Author: cdwan

Well, fall is upon us. I’m either drugged or sneezing. It’s awesome.

Flying back to Norfolk (pronounced “Naw-fuck”) Virginia today to do the second round of work with NASA. I’m back on Wed night.

Friday, Jen and I fly to Michigan to become Godparents for Z, and M’s new daughter, D. Along the way, I hope to catch up with _earthshine_, since I haven’t seen him in person since his wedding. Depending on how the scheduling realities on the ground turn out, maybe I can catch up with some other MI folks as well.

Finished one of the two sets of stairs on the deck yesterday. The ones we finished are “open stringers,” which means that you nail the treads on top of a zig-zag cut board. Dead simple. I tried to create “closed stringers” for the other ones, and wound up muttering profanity to myself, in the rain. I’m *sure* I can make it work … I just wasn’t able to do so yesterday.

That was the state when robotify, technolope, and capital_l showed up bearing wine and cheese to rescue me. We had a fun time sitting around, watching TED videos (as well as videos of baby pandas, sneezing), and then eating way too much asian food.

I made a recipe out of my new book, “Successful winemaking at home,” the “carrot whiskey. In point of fact, it’s a wine made from carrots, plus 4 pounds of sugar, some wheat, some raisins, plus oranges and lemons. So, it’s 100% weird, if not 100% carrot. It’s also not distilled. Don’t ask me, I just do the cooking. In any event, redmed has proposed that I add a product line to the “Sign of the Goat” brewery – the “fowl hooch” imprint. The logo may well be a chicken looking quizzically at a carrot, or something.

We got the skirting on the deck today, and purchased the remaining materials for the stairs. We abandoned the “cement pad” idea, and are instead going to simply tack the stringers to the ground. Wheeee. The dude at Home Depot managed to irritate me by proposing an entirely different approach and then reproaching me because I was buying the wrong things for his solution. Yeah, see … I’ve already got it half built, my way, buddy …

Also primed the fence on the East side of the property. The clean paint job really highlights how far those neighbors have let their house go. Maybe it’ll just fall down or something … though that usually takes a few more years from what I’ve seen.

People are coming over tomorrow to play with power tools and hang out. Come on down.

For all my statistics-lovin’, concerned-about-the-human-condition homeboys out there, you should consider looking in on Hans Rosling. Though he is not as physically attractive as you, he is both more articulate and smarter than you.

Or at least, than me. Judge for yourself. Go watch the TED talk, then go to http://gapminder.org and play with his software.

Would that I had such vision.

I slept until, like, 9:40 this morning. Apparently, I was wiped out from being onsite. This almost always happens. I opened my laptop this morning to see this, which I had forgotten that I had written while leaned up against the outer wall of some airline’s “gold elite” club, sucking their free wireless signal:

The heaviness hits at the airport, or on the airplane. The feeling is compounded by a heavy, greasy dinner from under a heat lamp. I know what this will do to me, but my body demands calories. I snort at the rubber tomatoes and plastic lettuce of yesterdays salads … the ageless, preserved sushi under the blinding LEDs. I feel the bitter slap at my guts of that one final cup of coffee, timed to support the drive home after we land. I yearn for the empty calories of an ice cream cone.

I noticed this afternoon that my dress pants are worn through. Warp and weft have split at the knees. The cuffs hold on in a dotted line, but have parted for about half the circumference of my ankle. Soon, my heels will start to catch in the gap, after I forget again and hang the pants back up rather than rendering them into rags. I wonder what else I’m forgetting to throw away. What other trash I’m confusing with my nice things … and vice versa.

So yeah, I go all whiny and emo from time to time too, apparently.

Anyway, it’s raining, and I’m going to walk up to my first karate class in weeks.

–UPDATE–

GDMF: The furnace repair guy just showed up. I had totally forgotten that I had scheduled him. No karate for me, and I’m onsite again next week. I should just give back my most recent belt … I’m going to have to re-learn it anyway.

Work done: Beer me.

Oh yeah, the directions from my hotel indicate that I should turn left on “Lumpkin St”. No kidding. “Lumpkin.” Im a’ take a picture.

For the interested, things are going much more smoothly this morning. I attribute it to a combination of “daylight,” and “sleep.”

Well that sucked, but it’s over now.

I’ve been around, and I thought I had seen most of the behaviors of airports. Here’s a new one: I was in the Providence airport and the power went out. Eventually, backup generators kicked in and the display boards rebooted, but everything else remained off, except the infernal mood music. Planes kept flying, security kept screening, but Dunkin’ Doughnuts couldn’t heat their coffee or run their registers. Odd.

In totally unrelated news, my flight was delayed. This got me in to Atlanta around 10:15, and thence out to ghetto-rent-a-car (motto: “hey, we’re cheap!”) by around 10:45. The Atlanta airport is, I think, the worst designed airport in the entire world. It’s a long “I” structure, except with extra crossbars. Each crossbar is a concourse, and you take a train to get from any of them to any other. Maybe I was just grumpy, but I hated it.

I also hated the drive. By the time I got on the road, I was functioning on about half the ‘ole brain-pistons, and I wound up taking a wrong turn between Atlanta and Athens. Under optimal conditions, it should have taken 1.5 hours. Instead, I just got here after 2.5 hours of driving. Bah.

Impression of Athens: Party town. I rolled through campus at 1:15am on a Tuesday night, and the main street was kickin’. It strikes me as quite similar to Ann Arbor, both in size and in proximity to a big, gritty city.

More later. Now I sleep.

Wow. Orange alerts suck.

I made it through security in decent time. Everyone was really cheerful and friendly, but they’ve upped the ante to “all shoes must be removed.” I’m actually in something of a rush, or else I might have used words like “decline” and “disrobe,” but I don’t really want to know what that would bring down.

So, chalk one up for cowardice, I suppose … but I let the man see my footsies. Security is starting to get a locker room funk.

Hey, at least I get to buy new toothpaste and shaving cream when I get to Atlanta. That’ll be *fun*.

Went on the fishing trip today. It was a total junket, but that’s okay. I’ll post pictures at some point. We retained 8 “stripers” of legal size, and released a heck of a lot more. I felt sort of bad about the whole “killing sentient beings” aspect of it … but if I’m going to eat fish, I need to be okay with killing fish. The funniest part was when our captain “made an example” of a seagull. The gulls would steal our bait, including attacking the ones with hooks in them. When they became pests he would cast out, a gull grabbed the bait (not hooking itself, just hanging on), and he would reel the bird in. If it took to the air, he called it a “kite.” On land, they were the “beach chicken.” Anyway, he would reel the bird in, with it glaring at him the whole time. When it was close enough, he would grab it by the neck and hold it up for the others to see.

“Look! Look at what happens! Do you see? See what happens! Get out of here!”

He would then rap the bird on the head with his fingers, saying “bad bird! Go!” and toss it back in the water.

Birds did not mess with us.

Ate one half of one of the striper fillets this evening. 20 minutes on the grill (skin side down) with a light crust of grey salt, rosemary, and basil. It was, no kidding, some of the best fish I’ve ever had in my entire life. Another fillet was rendered into seveche, and a third went to the neighbors. We’ve got a fourth … whose fate is uncertain.

I’m sitting next to my new laptop. It’s a Dual core Intel “MacBook Pro”. Naturally, I have to repartition the hard drive so I can dual boot it with windows and tweak everything to my liking. I am *so* geeked out about this machine.

Tomorrow: Georgia.