is that because the Tweeter Center sucks, I couldn’t get any pictures. Argh.

Our tickets said something about “NO PROFESSIONAL CAMERAS,” which kinda concerned me, but I thought, well, Canon’s own website describes the Rebel XTi as a “consumer” camera (the 30D is prosumer; the 5D is professional; and the 1D Mark III is “Holy Crap This Is Way Too Expensive To Take Out Of The Box”), and if I just put on a relatively tame lens (no monstrous zooms with lens hoods), they can’t really complain.

Incorrect.

Apparently when they say “No Professional Cameras,” they mean no detachable lenses, so despite the fact that my camera entered the building with a 50mm prime lens that wouldn’t allow me to get a shot of John any closer than “ant” view, it was confiscated (and returned later, worry not). This wouldn’t have been so troubling if the tickets had specifically said “No cameras with detachable lenses,” which would have been perfectly clear. It also would have been less annoying if they weren’t allowing people to bring in $800 Sony zoom 8MP digitals that were capable of getting pictures of the bass player’s ridiculous Village-People-Cop hat.

Anyway, we got in, and I immediately bought myself a large boring American beer, only to walk an extra 50 feet and discover they had a stand selling all kinds of quality microbrews. So my frustrations mounted. Then we got seated while James Morrison played his set, and I got even more pissed off, because the sound system at the Tweeter Center is so crappy it sounded like James was singing through a special filter designed to remove all consonants from every word. I couldn’t understand a thing. Even now I have no idea if any of his songs are any good; it might as well have been all instrumentals. I’ve heard better sound systems in an elevator.

The same goes for Ben Folds, who from what I’m told is a phenomenal musician and performer; all I can say is he has some amusing gimmicks and his songs often have pretty melodies. I’ll give him a B- because he kept throwing his piano seat at the keys, and at one point during a song he broke a piano string on a low note, immediately stopped the song, removed the string from the soundboard, handed it to a fan, and then restarted the song exactly where he’d left off.

Luckily, during his set I was able to run off and pee, and also buy a quality beer named something like “Circus Boy” or “Circus Penis,” or something. It was FANDAMNTASTIC, and I got back to my seat to listen to Ben Folds play 2 more completely unintelligible songs and then wander off to put on his neck brace (I’m assuming, since his head is roughly the same size as the rest of his body).

Honestly, the best part of the concert (up until John walked onstage) was making fun of other people with Liz. A quick rundown of the amusing people we saw:

  • Between 8 and 27,000 skinny little high school/early college-aged skanks who seriously needed to go dig a sandwich out of the trash or something before their bodies collapsed in on themselves.
  • An ENORMOUSLY fat woman in a wheelchair, attended by her fat husband and 2 fat daughters, getting wheeled around while sucking on what appeared to be a quart-sized glass of rum-soaked pixie-stix-sugar. There must have been 3,000 calories in that “drink,” which sadly was probably maybe 1/5 of this woman’s daily regular intake.
  • A couple thousand guys who were clearly there because their girlfriends liked John Mayer. These were the guys who were probably annoyed because they kept wanting to sit down and dorks like me wouldn’t stop standing up and screaming.

Yeah, I was screaming. John Mayer gives me happy feelings in my pants. DEAL WITH IT.

There’s not much to really say about John’s performance; he was ridiculously spectacular. It’s difficult to grasp how good a guitarist he is by just listening to his CDs; you kinda have to watch him play on TV, or live, particularly if he’s not constrained by late-night/early-morning network TV timetables. And the best part about it is that he can solo pretty extensively, but it never starts to feel like it’s gone on too long. For example: if you go to see Phish in concert, which I have, they will play maybe 8 songs, each of which is roughly 25 minutes long on average. Only one of these songs will have an identifiable melody. Usually after about 7 minutes into each song, Trey Anastasio would slow things down, and you’d realize they were launching into another 10 minute build-up leading to some kind of climax that left you feeling unsatisfied. John, on the other hand, played something like 25 songs, some of which were 5 minutes long, some of which were 10, but each extended solo was melodic and interesting and WENT SOMEWHERE. Going to a Phish concert feels like a 3 hour free-form jazz symposium at Camden County Community College; going to a John Mayer concert feels like going to a rock concert.

On the other hand, going to a Phish concert usually guarantees you a pretty boss contact high.

John didn’t quite play all my favorites, which I guess just means I’ll have to go see him again. However: not at the Tweeter Center, which has incurred my almight wrath for all times to come due to their immense suckitude.

Categories: anger, artsy fartsy, dear diary Tags:

July 20th, 2007 3 comments

I’m going to see John Mayer tonight with my sister, and here’s the plan: we’re going to sneak backstage, and then Liz will distract the various roadies and Ben Folds (who is apparently there in “support” of John, which I assume means he’ll just be cupping his balls during the show, which is nice in that John gets a nice little lift, and Ben Folds has something to do to keep him from actually singing) while I grab John and kiss him full on the mouth, probably with a measure of tongue.

That is my plan. Your thoughts?

Categories: wtf Tags:

Suds

July 18th, 2007 2 comments

Heck YES I’m making beer! What, you thought I was playing? Boo, I don’t play when it comes to Germany’s greatest invention. (Was beer invented in Germany? I should look that up. ::wikipediates:: Looks like it was invented in Mesopotamia. How about that.)

Anyway, I’d been wanting to give it a try for a while, so last Friday I headed over to How Do You Brew?, the nearest supplier of hardware and whatnot for making beer and wine. The gentleman in the shop, Joe Gallo, was EXTREMELY helpful, and I ended up staying about an hour, talking about the process and various tools. I bought the various tubs, tubes, and attachments, along with a kit containing the malt extracts and various hops and sugars. I wanted to make sure I had something super simple, that I couldn’t screw up.

Well of COURSE I screwed it up. C’mon, now.

The process starts with boiling a lot of water; various recipes call for various amounts in the initial boil. Almost all home recipes are designed to make 5 gallons of beer, but some call for you to boil all 5 gallons, some call for as little as 1 gallon of boil, and you just add the rest of the water later. This recipe called for a 2 gallon boil, and I happened to have a 2 gallon jug of spring water available, so I poured it in and gave a righteous boiling. While I did this, I filled a 7-gallon fermenter bucket with water and mixed in some sanitizer powder, and stuffed in all the various equipment that would touch the beer during the fermenting process.

When the water boiled, I poured in the two massive cans of malt extract (the kit supplies this so you don’t have to grind and steep your own grains, a complexity I may be ready for at a later date) and brought the mix back to a boil.

Here’s where I made my first mistake: the recipe was very clear about watching the pot to make sure it didn’t boil over. I took this to mean that as the boiling went on, various starches and things would make a foam on the surface that I would want to make sure didn’t spill out. So, thinking nothing of it, I dumped in the first package of hops.

Apparently hops and water and malt react violently, because roughly 2 pints of water exploded out all over my kitchen.

After the boil calmed down, I moved the pot over to another burner, because I was going to have to completely disassemble the left side of my stovetop to clean all the beer out of it. This kept me busy for about 15 minutes, and then I poured myself a large glass of gin.

The boil continued, and as boiling liquids are wont to do, much of the water steamed out into the air. I watched bemusedly, and wondered how, if I boiled this thing for an hour, I was going to end up with 5 gallons of liquid, since I appeared to be losing about a cup of water every 15 minutes (ignoring, for the moment, the quart I’d lost when the brew exploded). I pored over the directions to see if I was supposed to keep the pot covered, and could find no useful information. So I left it uncovered. Whatever. Towards the end of the boil, I threw in the last little bit of hops (very, very carefully) and began to ready the fermenter.

Unfortunately, I had made another sizeable mistake: the recipe called for me to use 5 gallons of spring water (tap water, being chlorinated, would kill the yeast), which I didn’t have. It also called for me to rapidly cool the mixture before adding the yeast, by sitting the fermenter full of liquid in a tub of ice until it got down to about 70 degrees; I did have plenty of ice, due to buying roughly 12 bags of it for a party and saving 4 7-pounders in my freezer. I remembered in the Good Eats episode on beermaking, Alton used an amount of spring water PLUS an amount of ice IN THE FERMENTER and that way immediately cooled the mixture to a temperature that wouldn’t kill the yeast. Brilliant!

My mistake was made in misjudging the ratio of ice to water. I was SURE that Alton had put all the water in the initial boil, and used about 3 bags of ice plus a few additional pint bottles of water. So I put two bags of ice in the fermenter and poured the hot wort in; it rapidly cooled to about 40 degrees and didn’t come close to melting all the ice. Dang; now I had overcooled liquid that was still a gallon short of the amount of water! I managed to stuff the rest of the ice in, and poured in some pints of heated spring water, but it still wouldn’t completely melt. Dang; I feared if I added the yeast to this mixture, the cold would screw it up somehow. Oh well; let’s put the cover on and sit it aside, and after rehearsal I’ll come back and it’ll be a nice toasty 70 degrees and I can pitch the yeast.

So I left, and came back. The ice still hadn’t melted. Hells bells, as my father would say. Oh well. I went ahead and bloomed the yeast anyway, poured it in, and put the top on. I had some problems getting the bubbler (a little device that allows CO2 to escape the bucket, but doesn’t let air in) working, and in the end I think it was allowing air into the bucket for the better part of a day, so hopefully the beer doesn’t taste like a monkey crapped in it. I measured the specific gravity of the beer on Saturday, and it was about 1.040, about where it was supposed to be; as of today, it’s at 1.010. The recipe says it should get down to 1.007 or so, so I’ll keep an eye on it and hopefully get it into bottles this weekend, after which it needs to “age” for about 3 weeks. Yay beer!

Categories: foodieness Tags:

July 17th, 2007 No comments

Thank SSCBJ for sick days, or personal days, or mental health days, or whatever it was I used yesterday to get out of most of my workday so I could get some bloody sleep. Bejeebers, I was exhausted.

Since Sarah’s doing the Brandywiners show this year, PLUS taking a class in a subject I don’t even begin to comprehend, I’m on Charles duty most of the time, so I’m routinely running a bit ragged. The weekend, which I’ll get to momentarily, nearly killed me.

Sarah had to be out of town most of the weekend at a wedding, so of course I made sure that my weekend was as busy as possible to make everything completely complex. I was singing in a benefit concert Saturday night, which included a Friday night rehearsal, so I had to find someone to watch HRB on Saturday; Craig and Mel jumped all over it, and did a bang-up job keeping him from eating nails and/or one of their cats, for which they are owed one ENORMOUS favor from me. That afternoon I took Charles and my parents to the Brandywiners picnic, at which there was frivolity and beer-drinking, and then sprinted home to try and get Charles to nap so I could shower and pack him up to go to C&M’s.

Of course, he refused to nap. At least, after a while, he stopped screaming, and busied himself trying to disassemble his crib through the combined efforts of mumbling incoherently while shaking the sides and banging his head into the slats as hard as possible. Since he was calm, I showered and changed, then I got him ready, dropped him off, and headed to Archmere Academy in north Wilmington, the site of the benefit, which went very well. Jenny and I sang “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better,” from “Annie, Get Your Gun,” which is inspired completely by a GAP commercial containing Claire Danes. Later we performed “No One Is Alone” from “Into The Woods” with two young people, Brooke and Madsy. It was all good times, and since my stuff was all done in the first act, I got to spend the second act eating and drinking in the lobby with the other people. It was fantastic!

After we were done, I returned to pick up Charles, who was a trouper despite the fact that it was 11pm before we got home, and we both passed out like your dad in the alley behind “Buxom.”

Sunday, we relaxed in the morning, and then went to a pool party at a BEAUTIFUL home near Hagley Museum. It was awesome; the pool was the size of my house, and instead of a diving board, it was just built into the hillside such that it had a stone wall and a diving ROCK. Charles splashed around and drank chlorinated pool water, and Sarah came back from Long Island in time to fling herself off of the diving rock and make everyone giggle.

Finally, we went home and fell asleep, which was just awesome. It was so completely rad. Nevertheless, I woke up yesterday morning STILL exhausted, and so I called in “dead” and went back to sleep. I awoke to attend a couple meetings, and then had time to run some errands, mow the lawn (untouched in three weeks; the neighbors were thrilled), clean the bathrooms (which had become sentient), and even do some woodworking. Good times! Good times.

Tomorrow: I make beer.

July 12th, 2007 No comments

Here’s a holla at ye. Let’s start off with: new pictures (just the first 5 are technically “new,” as in posted today). Yay! Yay.

As you are undoubtedly aware, I am what might be most kindly described as “husky,” or, as one of my childhood teachers actually put it, “sturdy.” I wasn’t always this way; in fact, at the time that the childhood teacher knew me, my BMI was probably 2. I was skinny as a rail until college. That’s when I discovered that, without parents around and few athletic opportunities available, I could cut all my classes and sit in my dorm room eating corn pops and taking advantage of The Internet, which was in its infancy (well, toddlerdom) at the time. I gained something like 35 pounds in 8 months, a feat which is normally only duplicated by the best sumo wrestlers.

Ever since, I’ve been in a see-saw battle against my enormous waistline; at the moment I appear to have reached some kind of sad equilibrium in which I get just enough exercise to compensate for my staggering food intake, because I just don’t have it in me to diet anymore. (I can’t even face the low-carb diet now, because the thought of running a mile (which cold sucks) and not getting to eat a donut and/or entire honey ham makes me want to cry.)

Enter the modern technology of holistic wellness, or philosophical weight loss, or hippie diets, or some such type fad. All I know is this guy says he can hypnotize me, via CD, into not stuffing my face with candy I steal from children whom I beat up for their candy. His name is Steven Gurgevich, PhD, and he has a website, so he’s TOTALLY LEGITIMATE. Also he has a name that sounds like a dry heave, which has the obvious effect of throwing anybody off their feed.

It consists of three CDs. The first CD sort of explains everything about the process, which is complex and involves “spirit” and “emotions,” neither of which I’m entirely sure I have, and warns against “hidden saboteurs.” (I like to envision small Englishmen chopping up my fat-burning liver with axes.) The second CD has some tracks with pep talks about breaking down barriers and learning self-control, and the third CD, which apparently is the most important, has the parts I’m supposed to listen to when I wake up, or before meals, or if I accidentally find myself tearing away at the flesh of a squirrel I find on the road because I’ve hypnotized myself so well I didn’t eat for four days.

So far I’ve just listened to the first CD, and here’s what I can tell you: man, it was boring. That’s not to say it wasn’t interesting, but because Dr. Gurgevich is a professional hypnotist, he says everything in a very calm, even tone, and after a while you fall asleep. I can also report that so far it doesn’t seem to be working, because I had to take a break in the first CD to go get Pepper Steak on Rice With Vegetables from the cafeteria. Anyway, I’ll listen to some more of the CDs and let you know if I, for example, spontaneously lose 70 pounds.

If this doesn’t work, I’m going to go with South Bronx Paradise.

July 11th, 2007 1 comment

Yeah, I was heck of up all hours of the night for work, so we’re going to do a link day. But before we get to that: have you ever listened to a song, divined what you believe the lyrics to be, and think wow, that’s amusing/cool/sublime/sexy/etc., only to find out later that the lyrics AREN’T what you thought, and what they really are isn’t as cool?

I’ve been rather suckered in by Timbaland recently, such that he can release a completely repetitive song entitled “The Way I Are” and I’m immediately listening to my head and singing along. At any rate, during the chorus, Timbaland sings something that sounded to me like:

I’m about to strip
And I’m well-equipped
Can you handle me the way I’m are

The “well-equipped” part always amused me, for some reason; I assumed he was alluding to the massiveness of his wang, which was about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting Keri Hilson. Imagine my dismay when I looked up the lyrics to try and figure out something that Keri sang, only to discover what he’s really saying is:

I’m about to strip
And I want it quick
Can you handle me the way I are

Which is less funny, doesn’t rhyme well, and is just disappointing from every perspective (except I guess from Timbaland’s, since I’m sure he’s raking in unbelievable dough off the single). I was very saddened by the whole thing. Anyway, if you’ve got any examples of similar lyric anomalies, let me know, I’ll be amused by them.

The linkz:

  • Best. Headline. Ever.
  • What in the heck is this? I am beyond confused.
  • Now, THIS guy is really on the ball.
  • I don’t know many Canadians, and yet from the ones I’m closest to, this isn’t even remotely surprising.
  • And let’s close things down with a quote from Bill Simmons’s latest mailbag. This may be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen on the internet:

    I want to go to the top of a really tall building, take a leak, finish, zip up, and then have my pee hit the ground. I want my entire pee to be airborne. Man I love beer.

    What more needs said?

Categories: link day, wtf Tags:

July 10th, 2007 No comments

Well, the beach was delightful. We didn’t get to spend our usual week in Fenwick this year, due to rehearsals and classes and the concert I sang in Balmer last week, so there was sadness and gnashing of teefs, but we had a good time while we were there. Plus, since we weren’t down there for a super-long time, we didn’t have to strap our cargo carrier on the roof, as that is a Hassle. We managed to get up early on the 4th and get on the road by 9:15am, just about the time Charles needed a nap. He didn’t sleep much, unfortunately, but he’s a good traveller anyway so the 2-hour drive wasn’t all that painful.

We arrived around 11, got unpacked, and immediately commenced laying around doing nothing for extended periods of time. Charles discovered the big sunny porch, dragged most of his toys out there, and tried to figure out a way to punch through the screen and fall into the bushes. (He was never successful, thanks to the intervention of Sweet Crying Sainted Baby Jesus.) We watched tennis, grilled steaks, and eventually fell asleep, fat and happy.

Thursday we decided to drag Charles to the beach, despite the ominous skies. He rather liked it. After a while it started to rain, and I was tired of cleaning sand off of Charles, so we hoofed it back to the house and cleaned him up in the pool, which was for him almost as much fun as the ocean. After some ritual hosing out of the orifices of everyone, we went to a seafood place where I ate a plate of food almost as heavy as my son, who yelled a lot, ate everything that got near him, and generally made a big fuss. Our waitress was both Eastern European and scandalously hot.

Friday, Dad and I had intended to go golfing, but it was hot, so we went to the beach instead and left Charles in Sarah’s care, since she’s not really a beach kinda girl (She’s more of a laying-out-by-the-pool kinda girl, as long as she doesn’t have to put her head under water or actually swim or put her drink down or anything.) I frolicked in the waves, got a good sunburn, and generally acted significantly less than my age. Luckily, there were lots of young women there to admire my pasty physique and generally be creeped out by me.

After that we went to a BBQ place called Bethany Blues, wherein Charles was surly and we had to shovel our food down our gullets and take him outside so he’d stop staring at people and screaming. (I dunno what’s up with him recently, but he’s not fond of sitting in restaurants and enjoying the ambience. He ends up throwing food on the floor and screaming for no reason until I tase him take him outside. Hitting the terrible twos a bit early, I suppose.)

Saturday we basically packed up, sprinted home, changed clothes, and went to Mel’s baby shower, which was loud but filling; Sunday we went to my uncle’s house out in York (another 2 hour drive! Charles was thrilled) for my aunt’s birthday, and let Charles float around the pool in a little boat-like device my wife acquired for him. The boy is like a fish, I’m TELLING YOU.

And that’s all I have to say about that. Oh, for the rest of the pictures, head on over to Charles’s site. HILARITY IS TO BE FOUND THERE!

Categories: dear diary Tags:

July 5th, 2007 No comments

omg no time to talk on vacation just go here look at new pictures ok thnx bai

Categories: artsy fartsy, wtf Tags: