I’m waiting for Windows to finish installing some IE8 debugging software, so perhaps now is a good time to take a breath, open Wordpress and note that I am not dead.  I’m just busy.  We’re perilously close to a major launch on the Subsidyscope project.  At the same time, Clay’s taken a month off to get married (see also: awww), leaving me to mind the store at Sunlight in his absence.  It’s flattering and exciting, but hasn’t left a lot of time for bloggy diversions.

But to catch you up briefly: I bought a netbook; Emily and I remain enthralled by Avatar; Halloween preparation is picking up speed*; I am in perpetually-worse shape; Emily’s cat is officially back in Philadelphia as of this morning, and her brother is in DC; and I still can’t reliably listen to the football game from the bus.

The next month is going to include a bunch of travel (Boston! Vermont!) and hopefully a slight becalming of my work life.  And if that happens, perhaps I’ll write more here!  I do miss it, and appreciate those of you who have bothered to keep my humble blog in your RSS reader.

* coffin construction is going well, I have multiple agents investigating sources of animal skulls, and when I leave to pick up lunch in a moment I’m going to see if the corner florist can’t be cajoled into giving me a good rate on dead flowers

Emily and I have been building a coffin.  This is nominally for Halloween, though I realized partway through the process that “he was buried in a novelty coffin he constructed himself” would make a pretty awesome kicker for an obituary.  Of course, that assumes that in the future people still get buried in coffins instead of being cremated to reduce A) crowding on the space-ark or B) the odds of reanimation.  Frankly, that seems unlikely.  But while the coffin’s ultimate fate remains uncertain, it should at least be a workable bar come October 31st.

The process is going pretty well.  We’re using these plans, and while the quoted $25 cost is pretty optimistic, it is relatively affordable as these things go.  At this point we’ve got the boards completely cut; we could assemble it immediately if we wanted.

First, though, I’d like to distress the wood.  There are a lot of techniques for doing this, and we’ve tried several of them on scraps left from the cutting.  I’d like to produce an impossibly-weathered sort of gray plank.  The internet says the lye in oven cleaner ought to manage this, but so far it seems to have done nothing — maybe we have the wrong oven cleaner, or perhaps the board’s pressure-treated nature is interfering with the deadly chemical reaction.  Emily found a method involving vinegar and steel wool, and claims that it shows promise (I remain skeptical).

The only methods that have proven to work are more physical in nature.  First, the wire brush: using a drill and an appropriate abrasive wheel allows one to scrape away the weaker portions of  the wood’s surface, leaving raised ridges and producing a more fibrous, soft sort of finish.  It looks good.

The other method is to char the surface with a propane torch.  It doesn’t produce the gray color I wanted, but the effect is sort of cool, particularly when applied after the wire brush.

Both techniques are fairly labor-intensive, though (particularly the brushing when using only a hand drill).  If anyone has access to an angle grinder or feels like joining me in my garage for some beer, fire and power tools, drop me a line.

I’m back from the beach, and already rapidly spending down the sleep surplus I accrued there. It’s a little bit strange being back. I find it comforting to have a plan on the horizon — something out of the usual routine to look forward to. There are plenty of events looming, but aside from Emily’s birthday none of them yet have definite dates attached. I crave structure! Otherwise it’s too easy for summer to start looking like an air-conditioned march through sunshine and into autumn.

It is nice being back, though, and I’m itching to start work on a few non-Artomatic projects. First, though, I’ve got to make sure things are working properly at AoM — thanks to Victor my piece was saved from malfunction on opening night, but I haven’t yet had a post-opening chance to get down there and confirm that everything’s working the way it ought to be (I tried to last night, but had forgotten that Artomatic is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays).

But here, the nominal reason for the post: my sister Beth (whose birthday is today!) sent along this link, and it’s worth a look. It’s one of those full-browser 360° panoramic photo dealies, in this case showing off Houstonian attractions that might be of interest to Rice students. Of particular interest are the scenes linked to by the thumbnail of the clown face, and the one two spaces to its right. The first shows off the Orange Show, the bizarre visionary art compound created by an eccentric former orange arbitrageur and his commitment to largely incorrect nutrition education. The second is the Beer Can House, a somewhat less deranged but no less impressive work in which a man fashioned thousands (millions?) of beer cans into artistic armor for his home. Both are managed by the organization that Beth works for and are worth a visit if you find yourself in Houston and temporarily unable to spend the time eating more tacos.

I’ve accidentally run current backward through some delicate electronics, gone through a staggering number of voltage regulators and flat-out melted a solenoid, but my Artomatic project seems to be working! There is, of course, still a chance that some hardware aspect of the thing will fail. Or that there’s a hidden software bug that will prevent it from rebooting on schedule. Or that I’ll screw something up when I try to move the log files to a nonvolatile disk location. But for now I’m feeling pretty good about it! If you’re by the Navy Yard Metro in the next month, you should drop by, see some art and ring some bells.

The Artomatic website makes it unfortunately difficult to find when the damn event will actually be open. But the info can be found in this press release. The key details:

May 29 – July 5, 2009

Wednesdays and Thursdays, 5 p.m. – 10 p.m.

Fridays and Saturdays, 12 noon – 1 a.m.

Sundays, 12 noon – 10 p.m.

closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

You can find a map of the location here — Artomatic is in the same building as the Navy Yard Metro entrance that’s closest to the ballpark. My piece is on the fourth floor.

OH YEAH: For those interested, the project’s software is all on GitHub. If you’re wandering in from Google in an effort to figure out how to get Python working on the Fonera with serial and network capabilities, this would be a good place to start.

Progress!

Based on only my sketchy verbal instructions, my dad whipped two of these up in astoundingly little time as I watched dumbly. He also fed me dinner! It was an impressive performance all around, and I’m very grateful. This thing’s about 3′ tall, and it’s what my finished piece will sit upon for display. It’ll be draped in cloth, though, so this is hopefully the last time you’ll see it.

In less positive news:

Upon getting back to the Metro last night I found my rear wheel had been stolen. My current run of bad bike-luck is now impressively long (for those keeping score, the last month has gone flat, flat, flat, flat, wheel, flat, brake cable, shifter cable, trued replacement wheel, stolen other wheel). I suppose I can’t complain too much — this Jamis served me very well and with very few problems for the past 3.5 years (ever since my lovely last bike was stolen from out in front of Logan Hardware). Karmically, I’m doing okay.

But this is still infuriating. The return on a stolen bike wheel is miniscule — the person who took this probably got less than 5% of the retail cost of the components that I’ll now have to rebuy. Worse, I know it’s my fault for being rushed and parking it at a Metro and forgetting my cable. And, well, it just sucks. I try to take these things in stride, but it takes me a couple of days to let go of the anger that being victimized provokes. Last night’s dreams featured some pretty elaborate bicycle-themed revenge fantasies.

I’ve been a little worn down all day. Yesterday Kriston and I set out to begin a batch of homebrewed wheat beer. But we did a bad job of estimating times and got a late start, and the result was a brewing operation that lasted until 3AM.

It seems to have gone fine, though. It wasn’t yet bubbling by the time I left for work, but of course that was only a horrifically small number of hours since it went into the fermenter. By the time I got home from work it was bubbling away happily:

This is a marked improvement from my last brewing attempt, which spewed foam all over the goddamn place. This time the friendly folks at the Philly homebrew store gave me some Belgian Wyeast liquid yeast, and it seems to be a bit better behaved than True Brew’s relatively vigorous stuff.

Want to hear me say “UHHH” several hundred times? Here, this should scratch that itch:

I can’t help cringing when I watch this, but I really did have a good time, and I’m grateful for being given the opportunity to represent Sunlight.

Washington Journal is an impressively high-volume operation — you’re led into the studio and then it’s almost immediately time to go. It’s a little bit disorienting. The fact that the studio turns out to be exactly on the other side of wall on which the green room monitors are located doesn’t help matters. It’s like a video window, man! I appreciated the coffee and the chocolate croissant, but it seems like an even nicer thing to do for your guests would be to minimize the mind-bending spatial revelations that you expose them to.

I can’t say I’m immensely pleased with my performance during the first half of the show, but things did improve as we got further in and moved on to topics that I’ve been working on for more than a couple of days (this recovery.gov stuff has been kind of sudden). By the twenty minute mark I was still acting weird and stilted, but not much more so than I do in real life. If I get another chance to do this maybe I’ll find a way to speak fluidly for more than six syllables at a time — that’s the dream, anyway.

I wish I had more amusing thoughts to share about the experience, but at the time I was too terrified to make many wry observations. Besides, I’m pretty sure that everyone who works in D.C. winds up on Washington Journal eventually — when I signed my name in the guestbook (marking myself as a total n00b, no doubt), I wasn’t at all surprised to see the name of a friend-of-friends that I run into at parties a couple of lines above my own. What I’m trying to say is that you’ll no doubt have a chance to have this experience yourself if you you have both a job in Washington and a collared shirt.

Oh yeah! They gave me a coffee mug! This small piece of proof (the above clip could of course be entirely computer-generated and for all I know is) is now my most prized media-appearance-related mug. Previously this position was held by the mug I received for my appearance at the NBC4 Health & Fitness Expo, which involved walking in and helping myself to a complimentary mug. I think someone was getting crowd shots, though, so it totally counts.

My new wheel is working great — more than 24 hours without a flat! — but on my way to work this morning something happened to my front brake cable. I can still engage the break, but it doesn’t disengage. My current theory is that the cable half-popped somewhere in its housing, maintaining the connection but providing a tangled wire mess that prevents proper braking (I have to pry the levers apart by hand). Back to the Bike Rack! The guys there are going to think I have the cyclist version of Munchausen by Proxy.

I have not been having good bicycle luck. Since Friday I’ve ruptured five innertubes and had two tire levers snap. The flats have forced me to walk through the cold, then the rain, then the cold again; I’ve had to skip appointments and be late to work and walk in bad shoes until my feet ache. My fingers are suffused with brake dust; my hands look like they belong to a Pompeiian mummy.

And yet! I am now so much faster at changing tires, and this feeling of accomplishment almost makes up for all of the hassle. The operation requires finesse, see, and you tend to accidentally hurt yourself and waste time and materials when you’re still getting the hang of it. But now I have the hang of it! I don’t do those things anymore! It’s great!

Well, alright, I’m still wasting materials at a phenomenal clip. But there’s a reliable and thoroughly pleasant honeymoon period of about forty minutes before the newly-installed innertube explodes, and that’s enough for basking. Tomorrow the offending rim goes back to the bike shop and people who objectively know what they’re doing; for now, for me, the subjective experience is going to have to be sufficient.

Hello! I didn’t spend last night in a hotel. This has become a sufficiently unusual occurrence that I thought I should mention it.

Not that I’m trying to present myself as a cosmopolitan traveler, mind you. My destinations have included Houston and Indianapolis, and next weekend I’ll be in Atlanta. These are places which don’t qualify as America’s armpits, exactly — what are we, Goro? — but they could fairly be called the sweaty small of our great nation’s back.

There’s something to recommend each of them, though, and there was a lot to recommend Houston in particular. First, my sister lives there, and she’s very charming. Beth works for the nonprofit that manages The Orange Show and the Beer Can House (both of which are very cool), and her boyfriend Jeremy is in the business of making deadly, spider-attracting chemicals. The two of them have an extremely pleasant house in the part of Houston near the highway, which is to say I have no idea where they live. It’s right by a taco truck called Elena’s II, though, which is across the street from a taco truck called Elena’s III. I can vouch for Elena’s II — that was some of the best food I’ve had in recent memory. Elena’s III could be a crapshoot for all I know.

That was the first thing that Emily and I realized about Houston: the food’s great. We ate Mexican food at every possible opportunity and I don’t think we were ever disappointed. Real barbacoa was a revelation.

The drinking was good, too. Bought from the supermarket, Shiner and Lone Star are unremarkable beers. But placed into their proper context — say, an ice house yard filled with Sunday sun, kids shooting basketball, dogs stealing food and friendly gentlemen who genially critique visiting Yankees’ horseshoe skills while not-very-discreetly smoking joints at the corner picnic table — they become the best beers you’re ever going to taste.

Oh! We also went to the rodeo. The attached fair and livestock show are pretty much what you’d expect, except with more places selling multi-foot sausages (available with stick or without!). The actual rodeo, though, was unexpectedly great. Perhaps on repeat visits the novelty would wear off — I can imagine that the casual sexism with which the announcers discussed each barrel-riding cowgirl’s beauty might start to rankle — but the actual events were thrilling and proceeded in quick succession. There’s a lot to be said for watching a grown man leap from a horse onto a steer and wrestle it to the ground, and even more to be said for watching it twelve times in a row. Since then I have been surprised to find myself watching professional bullriding on television, and reading with credulous interest accounts of how the sport isn’t actually cruel at all. That’s how quickly this sport (see? I’m calling it a sport) can get its hooks into you.

But none of the proper rodeo events could compete with the Calf Scramble. For the uninitiated, this is an event in which our human society pits its children against those of the cows. Dozens of fresh-faced Future Farmers of America race toward a smaller crowd of confused, slightly bored calves and attempt to cajole them into submission. If you manage to subdue one of the calves you’ll be presented with a certificate good for the future purchase of such an animal, which you’ll then presumably raise. Who knows? With hard work and a little luck, in a few years you might be one of the cowboys over at the Ag Expo applying can after can of hairspray to a bull.

The charming part of the scramble is how simultaneously overmatched and excited the kids are. Emily and I watched a post-game interview with an ecstatic and disheveled young woman who had just won a calf, and no sir, she didn’t mind at all that it had stepped on her head, in fact she didn’t even remember that part!

Here’s some video of the 2005 Houston Rodeo calf scramble. Unfortunately the professional rodeo videographers who shot it seem to have been intent on playing up the desperate athletic conflict of the thing. And who can blame them? They spend most of their time filming flinty cowboys as they casually, mercilessly assert their dominance over the bovine world. But most of the calf scramble is much more hapless than that, and considerably more endearing. If you had to pick a single representative image of the proceedings it would be of a girl holding on to a calf’s tail in the corner of the arena, both of them confused about what should happen next.

From Houston we went to Galveston, then to Austin via Lockhart. We had some great seafood in Galveston and stayed in a fancy hotel — it was nice! — but the town’s clearly still getting itself together from the hurricane’s aftermath. Austin was Austin — you know it’s great. Suspiciously great, in fact, like all college towns. Oh, and everything Kriston has said about barbecue in Lockhart is correct, and perhaps even understated. Kreuz Market is a monastery, and imposes vows of abstinence from sauce and forks upon visitors as soon as they walk through the door. When your server turns and reaches into the fire-flecked pit behind him to retrieve some brisket, it’s easy to imagine that he’s actually reaching into the underworld — and is that really beef? It seems too tender. What sort of barbecue sect is this, anyway? It’s all too delicious to fight, though. Accept your damnation, and be sure to try the sauerkraut.

And that was about it for Texas. I spent the past few days in Indianapolis at the Computer Assisted Reporting Conference. The conference was good: it was fun to be told embarrassing stories about my new coworkers, and to observe the extent to which journalists everywhere seem to share the same talents and affectations — many of the same ones that I suffer from and/or aspire to. These were good people, and I felt right at home.

Indianapolis, though… well, I don’t know. They’ve got some creepy, Masonic-looking monuments, which makes me think there may be some pretty good secret conspiracies going on. But the downtown is incredibly free of personality; the closest thing I observed to local color was an installation of the Weber Grill chain restaurant. On the plus side, the tapwater seemed to be extremely soft, so any travelers who are more worried about limestone scale or excessive shampooing times than about access to culinary and cultural options would do well to give Indianapolis a look.

In five days: Atlanta. I’ve been before and it was okay, although it was hard to shake the feeling that Ted Turner was singlehandedly responsible for about 90% of the city. Maybe this time will be different; I’ll report back.