last weekend...

Man, I will never get caught up at this rate. Jeez. Anyway, I'm going to start with what we did last Sunday, because it's pretty easy to sum up: we did nothing. We were gonna go to the Delray Beach Garlic Fest, because a) garlic is great and 2) I wanted to see The Wreckers, who were playing there, but in the end, we were just too tired, and there was too much stuff we needed to do around the house. What were we doing on Saturday that kept us from our chores and left us oh-so exhausted? Glad you asked.

The short answer to that is we went record shopping, tried a new restaurant, and then went to a hockey game. I took pictures of all of it. So my pictures for last Saturday and Sunday (and probably Monday, too) will all be from Saturday's outing.

The record store was this crazy place in Pompano Beach called Kelly's Klassics. It used to be in Wilton Manors, and if you try to look it up most places still list that old address, but it has now moved to Bay B at 1431 SW 12th Ave, Pompano Beach. It's this kind of a place:


A true vinyl nerd's paradise. There's treasure to be found, but you have to be willing to spend all day there, digging through thousands and thousands of records.



We spent about 3 or 4 hours there and walked out with a big stack of vinyl that's worth about $160, but which they let us have for $120 (yay, bargain!). The bulk of the purchase was Johnny's, but I found a still-sealed copy of Johnny Cash Sings I Walk the Line (a Sun Records compilation from either 1970, 1976, or 1979 depending on which source you believe), and a Nashville steel guitar record from 1961, plus an awesome storage box for 45's (of which I have exactly two right now - I'm going to have to start collecting 'em now that I've got a cool box to put them in). Speaking of 45's...



After record-hunting, we were starving, so we went to dinner at this little place up in Sunrise called Nirala Sweets & BBQ - well, I think the official name is Nirala Sweet & BBQ Restaurant, but the thing that grabbed my attention when I first saw it was their sign, which reads "Nirala Sweets BBQ." I saw that when we drove by it a couple weeks ago on the way to our first Panthers game and remarked to Johnny, "Now there's a place that has their priorities in order!" I figured we'd get around to checking it out someday, but the review of it here prompted my desire to eat there ASAP. There's also this review from the Miami Herald and this blurb from the BPB New Times to give you a good idea what the place is like. So here's what we ate:



Aloo saag, goat curry, and mango lassis! Mmm-mm. But absolutely nothing could prepare me for how amazing their sweets are!! I didn't get a picture of the sweets counter - I already felt like enough of a doofus standing there going "ok, I have no idea what any of this is, I have no clue what I want to try first, there are like, 25 different kinds of sweets here! what do I do, what do I do?" The owner was so nice - he gave us a sample of this one thing - "Try this, it's our top of the line." It was so good, I nearly fell over. "We'll take two pieces of everything on that shelf." That came out to be about a pound of sweets, and we killed that off in a week. So I will be sure to get a picture next time... because there will definitely be a next time. The place is on the way to the arena, and there's still a month to go in hockey season. But we'll have to pace ourselves, or we'll end up gaining 80 lbs each.

Well, this is getting kind of long, so I suppose I'll save the hockey stories for another post. I'm sure you're all on pins and needles, oh brother.

woohoo!

Jilly Bean got sick of listening to me bitch about free Flickr, so she upgraded me to pro! THANK YOU, Bean!!! She is teh bestest friend evar.

I'm still about, uhm, 10 pictures behind, tho', at this point. And since today is Johnny's birthday, I'm going to be out all evening instead of home, avoiding posting. Man. I am still so clearly not used to living somewhere where there's stuff going on all the time.

So I have no idea when/if I'll get caught up. No promises from me. Lowered Expectations, y'all. But at least now you'll be able to check out bigger versions of my pics (instead of resized 500x375-pixel versions) on my Flickr page. You'll be able to see exactly how bad a photographer I really am! That's exciting, right?

Friday recap

Well, now that I've finally got my pictures from the weekend in order (nevermind that it's just about 10 minutes away from being Wednesday by now), I can begin to tell you about it.

Friday was the Rhett Miller show at Studio A. It was good, but poor Rhett totally blew out his voice over the course of the show, so he sounded really rough by the end of it. The setlist, if you care:

• Melt Show


• This Is What I Do


• My Valentine


• The New Kid


• Buick City Complex


• Fireflies


• Brand New Way


• Bird in a Cage


• Singular Girl


• Four-Eyed Girl


• Four Leaf Clover


• Wish the Worst (he knocked over his mic stand during this song)


• Things That Disappear


• Barrier Reef


• The El


• Salome


• Help Me, Suzanne


• Won't Be Home


• Come Around


• Rollerskate Skinny


• Timebomb

-----

• Question (with verses en Francais)


• Big Brown Eyes


• Our Love

It was our first time going to Studio A. For all that I bet it is a shitty dance club, it is a pretty nice room in which to see a show. Of all people, Rik from All Is Well/10 Sheen/Whatever They're Calling Themselves This Week was working the door! I know no one in this town, but I recognized this guy whom I had met once in like, 2002, and whom I had seen play about 3 times ever. Then again, a foot-high mohawk makes a guy kind of recognizable, y'know? Anyway, I gave him my e-mail address so he could put me on the mailing list for whatever his new band is... he says they're playing a show there in April. I will definitely try to make it out for that.

So, Rhett. Oh, Rhett. I had forgotten what fun he is to watch onstage! He's a spaz! All flailing arms and liquid legs! It is simultaneously comic and endearing. I had never seen him solo before, but it's just like when he's fronting the Old 97's, only there's no band behind him. He still rocks everything out, yelping like there is no tomorrow in his inimitable way. Johnny's comment, after the show, was that he couldn't tell the Old 97's tracks and his solo tracks apart, the way Rhett played them all so high-energy and intense.

So here are my two pictures which should have been posted on Saturday, both from the Rhett show. Rhett in red (but not entirely in focus):


And here's a shot of Studio A's gigantic disco ball, which hangs menacingly low over the dance floor:

(Believe it or not, this one's blurry on purpose.)

There's more on my Flickr photostream, if you're interested, including a (blurry, of course) picture of the opener, Jesse Jackson (not the Reverend - this dude. See also: his MySpace, and this article from the Miami Herald). We walked in about midway through his set, but what we saw, we liked. He was a very good fit for a Rhett crowd, I think.

...or not

Ok, so, I've run into a bit of a problem with the picture thing. Well, two problems, really: more to do, and less time in which to do it. Weekends around here get really busy. We're not home for very long, and I don't have a lot of time to sit around cropping, fixing, resizing, and uploading pictures so I can blog about them. And because we're out doing things, I take a ton more pictures on weekends. My photo-processing workflow is broken. It just takes too long for me to get them online, so it never gets done.

Suggestions, anyone? Here's how I do things now - please tell me what I can do to make this whole process easier.

• upload pics from camera: this actually takes forever, because my camera and my computer don't play nice together. When I plug in the camera (a Canon PowerShot SD600, if you're wondering), it doesn't show up as a removable drive or whatever, like my old camera used to, so I can't just drag and drop the files to get the photos onto my hard drive. I either have to open iPhoto to do it (which takes forever because my 5000-some-picture iPhoto library is too big, so I have to wait for the program to crash a couple times before it'll recognize my camera and stop with the spinning beach ball of death so I can click the Import button - and then it has to go through my whole memory card checking for duplicate photos before it can copy the new files over), or I have to import them one at a time using GraphicConverter (which also takes forever if I want to upload more than, say, two photos). There's probably a newer version of GraphicConverter which will let you import more than one photo at once, but I think it only works on Mac OSX 10.4, and I'm using 10.39. There's also software that came with my camera which is supposed to make this process easier, but it would not install on my computer, probably because I was running low on hard drive space (I should try this again, now that I've got my external and have freed up some disk space).


• pick the best pictures to upload: I usually do this in iPhoto, even though it is glacier-slow, because it's the easiest way to scan through all the photos at any decent size and (relatively) quickly zoom in on the ones I need to check for focus or whatever.


• crop, retouch, color-fix, etc., if needed: I usually do this in GraphicConverter because I get more control over stuff than if I just used the iPhoto interface. The only way I can think of that would make this step go faster is if GraphicConverter would show me what aspect ratio my crop selection is (like I am used to having in PaintShopPro on Windows) before I actually do the crop.


• resize for upload to Flickr: I don't have Flickr Pro, so I need to make my pictures smaller before I upload them, or else I'll use up my monthly bandwidth allowance in about a week. I probably should just lay out the cash for Flickr Pro. That would save me this step entirely. As it is, I've been resizing with GraphicConverter, one picture at a time (if there's a way to do batch-resizes with the version of this program that I have, I couldn't find it). I just downloaded photo Drop, though, so now I can do the batch-resize thing fairly quickly.


• upload to Flickr: I finally broke down and downloaded the Flickr uploader program. It does make the uploading go much faster. But no matter what, it's still going to take me forever to title and caption all my photos, even if I do them in batches.

So that's all the mess I have to go through before I can post a picture. And when I take 99 pictures in one day, as I did this past Saturday, and then have no free time to go through that whole rigamarole outlined above, well, then you get three days with no posts. Where can I streamline this process? I've already done a few things to speed it up, as I mentioned. Actually getting the images from my camera onto my computer and quickly browsing through them seem like the biggest issues as of right now. I'm going to give the Canon software another try soon. Other than that, any suggestions? It bugs me like heck that I have to use about 4 different programs to do all this stuff.

learned my lesson

Ok, we're going to see Rhett Miller at Studio A tonight (woohoo!), so I'm posting today's pics now - if I get any good pics at the show, I'll post them tomorrow. Also, check out the Rhett Miller interview in this week's Miami New Times.

Ok, so I made my wristbands from that Joann's yarn I got on Tuesday. Oh, had I been dying to knit! I swatched and played around wtih needle sizes last night, and I finished 'em up today. Here's what I came up with:





I did the top one on size 11 needles, knit flat in stockinette and then sewed into a tube shape. I did the bottom one in the round on 10.5 dpns in k1, p1 rib. I like the look of the stockinette one better, but the ribbed one does fit more snugly, and is therefore warmer (this is key because it's actually cold in here today - only 58 degrees outside, and remember, we don't have heat! It's 65 indoors here right now, and that's usually about how cold our apartment stayed in Syracuse in the winter with the heat cranked up!)

Since those two pics are so boring, here's a bonus pic which I took on this day last year:
Syracuse University, 2/16/2006


Oddly enough, it is just as grey here today as it is in that pic. In Syracuse today, however, it is probably still all completely white.

told ya.

So. Two days and no pics. I told y'all - Year of Lowered Expectations. I hope you weren't expecting anything more from me.

Anyway, I sort of have an excuse for not getting any pics up on V-day. See, we went to see Dick Dale at Churchill's, and I was expecting to be home by about midnight or 1 a.m. and make my post then. But when we got there at 10 p.m., only the first of the three opening bands had played. The second band (Guajiro, a local punk band that sings "rock en Espanglish" - check out their myspace) went on not too long after we got there, and I thought they were pretty good, though the sound man had them up way too loud. The third band, Laramie Dean, took longer to set up than they did to play (this is not necessarily a bad thing). They get a 9/10 for style, because they had tiki torches and a small stone tiki head on stage, but their playing was a little sloppy and the guitarist's tone wasn't the best, and, most disturbingly, they did this arm gesture between songs which, while it wasn't meant to be, looked too close to Heil Hitler for my comfort. The great thing about shows at Churchill's, though, is that Sweat Records is located out back, so you can browse between sets. I found this awesome purse made from recycled tire rubber in the markdown bin. When I went to ask if the sticker price was the before-markdown or after-markdown price, the girl at the register said, "Well, I already marked it down, but make me an offer." To which I replied, "...uhh......" until she said, "How about $25?" "OK!" (It was marked $30 - I peeled off that sticker later and found the original price was $40). Yay, bargain!

So Dick Dale did not actually take the stage until midnight, which is quite late for a mid-week weeknight show. He was 100% worth the wait, tho' - so amazing!! He may be 800 years old, but he's still got it. It's so awesome to see someone who is not only incredibly good at what they do, but who so clearly enjoys doing it. Not only did he play his guitar and sing, but also he picked up drumsticks at one point and went back and played on the kit alongside his drummer; then came back out front and played his bass player's bass with the drumsticks while his bass player fingered the notes; and then the roadie handed him a trumpet and he played that, too! Craziness. And he was such a charmer, flirting with the ladies in the audience, and cracking jokes about how his crappy hotel didn't have wireless internet and how, as a Mac user, he thinks PC stands for "Piece of Crap" (tee hee). Oh, man, it was a great show. We didn't get home until after 2 a.m., and we reeked of smoke - I had forgotten what that was like, what with NY's smoking ban. I slept in until 11:30, but poor Johnny had to get up early and go to work...

Oh - we had dinner before the show at Tom Jenkins' Bar-B-Q in Ft. Lauderdale, which featured the best mac & cheese I've ever had in a restaurant. I was a little bummed that I couldn't get the hush puppies I'd been craving, since they'd turned off the fryer for the night by the time we got there, but that's what we get for not realizing we were walking in just before closing time. We'll definitely have to check that place out again sometime soon.

So, pictures. You get shots of just about everything I mention in this post:
Tom Jenkins' mac & cheese


Sweat Records


The underside of Churchill's patio roof - they've got all these tin beer signs nailed up under there. It looks really cool lit up by the mini lights.


Dick Dale


There's a few more shots from the show up on my Flickr photostream, if you're interested. And now that I'm caught up with the pictures, I'm going to bed.

today's goodies

So here is what I got today in my amazon.com package, and from my nearest Joann Fabrics, which I just located this morning:



The yarn is from Joann's. I know I live in the land of heat and no knitting now, but I had to get this. Not only was it 75% off the already-reduced clearance price, but also I saw it, and I immediately thought "wristwarmers." I knew it had to be mine. I'm gonna knit that baby up nice and loose on some slightly-too-big needles, and the finished product will rule my world. Can you tell I've really missed knitting this past month or so?

And for today's second picture, an update on how my hair is growing back in:



Look! It's bad 80's hair!! AKA what happens when I step out of the shower and just let it air dry without combing it down or anything! Yeah, I'm thinking of shaving it all off again. I can't wait until it grows out of this phase.

So, the other exciting news from today: the police called. They found The Grey Baron! We're going to pick him up in the morning. It's going to cost us $124 to get him back from the towing place, as long as we make it there before 9 a.m. (they open at 8:30). So we've gotta go to bed now, or it'll cost us an additional $54. Yeah, really. We're contemplating just telling the towing place to keep him.

bunch of savages in this town

A post title like that can only mean one thing: car trouble. For a change, however, it's not Lucy in trouble this time - it's our other car, The Grey Baron. He was stolen at some point overnight last night, from the street in front of our apartment.

There had been an attempt to steal him last weekend, but they'd only managed to get into the car and pull out the key slot from the steering column. We didn't bother reporting that because we figured it was just some dumb neighborhood kids who would give up since they hadn't managed to get the thing the first time.

I was actually up at about five this morning when I heard a car start outside, with someone gunning the engine a bit before driving away. Since we just moved here, I have no idea whether or not any of our neighbors are usually up at that time, so I didn't really think much of it. Man, if only I'd just looked out the window.

So, anyway, this puts something of a crimp into our lifestyle. We're probably going to have to go get Johnny a new car sometime soon, since eventually we'll have to drive our separate ways during the day. We were planning on getting him a new car fairly soon, anyway, since The Grey Baron is 16 years old and starting to fall apart. In addition to the iffy transmission, the air conditioning being broken, the roof beginning to rust, the ceiling fabric continually drooping, and the stereo wiring slowly failing, the car was infested with ants. Honestly, I'm not so sure we got the worst end of this deal. The thieves were clearly really dumb to target that car, of all the cars on our street. They probably just went for him 'cause they figured he'd be easy to hotwire.

But still, The Grey Baron was, essentially, my first car. I got in my first car accident as a driver in him in 1994. I drove all the way across the country, from Virginia to California and back, in The Baron in April of 2001. He was a hand-me-down from my maternal grandparents, once neither of them could drive anymore. He was already about 6 years old by the time I took full possession of him, but, as with old-people hand-me-down cars, he had relatively few miles on him and was in really good condition. I drove him up and down the Eastern Seaboard more times than I can remember. I learned how to be aggressive in city traffic (as you have to be, in city traffic) in him. He was a great road-trip car - such cushy seats! Luckily, I don't think there was anything irreplaceable in him when he was taken. Johnny had been keeping him pretty clean inside. I'll miss the photo-sticker gallery I'd created on his dashboard of pictures of me with assorted family and friends - a feature I've been meaning to recreate in Lucy. I'll miss all the great stickers I had on his back.

After the attempted theft the weekend before last, I thought to take a picture of the Baron's back end earlier this week, so that's today's second picture for you.



If you see this car, please contact the Hollywood Police Department.

Goodbye, Grey Baron. I knew we'd be parting ways soon, but I didn't think it would be like this. I wish I'd gotten to keep your hood ornament. That thing was sweet.

And on a side note: does anyone know anything about the Ravelco anti-theft device? I'm thinking of having one installed in Lucy now. Everything I've been able to find out about them seems pretty positive.

clearing the cobwebs

I've spent some time in the past few days deleting old files off my webspace to make more space for this blog to expand. I managed to free up about 4MB! Kinda sad that I had that much crap just hanging out on my server, huh?

I just went through and did a quick revision of my template, to reflect the fact that I've moved, in addition to my usual updates. The biggest change I made was to add a blogroll for all my links to friends' sites. It looks a little weird to me right now - I still need to mess with the formatting a bit, I suppose, to make it match the rest of the site. But it's great because it'll display the links randomly. Hooray for no-particular-order! I thought about doing alphabetical, but that's so boring.

Anyway, my motivation for doing all this messing about is that I have a project I want to try. I want to try to post a picture, if not every day, then at least every couple days, for this whole year. Since I didn't get the idea until late January (courtesy a friend of my friend Sam), and I only recently got my new external hard drive so I can actually download photos from my camera again, I'm a little late getting started here - so I'm planning to post two pictures a day until I am all caught up.

Now remember - I declared 2007 the Year of Lowered Expectations. That means there is no way I'm actually going to pull this off. But it is something I've been meaning to try for a while now, so I'm gonna give it a shot.

And now, without further ado, here's the first picture I have for you:



The view from our front window on a typical sunny South Florida day.

a sad day for Texas

A sad day for all the rest of us, too: R.I.P., Molly Ivins. I will miss you.

The thing I appreciate most about Molly Ivins is that she showed me how to be a liberal and a Southerner, too. Not some namby-pamby whiny liberal, but a wickedly funny, sharp-as-a-tack, righteously pissed-off Southern liberal. Without her showing the way, I might not have thought it was even possible to be all those things at once. It may not have occurred to me that it's possible to so clearly love where you're from, but be so angry about the stupidity and weaselliness of the lawmakers there. I'm disheartened that I don't see anyone else doing what she did with anything approaching her style and panache. Her voice was such a crucial one for me to hear in the national debate, and now it's gone. She will forever be in my pantheon of women I aspire to emulate.