A long time ago, a friend once asked me if I was the kind of guy who saw an attractive girl on the street, by the time I passed her, I was ready to ask for my records back.
Having just finished watching the Science of Sleep by Michel Gondry, I’m going to postulate not only that he is that type of guy, but also that he made an entire feature length film about it.
It was not the masterpiece that is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but fun anyway.
I’ve had uncanny bad luck with cellphones for the past 3-4 months. I had a new phone, a nice Nokia with a camera and an MP3 player. Cracked the screen. Went back to my Razr from 2006. Cracked the screen on that.
Now, I’m still into my contract for at least a year, so replacing the phone seemed like it was going to be a pain in the wallet. IE no cheap upgrade on the horizon.
My plan was simple. Go to the T-Mobile store, explain my situation, and ask for the absolute cheapest phone in the store. if not the freest phone in the store.
I had no expectations that this was going to result in anything but me spending 75 bucks on some shitty phone that I wasn’t going to like.
And then something magical happened. The sales rep told me something that wasn’t in his best interest. He told me to go buy a prepaid/disposable phone . A ‘burner’ in The Wire parlance.
Winning idea. I went to target and picked up a Nokia 1661. $18.
Prepaid cellphones take regular SIM cards. So if you are ever in a similar pinch, just grab a disposable cellphone and drop your old SIM in.
I should tell you that sometimes I have been known to trash pick. I’m nowhere near the level of scavenger that my wife is, but sometimes I give in. Like when someone leaves out a perfectly good salvageable mountain bike with a sign on it that says ‘Take me’.
I’ve been promising myself for at least two years ‘This is the year that I learn how to maintain my bike.’ Whether or not that comes to pass remains to be seen. However, this will most certainly be the year I bring a mountain bike back from the dead.
Good things about this bike: Working cateye, pump, the frame is not irredeemably rusted, the wheel set appears to be relatively true. Working front derailer. shifters and breaks appear to be intact.
Bad things about this bike: rusted chain, all cables completely shot and need to be replaced. graffix sticker. may have been stolen from the city of Laramie, WY at some point.
So my boss got a new iPhone. He downloaded the free iPhone app for geocaching. We went out a lunch earlier this week looking for a cache. We did not find it. not by a long shot. And thus an obsession was born.
I did find the one pictured above. Can’t tell you where though. That would spoil it.
Mark Halaway, 3rd from the left, 1997.
I found out rather abruptly that my old friend Mark Halaway died back in January. He was listed in the Memorial section at the back of our high school alumni magazine. When I was done being shocked, I began to remember very clearly all the good times we had, and what a positive influence he was on me as a early twenty-something, and then I sort of had a meltdown.
My belated heartfelt condolences to his family. Words are not available for how sorry I am to hear of his passing.
I had no idea that he was sick, or that he was getting care in the states. When he passed away, I was in the middle of packing up my house and family and moving in with my inlaws, all while searching for a new house. I wasn’t paying attention to anything but that and keeping my head above water at work.
A few things about Mark:
I went to high school with him. He was a senior at the Prep when I was a freshman. To be honest, he was better friends with my eldest brother Ed then. But in the fall of 1991, I went to my first big rock show in NYC was a benefit for WFMU at the Roxy. Sonic Youth headlined, after about 30 other bands. I wandered around the show, noticing that everyone at the show looked familiar, but aside from some of my classmates from school, I knew no one. It was one of those New York things. You know, Alone in a crowd. Except in this case, alone in a crowd of familiar faces. Its a bummer.
Anyway, Sonic Youth comes on and I worked my way up to the stage to watch. Time passed, things got louder. During the encore, someone right in front of me turned around. It was Mark.
A number of years later, after college was over, after I moved back to Philadelphia, I ran into Mark at Silk City. A few months previous, I had stopped publishing a skateboarding magazine. I’d tell you that things had not gone as planned if there had been one, but there wasn’t. It didn’t end very well and I was a bit down in the dumps about what to do next.
Anyway, Mark and I are sitting there drinking. And he says to me ‘I have this guy working for me who wants to start a magazine. He’s about your age. You have to talk him out of it or at least talk to him about what’s in store for him…’ I agreed without thinking about it.
A week or two later, I went by the studio where Mark worked on Corinthian street in Fairmount. That was when/where I met Laris Kreslins for the first time. He was working for Mark, scheming to start Sound Collector. I’m not sure if I could have dissuaded LK if I wanted to. Which I didn’t. I think I gave him a list of magazine distributors, and eventually an article and some photos.
This was the era in which Mark and I were closest. A couple times a week, at the end of whatever BS job I happened to be working then: dispatcher at a moving company, temp work, marketing shill for a major English beer company, etc, I would come over to the studio, and convince the two of them to go get a drink.
We’d hang out. We’d bullshit. Here were two people who were making a living doing work that they enjoyed, self employed. It was a glimmer of hope in the otherwise not so awesome job market of the mid to late 90s.
A few things I remember about this era and Mark in no particular order:
#1)He gave me my first (one of very few I admit) paying gigs as a photographer. They were doing a brochure for a campus debit card at Penn. They sent me off to campus to stage a few photograph. I did some long exposures. They liked my stuff. The brochure came out pretty nice.
#2)Mark showed me how to crack the case on my Power Mac 7100 and put in more RAM. I remember thinking: This is a guy who does graphic design and yet somehow knows how to take apart and put back together a PC. The two skill sets seemed so incongruous at the time.
Meanwhile, the whole time were removing screws and taking apart the chasis, he was making jokes about how terrible MAC’s industrial designers were. (Today replacing ram in any MAC requires the removal of 2 screws. Then it was more like 20. Someone somehow got the memo, to be sure.) I’m pretty sure that what seemed like 2 skill sets to me, were one and the same to him.
Mark and I fell out of touch when I moved back to New York in 1998. We’d touch base every so often. I knew that he went to the Ukraine to do video and design work. I knew that he had started a coding shop. I expected that he would return and we’d get a drink again at again at some point.
Rest in peace.
So no Comcast TV at the new house. Except for the cable modem that I am using to publish this post. I would have gone for Verizon FIOS here, not to be spitful or anything, but because its a faster product. Alot faster. The problem there: for whatever reason, They have my new address in a different zipcode then my actual zipcode. Annoying.
So how has digital TV over the air been? ABC 6 and WHYY 12 are a bit spotty. I heard on NPR a few weeks ago that since the digital transition, they’ve been having trouble w their transmitters. I hope someone got fired over that. I mean, how long did they know this was coming?
We started using Netflix again. I vowed to never return to this service in 2001 after receiving about 5 scratched, unplayable disks in a row from them. Either I have a much better DVD player now, my choices in DVDs are less common, or they’ve managed to get much better QA in place, because the problem has gone away.
Netflix on demand is also pretty nice. There are not alot of new movies, but there are way more options then say Comcast on Demand has for free.
what we’ve been watching tomorrow.
The conditions were relentless this morning, rainy, windy etc. Had my best rowing coach’s voice bouncing around in my head climbing the rise coming away from my house…’You row the conditions. The conditions don’t row you.’ Its gems like this one, implanted at 16, that can convince an otherwise smart person to go for a training ride in inclement weather. Thanks Bill.
I did what I had time for: 20 miles down to Yunk and back up, including going up Shawmont and Bells Mills rds. When I arrived home, I came around back, took my gloves off to fish my key out of my jacket and open my back door. And thats when I remembered.
Spring 1991. Same kind of weather as today. Shitty, basically. We were out in 8s. 4 of them. Maybe we were doing 3 x 1500 race rehearsal, the standard wednesday workout. Everyone launched from the Penn AC docks in full gear: turtleneck, jersey, sweats, shell. (This is before the advent of breathable base layers and other related space age shit.)
After the first piece was done, after the motors had been revved, we rowed to the twin stones and spun it to get lined up again. Everyone had taken a layer or two off at this point. Since we had a competent coxswain, we tended to be lined up first. I’d sit there, oar handle across my lap, watching everyone else get set up…and the steam coming off everyone around me.
It occurred to me that we all looked like overheated cars in the desert. Except that we were floating on a river and about to clobber the hell out of each other again.
Anyway, as I was about to open the door, thats when I noticed that my hands were steaming.
I hadn’t recalled the steam on the river in a long long time. Unexpected and small, but a good reward for today’s ride.
The bedrooms, the LR and the dining rooms are painted. The floors look about the best they probably have since…I don’t know, the 60s?
All the tiles are pulled from the porch.
The kitchen and the breakfast nook are gutted. All paneling out, floor tiles out, cabinets taken down(thanks Cullen!).
I gutted one of the upstairs bedrooms. Its down to the beams and the rafters.
My garage is stacked with contractor bags.
We’re moving in day after tomorrow.
I’m very tired. Thats all I got right now.
I was wrong about there being no surprises. But this is the nature of home ownership, right?
I found things this weekend…things that made me reconsider my otherwise universally warm feelings towards towards animals domesticated or otherwise.
To start with, I pulled up rugs in the family and dining rooms after our painting was finished. Parts of the matting under the rug by the front door all but sat up and waved hello to me when I pulled them up and turned them over.
And then there was the dining room. The exterior wall’s corners were staked out by two different types of animals. In one corner, I noticed after pulling up the rugs that there was plenty of bird seed around the tac board. In the next, there was the sweet perfume of dog urine.
The tac board lining most of the room was brittle. The wood broke around the nail, meaning that after I pryed the boards up, I had to go back and yank the nails. The corner used as a pooch urnial on the other hand, the tac boards were black and rubbery. They came right up, completely intact.
A silver lining in every cloud, I suppose.
So thats the domestic animal scene over on Edge hill road.
Now, for the wild:
After closing, Stephanie and I had lunch with our realtors and then went to the house. When we got to the deck, I watched as a squrrill ran across our roof and upto the attic vent.
I watched it go up into it. And promptly, convinced myself that I was hallucinating.
2 days later, I was taking a rest between painting rooms and the curiosity finally got the best of me. I took a ladder and went over to the crawl space and got up there.
I was immediately confronted with big pile of leaves, twigs and torn insulation. To make things even more awesome, the drey(technical speak for the squirrel nest) is sitting right next to a bunch of knob and tube wiring.
Also, I found that I wasn’t so much hallucinating on Friday. The attic fan(right above the drey) was open. Except for the remnants of some chewed up wire mesh.
I called a wildlife removal guy tonight.
I love squirrels. but not as housemates.
