August 2007

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Usually, when we jam on Monday or Tuesday night, I show up with a sixer of a beer we’ve never had, which we consume while we relax before we go in and then another while we set up. Dan saves the labels on a cabinet. We have sampled a lot of really nice beers, especially local brews like Back Fin Pale Ale and The Raven Special Lager, which has really cool red caps featuring the mug of one Mr. E. A. Poe. We were thinking of fixing them to the knobs on my bass, which is red, perhaps.

But this week, my interest in interesting (!) sodas got the better of me, and I showed up at Workbench Studios with some offerings from Boylan Bottling Company that you can find at Wine Underground. I can’t recommend either enough. The sodas are delicious, and the seltzers are even calorie-free. And the guys at Wine Underground are fantastically knowledgeable and damned nice.

But still, no brain-numbing booze this week, so the brown bottles were not of significance. I don’t know in what way, though.

Photo Friday: Insignificant.

I haven’t done it properly since 2003 (and only before that in 2002, really), but we are watching one of my very favorite films tonight: Amelie. I received it as a gift for my birthday in 2002 with a small volume of Baudelaire’s prose poems. I was instructed to watch it without knowing anything about it. So I did, on August 29th, the night before my birthday. Turns out that a lot of the movie is set on that day. In Paris, Where I can’t get soon enough.

If, for some reason, you haven’t seen it, go get it, and watch it. My, oh, my. I know it’s fashionable to like it, but that’s for good reason. It really is a fantastic movie.

I am listening to the [FANTASTIC] soundtrack right now as I smell my [all organic and made from scratch, even the icing, but my wonderful wife] birthday cake cooking in the oven.

Tomorrow, I am making omelettes. Jalapeno (with squiggle) peppers, plum tomatoes and sweet onion. And both kinds of veggie sausage. Links and patties. I am making them because, well, I’m the only one in the apartment who can make omelettes.

Downtown. Maybe find the army surplus daypack I’ve always been looking for at H&H. Read Street Books. The Walter’s Art Museum. Other fun things, involving lots of good coffee. My family is coming downtown to meet us at the Mount Vernon Donna’s, after which it is cake and ice-cream [organic, too].

It’s going to be a nice birthday.

The trike in action.

After getting The Mom warmed up Friday on a parking lot, I convinced her to check out one of our favorite spots to ride: Druid Hill Park. So Dan, The Mrs. and I met up at the Water Tower, rode down and had green/white fusion tea. We loaded the trike and The Dad’s bike onto a pickup. We left to bike down to Druid Hill and to meet the truck there. We got there at about the same time, seeing the truck against a very gray sky as we huffed up the hill that passes the big public pool, empty that day because of the clouds. We unloaded the bike and trike, had some bubbly water and teased the drivers that we had already ridden over two miles already.

So we had a mini bike gang running around the lake, stopping at the Castle to check out what I consider to be the best view in the city and of the city.

The Mom had the trike in its highest gear and trucked around the lake three times, totally about five miles — pretty dang good for someone so new to biking. Though I should acknowledge that strong legs run in The Mom’s family and that one of my brothers and I have quite large leg muscles and that The Mom works out at Curves several times a week. But nonetheless, that’s a good beginning ride.

The weather was ugly and soupy. Very humid and cloudy. So most of the photos I took didn’t turn out very well. This photo of Dan on the trike could not be fixed with my powers, so it’s colorized. But his face is priceless, so here it is.

The trike in action is very strange. I love to ride it, and I get it going pretty fast. But the steering is just weird, and I get it up on two weeks constantly. The band brake in the rear, frankly, doesn’t work very well. But once the brakes break in and I get some better pads on the front caliper brakes, I think it will stop better. It’s very comfortable to sit on, with a big tractor-style seat that sports nice springs. The grips are decent, and the gears shift smoothly — after I flipped it last week and worked on it. (For the record, it came from the shop unable to go into first gear because the cable was too loose. I won’t name the shop because they are nice.) The basket is great and winds up being our recycling bin on rides. It holds a dog, but the weight limit of the 68 pound trike is 240 pounds, so it can’t hold two people. She denies it, but I tell The Mom that she will be riding it to get groceries by Halloween. Complete with decorations on that big basket.

Check out Flickr for larger photos, as usual.

My mother never learned to ride a bike. She had six brothers and grew up in the city, so this is surprising. So a few months ago, at the age of, ahem, 29, ahem, she told me, in response to my constant, “You should get a bike!” that she would ride a tricycle, like she rode in Atlantic City once with my father before they were married. When we all went to help move my brother into his house in Abingdon early this summer, we came back in two trucks because we had to move a lot of stuff, run to Ikea, etc. I was in the second vehicle with my other brother, and we saw a man on a blue trike with the basket full of groceries. The cell phone rang, and the Mom said, “That’s what I want! Find me that, and I’ll get a bike!”

So find one of those I did, and I found a red one, her favorite color — it even has 6 speeds and full fenders! We had to have it shipped to her house, take it to the bike shop and pay them to assemble it. Turns out that the guy who put it together worked with the pedicabs in New York, so the trike was in good hands. After some issues with the rear band-brake, she got back from the beach in time to ride it.

But then she locked it to a poll in her yard with her husband’s Kryptonite U-lock after her first ride. And lost the key. And the original was nowhere to be found, and no one wrote down the key numbers, either. I took the poll apart and the poor trike (then known as Flower Power because of the flowers on the tires) sat sadly for a month while we spent far too much time looking for the keys. Either of them.

We gave up, and my friend tried to saw it off with something plumbers use to cut pipes, with no luck. Not even with a new blade.

We took it to the bike shop, and they needed three people and a “grinder” to get it off. When The Dad and I showed up with his pickup truck to get the bike, the man at the shop said, “You’re here for Big Red, aren’t you?” I rode it out of the store and around the parking lot and to the truck. I enjoy riding it, and I totally want one, once someone pays me enough to have a little house in the city where I will have a shed with all my bikes, or my garage, if the house has one. I’ll take a blue or yellow one, thanks.

The Mom bought a helmet in white because she’s Polish, and the bike’s red, with a white basket. All Polack colors. And, rather than a practical bell, there is a huge pig squealer because The Mom likes pigs. A lot.

She got to ride up and down her alley again last week when we got it back from the shop, like she did the day she got it/locked it. Put my brother’s pug in the back. Roxy was hypnotized by the blinky. I stole Big Red and rode around Hampden with her a little.

Then on Friday, the Mrs., The Mom and I rode up Elm Avenue to the lower Rotunda lot (the unused one) so that Big Red could get broken in a little more. It was The Mom’s first time in traffic, and the first time I saw her on a bike/trike in my 28 (Thursday!) years.

There’s nothing like the look on the face of someone who just discovered cycling. Nothing. It’s better than giving someone their first Moleskine or cup of French press coffee.

Stay tuned for part ii, and check out larger photos at Flickr.

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This is hand-made by a local (?) artist, and we bought it at a local shop in The Rotunda. I had to punch out some of the stars, one of which you can see didn’t quite finish.

Photo Friday: Unfinished.

So I went to the Harbor yesterday for something “business” related for the Mrs. and also for bumming around with a daypack among the tourists, before someone hires me (gasp!) and before the post-dissertation draft party is over. We had a fantastic dinner and far too much coffee. We did not do our usual jam/recording session Monday because the scheduling didn’t work out, and the bass player was just exhausted.

When I got off the Light Rail yesterday at Cold Spring Lane, who is coming off the ramp but Paulie? And who stops on Cold Spring Lane but Paulie? Turns out I was away from my phone all day, and we were jamming/recording last night. Paulie was in a mystery traffic jam to put him there, too.

Cosmic.

And we got more stuff done, which was awesome. It’s getting to the point where our recording is going to be more intentional, so I have to stop playing through the PA and bring The Nemesis (that’s the model). My bass amp is designed for heavy gigging (which we really only did before I bought it), and it will knock stuff off your walls. Seriously. I haven’t played on that monster since Carbondale, when my downstairs neighbor was gone, and my only next-door neighbor was also a musician and didn’t mind. I can only imagine what would happen if I cranked that thing up in Roland Park.

I still giggle when I say I live there. And if you’re in Baltimore and know how broke grad students are, you’d laugh, too.

I have been off M’s for a while, in search of something more eco-friendly. But such books either don’t seem to hold up well, or they are too fancy and fragile for me to want to write in them. So what, since I haven’t been writing? Maybe it’s dissertation burn-out. But, honestly, writing was the easy part. And the fun part. I think it’s a combination of being at a weird stage and being too lazy to break the no-writing habit. I blame that for why I don’t really do what used to make me happiest these days. Then I think about what consequences of this writing-drought might be, from my constantly-evolving neuroses, destruction habits and weird obsessions, and I get mad at myself for letting writing go, save for obligatory journaling because I am crazy about remembering what I do, who with and what movies we watched.

I bought a [silly, the Mrs. said] kit last weekend that gets to you actually WRITE, which I never really do much anymore. I needed a “writer’s notebook”. So I hit Atomic Books for whatever pocket Moleskine I could find. I wanted lines, but this squared version was close enough.

And the whole thing people always say about Moleskines that I long-ago started ignoring happened. Now I like to write again, even if it’s stupid stuff I’ll never type-up, let alone let anyone see.

I whipped up some band notebooks for my buddies and I because we can never get to paper and pens when we’re in the studio jamming before we forget things, like the chorus of the song we’re working on or new music to check out. Dan already has a Moleskine, but Paulie never had one. Last Monday, he took that Cahier and Papermate and wrote all night. We even defaced the pizza boxes out of some weird Nietzschean explosion of creative energy, though I can’t really post what we did to that here.

My eco-angel is weirded out. Maybe it’ll get the best of me and have me shopping for hemp paper again one day soon. But at least the M’s have gotten me writing again — with or without my corny little kit.

And by blew up, I mean that I smashed it with a hammer so hard that I hurt my ears. The damned thing died the other day. Called Verizon. Said they’d send a new one. Said it would be at my apartment today. But no. When we called today, they said they made a mistake. Didn’t send it. Overnight, here tomorrow. (Right.) Dial-up lady screwed that up, too. So here I am at my mother’s house, on my brother’s computer. Dropped and cracked my mp3 player. Destroyed one modem. Bent my steel computer table because I am a baby and because I throw fits. Almost choked the moron at the coffee shop who, when asked which cup she handed us was decaf and which was regular, said, “I don’t know.” She poured them out before my wife jumped over the counter and poured them on her head to see if that was a good way to check. I hope they take them out of her check. This after she was already rude. Now, I have a nice coffee, some bubbly water, and I’m going swimming. It’s been one hell of a week. I’m off to DE tomorrow, so I’ll see ya’ll soon, hopefully on my own broadband.

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A tree at Druid Hill Park this past spring, complete with something that looks like…a number of things.

Photo Friday: Oddity.

Last Friday, I helped babysit my cousin’s three little girls, ages 5, 3 and 1. They are just absolutely the cutest and sweetest kids you have ever seen. If you know someone, even your own kids, who you think might deserve that title, well, you haven’t met Yasmine, Aleah and Arianna. Trust me on this.

So we built a fort out of one of those L-shaped couches, complete with a castle on top. I used to love forts, well past their age, too. My brothers and I built a several forts every week in the summer when we were kids. Some of the most complex involved a dozen beach chairs and picnic tables and benches, piles of beach towels and all our mom’s clothespins. We had rooms for different things, secret exits, skylights, windows, even radios. I seem to remember crude security systems in the form of minor booby-traps, too.

We are helping out again today because their grandmother (and my aunt) is in bad shape due to some major back trouble. I’ve been teased that my wife’s half-Italian blood has run into my own, because when asked if we would be there to help, my reply was: “What? How can you ask that? We’re family!” I like to think my own ethnic blood had at least something to do with that, or, more likely, how generous my parents have always been with everyone.

Anyway, I thought that another fort might bore the girls, so I am bringing my mandolin today. I looked up the chords to some children’s songs, and the baby positively dances whenever she hears music. I have some light-gauged strings on there tuned down 1/2 step, so it won’t be so loud that it makes them deaf — not that mandolins are very loud to begin with.

And when they feel like dancing without singing,* I arranged some good old rocks songs in my head for mandolin: “Sweet Child O Mine,” some U2, etc. Kids and music are a good mix, even better than kids and forts.

*[Have you heard the Melissa Etheridge song "Dance Without Sleeping"? They play it in the trailer for Goodwill Hunting. It's a good song that you should listen to. Email me for it if you want to.]

I don’t want to complain about the heat too much. I know I’m not the only one who’s hot, and it was our choice to go without air conditioning at home for a summer to see if we can do it and, you know, to be greener. It’s hot in a lot of places. And at least I’m somewhere I want to be for the hot summer, which is a nice change.

But this caught my eye tonight. How the heck can we have a 113% chance of rain/thunderstorms tomorrow during several time intervals? How?

I think it’s funny.

I’ll be job-hunting, reading and play Call of Duty in my underwear, in front of several fans.

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My cousin’s wedding last weekend. Everyone was crying, joyfully.

Photo Friday: Wet.

So my battle with coffee vs. tea has been getting a lot of attention lately. Mostly because I think I’m stressed out about job hunting, family issues and general crap we all put up with. I think I’m projecting.

It’s very hot this week, so I thought I’d post about iced coffee. Mine is the best. And it’s easy to make.

First, don’t make your coffee “double strong” like Dunkin Donuts. If you have to do that to make good iced coffee, you make your coffee too weakly! (Kidding, but don’t do it.) Make it about 150% as strong (50% stronger, that is), preferably in a French press. One 8-cup French press/one quart/two pints/one liter/32-33 ounces — this is how much to make.

As a side note, I have found that South American/Mexican coffees work great. Zeke’s Organic/Fairtrade Mexican Chiapas is great. Some Brazilian/Cost Rican would be fantastic.

Take a non-breakable (or Pyrex) receptacle, and put one tray of ice in it. Normal glass might break (I haven’t tried because I don’t want stitches). Dump some sugar onto the ice cubes, in the center. Don’t use that fake crap unless you HAVE to, and don’t use as much as you normally put in your coffee, else you’ll over-do it.

If you’re doing it right (!) and using a French press, go an extra minute from your normal brew time. Whatever your method, pour your brewed coffee slowly over the center of the ice, where you put the sugar. The hot coffee will dissolve the sugar right away and melt most of the ice. Grab a wooden spoon and stir for about a minute to get most of the ice melted. Add cream. Not milk and not Coffeemate. Half&half! Add a good bit, and watch for color. See photos. That is perfect. Stir more.

Add tiny ice cubes to tiny glasses, like the ones shaped like stars I scored at Ikea. Drink away. Or, if you are especially tired, use my tired day method. See above, but use chilled, frosty pint glasses. Chug. Chug Chug.

P.S. I’m not a complete French press snob, I swear. I actually really like instant coffee and have a secret love affair with Nescafe’ — I’m not kidding.