Chimera Station

HOWTO: Silverlight-to-Mono Client-Server, Part I

2010-04-23T14:39:00.003-04:00

The premise of this HOWTO is that you'd like to build some shiny new web-based application, something that needs data comm to a back-end server, and for whatever reason, your preference is to do it using C# and the .NET framework.

Using Silverlight for the client is the obvious choice, perhaps the only one for our given scenario. (ASP.NET - what's that?!) On the back end, you can write the server as a straight-up .NET console application. If you were deploying to a Windows server you might even make it a bona fide service; that would be a smart idea. But let's add a different wrinkle and say that your server is actually going to run on a Linux box. What then? Well, the answer is, of course, Mono, which will run our .NET application CLR in Linux-land.

Nothing novel here: a quick search reveals other web articles on the topic. But as I've started to work through the actual implementation, I've come across the interesting bits. You know, where things don't work right. That's what I think is worth sharing.

First, installing Mono on the server. Mine is a Debian Linux distro. I followed the steps in this article: made /home/username/scripts/install-mono, copied the referenced bash file over, set the domain to mydomain.com, and ran it. After a good 20 minutes of churn and work... success!

On my development PC, I'm using (the free) Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express. I made a simple "Hello, World" console app to begin with, then moved the application executable over to my server (WinSCP is my typical tool of choice), ssh'd in (Cygwin or PuTTy) and ran "mono HelloWorld.exe". Lovely!

Next comes the first baby steps of networking. I want to use System.Net.Sockets based TCP/IP rather than a WebClient protocol. Mostly, because I believe that this will let me effectively push data up to the client from the server asynchronously. I don't want to get into extraneous polling, or have a strict client-driven request-response system. Someday, we'll see why that was a good idea; or perhaps not.

When a Silverlight app uses a TCP socket, certain network security access restrictions apply. For TCP, they apply even when your server app is on the same domain as the client app, and it applies for cross-domain netowrking of any kind. Now here's where some sources get a bit glossy. When you first try to connect with a Silverlight TCP socket (and it's restricted to destination ports in the range of 4502-4534), it goes (behind the scenes) to that server to retrieve a clientaccesspolicy.xml file, which has the rules to determine whether or not the client is allowed to talk to this server address.

"Behind the scenes" sounds magical, but it's not. At least not on the server side. In reality, you need to have an authentication service of some sort listening/accepting on port 943, which is where Silverlight is hard-coded to connect to. SL, once connected, sends a message: "", and the authentication server responds with the clientaccesspolicy.xml data (which is fairly mundane and not even today's subject). Well, no one is running this authentication service for you (probably; maybe you are running something like FreeRadius and know how to configure it to handle this; but, like me, you probably aren't).

The simplest thing to do, then, is to make our server app also be the authentication server, which means that before a Silverlight client can TCP connect to us (again, in the port range of 4502-4534), we first have to handle a listen/accept on port 934 and serve up the client access policy to whoever might ask for it.

When you do this (code not shown, exercise for the reader) and run, the server application crashes when it tries to create the listener on port 943. Why? Oh, well, in Linux any port number under 1024 is considered "privileged" or "well-known" and can only be opened by an app running as root. That's crazy! So, what can we do?

The first option, the bad one, is to run as root. This is such a bad idea that we're not even going to seriously consider it. But many native Linux apps are built to do something just like this: they are started under root, and then drop their root privilege as soon as they've created their critical sockets. I think this is what Apache does. I'm not sure how you would go about doing that in a .NET/Mono app, anyway. So let's move along.

Better options exists. This article has at least two worthy of consideration. The first one is to use firewalls via iptables to setup the kernal network stack to redirect a port, say 943, to another, say 4501. Then we would be able to run our server without being root, accept/listen on port 4501, which is where the Silverlight client authentication requests coming in on port 943 would be redirected in a fairly magical fashion. So that's one good idea.

The next one is to install and use the authbind package on the server, which would allow a specific port such as 943 to be used by some specific designated non-root application, such as our server app. This seems to have some merit, too, but overall it's a bit more fiddly, and the iptables approach seems to make better use of inherent Linux capabilities, with far less extra fuss and muss.

Let's stop right there, what a cliffhanger! In Part II, we'll tackle getting the Silverlight client authentication to work in practice on our .NET/Mono server app.

Cruising To The Outlandish

2010-04-16T16:43:00.002-04:00

My decade of PT Cruiser ownership is over. After weeks of research and searching, we traded up to a small SUV, so much the better to meet the needs of our parental hauling stuff around allotment.

So meet the new boss: it's a 2007 Mitsubishi Outlander LT with 34,000 miles - that's a full 100,000 miles less than what the Cruiser ended at. The 'lander has a 3.0L V6, 6-speed automatic tranny, selectable 2WD/AWD/4WD drive, great interior space and sensible layout and features, fuel efficiency on par with the cruiser, and the balance of the 5-year, 60,000 mile full vehicle warranty on top of all that. It was right up there with a newer RAV4 on my with list, and those are both harder to find and pricier. So I think we're in great shape with the Mitsu. If previous experience holds true, they're very reliable.

Titan Tournament: The Red Fist Of Death Tells All!

2010-04-11T10:46:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, I took home the trophy in the inaugural SWA-sponsored 2010 Northeast Titan Tournament. This followed a pair of preliminary rounds during the previous month. Titan’s the sort of game that makes for great stories – if you like Titan. Otherwise, not so much. So you’re been warned: keep reading at your own peril.

Based on the structure of the tournament, I guessed that was going to need to win two games in the open pool prelims in order to get a seat at the finals. Since my gaming free time is not what it used to be, this was no sure thing. On the first weekend of games, I was the first one out of a three-player board; I was re-learning a lot of Titan nuances in a hurry, having not played seriously for almost ten years. (Oh, and running on four hours’ sleep after a band gig in Pine Plains the night before.) Not an auspicious start! Fortunately, I stuck around for an afternoon session where I won a four-player bout by being the leader when time was called at seven hours. No one got eliminated, but I had built up a pretty powerful Titan and I think everyone agreed that I was the leader at the time. So that was one win – halfway there.

On the second weekend of prelims I only had time for one game, so it was going to have to count. Again, a four-player match, and again facing off against the SWA’s John F., a very good player, easily my better at mastering and moving on the main board. John was already the points leader at this time, but I had outlasted him in my first win earlier. This time around, though, it didn’t go on time: titans went down hard. I managed to devise a train wreck of sorts on the main board, where I was in the best position to clean up the pieces. It worked to plan, and I came out of it with a tough Titan in a non-mustering stack, and not much else. The real upside was that I eliminated two other players, and John maxed out at 12 legions and was denied the use of extra legion markers from eliminated players. I got through that dangerous run of turns when your Titan’s not tough enough to win on his own, and doesn’t have enough of a legion to help or muster with. The end came surprisingly fast, then. A few decent rolls brought me a Warlock, and Angel, and I rolled a ‘6’ on my first chance with Titan Teleport, picked out John’s Titan legion from clear across the board, and shredded it with a combination of Angel-Warlock firepower. His stack was full of strong Jungle creatures, but all those x-2’s are like cheese against angels and warlocks and Titans. So I got my seat at the finals, and had also definitely re-located my Titan mojo.

Which brings us to yesterday’s final. The top six contenders from the prelims were invited, but two were unable to attend, so we again had a four-player setup, using balanced towers to be fair. Honestly, a six-player game is so crowded and full of random mayhem that a four-player final probably made for a better game anyway. It was me, John, Mike, and Nick, who was also the tourney organizer and deserves a big shout-out of praise for the effort and smooth execution thereof. Cheers!

Certain trends emerge when you play a bunch of the same game in a row. As I’ve said, John is excellent on the main board – he gets a lot of good musters and keeps great board position while doing it. Me? Not as good. Even in a ‘serious’ game like this one I don’t keep as close track of what everyone else is mustering as I should, and I always have a very hard time favoring my own long-term mustering tracks versus something I could use right now. I do tend to be pretty mindful of board position at least. But, no, without a doubt my real talent lies on the battle board. I have a very good feel for how to run a battle, and I feel that I often have an advantage over my enemies even when the material is balanced. I humbly credit this prowess from all the whippings I received (and sometimes gave) back with my Buffalo Titan friends from back in the day: Random, Tom, and especially Kevin, who I think can bend the dice to his will. Oh, and I move fast, which I think unnerves some opponents. I’m not into pondering that board for ten minutes each combat phase. Like Antony says, when the battle is in doubt, charge. Using a football analogy, I run the Titan equivalent of the West Coast Offense. Run and gun, run and gun.

OK, so this final got off to a very ‘classic’ start: lots of mustering and splits, a very few cautious probes of battle, but overall conservative, even tentative, play. I myself was doing better on the main board than usual – at its high-water mark my Titan stack featured: itself, a Warlock, two Unicorns, two Manticores, and, well, an Ogre. I also had a jungle legion that got itself a Serpent before all was said and done. Good for me, but others were doing about as well.

The first real game-changing event happened as result of some of my earlier aggressions. I had taken on a combat that was rather a toss-up, and summoned my angel for the win, but it left that stack with but a Cyclops and the angel. For a bunch of turns I kept it out of harm’s way – it was my angel buffer, and I desperately tried and failed to pick a fight elsewhere: I wanted to summon that angel back to a ‘real’ stack and kiss the Cyclops good-bye. But I simply couldn’t get the opportunity. Then, I moved the Cyclops-Angel stack down close to a tower, on the chance that I might just get in for safety and a new basic recruit. On the way, I stopped next to Mike’s Titan legion. Now, John was coming around the outside with the scariest conga-line of legions any of us had seen in awhile. And so Mike rolled his titan legion into my stack mostly for the sake of the safer board position my space would offer.

I looked at his stack: I think it was an Angel and three Centaurs in addition to the Titan. A bit weak given that we were mid-game: his fear of John’s legions was justified. My big mistake of the day: I offered him full points with no battle if he’d lose two of the Centaurs. Mike’s bigger mistake: declining (he’d have gotten one back right away in post-battle muster). We were in the Woods and I think he wanted to at least try to off me with no losses to recruit a Warbear. So, to the battle map we went…

The Cyclops lumbered in and the Angel kept pace. Mike’s creatures didn’t close to combat. So the next phase, I did. I got the Angel and Cyclops double teaming a Centaur, the Cyclops’ flank exposed to another. The trees in the woods were a big help. I snuffed his Centaur, which whiffed on the retaliation. On Mike’s next move, he sent another Centaur into the same breach, instead of his Warlock. And he tried to finish off the Cyclops, I think. In any case, the Angel waxed his Centaur as well on the retal and was now unlocked from melee. On my next move I flew over to his Titan (and Warlock). I hit exactly for odds, three hits on the Titan, and the eleven dice of retal from Titan and Angel only got five hits. So I lived to the next round and hit for odds again, three more, and Mike’s Titan fell. The battle itself was mutual destruction, but Mike was eliminated, I got a ton of half-points, and a lot of board space to work with. Let’s just say that one more time: a Cyclops and an Angel taking out a Titan stack. Woof!

At this point, Nick was hemmed in on the board and falling behind in the muster race, but John was getting nervous: he’d seen me go on a Titan rampage in our last game. So he made the next bold move and sent his ‘Air Force’ legion (4 Rangers, 1 Wyvern) against Nick’s Titan legion that was holed up in a Tower. Nick’s stack was decent enough: a Warlock, some Gorgons, and he should have come out weakened, but alive. Instead, John’s flying range-strikers negated most of the Tower’s inherent defense, and then when they made their suicidal charge on Nick’s Titan, he rolled very, very well. I think there was a point in this battle where Nick’s forces needed to abandon the ramparts, and close on the Rangers in pairings of his own choosing. He put too much faith in John only rolling average, and that’s a game with a high cost to losing when your Titan’s on the line.

So now Nick was gone too, and John, with all the points picked he up, was winning. I smashed my Titan legion straight into one of his tougher stacks, expecting few losses, an Angel summon, and a Unicorn muster. But again, John’s dice were hot, and while I won the battle, I came out with only the Titan, a Warlock, an Angel, and one Manticore. A few turns later I Titan Teleported onto a small, nasty stack of his in the hills, hoping to grab another Manticore, but instead lost the only one I had in the process. I was down to all lords, no mustering potential, and a weak stack at that. But for the next bunch of turns, John couldn’t roll a six to get his own Titan Teleport to stomp me. And just low numbers all around for him, he couldn’t even close with conventional moves. It was just enough time for me to pick my way through a few other battle wins and get an Angel and Archangel into the mix. My hot jungle stack with the Behemoths and Serpent gave me just enough swagger (I was down to three legions total) to not be forced into any bad moves.

Somewhere in there, his Titan stack took out my last speed bump legion. This was good for me, because I had lost track of his Titan, being such a lazy main board player. And for the end game, it was weak! Four Lions, a Ranger, a Warlock, and the Titan. My teleport potential meant he couldn’t risk a split anymore, either. I got close to him and he declined to come after me (he had no angel to summon), and I knew I had him. I got a good roll the very next turn and took him on, lions and all, in the desert.

On paper (cardboard?) it looked like it might go either way, but once the swords came out, it was a rout. My Titan was a 13-4 at this point, against his 11-4, but I also brought two Angels (6-4), a Warlock (5-4), and an Archangel (9-4) to the party. All those flyers, again, essentially negated the terrain advantage for the lions and defenders. And the sand wasn’t helping his non-natives adjust easily, either. I got my Archangel two hexes from his Titan, pasting the Lion that stood between, and my Warlock bringing up the rear to start range-striking his Titan. He was flushed out, to no better position, and this time I had the hot dice on the retals and cleared some spots next to his Titan. Next turn all my tough guys rushed in and finished him, and even if his Titan got all 6’s on the retal, it wouldn’t be enough to take mine out. Victory!

So that’s how I came to be the 2010 Northeast Titan Champion. Everyone seemed to have a good time and the quality of play was extremely strong. I will post some pictures if I can get Nick to send them along. Nick’s going to tweak the format a bit from lessons learned, but I think it’ll be back and even better next year, and I’ll be there to defend my title. Just as long as I can play the Red Legion!

Idiot Splendour Gets All Welshy in Chatham This Saturday

2010-03-26T17:04:00.002-04:00

The 'Splendour sets down in the uniquely named Peint O Gwrw Welsh pub in Chatham this Saturday night. It's practically a matinee show: 8-11 PM, and at less than ear-blistering levels, too. And we hope to unveil our rendition of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer". What's not to like? Drop in and say hi!

Dapper Charlie

2010-03-26T16:59:00.002-04:00

This past weekend we got Charlie his nice clothes for Easter, and yesterday Kathleen got some pictures taken. (We also squeezed in the "I am 1" theme even though he's already about to hit fifteen months.) He is just adorable!

Happy 3rd Birthday, Loki!

2010-03-18T11:09:00.002-04:00

Loki was "about 5 months" when we adopted him August of 2007, so we proclaimed that March 17th was his official birthday. So yesterday was his 3rd birthday!

Here he was in October '07, still a young nipper:

All grown up now, fifty pounds even, lots of playful energy and great friends with 'lil Charlie, here he is now:

I took him to the doggy park yesterday as a special treat. There were about seven other dogs there at the time and he ran and ran and played and played.

Ongoing goings on...

2010-03-12T11:32:00.004-05:00

Posting has become sporadic... at best... so, my apologies!

The new Idiot Splendour lineup heads out for our 2nd showing tonight, down at Lia's Mountain View in Pine Plains - down the Taconic we go! After looking at a map, I realize that Pine Plains is just about halfway between me and my brother John's place down in Mount Vernon. I've got my guitar wireless all sorted and levelled out and am looking forward to using it.

Over the last couple weeks I've been working to add sax into the band repertoire, starting with our bluesier covers and a few select originals. If I can strong-arm Mark into singing and playing rhythm guitar parts of my own devices, this opens the door to doing a whole bunch of nice originals that I wrote with sax in mind as the lead instrument. "Alexander" and "Give Yourself Away" are already in the works. Unlike my previous bands, where a "clean" sax sound was the rule, running with the 'Splendour crowd means I need to get an effects box for the sax signal chain and get to experimenting. Craigslist, here we come. Maybe the Zoom A2 acoustic box will do.

In other pursuits of the geeky variety, I've been reading through Zelazny's Amber novels (just finishing the Corwin Chronicles now, moving on to the Merlin cycle...), and watching the original Firefly TV series on DVD, and also HBO's Rome, season 2. I want to find a nice XIII legion t-shirt to wear at band gigs! But, so far I've been frustrated in attempts to find someone with Galactica season 2.0 on DVD that I can borrow it from; it's no-go at our branch of the library. Also, tomorrow I hope to play a couple preliminary rounds of Titan at the SWA's Northeast Titan Championship. It's going to be tough, I need to get through at least two games and place well to get on track to make the finals. And I'll be wickedly sleep-deprived to boot. The only hope is that this will allow my natural wicked streak as a Titan player rise to the forefront...

Meanwhile, the nice weather has been most welcome. Charlie's loving being outside in his wagon and going on walks with the family. He's also enrolled in a "swim" class at the Y with mommy. You can see how he's slimming out:

He also got a really nice kitchen set as a belated birthday present, and he's loving it:

New Splendour Begins

2010-02-12T15:13:00.002-05:00

I thought it worth mentioning that Idiot Splendour, the band I've been practicing with since last September, has finally made it to the starting line: we play this Saturday at 9 at O'Toole's in Colonie. A strange and crazy mix of original prog-post-punk-rock alongside tasteful covers from classic to modern, it's sure to bewilder, and perhaps even entertain. And if that doesn't work, there's sixteen varieties of beer on tap.

Happy First Birthday to Charlie Today

2009-12-30T09:03:00.002-05:00

(Party to follow this weekend...)

Yes, it's just like everyone said it would be - the past year has really been quite a blur. Our precious little guy is already walking, playing, babbling, eating solid foods; it's hard to try and recall each of those milestones, as they just keep on coming, one after another. And of course there's so much exciting new stuff coming right along, too. If it's going to be a second year of blur, then, so be it. Our wonderful baby is happy and loved.

Happiest of Christmas Returns - - -

2009-12-22T15:37:00.002-05:00

BIG UPDATE: Morgan, our, cat, came back!

One of our apartment neighbors found her this morning, saw our sign, and called. She seems no worse for wear, though she probably spent one day and two cold nights outside. Perhaps she's down one life of her nine now, but we're very happy to have her back for Christmas.

Early Holiday Comings and Goings

2009-12-21T12:55:00.003-05:00

Whew! It's easy to forget how exhausting it can be to be full of holiday spirit and glee. We've been busy, topped off by our virtual/early Christmas celebration at home yesterday. We were motivated to do this to help spread out the crush of fun that's starting later this week: in town, then travel and out-of-town, celebrations, one after another. Also, perhaps a bit selfishly (but justifiably so), we wanted to make sure that to whatever extent Charlie "gets" presents and all that, that he gets to experience it first with us in a not-too overwhelming environment. It all went great. (Kathleen's blog's got all the picutres.) Then we made a big dinner for ourselves, realized it was going to be way too much to handle alone, and invited some friends over to share with us. So that was nice and in-the-spirit, too.

Other random holiday moments worth recalling:

- We drove through the park downtown to see the lights on Saturday night, which was bad planning on our part: of course this was going to be the busiest night. We shoulda done it on a Tuesday. We idled helplessly in line for an hour before we really got anywhere. The lights themselves were charming, quaint, and rickety in turns, and it was all set to a soundtrack of Charlie melting down. We'll plan this out better next year!

- We bailed on going to the Albany Winterfest this weekend because it was a bit too cold for us to feel baby-safe in. Next year. Good thing, too, as it would have been the prelude to the lights-in-the-park experience.

- We've lost our cat! This was the culmination in a slow escalation of fail: my dad changed the door handle in our old house in Batavia; the bad spirit of the doorknob sought us out in Delmar and made our apartment door handle go all clunky last week; which resulted in me not latching it fully when I ran out to get the mail on Saturday; and we didn't even realize our cat was gone until the following morning! Oy. Anxiety and dread - we've put up a sign and Kathleen is making some calls today. Hopefully the prodigal cat will come back, or be taken in by some kindly soul. There's aren't many other good possible outcomes.

- We've done a little charity secret-Santa-ing and giving to the local food pantry. In return, karma-wise, I stole a fuse from Target. Seriously. The day we put up our tree, we blew the little load limit fuse in the foot pedal on/off switch extension cord we use for the tree lights. I couldn't find a replacement anywhere. It would have been, like, ten cents if I could though. Anyways, I was shopping in Target one night last week and started checking out all their display lights for fuses. Turns out the new ones have a nice little chamber where the fuse goes in, that also holds a spare fuse! So I, ahem, appropriated one of those and no one's any the worse off for it. I just know those nice folks at Target would have wanted me to have it in exchange for all the business we've given them this last month!

- People totally stop going to the gym between Thanksgiving and the end of the year. It's been awesome. I move through my morning workout like an ambulance driver with the lights on. I hear the first two weeks of January are going to be payback, though, as all those resolution types give it the 'ol try. But, I'm told, that doesn't last very long before it quiets down again!

- And we're officially into winter and the shortest day of the year. Woo hoo! I used to pin my "winter survival hopes" on making it through January (this makes a lot of sense in blustery Buffalo), but now I feel that as long as the days are getting longer again, the great wolf in the sky won't swallow up the sun after all, and everything's gonna be all right.

Ad Astra

2009-11-18T12:51:00.002-05:00

Last weekend at the SWA November Game-a-thon, I got to learn a new game: Ad Astra (Latin for "to the stars"), "from famed designers Bruno Faidutti (Citadels, Red November) and Serge Laget (Mystery of the Abbey, Shadows over Camelot)".

To call Ad Astra "derivative" could be understating the case, and you would be in good company with many other reviewers if you chose to make that charge. A little perspective, then...

Two years ago, when I failed miserably in a brief stint as an independent game designer, I envisioned and attempted to put together a game based on the theme of space colonization (hardly unique), using some mechanics based on multiple resource types used to build various structures and such. Making little headway, I had my friend and d21 cohort Random join in to help, which only proved that two inexperienced game designers working in tandem were no better than one. Perhaps that's being a bit too hard on ourselves, because industry veterans Faidutti and Laget succeeded making the sort of game we meant to, and the only thing they had, apparently, that we didn't, was a laser-like focus in repackaging Settlers of Catan while subbing in a few new mechanics from other popular games so that the whole heist was a bit less blatant. Not much less, though.

Now, almost fifteen years out from Catan's watershed arrival in the US, perhaps it's actually no longer even possible to make a game that's not stitched together from the various genes of a half dozen predecessors; so, let's be forgiving and set that aside and ask simply whether it's a good game or not? On that count, the answer is certainly "yes": on a reasonably short time line it gives you a robust set of actions and tactics and scheming and a-ha moments to be worth the play time. I played in a five-person and a four-person game: it was easy to learn and we got down to strategic nuances quickly. I tied for the win in game one and came back to win convincingly in game two. That's fair disclosure, because who doesn't like a game better when they start off on a winning streak, right?

The question of whether to own it, though, is a different matter. I still think that if you only own a few board games, Settlers ought to be one of them. It's such a classic and it's amazing how well it still holds up. Given that, Ad Astra gets you a new flavor that's fun for awhile, but I don't think it's demonstrably better in a way that would encourage you to forgo Settlers for Ad Astra. Therefore, it's a great game to hope your friend or local club has, so you can enjoy it now and then, without bearing the inevitable guilt that would arise from how few times it would get pulled out from your own closet to play, if you owned it. And at the fairly typical $40 price point, there's a whole bunch of other, newer, more original games that are worth your attention. Starting with Settlers, if you don't have it.

The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie

2009-11-17T14:44:00.003-05:00

A few months after reading The City & The City, I got around to reading the other mystery on my list - Alan Bradley's debut novel, The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie. This one lacks 'City's weirdness: it's a straight-up classic mystery in style and pace, and I enjoyed it a lot. Its primary charm is the setting of a 1950 manor house and village in the British countryside, and the introduction of the unlikely, chemistry-obsessed heroine, eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce. The other thematic element of the novel is stamp collecting (Flavia's father's hobby), which is delightfully used as a vehicle of intrigue and drama, in ways you probably never thought possible.

Clever and wickedly funny throughout, with a great feel for characters and setting, it's of that style of novel that finds you racing into each new chapter, and clamoring for more of Flavia when it's done. (A second novel is already in the works.)

I think my mom would especially enjoy this one!

Overcoming Inconveniences

2009-11-05T10:56:00.002-05:00

We just got and installed a new, wireless printer, an Epson Workforce 40 inkjet. It's been surprisingly annoying to not have a printer - we left our old one behind in a box in our attic because it was bulky and we didn't really have a place to set it up. The wireless is great because after a quick setup we were able to drop it in a whole different room, better location and less clutter. Kathleen started printing out coupons again in a big way this morning. One good thing about this model is that it can take an extra large capacity black ink tank, which should be a bit more economical than the usual tanks...

Also, in the improvements department: with me now working from home a few days a week, it was the last straw to get back onto a landline phone. Our cell coverage in the apartment has been spotty since day one. and we both underestimated what a pain that would be. I've been doing a bad job keeping up with family and friends just because of this. Kathleen's mom is getting sick of her calls dropping. So, starting next Tuesday (if Verizon can be believed - ha ha ha ha ha!), we'll be back on the copper. I'll be emailing out the number to those who need it - stay tuned.

Stranger In A Strange Land

2009-11-05T10:19:00.004-05:00

Whew! I've finally finished reading Heinlein's perhaps-classic-epic Stranger In A Strange Land. I've had my ups and downs with RAH in the past, and figured I really ought to give this one a try. I managed to end up with the "original, uncut" version, which is some 50% longer than what was first published. Which mostly meant to me, once I got past page 320 or so, that I kept thinking, "boy I could have been done by now!"

That's right, I wasn't a fan. Mostly it was long-winded and ridiculous, and went very heavy on what's got to be RAH's biggest failing: committing tons of pages to characters ranting on and on about one issue or another (religion, the government, society). This is not a story. In fact it did much to deaden any value of the actual narrative that haplessly wends its way along oh-so-pokily.

I think from some sort of cultural-historical perspective, there's something valuable contained in Stranger, but the same thing can be said about Moby Dick, and neither is a very good read in its own right anymore. It must be said that contemporary sci-fi authors have done at least as good a job exploring interesting questions of our time without sacrificing the joy provided by an actual good and entertaining story. My recommendation is that if you're curious about this novel, you'll be better served finding some sort of synopsis on Wikipedia and get on to reading an actual good book all the quicker.

Addendum, Nov. 6th:

If I were a college literature professor teaching a course in science fiction, I would have my students write a compare-and-contrast paper setting Valentine Michael Smith, the Man From Mars, against Jonathan Osterman, Watchmen's Dr. Manhattan. Musing this over in my mind as I read the novel produced at least as much introspection and amusement as the novel itself. Christ figure versus God figure, 60's new age optimism versus 60's burnout bitterness, and so on...

Our Trip Up North

2009-11-04T15:03:00.002-05:00

Well, Kathleen beat me by a mile in getting pictures and stories posted. See:

- Our first day in North Creek.

- Our second day, in Lake Placid, at Wildwood.

- Our third day, including our climb up Cascade, and the night at the Mirror Lake Inn.

- Bonus: Charlie dressed up for Halloween.

The Way Out is the Way In...

2009-10-24T14:47:00.002-04:00

Our desire to move to Albany was the plan-of-the-year; the enabling event came in August when I landed a job here, at a place that shall be lucky to go unnamed. Because, while they are a bunch of well-meaning (more or less) folks, they simply don't have the first clue how to organize and execute to produce professional-grade software. We started on the Dilbert-Office plane and slowly slid into the Kafka-esque, comedically helped along by the inept roofing crew above us, who seemed to have a knack only for randomly disrupting the building infrastructure (power, Internet, ceiling integrity...)

Football metaphor time: a running play. The tailback smashes into a wall of bodies where a hole was supposed to be. It's all stacked up. But the back keeps those legs churning, sheds tacklers, works around the pile, breaks to the outside, finds daylight - victory!

That, there, is basically the story of my professional life over the last two months. After falling into a very deep and dour pit of despair, I kind of levelled out, got a grip, and all the time kept following through on a glacially-paced job lead recruitment routine. It all came together with a great phone interview last week, a highly satisfactory job offer this week, my resignation at the Million Monkeys Software Shack on Thursday, and my break to freedom yesterday. Glory be.

Now I have a week off between jobs, just in time for Kathleen and I to celebrate our first anniversary in style. Many, many, many trip ideas were considered and passed over for various reasons. The most popular variety of reason being along the lines of - "ugh, that's not gonna be much fun with a ten-month old!". What we came up with as our winner is a 4-day, 3-night drive up the Northway to explore the Lake Placid region, with each night spent in a different fancy hotel. A combination of sightseeing, hiking, and shopping, in a setting that'll let us go with Charlie's flow, whatever that may be.

Posts and pictures as we're able.

I Hate New Music - It's Just a Book Title...

2009-10-22T16:48:00.003-04:00

I've been dragging my way through Heinlein's ponderous and preposterous Stranger in a Strange Land, and needed a break. By chance, in the music section of our library, I found I Hate New Music: The Classic Rock Manifesto, by accomplished music writer Dave Thompson. I had actually read about a dozen pages of this a half a year ago, killing time in a bookstore.

More than occasionally funny, and completely over-opinionated by its very premise, Thompson hones in on that exact moment (it was, roughly, late 1978) when rock sold out and stopped being cool. A mix of random and relevant vignettes providing a particular perspective. Lovingly absurd. A fine distraction.

Oh well, then, let's try and finish off this Heinlein monstrosity already...

The Shade Songbook

2009-10-21T10:48:00.002-04:00

From 1990-1992 or so, I put together and led a band that made original pop-prog-rock music, under the fairly generic and unoriginal name of Shade. Ah, I was but a bright-eyed college lad, and had only taken up guitar two years earlier. Still, I was a fast learner, and safely relegated myself to rhythm and vocals as an extension of my songwriting; I happily cranked out song after song, scarcely ever stopping to check whether anyone else noticed or cared. Innocent bliss!

The band dissolved without drama as members started graduating and otherwise moving on. In late '92 and into early '93, I got to work with a Yamaha cassette 4-track in my the basement to try and capture these songs for posterity. I thought I was aspiring to high-fidelity at the time, but, sadly, no. A very small handful of SM57s for the drums (even the kick!), the usual onslaught of track-bouncing, an early Zoom box that rendered all the lead guitars with generally inappropriate buzzsaw splendour. My bad singing. Just brutal.

Credit where credit is due. I wrote and sung most of the songs, but everyone worked out their own parts in standard band style. Lead guitar: Mike Miller (1990-1991) and Dave Pandolfi (1991-1992), bass: Jim Scannell, drums: Kim Waff. On the recording, however, Kim did the drums and I did everything else. It was clearly a retrospective effort.

I recently located the resulting cassette from this project, handily sitting inside a working tape deck. I decided it was time to get these things digitized, so I pulled them into ProTools and saved them off as PCM .wav files. Then I encoded them as 256kbps .mp3 files - but made no effort to clean up the original tracks in any way other than fading in and out the noise floor at the beginning and end of each song.

So with no further ado, I present The Shade Songbook. Eighteen tracks of shiny-bright nostalgia. All the favorites, and all the way on down to songs that even I had forgotten existed. The goofy lyrics. The buzzsaw solos. Et cetera.

Though the time may be coming to start mining this trove for hidden gems and spare parts... you never know when and where these songs will re-appear, and in what form. They rise from the dead, bwah hah hah!

All right then - enjoy!

The Zen of No Context

2009-10-15T14:25:00.002-04:00

The other night when we were in the library I checked out the section of music books in non-fiction, just browsing. I noticed The Zen of Guitar, a cutesy little number with a premise borrowed or extended from the seminal Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair. I know this because I own (or have owned; lots of stuff got cleared out in the move) this book myself.

I've been thinking more about Zen and attitude lately; I've picked up a kindred spirit in my increasingly-Kafka-esque workplace, another recent hire; we withdraw to the Bountiful Bread for lunch and shake our collective heads at the order of things. We do a lot of reminding of each other to stay cool. We're leaves on the wind. It's a blustery day.

But it occurs to me that the cultivation of a Zen or right spirit simply in relation or response to a specific context or environment is inherently either a false start, or a first step at best. To admit to the specificity of the situation is to knowingly cultivate boundaries where none are truly needed. If you're only seeking Zen in response to a wacky workplace, or through the escape of playing your guitar, you might be even more constrained and caught up than if you weren't trying to do anything at all in the first place.

Better to cultivate a right spirit in and for all times and places. You may be more aware of this attitude in certain situations, much like how you feel what a good job the shock absorbers in your car are doing when you cruise over rough road. But to see the metaphor through, the right way is to have shock absorbers on and in good working order all the time, rather than trying to affix them right when potholes loom.

Council of Five Nations XXXII

2009-10-12T15:03:00.002-04:00

This past weekend I attended and helped out with Council of Five Nations, the annual gaming convention put on by the Schenectady Wargamers Association, now in its thirty-second year, and their third at the nicely restored Proctors Theater. One of my longest-time gaming friends, Dave Cheng, has been heavily involved with the SWA for almost his entire life now, and his leadership and organization skills once again showed, as the con was well-planned and smartly executed.

On Friday night I played Successors, an Avalon-Hill game from '93 (1st edition), or '97 (2nd edition) or '08 (3rd edition) - we were using a mix of 2nd and 3rd edition rules, I was told. The game is based on the struggle for succession of the empire of Alexander the Great immediately after his death, so we're talking circa 330 BC. Juxtaposed against a standard Avalon-Hilly mishmash of boardgame chit stack warfare is a Frodo-esque element where Alexander's body is slowly moved toward his personal Mount Doom of Pella to be buried - whoever pulls this off might secure a victory based on "legiticamy" rather than board presence. A great concept, somewhat crudely executed, our game sputtered on for five hours with its share of highs and lows, but I think we were all just relieved that it did, indeed, end.

After a night of too-little sleep I went back Saturday morning to learn and play Fire and Axe, a nicely done Eurogame from 2004 that fairly captures the essence of the Viking era. Hailing from the north, competing clans race to trade, sack, or settle all the expected European targets. It has a handful of mechanics integrated well together, including cards to drive the game through three Sagas, a wind/compass influence system, and a balanced scoring system to allow a couple different ways to seek victory. This one played out in two hours, so we all racked it up and did it again. I won the second game, but the highlight was the frantic and numerous failed attempts by two players to sack Rome. They raced down into the Mediterranean a half dozen times, spiting each other with dirty tricks, and each time one of them finally got a clear shot at the city, all they could manage to do was roll the dice horribly and totally fail. After a while it became the focus of entertainment for everyone playing. Rome finally fell, about eight turns after it should have. And those two guys ended up in last for their troubles, but have a great story to tell.

In the afternoon, one of my Buffalo gamer friends, Tom, arrived. I pitched my Agricola ticket so that we could go learn to play Le Havre, thus swapping out one Uwe Rosenberg game for another. Le Havre is like Puerto Rico on steroids, I think that's a compliment. A lot of the "rules" are spread out among a set of cards that comprise the shops of the seaport that the players are jointly developing. It was probably too much to grok in one sitting, just like Puerto Rico, and it's definitely on the "heavy" side of what can still be called a Eurogame, but it was a very good game nonetheless. Of the sort that if your group put some effort of mastery into, would find themselves getting a lot of plays back out of.

Le Havre also ended a bit early, giving Tom and I the time to take a nice dinner and relax and catch up. In the evening I put on my game master hat (well, T-Shirt), and ran Power Grid, which was almost a sleeper game when it came out in 2004 and is now extremely popular, or at least, highly regarded. Tom took a ticket for my event, as did two others (experienced Grid-ders each), leaving room for me to play, too. It was a very tight game, fiercely contested most of the way, and I made some very deft moves (my opinion!) to grab the inside track to victory - capacity to power nineteen cities, and rode it through for the win. We had enough time left for Tom to pull out his copy of Alhambra and teach it to one of our players (who was also in our Le Havre event).

We got home in good time, Kathleen and I hosted Tom in our hide-a-bed and Loki laid low in his crate for the night. On Sunday, we went back for the Con's final day: I ran a full table of six for Power Grid again, while Tom suffered two rounds of bad luck in a Battletech tourney. Tom decided to head home after that so as not to be on the road at the end of the day. I decided I had gotten my gaming fill as well, and passed on a chance to learn Dominion - some other time, perhaps. I found out where to find a local board game group and their mailing list, so I should have some chances now and then.

Meanwhile, I went home and enjoyed the rest of a lovely fall day with the family!

Au Pair Programming

2009-10-07T10:39:00.002-04:00

So, this is my second "not much to say" post out of the last, three, I think. Bear with me. I tend to write my little blog-o-ramas at work, five or ten minute interludes to take a break from my work day. This, however, has not been recently possible, nor will it be for the next week or two. See, my work task right now involves a prolonged phase-out of a contractor and taking over his work, and he's riding shotgun with me at the desk for a four-week span. Which has been going smashingly well, because he's a nice guy and smart to boot, but it's really cut into my ability to do these slack-off things. Shh - here he comes now!

More later. Like in a week or two, hopefully sooner. Which is a shame, because we've been doing lots of fun stuff here, there, and everywhere. Maybe Kathleen will have time to blog some of it, if Charlie would just settle down and let her. Ha!

At the Start of Lap 40...

2009-09-28T16:38:00.003-04:00

Family - check. Friends - check. Faith - check. Health - check. Finances - check. So then: so far, so good.

Resolution for the coming year: to be more generous and giving with loved ones.

...As the (self-appointed) CFO of Team Szinger, Albany Franchise, I have this tendency to get way too obsessed with counting costs, often overlooking things for which costs should not be counted - namely, being good to family and friends. So I'm going to try harder this year to remember how I want to be remembered, to give time, to savor occasions, to be nicer, the whole thing.

Fear of karma? Nah - response to grace.

Back Into Music

2009-09-24T12:34:00.003-04:00

I have too many hobbies, which take up too much time, mostly in possibly unhealthy isolation from others. At the top of the heap is music, which I've struggled with in a "is it self-defining or is it self-destructive" way for many of the years I've done it. It's overly simplistic to say that I'm happier when I have an outlet for my music-making interests, since that happiness is weighed against other, sneakier, costs. Anyway, suffice to say that since we've moved here, I've been grumpy about not having any good music outlets, and trying to remedy that within the available circumstances ought to be a good thing for me.

I've got my little ProTools studio set up, and have so far busied myself with trying to finish up a previous effort, a song called Reveal, that's missing bass and lead guitar. The bass was the sticking point previously because I could never locate a set of parts that really fit right, and always wore myself (and my un-practiced fingers) working the bass in exploration mode. But on that last song that I did complete, late last winter at the old house, I had a successful run with a MIDI/sampled bass parts that turned out credible-sounding and rocking. So I'm trying to do that with Reveal now. Maybe half done.

There's no getting around that sax playing is out in the apartment, so I'm turning back to guitar with an interest in bettering my lead skills. But even electric guitar run through headphones only has been problematic, because my best time for it is after the family's gone to bed, and Charlie's a light enough sleeper early in the night that even my un-amplified string-plinking risks waking him. I've been doing a bit here and there when the opportunity presents itself, and I think that's going to have to be good enough for now.

So what about a band or something? I did put up a Craigslist ad last month and waded through out a very wide array of responses, but nothing really clicked, just a couple interesting near misses.

Ah, but then I decided to take a chance in responding to someone else's ad, for a band named Idiot Splendour that's replacing a guitarist and drummer at year's end. They're nicely planning ahead for it - a good sign. After a few conversations and one lunchtime meeting, I found a little time to learn a couple songs and make an audition last Sunday, and it went well. The remaining members, Chris and Marc, are a pair of exceedingly nice (and sharp) guys, similar outlooks and like situations as mine, so I have a lot of enthusiasm and hope going into this. Now I have about three months to work out a pile of originals and the covers that are retained. Sounds pretty good at this point.

'Splendour leans toward the prog-rock side, which is a love of mine. Bassist is a big Tony Levin fan... I'm going to catch them live sometime in October to see how they reconcile this style with the more mainstream needs of a successful bar band. And to top it off is the chance to put some of my own originals into play...

Finally, this experience left me scrambling a bit to (re-)assemble my collection of original works, which have been mostly left behind in the move. Except I remembered a tape deck in storage at my in-laws' basement holding a dodgy cassette from 1991 with two years' of Shade originals. For the first time, I became concerned that I might lose any record of that bit of the past. So I've hauled out the tape deck, wired it into my studio rig, and have started making digital transfers, for posterity. Maybe I'll post a few of the standouts as mp3s...

With this oh-so-vital need in my life getting its needed attention, it's time to focus more on the rest of the family's needs, too. Starting with cheering up over my, ahem, challenging work environment, and keeping a chin up on the world.

Not Much...

2009-09-11T15:29:00.003-04:00

Well, nothing undercuts the desire to keep up on the blog as does a lack of meaningful events to report on. Work continues. Some rumblings on the music/band front, but premature to speculate. Nothing new on selling the house. Gaming on hold until next weekend's SWA September Game-A-Thon. Only news out of the gym is that I moved to a different shoulder press machine that I like better. Kath's had a bit of a cold this week so we've been laying low. We're watching Rome, season I, with Cara and Em, at a pace of one episode per week. Yesterday was episode III. I might start watching the ravely-reviewed Battlestar Galactica series remake since our library has all the DVDs, but Kath's not very interested, and it would be a lot of time, so we'll see... Oh, and we might go apple picking sometime this weekend. And try the local United Methodist church, which is now in full communion with the ELCA. Football season hits full stride on Sunday - though the Bills won't get to rack up their first loss until Monday night... And that's all that's news over here.

The City & The City

2009-09-01T15:42:00.005-04:00

Over the weekend I read The City & The City, by China Miéville. It's a weird-fantasy story fronting as a hard-boiled detective novel. The dust jacket called it a mix of Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick, and Franz Kafka, and I think that description is dead-on correct. If you like those authors, you'll like this novel. Like all good "weird" stories, it ponders things that afterwards cause you look at the real world with a slightly altered perspective. In this case, the issue is the idealogics of geospatiality - what exactly makes here here, and not something (or somewhere) else...? The good kind of hurt for the brain.

This is the first China Miéville I've ever read, so I can't compare that way, and I have another detective story on hold at our new library, so I'm moving in that direction for a bit. Highly enjoyed and recommended.

Working it Out

2009-08-27T12:45:00.002-04:00

So, I joined a gym here, namely the Planet Fitness in Delmar. I was worried that if I didn't set a new routine quickly, I'd just get used to inactivity here, and that would be a bad thing. Anyway, it's a pretty good deal, $10 per month to go to the one location, well, with an activation fee on top of that, and some annual fee also that's like another $35. I guess it's more like $150 per year. Oh, but wait, when I went in this past Monday they started a new special: $99 total for a year if you prepay. The very nice manager was happy to redo all my paperwork to give me the better deal, which is awesome.

I've always enjoyed being able to work out from home, but it got harder to stick with a schedule with a new arrival in the family. Then, I sold off most of my weights as we got ready to move. I did all right with a routine using mostly dumbbells for a month or two. Or so I thought. But "real" weight is a harsh mistress, and after the first few days back into a real routine, I could feel the burn.

Where I'm working now, everyone starts kind of late, so my routine is adapting - up early, walk Loki, go to the gym; this works, walking kind of serves as a general warm-up.

The gym is full of plenty of serious-business weight stations. The arrangement is fairly random, mainstream machines that target major muscle groups hobbnobbing with strange equipment only used by That One Guy who's rehabbing a torn rotator cuff or something. It'd be totally daunting to try and figure out a routine from scratch here: which one of the four ways of chest pressing weight is right for you? Which eight out of thirty machines should you use?

I've basically adapted my usual routine into the new space, shuffled a few things around to keep things proximate. I do three waves of exercises, each containing a series of rotations through three or four machines/stations, trying to keep orthogonality among muscle groups within each station of a wave. What? What does this even mean? OK, it's like this: first comes bench press / leg extension; next comes shoulder press / butterfly / leg curl; last comes arm curl / lat pull-up / lat pull-down / sit-up; with some sort of tricep extension and leg press thrown in if I remember. I can get it all done in under an hour, and the drive to-from the gym is at most five minutes. So it's home to shower and breakfast and play with Charlie for a few minutes before heading off to work.

On the other half of the room, an army of aerobic warriors run, cycle, and step in vague zombielike dis-unison. The effect is exacerbated by the half-height wall that separates us, so all I see are all these upper torsos mashing about, looking something like a bunch of muppets, perhaps stomping grapes into wine.

I decline to speculate on what all of us weight-lifters look like to them.

The Overhead View is of Me in a Maze

2009-08-26T16:39:00.002-04:00

Walking Loki, we've been exploring Delmar (a hamlet of the Town of Bethlehem) on foot. Mostly it's been just the big main routes, which are blessed with bike paths or other nice, wide sidewalks. Now we've started exploring some of the side areas off the main roads. I'd say it's ostensibly to keep an eye open for a house to buy, but these places are in the $350k range, so, not so much.

Anyway, Delmar is one of those places where the subdivisions are made up of lots of curvy, spaghetti, non-Euclidean roads. A few are also one-way just to make it more confusing, though it doesn't apply to pedestrians. But there's a lot of established trees and gardens, and like I said, the houses are pricey, so it's all very pretty.

When exactly did town planning get handed over to six-year-olds with crayons, anyway?

New Pictures At..

2009-08-24T13:42:00.002-04:00

Now posted: some pictures of the new place, and of course recent Charlie pix, at Kathleen's blog.

What Work Has Been Like So Far

2009-08-24T12:12:00.003-04:00

I started work at my new job (name withheld to protect the innocent, and it really doesn't matter, does it?) this past Wednesday. Initial impressions...

So, it's a small company, maybe twenty employees, two-thirds of which are developers. A startup with a primary founder and funder, backed by some other capital; this guy apparently created a successful company in the same domain but with more modest aims, early 2000 or so, and sold it off to some big company. Now he's back with a bunch of trusted vets to make a new company doing something much more ambitious. They've been at it close to four years and the main version 1.0 product is supposed to ship next month, so it's an exciting, dramatic, and stressful time for all involved. I'm part of a slow-but-steady hiring process intended to mostly work on the next version, either new features or architecture, or adding real heft to some 1.0 features that are brittle or somehow flimsy. Too early to tell for sure. They think they might ramp up to double the number of developers within a year...

So far here, I've wiped by machine, installed the MSDN release-to-manufacturing version of Windows 7, and VMware, struggled to get 64-bit guest hosts to work. And a lot of developer tools, mostly Visual Studio 2008. My early work looks like it will involve fixing/extending a .NET service that hooks into Exchange and does a bunch of messaging transactions. Whew! That's a lot of new buzzwords for me so it's been an overwhelming rush to try and ingest it all. But it will be nice once it starts to become familiar. It's also been a bit slow going because there's not much multitasking you can do whilst thrashing your OS with endless install-and-reboot cycles.

Now all the people here seem very nice, though they're working way too hard and long, but it's hopefully more a matter of their immediate circumstances rather than the overall culture. This is your more typical unmitigated-chaos startup, compared to my last job, which was a well-capitalized startup that featured such amenities as actual management, IT support, benefits, and the privacy of full height cubicle walls!

(Second job in a row where I am clearly one of the "old guys", which in software seems to be anything over 25. Where do old software guys go? Government jobs, or other fields, I think...)

Anyway, I learn fast, do good work, and like learning new things, so I hope I fit right in and do a good job. However, my gut intuition tells me that there's a certain can't-put-a-number-on-it-yet possibility that this crew is perhaps just way over their heads and heading for an epic-fail kind of wall crash. Nothing I can do about that if it's true except keep my eyes open and head on straight. Now that we're on the ground here in Albany, we can bop and weave through a bumpy ride, whilst the economy keeps on recovering, hopefully, providing more and better alternatives if needed.

I gave this analogy to my father-in-law, who's a construction manager. Imagine if a bunch of veteran guys in the construction industry started up a company and set about to build some nice building to sell, only they were going cut out all sorts of unnecessary clutter like architects, site planners, managers, and such. How exactly is that building going to turn out, and do you think there will be a lot of buyers for it? Of course this is the glory of software development, where you can, in fact, do the equivalent of selling a building with all windows, no doors, and a leaky roof, if only because your competitor is trying to sell a building with no roof whatsoever.

In short, it's gonna be something.

p.s. I'm streaming WBER 90.5 out of Rochester - "the only station that matters" - so far, local radio's not really doing it for me...

One for all My Mason Friends...

2009-08-22T10:30:00.003-04:00

...and you know who you are!

I recently read a little bit in Wired (oh yes, the shame of it all to admit...) about the art/craft of not reposting links well after they've peaked in popularity, lest you come off as all not cool and such. But hey, this is me. There's really no confusion on that issue anyway, right?

Anyway, a little while ago my friend Random sent me this link to the Skeptics 2009 Mix Tape, a collection of songs about science and skepticism. Truth be told, a lot of them are pretty 'meh', but that first one there, "I'm a Mason Now", by Jonathan Coulton, is superb. And it's a free MP3 so you can have your very own copy. Or just listen once and enjoy...

Anyway, regarding the out-of-dated-ness of it all: a little searching reveals that this song came off a JC album from almost 5 years ago, so there's really nothing breaking or trendy about it. It's just a good song worthy of more listeners.

On an essentially unrelated note (excepting that I know a pastor who's a Mason...), major kudos go out today to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, for doing the right thing, and not just the convenient thing... God bless us all through what's surely going to be a bumpy ride for awhile.

What Moving Was Like

2009-08-21T11:38:00.006-04:00

What Moving Out Was Like

Our moving day was last Saturday. I was off work for the whole week beforehand, and most of that time was spent sorting things out, looking around town for more boxes, and then packing them. Kathleen was in Albany for the first half of the week, finding us our new place to live, then came back to help pack. Really, only one of us could pack at a time, anyway, the other was watching Charlie.

In the late spring we moved a whole truckload of stuff out to Kathleen's parents' basement, which certainly helped this time around. But there's always complications; now, it was that we were moving from a house into an apartment and couldn't bring everything. So we weren't just packing, but also separating. Whenever we manage to sell the old house, we won't have much time to get the rest of the stuff out (who even knows where it'll be going?), so we packed as much of it as we could now.

One thing that worked out nicely is that we sold our appliances to our friends across the street, Ben and Joy. That was good since the place we moved into has appliances, and we didn't want to have to move these ones, and them store them for the eventual hoped-for someday of owning a house again.

Anyway, on Friday morning we finally got the truck, a big Budget 24' rental. First wave, late morning, was me and Kath packing a lot of boxes. Second wave, that afternoon, was my dad and me moving out most of the furniture, and also getting the washer and dryer out of the basement. Third wave, that evening, was Kathleen's sister's boyfriend Emerson helping me with the heavy couch, and moving the appliances across the street and hooking them up (first floor, whew!), and removing the old ones to their garage, while Kathleen and Cara boxed up whatever was left and cleaned and kept Charlie happy. It took the whole night and killed our last chance to say goodbye to some of our friends, but at least we're not too far gone away and should be back to visit soon enough.

Our friend Todd from the band days lent us his dolly, which was a life-saver for the appliances. We would never have gotten them moved without it. Ben and Joy were thrilled with their newest acquisitions!

What Moving In Was Like

The drive there was no problem; me in the truck, Kathleen in her car, Cara in hers, and Emerson taking my Cruiser. The move-in was also pretty easy. The apartment is on the first floor and also has a sliding glass patio door, so we were able to get everything in without too much stress. Kathleen's family came down to help unpack. There were boxes everywhere, but we got stuff emptied out and put away and broken down, and in just a few days it looked like we'd already been there for awhile.

Over the next couple days we picked up a few shelving units to make the most of the closets we have, which let us find homes for the last of the stuff. We did a good job not bringing things that wouldn't fit, and even have room for a few more things here and there. We also got a bunch of stuff back out of basement storage.

And, I was smart enough to bring my old wireless router, and remembered how to configure it, as we left our Verizon DSL router behind, with Time-Warner Cable and RoadRunner bundled into the rent. So after a few days offline we have the laptop back on wireless, the Wii online, and the studio desktop directly connected. Hooray!

We're in the (such-and-such) apartments, on the south side of Delmar, near the end of the bypass. It's very park-like, both the place itself and the surrounding environs. There's a lot of green space on the campus, and a central area with tennis courts and a pool, which was a nice thing since we moved in on the hottest week of the year. It kind of has a vacation resort feel to it. We're next to the ball fields for the local school, and there's a great bike trail that leads down to the town park. On the way it passes the dog park, where we can let Loki run and play with the other neighborhood dogs, once we get him re-registered.

On Wednesday I started my new job (more on that later, maybe), which kind of completes the cycle. We have a lot of little settling in to do, of course, but it's been pretty quick to start feeling like home.

Lurching Back to Life

2009-08-20T14:14:00.002-04:00

Why yes, it's true, we've moved to Albany - leaving a lurch-ful of friends and relatives back "home" in Western New York, or else scattered abroad, exactly where they were before we moved (excepting other friends who were moving at about the same time as we were - it gets confusing). So I'm going to try and resume my posting here to maintain the illusion of eventfulness in our really-not-all-that-eventful lives. It's glorious to keep kicking away at this outdated blogging thing, giving the cold shoulder to all that newfangled Facebooking and Twittering and whatever-the-next-new-tech-fad-is-ing...

But if you want to stay in the fashion, Kathleen has a Facebook page, featuring lots of pictures of Charlie. If you know how to use Facebook, you'll know how to find her. I think. I'm guessing, because I don't really know.

We have a new physical (US postal mailing) address; if you feel you need to know it and don't have it, send me an email. If you don't have that either, then well, you probably don't need the mailing address...

In brief: the move went well; the new apartment is nice; the new job is pretty good after two days; the old house is neither completely empty nor sold; we're excited to be here; but we also miss our old friends and family; the pets have settled in fine; and, I'm trying to figure out what kind of music I can make using headphone monitoring only. I'll try to write about all these things in the upcoming days, and even get a few pictures up, too.

A New Old Philosophy

2009-08-20T09:24:00.004-04:00

Happy Birthday to way-too-ahead-of-his-time author H.P. Lovecraft. Notable among his dire, pessimistic contributions to humanity is the concept of Cosmicism, which posits the utter insignificance of humanity in the grand scheme of things. Go, H.P.!

I mention this in passing because I decided that before we left Batavia I really ought to read at least one book from the city's only famous author, John Gardner. Because of my love of history, mythology, and fantasy, Grendel was the obvious choice (and let's not forget to mention that it clocks in at a brief 175 pages). A retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster's point of view, it turns out to be a pretty break view of things and definitely in the spirit of Cosmicism.

I excerpted one of the vital passages on our now-in-the-twilight-of-its-life d21-gaming blog. In it, Grendel confronts Unferth, a self-appointed Dane "hero", and with a minimum of words manages to dismantle this particular conceit of human-centric virtue.

Highly recommended. But for better or worse, we're humans and we carry on. Thus, "Heroism - it breaks up the boredom."

We Can Rebuild It...

2009-06-13T08:12:00.003-04:00

When we moved into this house, there was a workbench in the basement. It was big, but that's about all the good you could say about. It was flimsy and poorly constructed; in fact, it was too big.

Halfway through the basement tiling project I took a day to tear apart the workbench and rebuild it. It came out great, smaller and stronger, designed to fit specifically into one corner of the basement. But I wanted to add a bottom shelf, too, which is so useful for storing stuff and keeping the floor clear.

I finally got around to doing that last weekend, and last night I more or less cleaned up my chaos of tools and supplies and distributed it across both workbenches and various storage. Is all done. Is very nice.

Little Girl Is Back Home

2009-06-09T08:27:00.002-04:00

Our doggie houseguest, who we mostly took to calling "Little Girl", is back home. We were out walking her and Loki yesterday when a car pulled over and her owners popped out and recognized her. Turns out her name was "Maddie" and she slipped her collar and wandered over from just the next street. And just like that, she was gone!

The house is quieter and calmer again. I'm sure Loki misses her, though he will probably enjoy being undisputed top dog once more. And Morgan is happy to be out of the basement, I'm sure.

Maybe we'll get to see Maddie when we walk down Lyon St. in the future. Until then, take care, little girl. We hope you liked your stay!

Double Dog Dare

2009-06-01T10:51:00.002-04:00

Yes, it's been awhile. We've been busy! More on that later...

Breaking news is that, for the moment, we have a second dog. A beautiful beagle with no collar, tags, or ID wandered up our driveway this past Saturday. We took her in despite the fact that we were rushing to meet up with friends at the Buffalo Zoo. What else can you do?

Since then, we've put a call in to Batavia no-emergency dispatch (no callbacks yet), had her checked for a chip at the Genesee County shelter (nope), got her a proper collar and leash, and listed her info at a few local pet stores, plus Craigslist. And given her a bath. And decided to name her "Lia", which beats "she", or "that other dog".

Lia and Loki are getting along... well, rambunctiously. Lia's probably also around two years old, no puppy but plenty of energy. They do pretty well walking together (none of the neighbors recognize her or have heard of a missing beagle, and no lucky distraught owner has spotted her with us yet). She's obviously an escapee and not a stray, because she's housebroken and in good condition and minds her so-called-owners at least as well as Loki does! But the two of them have gotten pretty scrappy at times indoors as they try to sort out dominance, which'd be just great if it wasn't for a five month old baby in the mix. Oh, and Lia's not crate trained, so we close her in the downstairs bathroom at night, and crate Loki, to restrict the Cirque du Doggy to daylight hours only. Morgan, the cat, has been relegated to basement life for the time being. At least she's loving the new tiles.

In the space of two days we've been charmed by Lia, but still, we have got to find her real owners and return her. If not, well, at least two of our neighbors have expressed interest in her already. For a brief while we thought, hey, maybe we can have a second dog ourselves. That delirious moment is long since passed!

I don't think there's any Batavia readers of this blog, but if so, pass word along if you know of a family who's missing their beagle. Thanks!

Missing Mommy and Charlie

2009-04-17T09:47:00.003-04:00

Kathleen got to stay out with her family for the week while I came back to work and take care of Loki. The family gets re-united today at last - hooray! Meanwhile, here's a few recent pictures of Charlie from early April. He hit his three-month birthday at the end of March and was over 20 lbs! But he's finally stopped gaining so much weight and now is stretching out. He's started enjoying simple toys like rattles and spinners and mirrors. Very curious, very happy!

Basement Tiling, Days VI and VII

2009-04-17T09:30:00.003-04:00

All the tiles are down! I can feel your excitement - it means not many more of these boring posts! Day Six was the week before Easter, and then Day Seven was unfortunately not one of rest, but in fact two short days before and after Easter of just me laying the last 40 tiles. This, because it was the only way to work into the final corner without getting stuck there!

The drama unfolds in pictures...

The last big stretch:

Finishing up under the furnace:

And the water heater - this turned out to be a tight squeeze!

Under the stationary tub in the corner. I cut slots into the tiles to be able to re-bolt the sink's legs to the floor:

The final corner:

Detail around the last post:

Last night I grouted all the "hard" parts left: under the furnace and water heater, and the corner under the sink. Everything that's left is pretty easy, probably two evenings' of work. Oh, and I have to take down the root cellar door and shave off the bottom half inch of it so it has clearance over the tiles! That whole thing should really juts be replaced by something nicer, though.

Lessons learned: overall, I'm extremely pleased. It looks great, is so much nicer to walk on, and it wasn't really hard to do, just a lot of labor. Our only issue was that we probably "stuck to the walls" a bit more than we should have across the middle section of the basement, as necessitated by having to move "stuff" from one part of the basement to the other to clear out the next working area. This meant that things got a little tight when we filled in the middle, but I don't think anyone else will notice or care that we got squeezed down to 1/8" spacing for a few rows over in the laundry area. If we were in a higher-precision situation (say a kitchen, not a basement), it would have been critical to stick to rows and recheck the grid on the way. But for a basement, well, my dad says it's probably the nicest one on the street now, and I might even agree to that!

Basement Tiling, Day V

2009-03-31T11:37:00.007-04:00

(More baby pictures coming soon to break up this tiling monotony!)

Day five of the basement tiling project is in the books, and we're still on track to get done in just two more days. The big thing on this day is that we tiled under where the washer and dryer go, and we're also more than half done going under the furnace and hot water heater. I made a lot of nice cuts for pipes and holes, and mostly what's left to go now is a huge swath of full tiles right down the middle.

Down the wall to the laundry area:

Detail work on the drain pipe there:

Under the furnace:

Oh! And between tiling days four and five, I tore apart and rebuilt the crappy workbench that came with the basement into something solid and useful. Of course it's covered with random tiling debris, so it might not look like much... but its been re-sized down to fit right in that corner, it's way stronger than before, and the inexplicable half-inch gaps between the top boards are a thing of the past. Still to build the lower shelf out of remaining scrap wood, once I get a few longer wood screws on hand:

This is the hole with the emergency drain, currently sealed off to prevent backflow from the storm sewers in case of flood. I wanted to tile in as much as I could and still leave the useful depression in the floor - opposing goals. Since the hole is roughly circular, I devised this hexagon-shaped pattern. Years from now, when we're long gone, they'll know that a gamer lived here:

The washer and dryer cleaned up, back in place, and reconnected. Now once we get the tile down in front of them, you know, where people and laundry go, then we'll be in business:

Basement Tiling, Ongoing

2009-03-11T08:53:00.004-04:00

After the third and fourth days of laying tile, we're more than half done. At our present rate we have six-and-a-half days' total work, which means we have two-and-a-half left to go, which means, really, three. But the last day should be a bit quicker.

On the third day, we got under the stairs. No cuts needed there, we just raised the stair landing and slid the tiles underneath.

On the fourth day, we did the whole far corner. Excepting three wall tiles we left open because it looks like we still have water coming in there. We'll need to do still more exploring and filling...

We also went behind the furnace. It's on two cinder blocks, front and back, plus shims. We moved the back one to the middle and tiled there. Next, we'll move it back and tile under the middle, and finally we'll tile under the front. We'll have to reduce the shims' height by about 3/16", but that should be no problem. Same basic routine for the water heater, too.

A couple nice cuts for one of the beam supports.

And there's still a leaky bit further under the stairs. Not as bad as the other wall, but they both need to be dealt with.

It'll be a few weeks before we get on to tiling day number five. I have to grout the latest tiles and do some sealing; we need to work on the leaks. And then day five will be crazy because we're going to disconnect and pull out the washer and dryer and we'll be on the clock to get that spot done, and the appliances returned, ASAP. And there's still the last section of old icky vinyl sheet tile underneath the where the washer and dryer are sitting that needs to get scraped off. Oh, and hey, the stationary tub is bolted into the floor, too, and it's gonna have to come loose for a while. Fun, fun, fun.

But before any of that happens, I'm taking a time-out for a side project, which is tearing down the crappy (but big) workbench that came with the house, and rebuilding it into something stronger and better.

Latest Baby Pix

2009-02-27T10:01:00.002-05:00

A few recent pix of the boy, who's growing fast. Unofficially he's pushing 2x birth weight. He gets to go to the doctor's next week and we'll see what the official word is. Happy and healthy and getting more alert and inquisitive, too.

Horrors! Taking to the non-organic-rubber binky!

Getting ready for a grand day out with mommy...

Starting to work on holding his head up, too:

And Szinger Nagymama get her chance to hold and feed him...

Basement Tiling, Day III (Grouting)

2009-02-27T09:49:00.002-05:00

Grouting is nice because it generally goes a lot faster than laying tile, and it's a bit magical how "done" the floor suddenly looks after it's been grouted. I got all the tile we've laid so far grouted in one knee-hurting five-hour session, and then only another hour after that to seal the grout. (The tile itself, I wondered how porous the surface was, with regards to sealing, and the answer is: not at all. So it's really just the grout that got sealed!)

Material-wise, we're going through mortar faster than estimated, but slower on the grout and sealer. Good news is that the mortar is $5 a bag (Home Depot actually raised the price from $4.99 to $5.23 in the last two weeks, the nasty buggers!) and grout is $13 a bag, so we're saving in the right place. Might end up with extra sealer but it'll last forever, and it comes in gallon jugs, not 50-lb bags!

After these pix, I did another round of Tetris with the contents of the basement to clear up the middle area, and my dad came over to bust up the floor/wall seam in the leaky spots to redo with hydraulic cement, so we're just about ready to start the next round of tile.

Basement Tiling, Day II

2009-02-12T13:02:00.003-05:00

I took a day off from work while the opportunity was there, and my dad came over and we laid 81 tiles, an increase from the 64 we put down on Day I. This includes the first of the far wall tiles, which I cut to 8-1/8" using my boss from work's borrowed wet saw on Monday night. This puts us almost exactly at 25% done from a coverage point of view, though there are some tricky patches ahead.

Such as cutting pieces to fit around posts...

Here's the updated progress map:

Now for a break from laying tile - I need to grout and seal what's down, so that we can re-arrange the contents of the basement to get the next sections of floor cleared. We also found out during yesterday's severe thaw that there's water leaking in from the wall-floor seam in the next area. We're probably going to have to bust that up and repair it with hydraulic concrete before we proceed to tile there. So, we'll keep plugging along.

Blitzen Trapper: Furr

2009-02-12T12:41:00.002-05:00

So yeah, music reviews aren't a regular feature here. But I do try and keep up with new music, helped along by having two different college stations to tune into on my daily commute (89.7 WITR and 90.5 WBER). This, and the crosscut of eclectic stuff that makes across the NPR stations. So I've been making a habit of checking out new releases from our local library system when they show up.

One such popular CD from last year was Narrow Stairs from Death Cab for Cutie. It's a very pretty album but stubbornly, almost antagonizingly, depressing. This passes for art and culture. Pah! Who needs it? So, this post isn't about Narrow Stairs (bet you guessed that from the title!)

It's about Furr, from Blitzen Trapper. Described as ramshackle roots rock or next-wave Grateful Dead, this was a popular choice among the NPR crowd. So I checked it out.

Well, it's mostly upbeat, despite a lot of thematically similar "dark stories" about drifters and ne'er-do-wells. I wished I like it more, but it hit me as a mixed bag. Some interesting song structures and themes, but a lot of underwhelming vocal efforts (with styles ranging from Bob Dylan all the way to Tom Petty!), weird and pointless lyrics. And why can't these guys figure out how to end a song? They go for a few minutes, run out of ideas, then stop. I imagine the live shows are, um, interesting.

One clear standout favorite is the title track, Furr. It comes at a good time, as I'm busy reading up on dog training as part of re-orienting Loki into his new role in a baby-filled household. Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer, wants me to really understand what my dog is like as an animal and dog foremost, and maybe "Furr" has the right frame of mind for that, as well as capturing the post-hippie breezy freedom vibe that is one of this band's strengths. Enjoy...

Yeah, when I was only 17, I could hear the angels whispering
So I droned into the words and wandered aimlessly about
Until I heard my mother shouting through the fog
It turned out to be the howling of a dog
Or a wolf to be exact, the sound sent shivers down my back
But I was drawn into the pack and before long
They allowed me to join in and sing their song
So from the cliffs and highest hill, yeah
We would gladly get our fill
Howling endlessly and shrilly at the dawn
And I lost the taste for judging right from wrong
For my flesh had turned to fur, yeah
And my thoughts, they surely were
Turned to instinct and obedience to God.

You can wear your fur like a river on fire
But you better be sure if you're makin' God a liar
I'm a rattlesnake, Babe, I'm like fuel on fire
So if you're gonna' get made,
Don't be afraid of what you've learned

On the day that I turned 23, I was curled up underneath a dogwood tree
When suddenly a girl with skin the color of a pearl
She wandered aimlessly, but she didn't seem to see
She was listenin' for the angels just like me
So I stood and looked about
I brushed the leaves off of my snout
And then I heard my mother shouting through the trees
You should have seen that girl go shaky at the knees
So I took her by the arm
We settled down upon a farm
And raised our children up as gently as you please.

And now my fur has turned to skin
And I've been quickly ushered in
To a world that I confess I do not know
But I still dream of running careless through the snow
An' through the howlin' winds that blow,
Across the ancient distant flow,
It fill our bodies up like water till we know.

You can wear your fur like a river on fire
But you better be sure if you're makin' God a liar
I'm a rattlesnake, Babe, I'm like fuel on fire
So if you're gonna' get made,
Don't be afraid of what you've learned

Basement Tiling, Day I

2009-02-09T09:14:00.003-05:00

At long last, the Planning phase of the basement tiling project has ended, and the Actual Work phase has begun. (I've had the tile, patiently waiting for 15 months, and we've chipped - sometimes literally - away at the waterproofing over the last year.) My dad came over this past Saturday and we got started.

Tile work is always high anxiety - it's just so permanent! While not a high-detail, high-profile job like the fireplace border, the basement is a big area and it's important to get things straight from the get-go. The layout had us starting in the corner by the stairs with full tiles, no cuts, but this happened to be the part of the floor with the most slope - very minor overall, but a big deal when your goal is "even", if not "level".

Once we got out of the corner and around the drain pipe (to be filled with custom cut pieces later), everything lined up nicely and we moved along at a good pace.

The day's tally was 64 tiles over about 6 hours' work, which doesn't sound so hot, but you can only go as fast as you can go. With the method down and practice making perfect, the next session should see tile hit the floor at a slightly faster rate. All told, we're maybe 1/7th done laying the tile. Of course, there's the grouting and sealing to come after that.

Here's the updated plan-map. When my friend Tom saw this, he remarked, "gee, Martin, I don't know whether you're more obsessive or compulsive!" To which I replied, "I like to think they are exactly equal in measure!"

We might shoot for a mid-week Day II this week if our schedules allow for it. Stay tuned.

Cruiser got Kissed

2009-02-09T08:57:00.004-05:00

(A short break from baby pictures - Kathleen and Charles zipped out to Albany for the weekend for Cara's birthday...)

My poor Cruiser got bumped in the nose last Tuesday. I was getting off the Thruway, in the EZ-Pass lane, when the guy in front of me in his nice big Pathfinder (complete with trailer hitch) realized that he didn't have his own EZ-Pass with him, and decided to back out of the EZ-Pass lane without seeing that I was right behind him. D'oh! That's the sort of bad snap decision we all make at one time or another. The other driver was very nice and truly sorry. Sadly, neither of those qualities can undo twisted metal (OK, OK, it's mostly plastic).

Anyway, for barely moving, he plonked me pretty good. Estimated repair cost is something over $1200, not counting - sniff - the emotional suffering. So that's on the to-do list for the near future.

At least Loki, our chief morale officer, has been unwavering in keeping a stiff upper lip, er, jowl...

Family Pictures

2009-02-03T13:24:00.002-05:00

Last weekend we went out and had some portraits done of the whole family. Here's some of the best:

More Baby Pictures

2009-01-29T12:43:00.002-05:00

It's hard to believe that little Charles is but one day shy of his one-month birthday. He keeps eating and growing, somewhere north of twelve pounds now.

One thing you can say in this age of digital cameras: you can take more pictures of babies than ever before. It's just amazing to see him be a little different with each new day...

"Give Yourself Away", Mark III

2009-01-23T07:52:00.002-05:00

I'm persuaded by my brother John's regular updates on what music stuff he's working on...

I'm trying to teach this old dog that is myself some new tricks regarding composition, arranging, and recording. I'm starting with an old song, which is maybe counter-intuitive, but then again, it gives me something to compare against.

"Give Yourself Away", Mark I, I did on my old Roland VS-2480 in 2003, using an Alesis 16-bit drum machine, all other parts recorded for real - bass, rhythm guitar, sax. It's a bit too fast, the production is thin, a testament to my relative inexperience, but also the difficulty in working on the 2480. It was also in perhaps the wrong key (C, I think), was too short, and ended too abruptly. Still, it had its charms, bordering on punk rock in its DIY sparseness.

"G.Y.A.", Mark II, was done around 2005 and appears on the Buzzy Tonic CD I did with John (buy it now on CD Baby!)- you can hear a snippet of that version of the song on CD Baby, too. Buzzy Tonic, for me, involved learning how to involve keyboards into the mix (John's weapon of choice), as well as seriously upping the production levels while learning the ProTools world. The key changed to G, the tempo slowed a bit, and a lot more parts showed up. John put down the Rhodes, but it was me who decided on the snippets of backing synth-horns, and that crazy arpeggiating square-tooth lead in the turnarounds. All the while I was apparently not so into featuring the guitar - perhaps in the interest of leaving space in the arrangement for all this other stuff. What I ended up with was pretty messed-up, as I was at the time having a bit of fun playing around with a pretty severe Wah pedal into my Behringer rack-mount on heavy overdrive - with a 12-string electric pushing the signal. Well. It sounds like Battlecruiser 3000 AD. Seriously. Anyway, this version of the song added an excellent bridge, a better ending, and overall I am quite fond of it.

So now we're up to "G.Y.A", Mark III. What's the situation, then? Well, it's just me doing all the parts; the key has been kicked to B, which I think is perfect, for the moment... In a lot of ways I'm trying strike a balance between Mark I and Mark II - a somewhat leaner, more muscular "rock" production, but with a very professional sound overall. As per my earlier rants, I've shelved the sax for the time being, so I think we're going with the classic ensemble of drums, bass, rhythm and lead guitars.

There's not too much else to say at this point. I have spent a week or two just beating on the opening riff in search for the new, right groove that's always so elusive. I write on guitar and I use a lot of off-beat syncopation, and I've found it to be so enormously hard to keep that out of the bass/drum parts: that the deep rhythm has got to fire on the beats, with the upper part in counterpoint. I always end up dragging the bass/drum into offbeat-land, which is artificial sounding, lacks groove, and is pretty fatiguing to listen to overall. So like I said, I just spent a week "exploring" the opening riff and trying to find the right anchor groove underneath before anything else happens. It's taken awhile but I think I'm pretty close now.

A huge change from past productions in this regard is that I've gone virtual with the bass. So, like the drums, the bass is now a MIDI part, going into a SampleTank sound. This is a big deal. In the past, my limitations on bass have absolutely hindered my ability to explore a given bit of song in search for the right part. Is it a bad part, or is it just my bad playing? Now I can twiddle around much faster, and with more creativity. I have enough bass experience to "keep it real", which is to say I'm mindful of how it would lay out on a real bass, and I don't think I'm doing anything too crazy. One of the big goals here is to use simplicity to bring to power out, in best rock fashion.

Now, of course, once I've "found" the part, I suppose I could always record it for real on my true bass rig, but I don't think I'm going to. It's a lot of takes for me to get a keeper, because I don't have the time or inclination to practice bass regularly, and without that, I lack the control to really do a part justice. So instead I've put new effort into getting a virtual bass sound that I really like.

I'm using IK's OmniSynth, which is a General Midi bank for their SampleTank 2 engine. I've settled on the "Fingered Bass" patch, which is pretty good out of the box, but a bit too "poinky" and clean to really rock. The difference-maker is the effects channels available within the ST plugin. In the LE version you get Eq/Comp hardwired into Slot 1, and you can do a lot of nice sound-shaping with that. Slots 3-5 are disabled, but glorious Slot 2 is assignable to one of perhaps two dozen possible effects, each with a healthy choice of knobs to twiddle. I found that the Cabinet effect was what Fingered Bass needed to become a Genuine Rock Sound - it's driving through virtual 4x12s and picking up just that hint of overdrive and coloration to really bring it to life. So, that's been a big deal for me.

(For drums, as per the Buzzy Tonic sessions, I'm using the Acoustic Drums Expansion Tank for ST2. Nowadays I'm paying a lot more attention to tailoring attack velocities as a means to making the drums feel "real", along with the aforementioned sticking to the beat. I've also started getting into the ST2 post-effects on the drum channels in order to get them exactly show I want them to sound.)

So for all this, "G.Y.A." Mark III currently has a pretty good bass/drum groove for the intro/chorus part, a placeholder guitar riff, and nothing else. But we build by sections nowadays: it's pre-fabulous music after all, so sometimes it goes quickly. The next step is to get keeper guitar tracks in there. The plan is to use the 12-string acoustic for rhythm, using three tracks: the body-mic line'd out into stereo Behringer effects (minimal!) is two, and a direct-placement mic to a mono channel to get that string noise and top end, which is a vital bit of sweetener. And then a single stereo track for lead guitar, in search of the perfect sound - this is new territory as it takes up the banner previously carried by lead sax. A plan, like I said. We'll see. Gotta be flexible, you know.

If all that goes well, maybe in a week or two we'll even push into the second phrase of the song, adding the ever-dreaded vocals to the perilous mix.

Studioland, Restart

2009-01-23T07:43:00.003-05:00

I'll try to keep my studio blatherings brief - I could probably just as easily send an email to my brother John, with a cc to my cousin Peter!

I accidentally went to work on Monday - we've never had MLK day off before! - so I took yesterday off in exchange. I spent some time in the morning working on music, but really most of what I did was re-install ProTools. At some point in the past I had tried to install a few RTAS plug-ins that were HD only or something and I just got tired of seeing the strange errors/warnings every time I fired PT up.

As usual, something got wonky along the joyride down Reinstall Avenue. For me, it was that my latest PT comes with IK's SampleTank 2 SE, but I had to dig back through my old CDs and find and use ST2 LE instead, in order to use my Expansion Tank sounds. There, that one sentence technical description stands in for two hours of thrashing about in confusion.

By the way, I'm only on PT version 7.0. I missed the upgrade to 7.4, and now it's all the way up to 8.0, which is supposed to be a major, big-time step up. It's also $150, and I can't really justify it until I see whether I can actually stick to studio work and see why it'd be worth my while. My biggest problem in the studio is my sub-par PC mainboard, which causes way too many ProTools DAE stalls. To bring all those PC guts nicely into 2009 shinyness would be about $350, also something on the wait-and-see list, though it would obviously be of great benefit to do so. Ooh, I resist the temptation as long as I can...

After all that I even got to work on actual music for an hour - see next post!

Traveling Baby

2009-01-20T08:58:00.003-05:00

Kathleen brought Mr. Charles home to Westerlo this past week to meet his other half of the family. I caught up on the weekend, and we all made it back to Batavia safe and sound.

He just keeps on growing. Kathleen's aunt Lisa, a nurse, weighed him in officially last Saturday at 11 lbs, 1.5 oz. That's already up 25% since birth. He's getting more alert and inquisitive, too. You can almost see him thinking, "What's going on out there!?"

Today, Charlie is three weeks old! How the time flies...

Studioland

2009-01-15T13:58:00.003-05:00

Long-time readers may recall that I finished the music room project sometime back last spring (jarring memory cue: the walls are bright orange). I haven't had much luck putting it to use since then, however. A number of factors contributed, but by far it was moving right on to lots and lots of other house projects that was basically it. In fact, we haven't stopped and had a rest right up until our wonderful baby arrived.

One of the things I managed to do in the Christmas week of being-due but not-having a baby was to finish organizing the music room. Mostly this involved going through lots of old paperwork (it's also the home office, see), sorting some, trashing some, packing away music gear that was cluttering the bookshelf, and so on. So now the room is truly usable.

I'm keeping my expectations low, as they should be when your world has been re-prioritized by having children. Still, I see that there's going to be down time, a lot of it having to do with feeding (in which I can't help much) and sleeping, and it seems that I'll have some time for music if I stick to using the headphones.

So now we get to the other big problem, which is that I claim to like recording songs, but whenever I actually try doing it, I get upset and frustrated and depressed by my limitations and all that. It feels more and more like I'm trying to force things in the wrong direction, and if I want to carry on I need to find a new way of thinking on the matter that somehow goes with the flow and not against it.

Upon reflection, it actually turns out that I'd like to accomplish three rather disparate things, music-wise. I bet you're curious to know what they are. Well:

The first is to become a whole heckuva lot better on guitar. I've retired the sax completely for now, basically until I can learn to "speak" on the guitar as fluently as I can on sax. This means moving back to the Strat and practicing a lot, working on jazz and rocks and blues exercises. My best strengths are a willingness to practice and the ability to comprehend instruction, so I need to employ those. Oh, and I moved down to a thinner pick, which also helps. Funny, that. Anyway, after 2-3 weeks of working the first 14 of the "101 must-know Jazz Licks" by Wolf Marshall, it's obvious that I am capable of improving. So, hooray for that.

The second thing is to put actual effort into songwriting again. I write maybe one song every two years now, down from a peak output of one songs every three days or so back in 1990. Quantity/quality, I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere. But I've decided that one of the problems I have in recording music is that I compose in a certain way, a way in which the rhythm guitar part dominates to the extent of crowding out other ideas, and it itself isn't compelling enough to really carry the song. So I used to write songs by accident; then I simply stopped. Now, I'd like to start again, but apply some more matured ideas in my approach. Kathleen says, "Write some happy songs already!"

The third thing is in the recording itself. I still feel it's the proper final step, the magic where all those ideas coalesce into something real and permanent, so that I can actually share and enjoy the results. As I started saying earlier, I need to stop fighting the system and learn how to get along with the machinery. I'd love to be able to justify a $500 hardware/software upgrade to ProTools 8, but right now I simply can't do that.

These three things go together, really. After all, when I'm unable to write the bass and drum parts needed to support a song's guitar part, it feels like a failure in the recording process, when really it may be a composition or arranging issue. In essence, I need to take a new open-mindedness about the studio backwards to apply some lessons at the composition level. Likewise, I ought to do a similar thing in getting the bass/drum section locked down earlier in the process as a means of keeping the guitar from choking everything else out. And so on.

So, um, yeah. Three things to do, and less time then ever. What's the plan?

I'm so glad you asked. It's really pretty simple, I guess, but it took a lot of pondering to figure it out. They're all related tasks, so I need to progress on all of them together. Which means, a rotation through the three. Accepting that I'll only get a bit of time here and there, and having to enjoy it in just those moments without worrying about anything else, it seems the best thing to do is to keep a little tally sheet. The next time I get to do a bit of music, I'll practice guitar. The time after that, work on songwriting. The time after that, try a few ideas in ProTools and see if they lead anywhere. Best chance at getting better at any of them is to get better at all of them.

I'm not in a rush; there's nothing here to rush to. It's more about trying to discover the best way to use whatever opportunity happens to exist in a way that's not stressful and happy, and for me I guess a feeling of some accomplishment is a big part of finding happiness. Working with the flow of things, not against...

It's a good plan, at least. We'll see how it goes.

Baby Pic of the Week

2009-01-12T13:55:00.002-05:00

2008 Summary: Books

2009-01-06T12:51:00.002-05:00

After a quiet 2007 on the reading front, I actually ended up reading quite a few books in 2008. This, I attribute to: (1) we started going to our local library this year; and, (2) being out of the bands left more down time for reading.

Here's what I read in '08:

Spook Country, William Gibson ● The Green Hills of Earth, Robert A. Heinlein ● The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Robert A. Heinlein ● The Last Town on Earth, Thomas Mullen ● Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams ● Genesis: Chapter and Verse ● Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Core Rules ● The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It, John Seymour ● The Last Days of the Incas, Kim MacQuarrie ● The Snow Goose, Paul Gallico ● The Call of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft ● Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, Bill Kaufmann ● Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer ● Anathem, Neal Stephenson ● A Night in the Lonesome October, Roger Zelazny ● Coraline, Neil Gaiman

Latest Baby Pix

2009-01-04T13:13:00.002-05:00

Wer'ee trying to go through all the newborn clothes at least once before 'lil Charlie outgrows them!

Yes indeed, he's a little man of many big moods!

Birth Announcement

2008-12-30T19:57:00.003-05:00

(Updated 2008-12-31)

A beautiful and healthy baby boy was born to Mr. and Mrs. Martin and Kathleen Szinger, at UMMC Batavia, at 10:49 AM on December 30th, 2008. His name is Charles Francis Szinger. His birth weight was 8 pounds, 13 ounces, and his length was 22". And, he has a head full of light brown hair!

Labor was fast and furious - staff broke her water at 7:30 AM to get things rolling, and the baby was out less than four hours later. Active labor couldn't have lasted more than a half hour. Kathleen was a real trouper, stuck to her birth plan, and went the distance without drugs. The baby was active and alert right away!

Thanks for all the calls and well wishes, everybody! Happy New Year!

Dig Dug

2008-12-22T17:04:00.003-05:00

Oh yea, we got some snow; and then some more snow; and then some nasty wind. Pretty much like everyone else in the Northeast, right? I shoveled out to the gold-star standard on Friday and Saturday and Sunday, just to have the best shot of handling the wind storm. We tried to get to church on Sunday but had to turn back, opting instead to stop at a store and get a few used games for our Wii before hibernating for the day. The wind whipped and howled all day Sunday. I worked from home today, and went out late afternoon to clean up, hopefully for the last time for this particular storm system.

The wind made some crazy drifts on Kathleen's car...

These small city lots - totally running out of places to put the snow! All that heavy junk at the end of the driveway, I have to carry ten feet before flinging it onto our main front lawn...

The view from across the street - tranquility, or exhaustion?

Well, it's a white Christmas for sure this year. We've been taking turns helping dig out all our neighbors, and getting dug out by them in return. Our neighbor Joy from across the street is from Michigan and is clearly enjoying this whole shoveling-out thing far too much.

Baby Room, Finishing Touches

2008-12-19T17:07:00.002-05:00

As long as the baby's holding out on us, we figured we may as well get his room all the way done...

First off are the Tiddlywinks wall hangings that go with all our other room theme stuff. We noticed, when we were looking at them online months ago while adding them to our registry, that lots of people complained about the placement of the little loops on the back that you hang them from. And it's true, they were laid out pretty goofily, not even close to the mass centroid, um, you know, meaning that none of them would hang straight on their own.

But Kathleen got the right answer fast; we just pinned a safety pin through the back of each one in the right spot, and from there they hung just perfectly on the nails we drove in for them (yes - sob - the walls are perfect no longer!)

Anyway, check them out, they're mighty cute:

The other thing was the dresser. My brother's family gave us an old dresser to use, which was in good shape and functional, but it wasn't really a changing table and the height was going to be a bit of a challenge to use in that manner. So we kept our eye on Craigslist, and a pretty nice one happened to come along last week. Nothing too fancy, but the same finish as the crib, and the right height and functionality. The nice lady from Livonia insisted - "Life of Brian" style - that I haggle with her, but I was so happy to find the exact fit that I couldn't bring myself to go beyond countering her $80 with $70, even though we both knew she would have taken $50 if only I had tried. Ah, well. The best part was I did all this as a surprise for Kathleen. When I asked her to help me get something out of the car that night, she though I had gotten the Christmas tree without her!

The other dresser got promoted to the attic, where it now holds all sorts for 3-6 month and beyond clothes, ready to get moved down in the spring when needed.

Christmas Decorations

2008-12-19T17:01:00.003-05:00

Just a smallish tree this year: we kept the whole decorating thing in check just in case we ran out of time or energy. We put it up in the dining room, where it can be seen from the street from out of the side bay window. This keeps the living room clear in case we have house guests who need the space (Kathleen's family coming for the baby's arrival), and it keeps us from having to banish the TV set from the living room, which is what we did last year.

Meanwhile, it's the finished fireplace's first Christmas. At this time last year we only had the steel unit sitting bare on top of the unfinished hearth piece. This year, we can put candles and cards on it, and hang our stockings, too. Though Santa would be hard pressed to come in via the natural gas exhaust vent!

More Home Cooking

2008-12-19T16:55:00.002-05:00

Baby still not here... nesting continues. Home cooking is a good way to pass the days while waiting. So here we have homemade chicken vegetable soup...

...with homemade honey whole wheat bread...

...and homemeade chocolate peanut butter pie for dessert!

This, amidst multiple waves of christmas cookies. Come on baby, you don't know what you're missing out here!

Baby Room is Ready

2008-12-08T11:49:00.002-05:00

The carpet is in. The closet is loaded up. (We decided to leave the doors off for now.) The crib and dresser and shelf are set up. The wall border is up (not for the faint of heart, that job...). Cellular shade is on the window (and the two in the music room, too). Valences are up over the window and the door's window.

Still en route are some coordinating accessories - some wall hangings, an accent rug, the matching garbage can. But, more or less, we're ready. So bring it in, baby - we might not be ready ready, but we're about as ready as we're ever going to be!

New Thermostat

2008-12-08T11:18:00.006-05:00

In a hit-and-run style of home improvement over the weekend, we replaced our thermostat. The old one had been acting a bit fluky, and it's no fun to wake up in the morning to realize the furnace isn't running. So we grabbed a sleek new one and went to town.

Of course, we couldn't just do the "installs in fifteen minutes" thing, since the older unit was larger (requiring that some of the newly-exposed wall get painted to the new color) and had different mounting holes (requiring that one old hole be spackled shut prior to painting). So the total effort was more like 45 minutes, spread out over six hours.

But there's some oddity in the new unit, too, so maybe there's more going on than meets the eye. When the old unit started flaking, one thing we tried was to use rechargeable batteries instead, but that just made it complain of "low battery" in addition to its other woes. Now the new thermo seems to have the same complaint when using rechargeable batteries; so maybe there's something in the thermo's low-voltage detection circuitry that doesn't work with rechargeables. That's annoying. There's nothing in the 2-page Instruction And User Guide on that, but maybe I should look for more info online... (Update: submitted a question on the Honeywell web site, awaiting answer).

The other thing is that even though the control wires from the wall are firmly mounted to the wall mounting plate of the new unit, it seems like I can rock the front/main body of the thermo back and forth a bit with hand pressure and cause the unit to act... weird. Is it power loss, or connection loss to the wires, or something dodgy in the wire, or the LCD display? We don't know! So we're keeping an eye on it; haven't tried the Scientific Method yet though.

UPDATE #1 on the battery situation:

My friend Tom, who does hardlines product testing and knows more about batteries than just about anyone, anywhere, offered some expert insight:

Indeed for many electronics, you may find that running rechargeable AA batteries (typically Nickel-MetalHydride (NiMH), or possibly old Nickel-Cadmium (Ni-Cd) you will find the nominal voltage at 1.2 V/cell.

I'm betting your device is like mine and may use 2 cells. Typically this gives 2.4 V for a 2 cell series stack in good charge, under larger load, and likely towards end of life, closer to 2.0 Volts. Loads could include large power draw transients (like switching actions).

Now in contrast, consider a AA Alkaline cell (non-rechargeable) with a nominal 1.5 V/cell, with a typical 3.0 V for a two cell stack. New AA under light draw will actually be closer to 1.6 V/cell, or 3.2 V/stack. As alkalines decline, 0.9-1.2 V/cell is often used as a cutoff indicating dead cell. But even under switching they'll normally hold up in the 1.2-1.4 V/cell range.

So a low-voltage detection circuit for 2 alkaline cells is likely set between 1.8 and 2.4 V. Therefore, lots of 2 AA size electronic devices will have very short lives with rechargeable cells since rechargeables are starting at 1.2 V/cell.

Furthermore, most transistor devices are built to operate well at a 2.5 V threshold... easy for 2 Alkaline cells, but not easy for NiCd/NiMH cells. Better engineering... we'd all wish for that.

So - we should probably pop some low-tech alkalines in there and be done with it!

UPDATE #2

The response from Honeywell is to-the-point, albeit lacking in explanation:

The RTH230B thermostat requires 2 AA alkaline non rechargeable batteries. Please make sure a fresh set of 2 AA alkaline non rechargeable batteries are correctly installed. We do not recommend using rechargeable batteries.

So - we should definitely pop some low-tech alkalines in there and be done with it!

Baby Shower

2008-12-05T13:40:00.003-05:00

Over the holiday weekend we visited Kathleen's family in Westerlo, and on Saturday they threw her a baby shower.

The calm before the storm; all sorts of fancy food, and cake. We love cake!

It was something like thirty people were invited and fifty RSVPed yes. I don't know how that happens, but Kathleen's mom and her Aunt Tammy worked like crazy to pull it all off and get everyone happily into the living room and kitchen. Everything turned out great. They're probably thrilled and relieved that it's all over.

Our little-boy-to-be ended up with a ton of wonderful stuff; he has a loving and generous family waiting to meet him!

Due to some nice planning, my mom and dad and my brother John and his family from New York were all able to make it, too. The menfolk spent the afternoon romping about the woods that make up the property, oh and eating cake, too. Then we were able to load up the bulkiest things into my dad's truck to get dropped off at our house on their way home. That was a huge help because we never would have gotten close to making it without them.

Even so, the Cruiser was packed for the ride home, too. We tried out something new, a collapsible travel kennel for Loki, since it's no fun for mommy for him to be riding on her lap, now! He did great with it, since he's crate trained, slept all the way home and barely whimpered. And it was a long drive, too, owing to the freezing rain and holiday congestion. But everyone made it, and we've been unpacking ever since.

Finishing touches on the baby room this weekend; pictures next week.

From Rolls to Scones

2008-11-24T12:25:00.001-05:00

Holiday baking, in league with the nesting instinct, at work:

Baby Room Colors

2008-11-24T12:19:00.002-05:00

Getting there in the baby room. Colors look better in real life than they do in pictures, especially once dried!

Taped off...

Green on top...

Brown on bottom...

A handful of trim and cleanup jobs remain. Carpet comes in next week. Wall border goes up sometime before then. Closet shelving rework sometime after. Etc., etc., etc. Seriously; almost done.

CSA Week 22 - End of 2008 Season

2008-11-24T10:05:00.004-05:00

We learned all sorts of new things from our CSA this year. The last thing we learned is that Butternut Squashes are pretty darn heavy, especially once you've got a lot of them. The final week's harvest was affected by the early snows that we were experiencing, and so a lot of the last greens were buried. What did come in were Delicata Squash, Leeks, and Butternut Squash.

We hadn't had Butternuts all year, which was surpirsing because they, along with the Acrons, are the most recognizable of the winter squashes. Well, I guess they were saving them for the end because there were a ton this week. Since we love the Butternuts so much, and because there's no "next week" to look forward to, we took as many as we could manage (weight-wise, guilt-wise...) in our second bag

The result was a nigh-ridiculous 63.6 pounds of vegetables! Your average-sized Butternut weighs about three pounds, so they add up fast. And in the grocery store they seel for a dollar a pound, and non organic to boot.

To the best of our record-keeping, our 2008 CSA season yielded 582.6 pounds of veggies, for an average of 26.5 pounds per week. Another good average to consider is this: $0.50 per pound, of wonderful, locally-grown, organic produce. And hey, that's not even counting the many pumpkins and gourds we also got, and that's not even counting the many new friends we made, and the bounty which we were able to share with our family and friends.

The freezer's full of veggies; the basement's full of veggies; we're hunkering down for the winter. Have a good Thanksgiving, CSA friends, and we'll see you next year!

Cinnamon Girl

2008-11-19T09:08:00.004-05:00

Kathleen is starting to experiment with the new bread maker... here she used it to make the dough for cinnamon rolls. I thought they turned out great but I don't think she would have rated them higher than a 7 out of 10. We're in "practice makes perfect" territory, I guess. That's going to be rough, eating all those cinnamon rolls on the way to perfection.

CSA Week 21

2008-11-19T08:54:00.004-05:00

So this was the penultimate week of our CSA, and we smashed through the 40-pound mark, mostly on the strength of a whole lotta squash. (I think it was 43.8 pounds, officially.) Oh, and a bunch of carrots, too, which they got in a trade from a farm in Little Valley. With one week left to go, I think we're already starting to feel a sense of withdrawal. Saturday mornings are going to feel a little empty for awhile!

What's not empty is the basement shelf, laden down with onions and squashes:

Baby Room Priming

2008-11-10T10:37:00.003-05:00

It's back to business in the baby room! All the wall and wood repair was completed before the big side-trip of doing the halls and dining room, so after doing the final bit of finish sanding, and cleaning up the dust, it was ready for action.

This is, technically, after the ceiling's been primed, but this is the state of the walls, post-repair and pre-prime. It had been wallpaper on the bottom half and I expected a bit of rough sledding there but nothing insurmountable, based on how the dining room went.

This is after the first coat of priming. And, I used a different sort of prime on the woodwork, hand-brushed, not rolled. There's obviously a lot of bleed-through...

And here we are after the second coat of priming. Much better but not perfect. (It's a 1925 house. As I jokingly announced to no-one-but-Loki as I finished up: "The only thing in here that's perfect is me!" Soon this bluster will be rendered false by the arrival of the baby...)

Anyway - we may do a similar top-down color split with a border in the middle, in which case this level of prime coverage might be sufficient. But perhaps a third pass of prime would be a safer bet. We'll have to evaluate it once it's dry. We're talking two hours of work as an insurance policy.

And the woodwork needs its second pass, too. Oh, the non-frame parts of the windows and doors haven't even gotten a first pass yet, either. So that's all on the docket for tonight.

CSA Week 20

2008-11-10T10:30:00.002-05:00

The big week XX - only two left to go, I think. 33.4 pounds, including a ton of onions and Pablano peppers I brought to share with friends later in the day. Also spinach, Savoy cabbage, turnips, collards, brocolli, and the intriguing arrival of Buttercup Squash. They kind of look like small, dark green pumpkins, or fatter acorn squashes without the pointy ends. We'll see, hopefully they're good because I took a few (!) extra. The basement is getting full of squashes and onions, and the freezer is getting full of frozen peppers and broccolis!

Loki Wanted to Be a Ghost for Halloween...

2008-11-10T10:27:00.002-05:00

... but we told him he had to stay home and bark and everyone who came to the door.

Today he rediscovered the joys of running around in the snow like a nut.

Ah, Batavia, New York...

2008-11-07T13:30:00.006-05:00

I was born and raised the Town of Tonawanda, a first-ring suburb of Buffalo. As an adult, I moved out to the "country" in Genesee County, Town of Batavia. Always Buffalo-facing, I never gave much thought to the City of Batavia, five miles to the east, other than it being the shopping destination of choice for most of life's daily needs. I came to understand that most of Genesee County is more likely to be Rochester-facing - we got the 585 area code with them, bland pollsters operating from a half a world away assume we watch the Rochester TV stations, and so on. But I never gave much consideration to the idea that any significant number of people could be Batavia-facing.

In March of 2007, Kathleen and I moved into the actual City of Batavia, and since then my perception has been changing.

(But first, here's the stats: the Town of Batavia with its roughly 6,000 inhabitants, encloses the City of Batavia and its 16,000 citizens. The actual border between Town and City gets more smudged every year, as most of the new retail construction on the west end of the "city" is actually in the Town. A better candidate for consolidation is unlikely to be found!)

Our pretty house in the city is on a safe street, in a good neighborhood, with friendly neighbors. Down the street we find the elementary school and its playground, and the high school stadium. We can walk most anywhere in the city and often do, taking trips to the grocery, hardware store, library, racetrack, Tully's, and the whole slew of strip-mall splendor (Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Bed Bath & Beyond, ...), Benny's Barber shop, or just letting Loki lead the way as we explore the streets and parks.

Slowly, I've become more interested in the history of the place. I've just finished reading Bill Kauffman's Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, in which the author's classic experience of the Native Son returning to his small hometown is set in the very same Batavia. It's his vehicle for bemoaning so much of what's been lost in Small Town America and also celebrating the good in What Remains There, but it's also very much about Batavia. Literate (probably to a fault) and witty (to compensate), Kauffman produces a veritable parade of references that shed light on Batavia so as to almost move it from the Real to the Mythic. You can feel the love, and it's contagious.

But Bill longs for a Batavia that's long gone, not coming back, and also beyond the horizon of my comprehension. They tore apart Main Street to put the Brutalist mall in long before I got there. My Batavia has always had a Tops and a Wal-Mart, GCC and the Thruway. I hardly perceived of Carr's department store before it ceased to exist, and I likely wouldn't have shopped there anyway. The model of American City has always been dynamic, and the snapshot of 1930-1960 is no more or less valid than that of 1970-2000, or whatever comes next for that matter.

Despite all our wreckage - and maybe even in part because of it - the spirit is strong here. But a path back is not the path forward, so the challenge is to find a way to gather up all those values and carry them along into a new and better future. Retailers come and go, and I'm sure in fifty years someone will be out there weeping the bygone days of Wal-Mart. Whatever. The Thruway makes it easy to leave, or pass through, but it can also bring folks to stay. Batavia can be a bedroom community for Buffalo and Rochester, but at some point it needs to attract more local employers to thrive. I'd work at Graham if I could (this year #10 on Forbes' list of top Small Companies), but I don't think they need software engineers, and my mechanical engineer father doesn't won't be coaxed out of retirement, so all I can do is buy their stock.

There's days I want to dig in deep: start a gaming club run out of the library's community room, get an ELCA church started, run for government. But unlike Kauffman, I'm no native son, certainly not yet. (And have you ever tried being a professional software engineer in the downtrodden Upstate? Yikes!) And unlike his pliant wife Lucine, my Kathleen comes from her own place with family that's calling her (and thus, us) home. So where it goes from here is anyone's guess. If I could just convince everyone else to uproot and settle here, that would sure be great.

Meanwhile, I've subscribed to The Batavian, the blog for all things Batavia, and it's been the here-and-now counterpart to Bill's book. And it's cleverly making me consider whether to drop our Buffalo News subscription in favor of the Batavia Daily. I've always championed the Buffalo paper as one of the very few quality big-city papers I've ever come across. I was never even slightly tempted to switch to Rochester's Democrat and Chronicle, which I have been constant in my complete dislike of. But without the Batavia paper, I can see now that I'm missing out on my home town news, to say nothing of supporting the "locals". It's a smaller paper to be sure, so I'll be giving up a lot in losing the Buffalo News, but I know that it has to be just one or the other: I don't have time for both, nor the money for the redundancy.

I'll try to write a few character pieces on Batavia in the future...

Halloween Costumes

2008-11-03T08:52:00.003-05:00

So Friday night was Halloween Proper, and we got somewhere around 60-75 kiddies, which was a good turnout but way down from last year. We spent much of the evening chatting with our neighbors, and the consensus is that this year's number was more typical for our street, while last year's were an aberration. No one had a compelling theory as to why, though.

Saturday was a downtime day, but we had our friends' Halloween Party that night to look forward to. Costumes optional, and I've always been the lazy grinchy sort who doesn't want to make the effort. Bless Kathleen for being more inspirational and into the seasons. How that worked out this year was a bit funny.

After deferring and demurring all week, somewhere around mid-Saturday morning I spontaneously decided that hey, I could make a pretty good Captain Hammer from the newest of cult favorite movies, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. And it would be easy! - mostly "normal" clothes, some big black gloves, the logo on a black t-shirt, bim, bam, boom and you're ready to go. Kathleen, biting her tongue over how we could have, you know, prepared for this all last week (to say nothing about how my costume choice couldn't pair with anything that she could do...), decided to go with being happy that we were in the spirit. And so a whole afternoon evaporated in search of costumes and costume bits.

Black pants, yes, black work boots, yes, these are the best sorts of costume bits because they'll see real life use afterward. The gloves were key to getting to look right, and for awhile it looked like I'd have to make do with big black neoprene cleaning-supply gloves from Home Depot. But no, on our third or fourth stop at the here-today, gone-tomorrow costume shop storefront in town, we finally noticed the big black Darth Vader costume gloves, which were practically ideal, and priced like they knew it! Last bit of material for me was the inkjet iron-on kit from Wal-Mart.

Meanwhile, Kathleen agonized over the various remaining costume kits available in a handful of stores. You know the drill for female costumes these days: sexy-this, sexy-that, sexy-the-other thing - but what of it's not complete junk, and what can be accessorized, and what can be managed with (ahem) dignity when seven months pregnant? After way too much time spent looking, we went with the "sexy cop", federal variety (Bureau of A.T.F.)!

Then when we got home, the tables turned. For all the picking and second-guessing, Kath's costume came together in a snap (or maybe it was a big brass zipper) once she picked it out. Mine, had some trials ahead. First, of course, I had to jump on the computer, find a good online image of the "Dr. Hammer" logo, which turned out to be a small and jaggy photo image. So then I ran it through Vector Magic to turn it into something workable, and used Inkscape to lay it out, flip it, and print it on the iron-on paper. As you'll see, the logo uses a lot of yellow, and thank goodness the yellow tank on the printer wasn't totally shot. I can't say the same for my blue tanks, and so the gray part of the hammer actually came out a bit pink as it lacked the right dose of blue. Oh well.

Then the real fun began. Kath gamely managed the iron-on process, only for us to discover that the transferred image is not opaque, and so the yellow basically disappeared! No panic, no panic. Grace under pressure, we repeated the whole process, made a new image and ironed that one on to an old white shirt. That one came out correctly, so then we cut out the logo, cloth and all, with the intent of sewing it onto the black shirt. Even better, though, we realized that we could iron it on, and original, no-good image already on the black shirt would bond with the backside of the white logo cloth and effectively seal it all in place.

Not too, too late, but with the house in shambles, we were done. (A mid-day baking project was left in tatters as we ran out of time, so the kitchen food mess rivaled the dining room craft mess!) This is what we love about holidays.

For all that, the results were rather excellent, and both costumes were a big hit at the party.

Here's me - trust me, the stupid face is part of the look. Yeah...

And Kathleen - straight on you'd never know that her due date is less than two months away!

Turn her sideways, alas, and the illusion is shattered!

Together and having fun and Tom and Jen's party. Practice making perfect in the stupid-look department for me.

Next year's early favorite costume idea is the Comedian from The Watchmen, if the movie version isn't a complete embarrassment. Kath could go as a transgender Rorschach (masked, you know) or more normally as Silk Spectre, though the early look of the movie version has stripped her of all her unique charms, leaving only the tired moviedome hack job of black-leather superhero hussy bimbo in its wake. Another fun choice would be Bill and The Bride from Kill Bill. Or maybe just Ketchup and Mustard. Or ghosts.

Happy Halloween, it's in the books. Thanksgiving, here we come.

CSA Week 19

2008-11-03T08:43:00.002-05:00

Another 32 pounds of fresh organic goodness. A different variety of acorn squash showed up this week, a little smaller: a single-serving squash! We got a bunch o' them. Last of the Pablano peppers, but in a nice surprise there were also a ton of Cubanelles. Each Sunday night for the last month of so I've been dicing and freezing peppers, so we should be enjoying those all winter long. More onions and leeks, of course, and the great second wave of broccoli happily continues. More kale and turnips and red cabbage, too, and the challenge to find tasty ways to use those goes on, too...

Pumpkins carved, ready for Halloween

2008-10-31T11:41:00.003-04:00

So, we're not really pumpkin artisans - my brother John and his family did some nice ones this year! - but we got our happy scary pumpkins carved up and ready for trick-or-treaters tonight.

That one on the right is my company's logo - see here to compare - aren't I just the sport? Brought it in today, it's a big hit. We've got employees bringing their little ones around later today, so that'll be nice.

Last year at home we got around 150 kids, in excellent weather. Tonight it should be pretty good out, and it's a Friday night, so we've prepared for about the same. Hope we have enough candy to have at least a few leftovers!

Comfort Food (for Hard Times)

2008-10-31T11:31:00.004-04:00

We're eatin' like it's the Great Depression or something! No, there's way too much of everything, and it tastes too good, for that to be true. Behold - - -

Vegetable beef soup using all CSA veggies (except some baby carrots), barley, and leftover beef from our wedding dinner:

Red curry squash, also from the farm. Works almost exactly like an acorn or butternut, here baked with butter, brown sugar, and chopped apple in the middle:

Along with homemade bread (rosemary) that turned out as a good first try on the new bread machine (wonderful wedding gift!), and a tossed salad using lettuce from my parents' garden.

It doesn't get much more down home than that.

Hall Reno, Part II

2008-10-29T15:01:00.002-04:00

So we got the front hall done, too. Actually both the downstairs and upstairs halls, but all the real decorating happened downstairs. We found a rich medium purple tone to use, contrasted with another shade of purple so light that it's almost white. The downstairs is primarily the dark color, and the upstairs is light. There's nice contrasts to be found depending on where you're looking.

The rod and curtain there are new, a darker purple with white sheer. And we got little white sheers for the front door flanking windows, too:

Here you can see the light/dark contrast. As with the dining room, we removed the ceiling molding and then put it back up after painting, and that was a smart idea.

$20 area rug for accent from Walmart:

Above the frame to the living room, a little bit of craftiness; my inspiration, Kathleen's execution. Fall leaves in picture frames. The idea is to change out the contents of the frames each season, so maybe in winter there will be snowflakes, and flowers in the spring/summer. We'll see how we do keeping up on that. There's also a matching big frame and a place on the wall for it, but we haven't totally figured out the approach yet. So this is what it's like for now:

So now it's back to the baby's room (again?! finally!) - with no more side-tracking!

Dining Room renovation

2008-10-28T13:01:00.003-04:00

The dining room was one of the two major house projects we worked on and got done in time for the wedding. It had been wallpaper over (mostly) plaster, and the glue was old and dry and as such the paper came off easily. Too easily, in fact, since most of it's been down since the late spring, which is when we discovered just how easily it could be peeled, and thereupon occurred a wallpaper-removal frenzy not unlike the excessive popping of bubble wrap. It's amazing how used to looking at unfinished walls you can become, but perhaps our guests deserved something a little more finished?

I managed to get the ceiling painted over the summer, and in the last six weeks we juggled the rest of the tasks against other equally compelling projects. We made a good move here in outright removing the ceiling molding and chair rails: the molding because it allowed us to patch up some crumbling plaster behind it, and the chair rails because it made it easy to get all the last wallpaper bits out, and provide a margin of error in where we split the colors. We decided to go with a burgundy down below, accented with an antique white up top. It's really nice how well the rich colors work in an old Victorian with good woodwork.

But first was the usual round of repairing holes and cracks and smoothing things that weren't quite flat with the walls. I've gone through a lot of Spackle this year! But the results were worth it, and overall these walls were in good shape:

That first coat of primer was a nightmare, as it was going over unpainted walls and tended behave rather poorly under the roller. We almost had a little breakdown when it took twice as long as expected, and used twice as much primer to get there. But it dried perfectly well and the second coat left us with a lovely uniform white surface, all the remaining discoloration of the old wallpaper a thing of the past. Then it was on to the colors. Oh look, an action shot!

Here, the burgundy down below was a bit tricky - it was a thicker base and later showed a tendency to want to stick to the masking tape a bit too much. Nothing a little touch up couldn't fix, but still, by comparison the antique white up top went on very easily.

With that all done, it was time to clean up all the wood trim and re-attach it, and it looked sharp. Then new curtains - finally! - using rods that match the ones in the living room; curtains picked out by Kathleen, and she completely matched the color, too. Dinky table back in, with our nice tablecloth that just happened to match the color scheme, and voila.

Getting fancy with the drapery on the back window...

I guess I should have picked up around the table first! Anyway, the lovely roses are from my parents. The light fixture we picked out and had installed during the electrical upgrade in early '07. At last the rest of the room has caught up to its dignified style.

Hey, you can even see the new living room carpet in the background. Yeah, we got that last week, too. We're going to single-handedly kick-start US consumer spending!

This might be the first time since we've moved in that every outlet and switch on the first floor has a faceplate cover on it!

On the "someday" list is to replace the dining room set, including hopefully a buffet and sideboard, as there's a couple spaces where those'd fit rather nicely, and then we could finally get the good china out of the attic and use it! But that's not at the top of the queue by a long shot...

Just Married!

2008-10-27T13:41:00.002-04:00

Introducing Martin Robert and Kathleen Mary Szinger, joined in marriage on the 25th day of October, 2008, in Batavia, NY! We would like to express our deepest thanks and gratitude for the loving support and encouragement of our families and friends, both in attendance and wishing us well from afar. We are thrilled to be joined together with two such wonderful families, and are looking forward to many years of sharing our life of joy together with all of you!

More pictures, stories, and family additions, soon to follow...

CSA Weeks 17 and 18

2008-10-27T09:43:00.002-04:00

Two weeks in one!

In week 17, the haul was 33.8 pounds. HA! - that includes almost a whole bag of gourds, leftover from the farm festival. But it doesn't include a bunch more pumpkins, also festivals leftovers to be taken away. Our house has become quite nicely decorated in fall vegetables as a result!

Winter squash is in, plus lots of peppers as they start harvest everything left that's good, more onions of course, and brocolli, and leeks and golden beets and red cabbage and green kale.

In week 18, we ended up with 27.8 pounds of actual veggies: we took a lot of extras to show and share with Kathleen's family that was coming to town. Spinach is back! Plus broccoli, the last of the red peppers, more Pablanos, plus scarlet trunips, swiss chard, savoy cabbage, and red curry squash. I've never seen this kind of squash before so it'll be fun to figure out what on earth to do with it. Also we're hopeful that these turnips might have a taste we find easier to enjoy!

Under Wraps

2008-10-23T08:47:00.002-04:00

Yes, it's been quiet on the blog front this week. I haven't had time to upload last week's CSA pix, or any of the recent house renovation progress, either. Possibly tomorrow we'll get to that. Pictures of the finished rooms are going to have to wait until next week, though - we don't want to ruin the surprise for our families coming to visit. Saturday's a big date!

CSA Fall Festival

2008-10-16T08:01:00.002-04:00

This past weekend we got to enjoy a trial run of parenthood as we watched our friends' two boys, Curtis and Drake. Mom and dad headed off to Niagara-on-the-Lake for a little getaway and we did our best to be good surrogates. All in all a big success - no big boo boos, house still standing, etc.

(The biggest bump really was that it disrupted our previously-unrelenting pace of home improvement project work. Humorously, I took Tuesday off from work because Kathleen was on fall break, and what did we do? A full day of home projects work. We're nuts.)

But on Sunday our CSA, Porter Farms, held their annual Fall Festival. Since this is our first year in the CSA, it was also our first Fall Festival, and we weren't entirely sure what to expect. But come Sunday noon, we scooped the kiddies into the car, took our pumpkin cheesecakes and pumpkin bread, and off we went.

It turned out to be really nice. There were about 200 people there coming and going over the course of the afternoon. There were pumpkins to pick out...

... and paint...

And we could go look in the barn (currently one horse and a google of sheep), and we took a hayride out to some of the fields, where the various crops were pointed out and we were told about some of this year's agricultural trials and tribulations and what next year's plan will be. This was of more interest to the adults than the chillins', but it was a beautiful fall day and nice to go bouncing across the rutted field.

Oh, and there was a ton of food. Primarily pot luck, and there was a lot of creativity on display. Not surprisingly, there was a lot made out of our organic veggies, and the selection was overwhelmingly vegetarian. Lots of exotic stuff to try and consider making ourselves.

And somewhere between a third and a half of everything was a dessert, tables and tables of delicious baked goods. We were stuffed. Curtis and Drake were pretty picky regarding the main dishes, but more than made up for it at dessert.

Now we're back to a nice quiet house, and enjoying it while it lasts. Which is about two months, give or take...

CSA Week 16

2008-10-16T07:56:00.002-04:00

Acorn squash arrived this week, a we got a lot of extras! I think we might get Butternut squash this week, so we have to store these away for the winter as much as we can. We've already given half our acorn squashes out to friends and family...

Meanwhile, we got a lot of peppers because they picked them in advance of a frost we had. The frost turned out to be pretty mild, so we might still get a few more weeks of peppers. Also in there is some more broccoli, some turnips, more onions (of course!) and even some more zukes. Owing mostly to the bounty of squash, we weighed in at 35 pounds even this week.

Two Stories' of Hall Renovations, Part I

2008-10-08T11:42:00.004-04:00

We're getting the halls done in the house, both upstairs and downstairs. They were in pretty good shape to begin with, but still it's all plaster-based and you always end up putting on (then sanding down) way more Spackle then you ever imagined you were going to. Walls and ceiling are patched up beyond the point of reason, primed, and Kathleen even got started on the light color walls.

We're going with a two-tone approach - a somewhat deep purple downstairs and on the stair walls, and then a much lighter shade upstairs. The trick is that two little walls downstairs will also be the light color, providing a nice accent, and matching view when you face the stairs from the front door. At least that's the plan. (After all the wall repair and priming, changing color approach is really not that big a deal if need be...)

Loki decided to be a ham while I was taking these...

Pumpkin Festival

2008-10-08T11:34:00.003-04:00

This past Saturday we met up with friends Tom and Jen and their two boys in Clarence for their Pumpkin Festival. Hay rides, corn maze, farm animals, carnival food, haunted house, magic acts, crafts and face-painting for the kids, and lots and lots and lots of pumpkins.

A few choice pix, then:

Competition-grade pumpkins:

Consumer-grade pumpkins:

Firing the pumpkin cannon:

The pumpkin cannon:

The troll in the fun house:

CSA Week 15

2008-10-08T11:31:00.003-04:00

Purple broccoli, cabbage, lots more peppers (including Cubanelles again!) and onions, leeks, and a surprise return of yellow squash and zucchini. Oh, and "dinosaur" kale!

This week's culinary stressor is to come up with a dish to share for the farm's harvest festival on Sunday...

CSA Week 14

2008-10-01T15:47:00.002-04:00

The big news this week is that our CSA traded a bunch of their onions for a bunch of carrots from a CSA in Pennsylvania, so we loaded up on those. Lots of peppers, including jalapenos for the first time; also eggplant and kale for the first time. A few more squash and zucchini trickled in, plus more leeks and tomatoes and, of course, more onions. We end up with over thirty pounds again, and shared half of it with our friends in town.

Projects: the Mundane

2008-09-24T08:14:00.002-04:00

The baby room (we can call it that now, I think) is the site of ongoing, but rather boring, work. Finishing up the wall repairs and scraping what needs to be scraped on the woodwork prior to priming and painting.

Meanwhile, a few very simple and photogenic projects are in the mix. We got some mesh bags to hold all our onions and decided that the basement stairs would be a good place to hang them, but that meant putting up new hooks. That happened last Saturday morning. Oh, and you can also see the very nice bag my mom made us, which holds old grocery bags...

While thinking about hanging things, I decided that I was annoyed at the stubby little hooks on the back of the bathroom door, and how we could very much use some proper towel bars for our towels to dry out on. This is two houses in a row I've been in that haven't had any! So we picked some of those up on Monday night, good 'ol cheap made-in-China Walmart specials, which just happened to be the exact match to the toilet paper holder and hand towel ring that are already in there. So that was pretty lucky.

Very clever mounting system, I couldn't have come up with anything so smart; and not hard at all to put up. So now we have towel bars.

Mundane project number three is a kick plate for the freshly-painted back door. We got this on Monday night too, but I probably won't put it on until the weekend.

CSA Week 13

2008-09-24T08:11:00.003-04:00

A more reasonable 19 pounds of vegetables this week, as all the heavy melons are done for the season. Last of the beans, so we took extra; lots of peppers. Turnips and a red cabbage; leeks; more tomatoes and onions.

Happiness Is...

2008-09-17T19:54:00.003-04:00

The world turns upside-down and back around on a matter of days...

On Monday we were told that there was a problem with our ultrasound.

On Tuesday we went in and met with the doctor, who told us not to panic (an impossibility), while describing the various factors he saw that indicated a potential (though later we saw he had written "probable") incidence of Spina Bifida.

This morning we went to Strong Memorial in Rochester for a genetics counseling meeting, followed by a new ultrasound done by their paranatologist. And found out, to our infinite relief, that there was absolutely nothing wrong that they could see. Good spine, good intercranials, no bloated abdomen, no thickening of the skin. No amneo needed, sorry for the bother, go have a good day now!

So after crying in fear, praying, waiting, then crying for joy, roughly in that order, it's somehow "back to normal". Which feels better than I ever imagined it could.

CSA Week 12

2008-09-16T13:45:00.002-04:00

Lots of tomatoes, peppers, onions, watermelon, beans, and beets pushed this past weekend's total to thirty-three pounds. That's a lot of stuff! And it's all good, um, except for the beets, which we really could do without. But we'll try to find a good home for them...

Arriving Soon: It's A Boy

2008-09-12T15:38:00.005-04:00

If it's news to you that Kathleen and I are expecting a baby in December, then you're pretty well officially the last to know. Sorry 'bout that; the truth is a harsh mistress sometimes.

Anyway, what is news, you already read in the title of this post. The sonogram yesterday revealed with no room for doubt that it's a boy. I can't post the pictures that prove it, but suffice to say they leave nothing to the imagination.

Instead, you can enjoy these ones:

House Is Painted

2008-09-12T15:32:00.002-04:00

From the old...

... to the new!

Our painter did a great job and we think the house looks just lovely now. All that's left is the upstairs back porch rails, once the wood has cured.

And just look at that nice soffit repair work! OK, OK, so no one else cares about this but me, and whoever is lucky enough to own the house in the future...

Blooming Onions

2008-09-10T11:43:00.003-04:00

We had a blooming onion for lunch at the Erie County fair when we went last month. A few weeks later, we saw and bought a blooming onion "maker" at a garage sale for fifty cents. This consists of a handy holder/template for slicing the onion, and another plastic doohicky to core it out later. And directions for making them, including recipes for some different batters.

So what with all the onions we now have, we decided to give it a try last Saturday. The biggest challenge was the lack of a deep fryer, we heated peanut oil in a pot and monitored temperature with our newest gadget, a deep fry/candy thermometer.

Deep frying's a bit stinky; now I remember why my mom liked to use her electric fryer out on the back porch. We made four onions, kind of overkill, but useful to justify the amount of batter made, and the oil, and the practice. And each one came out a little better than the one before.

This ended up being Saturday's "dinner", and the fresh pasta sauce had to wait until Monday to make it onto the dinner table. Delicious! Almost as good as being at the fair, and a good recipe option to have for the future.

The Fire Pit

2008-09-10T11:39:00.003-04:00

Picture, as promised. The base is a heavy ceramic clay, with a classic rustic look that the picture doesn't quite do justice to. We had to "cure" it with the first couple fires. It looks and works great, and just in time with the arrival of fall and its shorter days and cooler nights.

CSA Week 11

2008-09-10T08:40:00.003-04:00

Halfway through the season, and we cracked 30 pounds this week! Mostly because they had a ton of spare onions that they said "take as many as you can, or they'll go to waste!" Also, three cantaloupes, harvested just a bit early, before they could succumb to mildew. Lots of the other usual stuff, too. We forgot to keep all the veggies together for a "group shot" this week, but here's some of them, at least.

We combined our farm and home tomatoes and made homemade pasta sauce in our slow cooker, using up a handful of peppers (six different varieties!) and onions (red and yellow) along the way.

The sauce came out great, though we did have to add some tomato paste at the end to get the consistency right, and to offset what might have been the verge of pepper overload. We ended up with a lot of suace and froze some. It turned out delicious though!

Closet Door Frame Trim Rebuild

2008-09-10T08:27:00.004-04:00

In the next bedroom we're re-doing upstairs, at some point in the past the old, normal-sized closet door was ripped out to make way for a pair of sliding closet doors. These doors are a big improvement over what had been there, but unfortunately whoever did the job ripped out the nice trim door frame from above the old one and never replaced it with anything similar. Just a kind of emptiness, culminating in a especially ugly hole-like emptiness where the corner pieces used to join:

I had always been hoping to remedy this. So it was a happy surprise when, as we rummaged for something in the attic a few weeks ago, we came across the original door frame trim piece that had been removed! It wasn't wide enough to span the new closet door, but it was a start. Then we thought about it for a bit and remembered that our downstairs hall closet has the complete trim/frame on both sides of the closet door, including the inside, where no one can ever see it. (I think this might have been an the original entrance to the kitchen or something...). So we stole that piece, too, and with an evening of wood crafting handiwork (last Thursday evening, to be precise), I fashioned a new door frame trim piece and set it into place.

It joins up nicely in the corner, too.

It'll look lovely once it's all primed an painted. Actually, it's likely that no one will ever even notice - it's the kind of thing you only pay attention to when it's not right! But it's done, crossed off the to-do list, and it's looking good.

Goin' to the Car Wash!

2008-09-03T09:30:00.003-04:00

It was a hot weekend, at least during the days! We thought about going to the beach on Labor Day but somehow decided that cleaning out and washing our cars would be more fun. OK, well maybe "enough fun, and something to show for it when we were done," is more like it.

This was the first time Kathleen and I washed cars together (far from my favorite chore, that's for sure!), and I guess from a relationship point of view, if it was a compatibility test of sorts, we passed with flying colors. Everyone grows up with slightly (or greatly) different ideas as to what it means to clean a vehicle, and how. Turns out we are very close, so it was a good time.

My car got a little extra love in the wheel-cleaning department because it's got those fancy chrome ones and ya gotta get all the brake dust corrosion cleaned off every now and then.

Kathleen's car, well, it's holding together great at close to fifteen years and 300k miles, but no amount of clean makes up for the inevitable dulling of the finish. Here's hoping it makes it through a few more Western New York winters!

Pull-Up Bar

2008-09-03T09:07:00.003-04:00

Our CSA Saturday morning pickup ritual has evolved into adding stops at yard sales on the way when we see them. And, on an completely unrelated front - until now! - for a long time I've been plotting and contemplating how to add a pull-up bar in the basement to add to my workouts. These two forces came together last weekend as we picked our way through a sizable yard sale.

Because, see, I came across a "Weight Watchers" brand sit-up contraption, the likes of which I confess to have never understood. This one, though, sort of collapsed and came apart into three pieces for storage, and one of those pieces was almost an exact match for the pull-up bar design I had been envisioning in my head. And it was a single glorious piece of tubular steel, with foamy grip stuff in the right places, and would-be bolt holes in the right places. This was a good find!

The husband manning the sale was in a mood to get stuff out. He saw me checking out the pieces. "A dollar!", he offered, and I didn't really respond, as I picked up the piece and rotated it around in front of me to see if it would really do the job. A few moments passed. The man countered his own offer: "Oh, just take it. Get it out of here!" Awesome! Ultimately we got it and a handful of other little doodads for four dollars and zipped home with our veggies and our treasures. After this and our one-dollar crock-pot a few weeks ago, I am totally starting to get the appeal of yard sales!

One trip and about one dollar's worth of bolts, washers, and nuts later, I was ready for action. Our basement has some lovely uneven spacing in the beams, so I spent a while test-fitting the bar all over the place until I came across the perfect fit. Then it was a bit of drilling and bolting and voila!

Here it is, ready to go. The basement is full height, but it's not like that means there's a twelve-foot ceiling. You drop into place and do pull-ups with bent knees. Works like a charm, though it's been awhile and I can only do ten pull-ups now before giving out. That's a good starting point, at least. The best part is the little "Weight Watchers" label that's still affixed right in the middle of the horizontal part of the bar!

Then it hinges up on the bolts for easy storage! OK, OK, I'm actually using a stiff curvy section of live electrical wire as the "bracket" that holds the thing up, which is perfectly safe and not at all a violation of the electrical code, no, not at all, I swear. I'll keep my eyes open for another free piece of junk with which to make a real bracket someday...

The other two-thirds of the original device are bound for the trash, even though the nagging pack-rat part of my brain is trying to come up with something useful to do with these nice arcs of perfect steel tubing. Hmmmm.... It was garbage day today but in all the morning excitement I forgot to put these out, so maybe that's a sign!