Author: cdwan

I’m staying at an “urban” bed and breakfast in Baltimore. It’s called the inn at 2920.

When I got here, the keepers had left a note out for me saying which room was mine, and asking whether I took coffee or tea with my breakfast. The key paragraph is:

Your room is located on the 3rd floor. Go up the stairs and make a right in the hallway. Your room is the furst on the right. The jacuzzi jets are switched on and off by using the button on the inside of the tub. Your fish is named Jim.

This is the second instance I’ve seen of a “companion fish” in a hotel room totally making the experience for me. More places need to have named fish available.

Tomorrow, more work.

Just saw No Country For Old Men. What an awesome movie. It was probably as close as one can get to a Cormac McCarthey book without actually being such a book. I highly recommend it.

However, I would recommend it when one is not getting back, alone, to one’s dark and solitary hotel room at 12:30 in the evening. One should share pie and ice cream with a friend after that sort of movie.

We don’t wonder where we’re going or remember where we’ve been.
We’ve got to keep this traffic flowing and accept a little sin.
Long Line of Cars; Cake

For those who were not already aware – Kayak is the best travel planning tool in the whole universe.

Also, I’ve started using one of those “total view” things where I give all my rewards program numbers and passwords to a central website, and it scrapes my account balances out of their pages from time to time and shows me a single summary page. At first, I was nervous about giving my Northwest Airlines reward number and password to a website … but then I realized that it’s the same website that I use to maintain my retirement account. If I’m nervous about them stealing my frequent flier miles … I should probably move the real money too.

I’ll be back at NASA, and then at Johns Hopkins next week. The trip kinda snuck up on me this time. Gotta go get some sort of evergreen tree before getting on the plane.

Went to see Cake last night, with redmed, capital_l and technolope. They were, in a word, F-ING AWESOME. Fine. That’s two words. Whatever.

The opening acts were odd. The first group was a forgettable younger band who kept mumbling their name and turning their back on the audience. The second was King City, a six piece acoustic-ish “what the hell was that,” mad mash up of circus music, polka, mariachi trumpet, and whatever the hell else they felt like. technolope commented “well, they only seem to have one song … but I like that song so it’s okay.” The third act, the “Brazilian Girls” was too-loud, too-echoey electronica plus tuba (yes, tuba) ensemble. The singer was cute, but that was about all they had going for them. The tuba player dancing around on the side of the stage made me think of the fat kid dancing alone in his room. It was odd.

Then Cake took the stage with a shout of,”We are Cake! We are here to serve YOU!” They played all the standbys. “Short skirt, Long Jacket,” “Never There,” “Shadow Stabbing,” “Frank Sinatra,” “Stickshifts and Safety Belts,” “Italian Leather Sofa,” “Rock and Roll Lifestyle,” “Sheep Go To Heaven,” and many others. They take stuff slow and deliberate in person. That snide, post-whatever, self aware air that I love about them comes through absolutely clear.

At one point the crowd was singing the backup line to “Short Skirt,” and he divided us up left and right, playing one side against the other. “Louder! They hate you! The other side hates you because you’re STRONGER. There is good and there is bad, whether you like it or not! There are people who work hard, and there are people who bitch that other people aren’t working hard enough. LOUDER!”

It was cathartic.

Then, this morning, Judo again. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that I was worked over by three black belts. A nicer way to put it might be to say that I got a series of back-to-back private lessons. It was just the four of us for a two hour workout. As usual, very positive … very well intentioned … and I learned a huge amount.

Still. Worked over. Two hours. Three black belts. I’m gonna go soak.

I feel like I don’t post here very often anymore. It’s not because I’m too busy … heavens … I have plenty of time. I just don’t feel up to it. It’s a combination of the usual winter desire to crawl into a hole and sleep until spring, plus the persistent sadness of a holiday season with an empty seat at the table. Naturally, this is true for every other human being on the planet. There have been empty seats at the table ever since I have been self aware. It’s just that this time it’s more intense.

In good recent news, I have obtained a certificate of compliance for the house in Detroit. This should have been simple … but it wasn’t. With that, and the certificate of rental registration, I believe that we’re fully legal again. Also, there are new windows in the rental flat. Woo hoo! Progress! Of course, the windows were one of those problems that was easily solved by the application of cash.

I made a gingerbread house yesterday. It’s all frosted and covered with decorations. It feels festive, in a “going through the motions” sort of way.

Tomorrow … who knows?

Tonight: Back from a fun evening seeing Natraj with redmed, fanw, and friends. Nothing like a little mad world-music drumming to brighten a cold evening. There was also some interpretive dance from some traditional indian style. I wasn’t as big a fan of that, except as it enabled the drumming. I will now officially go to see anything in which percussionist Jerry Leake performs.

Before that, I napped.

Before that, I had my second workout at Phoenix Judo. This is a judo “club,” that has none of the BS and all of the awesome that I’ve been looking for in a school around here. They’re located in a local health club, and are relatively informal yet very competent. Class today ran from 11am to about 1:30pm … and I learned like a bandit. More on that later.

Last night, fondue with wolftone and his lovely spouse, plus redmed. Later on capital_l and technolope showed up. I think we went through two bottles of homemade wine, a bottle of pinot grigio that was split between the fondue and the glasses, a chardonnay that had to be poured out (badly corked), another chardonnay that was not corked … and then technolope brought over ice wine … and then the tequila came out.

Late notice:

Any and all are welcome to come over for fondue at our place in Braintree this evening (Friday) at around 7pm.

This *was* going to be a Pampered Chef party … but at this point it seems to be collapsing into social even driven almost purely by cheese.

Drop redmed or I a note if you want to come over. chris at dwan dot org.

For technolope, courtesy of atgatg: