DRM-free music on iTunes is here. Well, mostly. It's a start, anyway.

link to this | comments (0) | File:  iTunes  Music 

First, there are the lists. And lists of lists. And sub-lists. And endless ordering and re-ordering of the lists, the things that need doing. The stuff that needs purchasing, for example. That's a big one. And it's one of the Six P's. See, we close on the house tomorrow. And after that, there's the Six P's. They start with the grunt work: painting, packing, porting. Then there's the practical stuff. A little plumbing, along with some powering, because there's an electrician coming out at some point. And that brings us back to purchasing. All of these P words are bound together by one other: pain. And that's especially true with the purchasing. The endless sweaty craze of purchasing. 'Separation anxiety' is one phrase that comes to mind, though I don't think the term is meant to be applied to one's wallet.

But it's necessary, the purchasing, unless we want to live in an empty house. Because, for the first time, we're upsizing and it feels kind of weird. In the past, we've had to sell things every time we move so that we'll fit into our new spaces. But now we have strange new spaces with names like 'Dining Room' and 'Office.' And some areas don't even have names yet. So we just use phrases like 'Back Bedroom,' or 'The Small Room.'

I'm just glad to know C and I actually have a nesting instinct. Because I was beginning to think we were genetically handicapped in this regard. I guess we're just late bloomers. Because we've definitely sprouted one of those things. Big time. And it's kind of making me crazy. All this nesting is tiring stuff. Because, let me tell you, there is this matter of the love seat. And you'd think, how hard could that be? The answer is tremendously. Because we've got very specific criteria for this thing. Width. Color. Aura. It's all been decided. It's in the cards. And now we just need to locate the right one. Only somebody's tossed 'em all across the room, willy-nilly. And actually, if I could, I'd do all kinds of things 'willy-nilly' as long as it gave me the opportunity to use the word 'willy-nilly' in a sentence. So the cards, yeah, they're willy-nilly, and it's not just one deck, it's twenty. And you can only look at one card at a time then you've got to throw it back in the pile. Willy-nilly.

But you keep at it, man. Because this shit is important. This is, after all, where you're going to be resting your ass for the next several years. And you want it to be comfortable, right? Exactly.

So, right now BoConcept is a very strong contender, mainly because their sofas look great and you can customize them to your liking. But it's also nice that you can order one and have it delivered in a reasonable amount of time. We've had two primary problems with the love seat. One is that nobody seems to make small love seats anymore. It's all huge sofas. And we're selling our huge sofa this week. We don't need another. The other problem is delivery time. Did you know that if you don't want one of the pre-made models at stores like Crate & Barrel or Pottery Barn or any furniture store really, you're looking at waiting 3-4 months for your furniture to arrive. This is unacceptable in the I-want-it-right-now age of the Internet.

We did knock out one big decision this weekend: the area rug, which we found at this great rug place out in Sterling Virginia. If you're in DC and looking for just the right area rug, you should definitely check out RugHome. They have a great selection of contemporary and oriental area rugs. But what sets them apart is the level of service they provide. They're very knowledgeable and helpful and will take the time to help you find the right thing. So we got the rug yesterday, which is great because now we have a template of colors that we can use to choose paint for the living room.

We've also got to decide on a primary piece of art for the dining room so we can select colors for that room, too. We've narrowed it down to a few Rothko's. We'll just have to see which one looks good in the space tomorrow when we do our final walk-through.

And now I have to give giant kudos to C. She's putting a lot of thought and effort into this whole decorating process, which is good, because I've discovered I only have a limited amount of patience for it. It's because I want to hurry up and get to the good stuff, like looking for a new stereo!

Some photos to come later this week . . .

link to this | comments (1) | File:  House 

One thing I'll miss when we move to Bawlmer is the sound of choppers up and down Mass Ave during Memorial Day weekend as the Harley's arrive in DC for operation Rolling Thunder. Vroom!

link to this | comments (1) | File:  DC 

Bloggers tend to blog about this subject ad nauseam, particularly people who have just started blogging. So it pains me a bit to go down this road. But what the hell. At the risk of making people sick, I have to now jot down a few words on this here blog about - here it goes - the act of jotting down a few words on this here blog. Don't you love it? Blogging is so self-referential. It's the perfect medium for a postmodernist-leaning, Gen-Xer such as myself.

I've felt a bit muzzled lately. Muzzled, as in restrained, like the the thing that goes over the snout of a dog. Not muzzle as in a Muzzle of Bees, which is a Wilco song. Or just plain old Muzzle, which is a Smashing Pumpkins song. Sorry, but the Mellon Collie recently found its way onto my iPod for some reason, which might explain some of the Infinite Sadness, of late. And, holy moly, have I mentioned that the new Wilco CD, Sky Blue Sky is really, really good? Really.

Crap. You see? This muzzling - it's got me all crazy-like. Makes me all scattered in the brain. And a bit skittish. I mean, even more than usual.

But let me get back to the issue at hand: the fact that these words I'm writing are up here and out there and every other term you can think of for 'publicly available,' and indexed, and devastatingly searchable, archived - potentially - for years and years. Sometimes that reality is just a little bit overwhelming, especially when you see it backfire on some people in not-so-positive ways. There's so much talk about how the things you write online might turn off an employer or client or, in the case of singles, a potential date. Luckily, I'm not worried about the latter, but the former does cross my mind from time to time - the fact that there may be potential clients out there who have Googled me, found this blog, and written me off because, you know, who wants to work with a guy who writes about having an ultrasound done on his right testicle?

Of course the flip side of this, is that putting yourself out there in words and pictures (no, there are no ultrasound pics, sorry) may help you find people who actually get your personality and sense of humor, and this could lead to some much better working relationships. However, if I were to find a date based on the aforementioned post, I might be a little - what's the word - terrified. The bottom line is you can't think about it. Otherwise, it's hard to write anything at all without editing it to death, which goes for just about any writing, really. But with blogs it's kind of part and parcel of the whole medium, because there tends to be a kind of 'urgency' ingrained in the very style of the thing. It's a get-this-out-there-now, editing-is-for-wimps kind of mentality. But here's a little confession: I edit all of my posts. Here's another: there are many, many things I've written for this blog which I've never posted. And finally: It's not uncommon for me to spend a couple of days writing something to put here.

This all might make me a little uncool in blogging circles (as if the testicle/ultrasound thing hadn't done that already). And it's part of the reason I'll never be an 'A-List' blogger. There are actually several other reasons: I post too infrequently, my posts are way too long, and I'm a male 'personal blogger,' quite possibly the lowest life-form in the Blogosphere. And right now, I'm muzzled. Which makes everything worse.

It's times like these that call for photos instead of words. So here are three new galleries I've been meaning to post for a while now, two final ones from our trip to Japan this spring, and one final 'Before and After' gallery for our bathroom. I will now go back to being muzzled.

Japan Trip - Osaka
Our trip to Osaka, where we come across painted manholes, Panchinko and accidentally venture into the red light district.

Japan Trip - Nagoya
We spend a couple of days with Mitch and Naoko in Nagoya. We catch a baseball game, go to Starbucks, shop at the local Mac store, and eat burgers. Such a strange and different world from being in the States.

Bathroom Remodel - Start to Finish
One final gallery for the bathroom. A lot of people have seen some of these pics already, but I figured I'd put them all in one place, the before, during, and after.

link to this | comments (3) | File:  Blog  Writing 

Monday it was sunny, but cool, with a pleasant breeze. I grabbed my camera and walked south on 10th. At F, I remembered a recent post Reya had made, and so I jutted over to 8th to take a quick peek at the street painting there. Then I walked by the Navy Memorial, where some elementary school kids were giving a performance of music and dance. I grabbed a sandwich at the FBI Cosi and headed across Pennsylvania, over to 12th and down past the IRS building, across Constitution, to the Mall, where I claimed a park bench just east of the 12th street tunnel. I ate my Ginger Chicken on whole grain and took some pictures and thought about "place" and how it's supposed to be not where, but who you're with that really matters. How for the most part that's true. But sometimes. Sometimes where you are makes all the difference. And it's kind of an inscrutable thing, the sense of connection you can feel with a place. It's not something you can easily point to, and it doesn't always make sense. It's not necessarily a factor of time spent, or nativity, though it could be. It's something about the air in a place - the way it touches your senses. The way it feels.

As I ate, people walked past, and I listened to the strange temporal quality of their footsteps. The way they suddenly came into my aural bubble, and just as suddenly vanished. One moment they were there, in front of me, belonging to that person. These feet on gravel. The next minute they were gone, along with the person who brought them. These footsteps. Now quiet.

A girl stepped up to where I was sitting. She introduced herself and said she was from WAMU, the local NPR station. She asked if I would mind speaking into her digital recorder the answer to two questions: 1) my name and 2) what it means to me to be an American. And I said sure, because why not? Even though I had no real clue what the hell I was going to say. I mean, I knew my name, which was a start. But I had no idea how to respond to the America thing. And the truth is that there was no real answer for that question. It was just one of those fluff questions that people ask on TV or radio shows and it doesn't have any real significance. In order to provide me with a visual cue, she had written the questions in ALL CAPS on a folded piece of lined paper. She handed it to me. I joked about the pressure. "Just use the paper," she said. "But the paper doesn't have the answers," I felt like saying.

Then she pressed a button and I spoke my name into the mic and, after a couple of nervous tongue and teeth clicking noises, which were painfully loud and clear to me, I said that . . . "well, I was sitting here on the Mall in DC on a sunny, but cool afternoon, eating a sandwich I'd bought at Cosi, thinking about this place, and I guess it was that. That was what it meant to me to be an American: the ability to do this thing I was doing, which I didn't do nearly enough, and which I suddenly felt I should have done much more while I lived a twenty-minute walk away, instead of taking this place for granted every day, eating lunch in my apartment alone, using the excuse of not enough time or two much work. And damn, I regret that. And do you ever feel like you're not living life, you know, correctly? Like maybe you're worrying about the wrong things?"

That's what I said. Or something like it. Okay, maybe not those last couple of things about regret and worry. But I was thinking them. Whatever I said, I'm a little embarrassed now to think about it because, well, it didn't get to the heart of the matter. It was fluff. A fluff reply for a fluff question. Oh well, I guess I was feeling fluffy. And who knows, she might have been in the mood for fluff. And my fluff response might be on Metro Connections on NPR around July 4th. Fluff, immortalized. For the sake of radio everywhere, let's hope not.

The girl smiled politely, thanked me and, as we engaged in some small talk, she packed up her recorder and cue card. Then we exchanged farewells and she walked on to the next populated bench. And her footsteps disappeared, just like the others. And before long, I began to question whether or not she and I had even interacted. And as I sat there under the shade of a tree branch, alone, with my camera in my lap, my balled up sandwich bag and bottle of water next to me, looking off toward the Capitol, I felt a little like crying. Because place is never permanent, and sometimes that feels tragic. Because of the lonely temporal quality of, not just footsteps, but just about everything.

link to this | comments (2) | File:  Radio  DC  Chewing 

An excellent interview with Matt Mullenweg, WordPress Creator, on the state of blogging: Part 1 | Part 2. (Thanks, Mat)

link to this | comments (0) | File:  Blog 

Okay, call me over-reactionary, but I'm throwing away my Centrum as I write this . . . (via Laundro)

link to this | comments (1) | File:  Health 

I don't really know the best way to say this. I've tried about twenty different sentences. Which is ridiculous. Because it's pretty simple, really. So I'm just going to say it: We just bought a house in Baltimore. Or to put it more accurately: we just reached an agreement on a house in Baltimore. There's still a few things to attend to. There are a few more initials we need to put on the offer we made yesterday. Then there are the inspections. And details on loans to work out. But that part's easy. The hard part, the negotiations, are over.

And so 'excitement' is one word you could use to describe my frame of mind right now. 'Elation' might be another. 'Relief.' There are several words, actually. And I'm plagued by a condition where I can't really decide what to do next. I tried pouring a scotch. I took a sip and then, inexplicably, I dumped it out. It didn't seem like the right occasion. Which is strange because I didn't know there could be a wrong occasion for scotch. It's amazing the things you learn in life. Sure enough, there could be. And this was it. What this called for was not scotch, but a cup of green tea. Because I wanted a bit of the mellowness to wash over me, but with just a touch of the alertness. Let me repeat that. Because it seems like a good thing to do. A bit of the mellowness. A touch of the alertness. Got it? Good.

And so, I'm sitting here, trying to remember simple things, like how to construct a sentence without using the clever turn of phrase, "Holy mother of God I can't believe it!", or how to sip from a mug without laughing and dribbling green tea - with a bit of the mellowness and an intsy bitsy touch of the alertness - all over my chest. Or how to stop bobbing my head to the music blaring dangerously loud in my headphones. Or how to stop smiling like the Cheshire Cat. Or how to pass in front of the full-length mirror on our closet door without dancing (just a little) to Aqueduct: Hardcore Days and Softcore Nights as it shuffles onto my iPod.

And right now it's 11:56 pm Thursday night and I'm waiting for C to freakin' land in Los Angeles, already, where she has gone to watch her sister graduate college. Because this is some exciting fucking news, you dig? Like big stuff. And I need to tell people, damnit. I need to tell her most of all. Or I may just explode - with a bit of the mellowness and a touch of the alertness - all over my recently-painted bedroom walls.

Which would be bad. Because this past Tuesday we signed the perfect couple to rent our apartment. And they probably wouldn't care for exploded landlord on their walls. And I really am just jazzed as hell about these people because they really love the apartment. And we really love them. Really. They are incredible. If there was a 'tenant construction kit' and somebody plopped it in front of C and me and said, "Here you go. This is all you need. All you have to do is read the instructions and you can construct the perfect tenants" - even if there was this kit. And we read the instructions from cover to cover - and then re-read them in Spanish and French, just to understand the finer meaning - and then put all the right pieces in all the right places, just like the instructions said to do. Even then. You hear me? Even then. We could not have come up with two better people to live in our apartment. They're like C and me, minus about seven years, several thousand strands of gray hair, and chronic joint pain. I like that they both develop web. And they both play music. And they just got married. Eloped, actually. And this will be their first place of their own together. Which is awesome. Because I think they're going to love it here. Because C and I loved it here. And so I'm really really happy for them. And I'm happy for our apartment - because they fit one-another.

I've been wanting to mention the tenant thing for a while, to talk about how fortuitous and incredible it was that they happened to find us right at the same time we happened to be looking. I wanted to talk about how things sometimes just seemed to work out that way. But there was still the other piece of the pie, which was the house thing. And it was sort of lingering out there. An unknown. And I didn't want to jump to conclusions about our lucky momentum. Even using the word 'lucky' right now makes me cringe a little bit, because I feel like the luck gods will smite me with a whopping load of lard on my car or something.

But it's hard to contain it now. After several volleys of offers and counter-offers throughout the day, after some good natured splitting of hairs over prices and closing dates, we seem to have reached an agreement with the owner. And all I can say is: Three big, full-throated cheers for a balanced real-estate market! Where the buyer actually has some control over the negotiations. Where the asking price is the highest price you're going to encounter along the way, not the lowest. Where nobody mentions things like 'escalation clauses.' Or waiving an inspection. As a buyer, I like this market. I could swim in these waters for a while.

And so, barring any weird things with the inspection, we're on our way to Mobtown. Where we will live in an actual house for the first time since we got married, seven years ago this month. A house. With two freakin' floors. And a basement. And a back yard, with a deck. And a stoop, Hon!

It's exciting. But also a little bit sad. Because opening a new chapter always means closing another. And the last one was pretty damn good. I will miss DC. A lot. I will miss our apartment. A lot. I'm also dreading the actual move. But I'm not thinking of that right now.

Right now, I'm just going to groove to Aqueduct one more time. And answer the phone. I think that's C calling now. I'll post this in the morning.

link to this | comments (8) | File:  House  BMore 

It's been a while since I've mentioned Hoshi. In part, this is because thoughts, of late, have been consumed with other things, such as trips to Japan, bathroom renovations, condo leasing, and trying to find a place to live in B-More. Even without those things, Hoshi doesn't really factor into my daily thoughts all too often. I don't have the same history with her as I did with Carmen. I only drive her about once or twice a week, usually on the weekends. C and Hoshi have a much more intimate relationship, making their daily hour-and-a-half round-trip commute to the office campus and back together. More and more, people in their 20s and 30s seem to be making this awful reverse commute - not to, but away from - the city. Large companies love cheap land. So they build their campuses far away from anything right and proper. C's office complex is located on a lonely stretch of a nowhere suburban landscape somewhere between DC and Baltimore. It has a name, this area, but we've come to know it, affectionately, as 'The Vortex.' Every morning, C bravely maneuvers Hoshi into this world of clean, right angles and strip centers. And back out in the evening. Sometimes I worry she will be lost inside the swirl of it. But to my relief, she manages to make it back. But a good part of her day is sucked away out there, in the vortex. Lately, she's been working quite hard, and has had to leave before the "no rush hour street parking" begins on Mass Ave. Then she arrives home well after the sun goes down. But she's never lonely on her travels. First of all, she's always equipped with at least two cell phones, and she's not afraid to use them (with headset, of course). Second of all, she's got Hoshi to keep her company. And driving Hoshi on the highway is sometimes all the company you need.

C has gotten used to driving alone. That is, with no other sentient being in the car with her. And this is a good thing. Because anything with a bladder and/or bowels and even the slightest instinct for self-preservation should take great caution when sitting in the passenger seat of a car C is driving, especially Hoshi. Small children and the elderly are probably better off engaging in activities that are slightly less . . . stimulating. Like a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon, or a roller coaster ride on top of New York, New York in Las Vegas.

But I'm probably not the one to be throwing stones here. I'm pretty aggressive myself. It's hard not to be when you're driving Hoshi. That growl works its way through your ass down your leg and into your foot and results in a significant increase in weight in that particular appendage. You get used to the way your stomach always feels like it's a passenger in the back seat. And you like it. The thing about driving alone most of the time is you get used to the fact that nobody is with you. And you can do what you want. I understand it. I got this way in Dallas. You know your route, you take it every day. You know where the pot holes are. You can anticipate every turn, every bump, and - to yourself - you're just driving normally. But when others don't know the route, when others aren't privy to all your knowledge of the road. It leads to a bit of the white-knuckleness.

Anyway, the point is, we're both a little on the aggressive side. But, that said, we do have very different driving 'techniques,' and the fact that the other doesn't share a particular habit has lead to more than a couple heated arguments over the 'correct' way to drive, and even once resulted in the cancellation of our dinner plans. The logic being this: how can I possibly share the same dinner table - let alone the same bed - with this person, who is such an obvious idiot when it comes to maneuvering in heavy traffic? Sometimes our passions get the best of us.

But one aspect of our driving that we both have in common is we like a clean windshield. This is an absolute must. I know there are people out there who drive their cars around with all kinds of shit on the windshield, where the only clear spot is a small area near the rear-view mirror and you have to drive with your head slightly tilted to the right to see anything. And you want to say to them, What is wrong with you, man? Clean that shit off already! And so you nag them into turning on their wipers, but they don't even work properly and all they do is smear the shit around so that now there is a general film o' shit over the entire glass, along with semi-circles of water where the wipers had something stuck to them and left a mark. This drives both C and I equally crazy. And it's one area where we can reach a common ground, bringing us back to speaking terms, where we can again contemplate the prospect of dinner and, thankfully, bed.

With pollen season firmly upon us, having adequate cleaning fluids in the windshield-wiper fluid reservoir is imperative. It's possible that, on a heavy pollen day, we might, in fact, use several cups of the stuff. We usually have a liter bottle of the bright blue liquid in the back, you know, for emergencies. Like the one that happened recently: Much to C's horror, she pulled on the lever one day only to witness a pathetic dribbling of windshield wiper fluid onto the very lowest portion of the glass, an area untouched by the wipers. She pulled into the next gas station, bought a bottle of fluid, and topped off the reservoir. Problem solved.

Or not. A quick test resulted in the same sad display of dribble. This would not do. Was there a problem with the pump? Hoshi was only six months old. Could she be developing these sorts of problems already? This is why we'd moved away from VW's, so we wouldn't have to deal with this kind of slow self-destruction. C told me about the problem and we agreed that something needed to be done about this situation, pronto. So we made an early Saturday appointment at the Mazda dealership, which we both entirely forgot about and slept through the first week. So we re-scheduled for the following Saturday (last Saturday).

Let me pause here to remind people that C defies most gender stereotypes. She is downright intuitive with a map, she cheers louder than me when the Broncos play, and her savvy with a remote control instills in me great fear and awe. So she can hold her own around a car. She's not afraid to lift the hood, kick the tires, or stick her hand in greasy crevices. She certainly knows how to top off windshield wiper fluid.

Unfortunately, the mechanics at the Mazda dealership don't know the C that I have come to know. They don't know the girl who helped me change a car battery in our VW Jetta - a five-hour affair involving lots of cursing and threats to said Jetta of an imminent demise with a large wrecking ball - or replace a halogen headlight. They don't know the girl who gets excited by football stats. Instead, they caught a glimpse of a different sort of C. They bore witness to a C who delightfully re-affirmed all their pre-conceived female stereotypes.

I wasn't there when C got the car, but the exchange seemed to go something like this:

"Well, we topped off your fluids and you're good to go."

"Oh no you don't. You're not going to pull that one over on me. You don't think I tried that already? I topped off the fluid long before I made this appointment and it didn't do anything."

"Really?"

"Yes! So don't try and tell me that's all that's wrong here, because I know . . ."

"Come show me where you put the fluid."

The mechanic lead the way outside. Like Hoshi's freshly cleaned windshield, a similar clearing began to occur in C's mind. And it's generally recognized that a clearing of this sort - in the area of the brain - can often lead to a sinking of the stomach. Suddenly, she didn't want to show the mechanic where she had put the fluid. She didn't want to show herself where she had put the fluid. She didn't want to know.

She pointed to a plastic container that contained a bluish-green liquid. And looked at the mechanic, a bit sheepishly.

He shook his head. "Anti-freeze," he said. Then he pointed to another container. "That's the windshield wiper fluid." The container he pointed to had a cap with the universal sign of squirting arcs of water emblazoned on it.

When she got home, the exchange between us went something like this:

"We need to take the car back at three."

"We do?" I said. "Why? Did they have to order a part?"

"You're going to be mad."

"What?"

"Don't be mad."

"I'm going to be mad if you don't tell me!"

"Well, let's just say they need to flush the coolant . . ."

It turns out putting a little windshield wiper fluid in the anti-freeze isn't actually the worst thing you can do to a car. And they might not have even flushed the cooling system if Hoshi wasn't so gloriously turbo-charged.

It also turns out I wasn't really that upset, considering we'd been driving Hoshi for the last two weeks with her special brand of anti-freeze and it hadn't caused any noticeable problems.

In the end, no eating plans were canceled. And I even resisted the urge to joke (until now.)

In the past, I've made posts about how C defies the natural laws of gender stereotypes. But this post is different. It's a 'Gender Stereotype Affirmation' post. And I'm proud to report that my baby can honestly be a real, live . . . girl! Oh, I've actually known this for some time and there are many other examples I could give to its veracity. But in general, I try to help C maintain her tough-girl image. But every once in a while it's kind of fun to expose the truth.

link to this | comments (4) | File:  Cath  GSD  Hoshi 

I find myself looking for song lyrics quite a bit. But I hate most lyric sites because of all the moving ads and pop-ups. Now there is the peaceful, efficient LyricWiki. So, when I need to, I can find the verbal stylings of all the Hall and Oats classics, ad free.

link to this | comments (2) | File:  Music