From Addison Oaks …

5 families.  13 kids.  Making breakfast every morning for 22 people.  Ripping a worm in half so everyone could fish.  Cutting 50 feet of 1/2 PVC tubing to make marshmallow shooters for everyone.  I ask you, does it get any better than this?  Yes it does–when it’s over.  Next year – I take a nap.

From last week’s Flight of the Conchords, my favorite FotC song!

 We just got a shiny new 17″ laptop to replace the dying Shuttle SFF PC in the office.  The primary reasons for this were:

•  I was sick to death of trying to revive the Shuttle PC (a few months ago I took the entire thing apart, re-seated the CPU with new thermal paste, reformatted the HD, etc, and yet it still it spontaneously re-booted several times a day, usually when my daughter was trying to do something “important” — “Daaaaaaadd!”)
• To get my daughter off my PC in the basement, because the Shuttle was not strong enough (even with a  new graphics card) to play the meaning of her young life, So in my new spirit of “There’s a slim difference between amateur computer enthusiast and banging your head against a wall untl it bleeds,” and trying to be, shall we say, economical, I actually found a swell 17-inch laptop with a standalone graphics card (which is  must-have if you’re going to play any kind of kid’s video game at all).  It’s this baby from Everex via New Egg (the worl’s awesomest online PC supplier), and if you can live with the facts it’s mostly sold overseas and has three backslash keys (\\\!!), for the price you cannot beat it.  I threw in an extra gig of RAM, and voila!  Instant happiness!

Now the kids are happy, the Wife can check her work e-mail, and, most of all, people are leaving dad’s stuff alone!  So it’s a win-win!  So, if you’re ever in the market for a very reasonably priced (aka cheap) laptop with a huuuugescreen, dedicated graphics card, and can live without the panacea of “support” of the major labels (and tons of bloated extra software that comes with it), I can’t recommend this baby enough.  Now, if you’ll excuse me , I have to go to the basement…

PDAs have become mini laptops. The day is not far away when a pda will have the power and features to mimic today’s notebook computer. You may have a toshiba notebook and a pda today but in the future you will have your pda only. You must be thinking a pda keyboard cannot replace a standard keyboard. Well technology can give you a keyboard the size of a coin with the ability to expand to a full size keyboard as you are accustomed to in those sony notebooks. In the future you won’t need a laptop charger because you won’t have a laptop, just kidding!

So I go to make my cappuccino this morning, and the espresso’s a-brewin’, and I reach into the fridge and what comes out but 1/2% milk!  What in the f*&*!?  Who in their right mind imagined this abomination upon the soul of Man, half percent milk?  I mean, I can understand not using whole milk, because it’s got a higher fat content and you’re worried about cholesterol, etc., and I can almost live with 2% milk, because you mostly just add it to into recipes and stuff — but one half of a percent milk?  That’s one half of a percent away from pond water!  And that is pretty much what it tastes like!  It has no flavor (as a matter of fact, it has a negative flavor–it takes away flavor because you are plagued by the nagging sensation “Why does my coffee taste like sh*t?”), it looks like water mixed with paste, it is a pox upon the face of the Earth and should be scourged from our collectives memories like a bad nightmare, like McCarthyism and Deney Terrio..  If you are that desperate to remove fat (aka “flavor”) from your diet – Skip the Cheetos!  Lay off the pie!  Put down that candy bar!  But by the name of all that is holy, pour that 1/2 treacle down the drain and march down to the grocers and demand REAL milk, preferably from the teat of the very cow that bore humanity on its mighty bovine shoulders.

Amen. 

So I come home after a long day and I ask the Wife “Wouldn’t it be nice to take the kids and walk to the pool?”, to which she replies “Wouldn’t it be nice if you bought a replacement belt for the attic fan and installed it in the sweltering heat?” to which I said “Sure!”

We needed a 52″ “V-belt”, so I let my fingers do the walking.  Ace Hardware had none, a representative from Home Depot proudly told me they sold attic fans but had no replacement parts for those fans (why on earth would a home improvement store sell replacement parts, anyway?), and a confused lady at Auto Zone told me unless I had a catalog number (instead of the mystical riddle “52 inch fan belt”) she could not help me, but the awesome folks at Murray’s Discount Auto not only had it, but set it aside for me, and Coop and I picked it up in about 10 minutes for six bucks.

For those of you who have never installed an attic fan belt, you can’t just loop on a new belt between the big wheel that turns the fan and the little wheel on the motor, because they are far enough apart to make the tension to keep the belt on.  Instead, you have to loosen the bolts holding the motor platform to the two rods on either side, sliiiide the motor platform up, attach the belt, then push the motor belt down and re-secure the bolts.   And all his in the sweltering, shadowy, insulation-filled loveliness of your attic.  Piece of cake!

20 minutes later I was done and the fan was working.  There are still some issues with the ceiling vent opening fully when the fan is running (we are theorizing the vents themselves, which seem to be custom-made, may be too heavy to be opened up by the wind pressure), but the manly part is complete (or was complete once I vacuumed up the mess from the insulation out of my closet, stripped off my filthy attic clothes, and took a long shower).

Next up:  Moving the entire house six degrees to the East to improve our Feng Shui. 

Brett and Germaine are just two guys from New Zealand trying to make it in the world of popular music. They have a Manager who manages them during his breaks at the Tourist Bureau of New Zealand. They have a run-down apartment in a bad part of New York. They have one fan, but she’s obsessed with them. The write write very catchy songs and perform them in music videos made up in their own minds. Brett has awesome falsetto. They are Flight of the Conchords, on HBO, or the usual torrent sites. Here is one of my favorite songs by them, “What You’re Into”.  They are easily the second or third best novelty folk duo from New Zealand, hands down.

Turns out you can get the coolest stuff, if you just work at it.  And it’s even easier with machines to help.  Check out BustAName.

For some reason Maddy wanted to join our local swim team, the Pleasant Ridge Pirahanas.  So she’s been at training for a few weeks, and yesterday was her first official meet, and darned if she didn’t do a swell job!  It was an interesting experience, as I’d never been to one of those meets, except to complain (“Why is the pool closed?  Can’t they see I want to go swimming?”)  It’s very well organized, there are at least 40 individual races (with multiple heats) and additional relay races, and the whole thing just zips by.  You can wander around and take your younger kids to the playscape while they run everyone through theor paces, and the ribbons are handed out during the meet and not with some big awards ceremony afterwards.  I only saw one of those dreaded Swim moms screaming at her kid for going too slow.  That was scary and weird.  She’s enthusiastic, so it looks like we’ll be dong some more of this.  I’m especially thrilled about next year’s season, which will start in April and require trucking Maddy to the high school four days a week at 4 PM.  It’s a good thing I don’t have a job–oh, wait!…

More pictures here. 

 More books here.

 Been listening a lot to the boxed set CITIZEN STEELY DAN (though in this era of the iPod, is anything really “boxed”?  Let’s call it a “virtual” box) , which collects everything they did from the beginning up to their reunion a few years ago.  Like the fair-weather fan I am, I’ve always loved “the hits” and the one album I used to listen to a lot as a teenager, “Katy Lied”.  My comments are as follows:

Good Things About Steely Dan

1. Catchy songs with excellent melodies and “jazzy” chord progression and harmonies
2. Really awesome guitar solos by Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, esp. “Reelin’ In The Years”, “My Old School”, etc.
3. Runic lyrics that can be interpreted in a variety of ways (though I’m fairly certain “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” is about discovering you are gay, and “Bad Sneakers” is about being an undercover cop)
4. Cool, clever cats

Bad Things About Steely Dan:

1. They were very much “studio” musicians, who rarely played live at this point in their ouvre, so their songs are to my mind ”too” perfect, and they never really cut loose (or if they do “cut loose”, it’s on overdub 2,134, take 6, track 2)
2. Runic lyrics are a world unto themselves, to the point where you need this Steely Dan lyrical interpetation site.
3. They are so clever they wrote “Everyone’s Gone To The Movies”,which is about showing underage children 8mm pornographic films.  And while I used to think that was clever and hep, as I get older and a little more worried about my own kids, I have to wonder — does the world really need another toe-tapping song about pedophilia (cf. Gary Pucket’s “Young Girl Get Out Of My Life”, Andre Williams “Jail Bait”, and every song Chuck Berry every wrote)?  Then again–it sure is catchy!