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August 28, 2005

Back to the Grind

Well I'm finally back in an urban environment with a damned internet connection. I spent two blissful weeks without reading an email, deleting comment spam, or reading a blog. Bliss, bliss, bliss. No work, either. Or TV. Or even a movie.

I hiked, kayaked, played with my Mom's digital camera (the Canon Rebel), played tennis, had a great weekend with friends, and basically played house in my family's place upstate.

We stay near Warrensburg, NY, where there is a fantastic smokehouse called Oscar's, so my vegitarian inclinations also went out the window. Whenever I go there the beef jerkey just cannot be ignored, and I end up walking out with all sorts of non-vegetarian items. The horseradish smoked cheddar is fantastic. The bacon, sausage, steak, ditto. I suffered for the indulgence, since my stomach still isn't used to dealing with meat, but damn it was good.

I also spent a day antiquing, which is basically glorified garage-sale hunting with a threefold price markup. I bought old medicine jars and other useless things for no particular reason.

Since Derek couldn't take off quite as much time as I could, I had the house -- in the middle of the woods -- to myself for a few days. I had the optimistic idea that I would use the time to plan ahead a little, maybe do some writing or knitting or silent contemplation of the hummingbirds (you know the sitting on a tropical beach fantasy? Like that, but in the Adirondacks), but I got caught up in a million tiny little projects and activities with the neighbors (more pointless antiquing) and managed almost no contemplation whatsoever. But I did reach the ultimate vacation point of having spend so much time in the woods that I was ready to start working again. We've always spent a week per summer upstate (since college, anyway), but it never seems like enough. Two is perfect.

I'm heading back up for Labor Day, but it looks like I'll miss this: The "World's Largest Garage Sale". A bit of an overstatement, possibly, but nirvana for junkies like me, I'll bet.

Posted by csageday at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

August 09, 2005

Underground Radio

Every once in a while, when we're driving down from the Adirondacks on a Sunday night, we catch the Underground Garage radio show on Q104.3. The DJ, "Little Steven," educates the masses about garage rock and plays a wide variety of stuff -- clips from films, songs from lesser-known bands, and obscure hits from major bands like The Who, The Stones, The Beatles, etc. Yesterday's show had a movie theme and included trivia about A Hard Day's Night (one of my favorites) and Bonnie and Clyde, with some other random tracks thrown in. It's always an eclectic mix, and after the repetitive playlists on [pick any music radio station], it's a welcome change to have a DJ that doesn't sound like a sales rep. (FYI: The website is a bit like the show -- it's all over the place but it has great old audio/video clips buried in there somewhere.)

The format for the show is a kind of rambling, non-standard, play-whatever-the-hell-I-feel-like mix you sometimes hear on low-budget or college stations at 3AM. This only works if the DJ is interesting, so it works for Little Steven. (We once heard a similar kind of show on a classical station -- we listened to the same classical piece played in digital format, then in analog, then in digital format again. Between each one, there was a droning commentary about the subtle differences between them. Ugh.) I'm guessing plenty of podcasters out there are reintroducing this particular format with less success.

By the way, can I take this moment to mourn the loss of the old 101.1 CBS FM? I know it switched off a while ago but I was forced to listen to CBS radio station jingles at 7AM for many years. My elementary school bus driver didn't really like kids and had that station on every morning, without fail, at a volume you couldn't really ignore no matter where you sat. I can still hear the jingle in my head: "101, CBS FM/ 101, CMS FM/ We play your favorite oldies/ CBS effffeeemmm Newwwww Yoooooooork. [cue "My Boyfriend's Back"]" That tune is permanently branded on my brain. Jingles aside, it was a nice mix of old stuff, with some Beatles thrown in, and I miss it.

Posted by csageday at 12:09 AM | Comments (1)

August 08, 2005

Lovin the Leeches

Very briefly, while reading a fascinating New Yorker article about leeches and their growing use in medicine, I considered marching into the leech-infested muck at the lake upstate to catch some. Leeches give you a natural local anesthetic, thin your blood, and suck it out -- it's great for headaches, black eyes, reattached fingers and toes, osteoporosis . . . and people paid big bucks for treatment a century ago. The article was so thorough and interesting that I thought, for a split second, "It's a bargain getting them for free! I should run right into the swamp! These things are amazing!" Then I remembered what they look like. Plus, I feel fine.

I wish I could link to the article, but it's long gone (it was the July 25th issue). Suffice it to say that leeches do have proven health benefits, are sophisticated little animals, and can live up to a year without a feeding. They're also disgusting, they're attracted to shadows, and they just love the bottom of our red kayak.

Posted by csageday at 11:13 PM | Comments (1)

August 05, 2005

Are You Still Here?

While I'm off communing with leeches and loons upstate, entertain yourselves with juste milieu. JM can happily rant about everyone who annoys her because she was smart enough to make her blog anonymous. God, I should start one of those. Man, I have stories to tell. btw, somewhere in the JM archives there's a post about moving into Williamsburg a decade ago -- before the hipster invasion. WB has never really appealed to me -- I'm much too attached to brownstones and trees and the Coop, but the post might be interesting to fellow WB alumni (or residents).

Posted by csageday at 06:14 PM | Comments (0)

August 04, 2005

So Much to Blog About; So Little Motivation

I've had to put blogging completely on hold lately for various reasons. We've been doing summery things, like going sailing and going to the shore, and I've also been working on this site for a friend pretty much every weeknight (warning: I'm a terrible designer), so my blogging time is cut short. Here are some quick catch-up things, since I'm away this weekend and the next and the next and so on until September (and where I'm going, there's NO INTERNET).

First, Francis blogged about this ages ago because he is a responsible, dependable blogger, but we saw Brian Dewan at Barbes and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I knew nothing about Dewan's music (although we had caught him showing film strips a while back at the Brooklyn Museum) so I was happily surprised. It was a one man show, except for the hilarious barbershop trio performance of The Beatles' "Revolution #9" at the end. Think about that for a minute. Imagine one guy saying "number 9" over and over, and all of the other discordant sounds on that loooong track being reproduced a capella by the other two. The added a little choreography, too, jumping to face the same direction, etc. All with straight faces. Anyway, Dewan plays various throwback instruments -- an autoharp, a zither, and an accordion. His lyrics are clever and wacky and his straight-faced, intense delivery is a hit with the audience. It reminded me a bit of TMBG even before he played "The Edison Museum" -- a track that is on TMBG's "No!" He did an amusing heavy-metalish parody on the zither ("Loathsome Idols") and some vintage-sounding, tamer pieces on the autoharp and accordion. Lyrics to one upbeat song played on the accordion go like this: "Put your money where your mouth is. [pause] Put your money in your mouth. [pause, silence] Eat it [pause] it's the principle of the thing ... eat that dirty salad ... eat it ... now." I'm doing a terrible job of describing this, but please go and see Dewan next time he's playing something. Anything. It'll be worth it. Or go buy a CD or listen to the clips on Amazon or iTunes. I laughed my ass off and I wasn't even drunk.

That same day, at an obscenely early hour for a Saturday (8AM), Derek joined me for a Sebago sail for the first time. Because the wind was strong but shifty, we spent the morning screaming (not at each other), getting wet, hanging off one side of the the boat, scrambling over to the other side of the boat when the wind suddenly shifted, and barely managing to keep the boat (a Laser) upright and ourselves out of the bay. It was crazy. We were sore for a week. Hopefully it didn't completely spoil sailing for D.

What else? Last Saturday, we were extremely lucky. We went to visit my sister and her family at the Jersey shore. The traffic was good (amazing), the weather was good, and we found fantastic lobster rolls. Both Derek and I, like idiots, wore our prescription sunglasses in the ocean and lost them in the waves. I searched for mine for a while since they're biggish and expensive, but eventually gave up and taught my nine-year-old nephew to knit instead (he wanted to learn! how cool is that?). About half-an-hour later, my-brother-and-law showed up with my sunglasses dangling off the end of his fishing pole (the tide had washed them up over where he was fishing -- no, he didn't actually catch them when he was fishing). Later on, Derek managed to find his pair around the same spot (after diving into the muck a few times). The waves were rough enough to have sandblasted all the paint off his frames, but the lenses were fine. It's kind of eerie that we found them both.

Okay, I'm clearly depriving myself of far too much sleep. And blogging about mundane things. I'll pick this up again when I have something interesting to say. (Did I mention that it's hot in our apartment? And muggy? And sticky? These are not ideal blogging conditions.)

Posted by csageday at 02:34 AM | Comments (1)