Carolers - or, I really ought to fix my doorbell.
Current mood: embarrassed
Category: Life

So I'm sitting here workin on a site for a friend of mine, and I hear a knock, I assume for the people next door.  I look up and it looks like they are indeed next door, whoever they are, and I go back to typing.  The forced-air gas furnace is blowing hot air all around our house, but under that, I kind of hear Christmas music. 

I didn't think much of it until I got up from my seat to get some milk, and on my way back, I notice a pile of carolers outside our house, making their way back to the street.  I have my porch light on, I'm sitting right there, but as anyone who would even read this knows, I've completely revamped the first floor of my house, which included nice new windows and doors that reduce the sound from outside dramatically! 

I'm sure they saw me get up to get some milk in the middle of their caroling.  Mel's asleep on the couch next to me, and missed the whole somewhat embarrassing close encounter.  I am a social retard, through and through.  It's what comes naturally to me.  I'd love to write it off and say that maybe they would try and get me to come out with them or invite me to their church, but it's really so much more harmless than that.  It was really sweet of whoever they were to sing to me, barely audibly, while I sat and very plainly ignored them.  Jeez.

While I've got this open, if you're in Philadelphia tomorrow (Thursday night) we're having a party at Weblinc's bar, National Mechanics, starting around 8pm.  Stop on by and say hi, the lot of us are going to be up pretty late.

5:31 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Tchai Iced Tea

1) Boil water in a kettle of some variety.
2) Add two fat spoons of raw sugar to the bottom of a nice, tall, pilsner-sized glass.
3) Pour boiling water about halfway up the glass, and stir the sugar until it's all been absorbed into the water. 
4) Add two teabags of delicious chai tea, stir vigorously, then let steep for about five minutes.
5) Remove teabags, (almost) fill the rest of the glass up with ice. 
6) Add sweetened, condensed milk on top of the ice, then mix it in nice & good.  (You don't want the bottom of your cup to be much lighter than the rest of it)
7) Imbibe sweet concoction.
8) Forego sleep for hours and hours as a result of high caffeine and sugar content.

10:32 AM - 3 Comments - 3 Kudos - Add Comment

Tech toys and recent happenings.

Weblinc (my very cool place of employment) bought everyone 8gb iPhones the week after they came out.  Combine this with my laptop's power supply's sudden lack of ability to charge my battery, and this is part of why I haven't really been interacting with anyone beyond email.  Work excluded.

I think the iPhone is about as good as the hype.  Email's a little bit clunky, and there's no auto-dial functionality (Yeah, I used voice-dialing on my old Nokia), but everything else on it completely makes up for that.  The only other downside is the attention it gets me on the train.  It's like a really cheesy commercial.  "Excuse me, but can you surf the web on that and listen to music at the same time?"

On my way to that train station yesterday, I spotted a Google Street View camera car (and snapped a photo of it with my iPhone -- yeah, yeah, I'm that guy.  Look, I don't own a Mac nor do I dabble in Linux.)  I sent the photo in to Gizmodo and now they want everyone to send photos in.

NIN Hotline shirts arrived in the mail a week or so ago -- nice quality, although the printing company in charge botched the logos on the black ones.  They still look alright, but not as cool as they were supposed to look.  Shirts are so much more hassle than they're worth.  Part of me thinks it would be fun to break down and get my own silk screen set (finally!) and just do short-run one-off designs of, say, 10-25 shirts at a time.  But even that would be kind of overwhelming.

What else. Destroyed the first floor of the house a week or two ago (lots of horse hair plaster & old wood lathe), and have since rewired the first floor lighting and second floor electrical, and replaced most of the ceiling with sheetrock.  Good times.

Been reading "TOUR:SMART" by Martin Atkins and several dozen (hundred?) contributers.  A good read, should be required reading if you're just now starting to play shows as a band, or even if you've been doing it for a while.  It's probably even better reading if you're interested in managing a band.  I do miss playing out with Slow Andy, but all the musicians I know out here play classical instruments, and with the house, I'm not sure I'd even have time to play out.  On that note, Tony came out two or three weeks ago and we worked one of a handful of tracks that he's been playing with for a while.  Added a new section, laid down some drums, but that's about all we accomplished.  I think it's pretty good, but still has to be fleshed out.  He's definitely made a lot of progress over the past few years, maybe in the next month or two I can coax him back out here to work on it some more.  (Did you read coax as co-axial too?)

Three or four of the houses on our street are undergoing renovation of various degrees.  This is very good.  I'm quite pleased to see our little neighborhood between the park & the church undergoing some upscaling.

On the downside of things (WARNING: HOMEOWNER BLATHERING AHEAD), the awesome deal I got on a circuit breaker panel has been downgraded to a muttered-under-breath "goddamnit" upon researching and discovering that this Sylvania/GTE box is a rebranded Zinsco panel, which, from everything I've read online so far, is probably a worse fire hazard than our fuse box.  Fuck!  Maybe we can make our $40 back on eBay :p  Upgrading the electrical will have to wait until some other day...

Finally -- Myspace messaging is completely retarded.  Why is it I cannot select messages from my inbox and mark them all as spam/abuse?  I don't want to read robo-Natatia's bot-greeting, encouraging me to click on her photos.  Fuck off!   

8:01 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Shit-tonnes of Slow Andy videos.

Since 95% of my friends on MySpace haven't been to a Slow Andy gig, I point you to Myspace.com/slowandy where we have a video blog featuring all kinds of shit, from our first gig ever, footage from recording our covers CD in 2002, live videos from the Hardware Bar, Field of Screams, and Murph's Other Bar, and other crap like that.

I think there's even a montage clip set to the 'studio' version of Codename: Trixie.   Check it out.

P.S. - We're playing a free 21+ gig at Smalls in Harrisburg on Friday.  I realize that no one online really comes to Slow Andy gigs (Except for Anita, woo!) but I figured I'd post this anyway.

8:18 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Why haven't I written back to anyone? Because of this.

Two weeks ago, half of the back of our house looked like this.
One week ago, we tore that down and put plywood up, and installed a new door.
This past weekend, after munching turkey with family & friends, we put up new vinyl siding, fascia/soffit, and a PVC gutter.  Now the house looks like this:

And that's just the short version of what happened.  We spent maybe $300 total, replacing the wood siding with a new exterior wall, foam-board insulated on the outside and batted on the inside, and a whole lot of PVC/vinyl.  Now from another direction, water won't be able to rot away the kitchen like it had in the past.

In the future, that concrete patio may resemble a deck with an arbor over it. Or maybe we'll get lazy and just tile it.  Either way, doing this shit correctly ourselves beats the pants off paying contractors to fuck it up.

It'll be fun to do a nice big before & after photo album, once this house is looking nice all around.

Also, I totally wouldn't have done this by myself.  I've got the best wife EVAR.  

8:33 PM - 7 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Metropolitan job markets rule.
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers

Working in York, PA, I often heard people say "You should work in Baltimore, you can make a lot more money."  I didn't much like Baltimore though, and it seemed like a big commute, especially if I lived in York.  The best I could do to limit that would be to move back to Shrewsbury, which is where I was trying to get away from, particularly now that it's the poster-village for Suburban Sprawl.

Well, having moved to Downingtown, I reluctantly engaged in the job hunt.  I always dreaded looking for jobs in York, and most of the ones I landed were via word of mouth. 

Well, on Craiglist alone, I've found enough jobs to apply to -- two to five relevent new listings each day -- and none of them pay less than $45k/yr for the work I'm looking to do.  It's really kind of amazing to me, considering I was making all of $13/hr when I left Affinigent. 

In fact, I spent most of today just filling out applications and sending off my resume.  The IT market in Philly is phenomenal right now.  I've had a couple of interviews, and can't wait to actually start making money again.  Mortgages don't pay themselves, after all.

So yeah, for some reason, I felt like posting that somewhere. 

1:51 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

I can't see in three dee. Or I couldn't, until recently.

I'm going to be really cheesy here for a little bit.  I think it's hokey when people say "such-and-such-band changed my life" - I think I can honestly say that Nine Inch Nails really has changed my life for the better in more ways than I can name off.  It's really awesome.

Now I think I might be able to say that Tool has changed my life.  Their latest album, 10,000 Days, had a somewhat gimmicky package, as the last two Tool albums have had.  This one had a bunch of stereo-optic images and a little pair of glasses to view them with.  It worked, I bought the album despite having downloaded it weeks before the release and not really being that into it.

The stereo-optic thing, that was pretty cool, but it took me quite a while to get my eyes to focus correctly and make things pop-out.  And boy did they pop-out!  It was cool, and reminded me a bit of those red Viewmaster (I think that's the name) things that I had when I was a kid. 

Now for a little aside.  In recent years, I've theorized that my depth pereception wasn't quite what everyone elses might be.  Dianosing irregularities of the senses is always difficult, because you can't really describe something correctly.  That whole "What if your perception of green looks red to other people, even though you all call that same light wavelength 'green'" stuff.  I've always sucked at baseball, for instance.  I don't think I've ever hit a baseball in flight.  Those magic eye things, where you have to stare past the poster to see the hidden shape?  Never worked, ever.  The closest I could get was to cross my eyes (staring at my nose, rather than staring past the poster) and I'd see an inverted 3D shape, but it was supposed to pop-out, not pop-in.  I hadn't thought about it much until recently, really.

And now, back to my lame blog.  Mel came home and looked at the artwork, and immediately saw the pop-up stuff.  Like, she put it up to her eyes, and was like, "Oh, that's kind of cool."  I, on the other hand, still had to hold it up to my face, and spend five minutes focusing on the wallpaper behind one of the band members to make this effect take form.

The other week, I heard an interesting story on NPR.  (Imagine that.)  There was a lady who talked about how she was cross-eyed as a kid, and wasn't able to see in three dimensions, and despite research on the topic saying that if you can't do that by childhood, you'll never regrow those neurons, she tried some daily eye excercises and developed the ability to see depth!  There was some quote of her talking to her doctor, him saying "Do you think you could imagine what it'd be like?" with her responding in the affirmative, only to come down the road years later, calling him up saying "I thought I could imagine it, but I was wrong, it's so much better than I imagined!"

Since getting the Tool CD, I've been having 'flashes' of depth.  Every now and then, I can see it, but if I move too much, I lose it.  It's a bit like lucid dreaming.  Tonight, I'm sitting in my ghettolicious bedroom in Downingtown (we'll be redoing the upstairs later, downstairs comes first -- photos coming soon) and I held up a mirror to see how my hillbilly shave came out.  (Jordan helped me take out the kitchen sink, and the bathroom's not happening as quickly as initially planned, so I went out back and shaved my face with a disposable razor and the garden hose.)

Holding the mirror up, I noticed that everything in it was 'popped-out' like the 10,000 Days artwork.  I'm sitting up here tilting the mirror and looking at things like the door, the trash bag on the floor, the mattress, with the kind of feeling I imagine people must have felt when full color movies or photography came out. 

I'm still not able to really see depth yet.  I'm working on it, doing some excercizes based off what that lady on NPR talked about.  It's kind of bizarre, having gone through twenty-six years of my life not fully sensing the world as I should have.  But having it slowly switch on now is also kind of a treat. 

THERE IS A MORAL TO THIS STORY.  I was not born cross-eyed, to the best of my knowledge. However, when I was a kid, I was an odd kid.  I would cross my eyes really, really hard, to freak out the other odd kids I hung out with.  I did a trick where I'd cross my eyes, and appear to only move one of my eyes.  I crossed my eyes better than anyone else.

Well, apparently if you make a funny face, it really fucking does stick.

Look for my next blog when I meet Santa Clause face to face.  Or when I post photos of the process of renovating this house.  I've learned how to impersonate an electrician, solder pipes like a real live plumber, and today, repaired the joists under my kitchen, installing a vapor barrier and preparing to lay a new subfloor... blah blah blah.

I'm such a homeowner.

7:17 PM - 10 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

Slow Andy. Tears for Agnes. Getting back on track.

So I happen to have lucked out and have a really rad family.  My sister, Erin, found out that her friend Casey's brother, Cory, who coincidentally is buds with my brother, Ryan, was a drummer looking for a band.  This was good, as I was in a band looking for a drummer, with little success.

We had our first proper practice with Cory on Sunday, and he ripped it up pretty well for not having played with us before, and probably being as rusty as, well, the rest of us in Slow Andy.  He also happens to be a really cool guy, which is even better than the fact that he drums well, because as much as we like music in Slow Andy, the real reason we're still playing after five or so years is because we're a bunch of pals who get along.  It forces social interaction, gets people out of the house, and lets me work on my rhythm, and all that, but it's also an excuse to hang out with cool people.

We haven't played out in half a year.  I'm really, really, really, really itching to play a show.  At the rate practice is going, I'm pretty confident that if we wanted to gig some opening slots, we could do that within a month.  That first show is going to be a loooot of fun.  Playing bass is fun, and I'm dying to turn my bass amp up, and force Scott to unleash the power of his Marshall in order to compete.

What's kind of unusual is Cory apparently used to have a tape of my first musical outing, thePFS, something I did with a very talented guy named Dan Dannenberg when we were both in high school -- he in Alabama, me in PA.  I hooked Cory up with a Tears for Agnes CD -- hey, maybe I can convince him to drum on some future tracks with that project.

Speaking of, Jordan's really been kicking ass in that field.  He got our CDbaby activated, mailed out CDs, and it sounds like he's really getting his shit in gear.  He's got no shortage of music, and if I can ever get my feet on the ground, we're going to put out an album or EP of shorter, more abstract pieces.  Might even be a DVD, if I can get my shit together in time.

Tony's been working with Jordan on some stuff, new and old.  Definitely coming a long way since jamming out on Jordan's bed with midi and an acoustic playing into a PC microphone.

The slow andy stuff is kind of focusing again.  There's at least a blur of activity with tears for agnes.  Maybe this year will be another flurry of activity for both of 'em.  I hope so, but there's a lot of other crap going on. 

Also, if you're reading this and want a tears for agnes CD and you're local, now is the time to get one, because I'm shipping the rest of my stock off to CDbaby in preparation for pimping on teh interwebs.  Should be on iTunes ANY MONTH NOW.

7:20 PM - 3 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Nose goblins, argh

I was just in the bathroom to blow my nose.  During the process, I felt/heard a rather solid snot rocket eject from my nostril.  Looking into the tissue, it was nowhere to be found.  Has this happened to you before?  This thing could be anywhere.   

Thought I'd share.

12:27 PM - 3 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

I had a lucid dream finally. Sort of.

It snowed a decent amount lastnight, and Mel was sick and having trouble sleeping - she had a very long day, and a lot on her mind, I'm sure - and somhow this combination resulted in me waking up at 7:30am to the sound of my cellphone's alarm, looking outside, seeing snow, and going back to sleep.

The next time I wake up, it's because the cat's making noise.  I had let her out of the room earlier, when my cellphone had gone off, but when I got up to let her in, she walked around the curtain, apparently she was just making noise to be a pain.  I looked at my alarm clock and it was 10:35am, and when I looked out the window, all the snow had melted away.  Feeling as though I'd blown it, I went back to bed and back to sleep.

It was here that I had my lucid dream.  Or at least, as close as I've come to one.  I dreamt I was in some kind of (cliche, I realize) virtual world, metaverse, cyberspace, matrix whatever, and I was trying to get away from someone who was trying to start trouble.  At some point I meet up with my brother, who's driving a Colt, but when we get out to the parking lot to stow some stuff before we go, he jumpes through the windshield to get in, and it's not a hatchback so much as an old station wagon, on the inside.

I wake up again, and it's 10:45am, and go back to sleep.

In my dream, now, I'm at some seaside city, working on getting this hidden springboard thing to work while some people I know are watching.  The trick is that in order to stay in the air longer, I have to not think about it, just do it.  And it was pretty vivid, flying out past the buildings, the sound of the wind in my ears, the disappointing feeling when I accidentally thought about it and began to fall, only to land on something and return to the springboard and try again, getting further each time.

I knew that I was dreaming, and that what I was doing was unreal, but that I had some element of control of it, but I didn't fall out of the dreamstate upon realization of this -- unlike any other time I've had decently realistic dreams.

When I regain consciousness, it's a little after 9am.  There's actually a lot of snow outside.  Now I'm at work, but I had to type this up before I forgot.

I guess in order for me to have and control lucid dreams, I need to be dreaming within a dream - an insulating extra level of subsconsciousness, or some such malarky.  

It's cold outside.        

7:57 AM - 5 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment