Blog Master G

In what felt like the first official party of the summer, we made the most of our yard Friday night for a crazy impromptu BBQ that turned into a rockin’ good time and tons of fun. From enjoying Cati’s most delicious sangria to cruisin’ on Jami’s “Paid 4” bicycle (as dubbed by Alex) to break dancin’ in the driveway and yard, we had a blast. Along with the A_ndersons, the party people included Justin, Alex, Cati, Hugh, Jami, Sarah, and Eric.

View all A_nderson Sangria Social photos

It finally feels like summer has begun today. No rain, no spring breezes. It’s 92 degrees right now and feels like 95. according to the Weather Channel report for the 12866.

Before a game of badminton on our new backyard court, my Dad and I hung all the screens around the house — they’d been sitting in the garage for a couple weeks since the painters finished painting them. Now we can open the windows without being visited by bugs ‘n flies ‘n wasps, oh my!

Happy Father’s Day to my Dad and dads everywhere!

Two years and three days ago Jen and I became first-time home owners. June 14, 2004 is when we closed on our house. One year ago I posted this entry: 1 Year of Home Ownership. One of the many cool things about having a blog is for the (public) historical record it creates. I can look back and see what I did or accomplished on a certain day, or even compile a list of things we did to our house during our first year of ownership.

And I wrote down our goals. My mom always taught me from a young age that writing down goals is important — you’re more likely to achieve them that way. And sure enough, if you look at my list of five documented house goals from a year ago, we’ve achieved four of them, and the fifth was prefaced with a “maybe” and is actually a bad idea for anyone who owns an historical home, as we do — “Maybe replace the original windows with modern, more energy-efficient (and less pain-in-the-ass) variety” — so it’s a good thing we didn’t achieve that goal. Not only did we achieve the four goals from the past year, but we went beyond (first four are the documented goals we achieved):

• Inside painting
• Outside painting
• New furniture
• Trimmed the branches
• Kitchen sink re-enameling
• Kitchen faucet replacement
• SSPF plaque

(This isn’t the first time we’ve documented and achieved goals. Maybe there’s something to it after all, eh?)

So in the spirit of documenting house-related goals for the upcoming year, here we go:

• Flesh out furniture collection
• Continue to decorate house
• Replace existing mini blinds with wooden blinds
• Organize basement
• Remove downstairs bathroom wallpaper and replace with paint

Two years ago yesterday we were just bonding with our house. Now it feels like we’ve lived here forever.

In other news, I fixed as much of our broken kitchen faucet as I could, but it needed to be replaced. We had a plumber come Tuesday morning to replace it, as well as fix a bathtub leak. When one goes without a kitchen faucet, one really appreciates it more than ever. When one struggles for many hours with trying to fix a mechanical thing, one has a much greater appreciation for that mechanical thing. I will never look at a faucet the same way, or take one for granted ever again. Luckily we have a bathroom downstairs, so another water source was not far away, but it’s fantastic to have running water in the ktichen again.

Here’s what it looked like when I was in the middle of trying to fix it (this is the old one that’s now been replaced with the same model Moen):

I’ve long been a fan of Radio Paradise and probably always will be. I’ve thrown the occasional PayPal donation their way, and they’ve helped to expand my musical horizon, which, as Jen often says, is stuck in the ’90s. Our friends like Alex and Justin are much more the music aficionados than I am, and they’re always trying to get me to listen to and discover new music. Now I am.

With Yahoo Music’s LAUNCHcast Plus — there’s also a free service with ads and lower quality streams — you get CD-quality, ad-free streaming music that you personalize to match your tastes. It uses a Netflix-like ranking model to allow you to rate every song, artist, and album you hear. By default, you rate on a 5-star scale (or you can even changed to an advanced rating scale to rate on percentage). Rating is addictive. I’ve caught myself over the past few days since I upgraded to the $3.99/month service (or $2.99/month if you pay yearly) running into the room to rate a song to make sure I do (or don’t) hear it again. It’s amazing how well it works. I noticed after reaching the 100 song or so mark that every single song I now hear on my station — you can listen to my station, too! — is a song I either already know and like or one that I don’t know and really like. It’s an awesome way to discover new music.

There are also more than 100 pre-programmed stations (Plus version) that you can stream. If you’re a hardcore music fan like Justin, you can even subscribe to both the streaming and download version of the service (Yahoo Unlimited) — that is, you can either stream or search for any song (more than 1 million in the library) and download. You can keep the song on your computer or other portable device so long as you subscribe. Subscription-based entertainment really is the future. I now subscribe to both movie and music services. The DVD and CD collections I own are rarely used, though I’m sure I will continue to buy the occasional DVD and/or CD I really love (though downloading via iTunes or other service is more likely).

Stop the presses! My good friend Justin Wilcox now has a blog (but the photo to your left is not Justin’s blog, of course, but me on my other good friend Alex‘s V-Rod). And he’s been posting fairly consistently for more than a week now, which is longer than many new bloggers make it, so I have faith in him. Welcome to the world of blogging, Justin, and keep up the good work!

Attention Vassar alums: Do you have a recipe that’s meaningful to you that you’d like to share with the world? The Vassar Club of Chicago is working on a cookbook called “Cornaro Cuisine, a Vassar cookbook with a liberal arts flavor,” and wants to hear from you! And it doesn’t have to be only a recipe. It can be any of these things:

1. Share a favorite family recipe
2. Share an interesting/funny/touching story related to food from your years at Vassar
3. Submit something about the relationship of food to their area of professional expertise (like Elinor Pearlstein ’73, Associate Curator of Chinese Art at the The Art Institute of Chicago, wrote a short two paragraphs about the representation of Food in Chinese art)

If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll pass along your message to the right folks.

Saturday night we saw the Da Vinci Code. It was terrible and an insult to its audience. I did not read the book, and the movie does not encourage me to do so. It’s one of those movies that has no faith in its audience, appeals to the lowest common denominators, and cuts to those scenes that explain the painfully obvious (How did they get from the plane to the car? I know! Maybe they walked! What a concept! But you’d better spell it out for me just in case I really couldn’t have figured that out). Signs is another movie that made me mad like that, too.

Luckily my anger caused by the Da Vinci Code subsided on Sunday afternoon when Cati cooked up some delicious homemade paella — with a bit of coaching by her grandmother in Spain — and invited us to help eat it. We soaked in the rays in Alex and Cati’s backyard on the unusually sunny day — it’s been so rainy lately — and the afternoon picnic lasted until nearly midnight, featuring some late-night Hearts action and delicious strawberry-banana-yogurt-rum smoothies that Alex blended up. My face is tomato-red after spending a day in the sun (unlike in Vegas, I didn’t think to wear sunscreen).

View all BBQ Photos

View Alex’s photos (added 8.2.2006)

Saturday we spent most of the day relaxing to recover from the Vegas trip, but also doing a hell of a lot of yardwork, including the twice or so per year trimming of the hedges that run around our front yard and southern side of our property.

Finally, is it just me or has Gmail gotten slower lately?

Friday through Tuesday was my third trip to Las Vegas, the least sustainable city on the planet. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship and mixed emotions about hitting this adult Disneyland in the desert — it’s always a blast, but it’s always so over the top in so many ways (the sheer enormity of all the casinos, the drinks, the gambling, the food). Not only that, but I’m one more tourist consuming all that energy and water and waste in the desert. 107 degrees of dry heat. Returning Tuesday night and feeling the humidity as we walked off the plane in Albany made me appreciate the humidity here in the Northeast for probably the first and last time. Regardless, Vegas is easy to get to and is a great rendezvous for NY-CA meet-ups… and for having one hell of a time.

This trip was much smaller than our last two trips (Vegas 2003 | Vegas 2004), which were both bigger trips of about a dozen of us. This trip was actually a business trip for Jen, hence the lack of a bigger group of friends joining us. Alas, this trip consisted of Jen, a handful of her fun coworkers, Ben, Enoch, and yours truly.

We enjoyed three nights of delicious meals — an Italian place off the strip, Jasmine at the Bellagio, which offered an incredible front-row view of the famous dancing fountains. I ate this bass dish, which was the best piece of fish I’ve had in as long as I can remember (probably since our last trip to Farallon): Soya Chilean Sea Bass / Chilean Sea Bass roasted with Rose Dew wine with Ginger soy, Lotus root, Shitake Mushroom & Asparagus. Mmm mmm good! We also ate at Vic & Anthony’s Steakhouse inside the Golden Nugget on our final night in town.

And here’s the great thing about Vegas: On one hand, you can find some of the finest dining in the country, if not the world. Then just down the strip you can find the Hooters Hotel & Casino, where Ben and Enoch hooked up a room for the weekend, and where we spent most days by the pool and auditioning for the next Hooters calendar. OK, not really, but we did get our photos taken with the Hooters Calendar 2006 cover girl, as well as Ms. February and Ms. November. Check out my rockin’ tan. I put those models to shame, right?

Craps. Oh craps! I now know how it earned its name. By day, the boys and I rolled the dice and lost lots of money (except for Enoch). By night, when we joined Jen and Nicole, we rolled the dice and lost lots more money (except for Enoch). Hey, we may have lost a few hundred bucks at the tables (more than I lost in my last two Vegas trips combined), but man oh man did we score on the free drinks! Little do the casinos know how far ahead we really were.

New York, New York: Though we passed by Coyote Ugly (really long line), we did do the next best thing: Rode the rollercoaster after a night of drinking. What fun! And later we grabbed some Ugly Sticks (Coyote’s foot-long slushy drinks) on the way out of the casino — that’s the other thing I love about Vegas, of course: Open container law, so party-goers don’t have to lose the buzz when leaving the casinos and hitting the streets (hopefully by foot, of course).

Our last night in Vegas we high-tailed it to Old Vegas — mine and Jen’s first time there — and had another delicious meal, followed by more lost money at the craps table (but Enoch had already left, so he couldn’t show us up that night!), and cruising around old town, seeing the seedier and original side of town. We saw the famous waving cowboy, but missed the light show. We ended the crazy evening by hopping the fence at our hotel’s swimming pool and enjoying some 4am swimming and hot tubbing.

We woke up 5 hours later and have been in a daze of trying to recover from our vacation ever since. This weekend: vacation from vacation.

In other news, our kitchen faucet sprang a leak. I’ve tried to fix it myself and successfully replaced the stem, but one of the key parts to put it back together is all jacked up, so I’ve schedule a plumber for Tuesday. Hopefully the kitchen won’t be too far buried under the mountain of dirty dishes by then (we also can’t run the dishwasher since it’s connected to the same water lines as is the sink).

View More (Edited*) Vegas 2006 Photos

* Email me if you want a link to all photos.

It’s just before midnight on 6/6/06, so I thought it would be a fun excuse to post something. Three years ago I wrote about another 666 — my 666th blog post. Satan. Yeehaw!

And speaking of evil, Jen and I just returned from 5 crazy days in Sin City — yes, Las Vegas. It was a non-stop festival of debauchery. I’ll have some pictures and a recap soon, but for now, I sleep.

Happy 6/6/06 day. See you in 60 years on 6/6/66. I wonder if I’ll still be blogging then. I’ll be pretty old then.

I almost always have nothing but respect for our soldiers, especially those who are put in harm’s way on a daily basis, but how does attempting to “disable the vehicle” result in the death of two women, including one on her way to give birth? I know, fortunately, thanks to the bravery of so many young soldiers, that I will likely never understand what it’s like to be in a war zone, so I’m not really one to talk, but I just don’t understand how a road block could turn into a lethal attack on innocent civilians. Yes, accidents do happen… but how does one like this occur?

U.S. troops kill pregnant woman in Iraq:

BAGHDAD, Iraq – U.S. forces killed two Iraqi women — one of them about to give birth — when the troops shot at a car that failed to stop at an observation post in a city north of Baghdad, Iraqi officials and relatives said Wednesday. Nabiha Nisaif Jassim, 35, was being raced to the maternity hospital in Samarra by her brother when the shooting occurred Tuesday.

Jassim, the mother of two children, and her 57-year-old cousin, Saliha Mohammed Hassan, were killed by the U.S. forces, according to police Capt. Laith Mohammed and witnesses.

The U.S. military said coalition troops fired at a car after it entered a clearly marked prohibited area near an observation post but failed to stop despite repeated visual and auditory warnings.

“Shots were fired to disable the vehicle,” the military said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press. “Coalition forces later received reports from Iraqi police that two women had died from gunshot wounds … and one of the females may have been pregnant.”

After four days of non-stop action, it’s going to take at least a couple days to rest up… before we do it again this weekend.

The past weekend started with cocktails and a Crossgates showing of X-Men 3: The Last Stand with Jen and Alex. It’s always entertaining seeing movies on opening night — and this one set a Memorial Day opening weekend record — with the energy of the crowd, the clapping, the gasping, the “oh damn, Beast! you so hot!” cat calls coming from the women behind us. And the movie itself was much better than expected, too — a thoroughly entertaining addition to the X-Men saga.

The rest of the weekend featured a quadruple header of BBQs, living it up in a quintessentially American way. We hosted my in-laws for the inaugural hosted BBQ of the year on Saturday evening, followed by an evening of drinks with Hugh and Jami downtown at Gaffney’s. Sunday we hosted a small pre-party BBQ with Alex, Anne, and Tom before heading to a larger BBQ at Hugh and Jami’s not far down the road. We capped off the first weeekend of summer with a Monday BBQ at Nat and Heather’s place, where we had the pleasure not only of their company but of being introduced to a delicious hot ‘n sweet sauce available only in Oregon.

View all A_nderson BBQ photos

View All Chandler BBQ photos

View all Nat & Heather’s BBQ photos

All that and we cleaned the entire house, mowed the lawn, did some gardening, and planted a new flower bed.

It’s been really hot and humid the last couple days — high 80s — so while drenching sweat and in the pouring rain, flashing lightning, and booming thunder yesterday, I lugged the two bedroom air conditioning window units from the basement into their summer homes. Though probably not the smartest idea, given the lightning, I quickly set up a ladder in the rain to position the larger bedroom unit properly into place. But sleeping last night in the cool breeze of the AC made it all worth it, unlike the previous night’s sticky and sweaty slumber.