Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: asshats, drunken roofers, garbage carts, home remodeling, tomatoes
Last week, someone took my city-appointed garbage cart. It would be a hard thing for someone else to mistake it for their own because there just aren’t a confusing number of cans near my store-most people have dumpsters. And my can says “819 E. Johnson” on it. So I call the city on Monday to ask for another can and they wouldn’t give me one. New ones cost $50. and why don’t I just go out looking for mine, the scornful lady said, maybe someone took it by mistake. So I lied and said I’d do that said and then the next day, Tuesday, my can re-appeared right in front of my store. So that’s great. Really strange, but great. So then today, Garbage Day, I’ve got both my cans out but my garbage does not get picked up because some asshat parked their car in the only spot in a three store stretch where there are garbage cans waiting to get emptied. For fuck’s sake.
But anyway, on to other things. You know, I think I may have found someone who knows cement guys who will work on our backyard. When we last left this saga one contractor had looked at the job and never got back to us. Since then a second contractor Don found scoped it out and never got back to us. In the meantime, Hope, my surprise tomato plant (who’s life is endangered by the project) has been growing wildly and producing a modest amount of fruit, most of which I believe is being stolen by squirrels.
Now that we’re up to date on everything…The construction guy I ran into is the husband of a gal, Carol, who’s jewelry I used to carry in the store. Carol also borrows my EZ Up Canopy for shows every fall. Anyway, he came and looked and said he check with several cement guys and get back to us and I believe him because, in the past, solids have been done for Carol. Should it turn out that I am responsible for finding a competent contractor, it would be a first for me and thus worthy of some kind of celebration.
I’m still haunted by the roofing team I hired back in 1997 to put a new roof on the studio. The initial picking of them after meeting them was done by my former landlord but I’m the one who gave them a check and let them up on the roof so whatever happened after that is pretty much my responsibility. Three things off the top of my head that just weren’t right with the project: It took them 6 months to finish a 1000sq ft. roof, they broke into an apartment in a building adjoining my roof to steal back a handful of washer-type hardware that they left on the roof and that someone in the apartment had taken inside, and the boss had to be called in one day to help revive an employee who drank so much that he passed out on the roof and was unresponsive to attempts to awaken him. Well, four things–the boss got raging pissed off at me when someone stole his leftover insulation from out behind the building. Weeks earlier I had actually given it away to my Madison Gas and Electric guy because he asked about it. It had been there for months, I thought they abandoned the project and I wanted it cleaned up. In this neighborhood, people will steal anything that isn’t nailed down, roofing guy, I said, remember the washer-thingies?. What a trip people are sometimes.
So that was the last contractor I picked. I don’t think I’m very good at it but I’m feeling better about this one.
We went to a shrimp boil at a minor league ball game last night. Madison Mallards vs. The Woodchucks (from somewhere). That’s a slice of hometown Americana for you. Like everything else I attend, this was a little treat for vendors, such as people who work for The Great Dane, since their beer is sold at the ball park. Always with the Great Dane and the treats.
Baseball is a little slow for me but minor league baseball is pretty entertaining cause they’ve got a lot of weird stuff between innings to look at. Also, there are funnel cakes for sale. So it’s dinner and a show. We had a good time.
But back to the above photo…Kafka is a relief pitcher who warmed up on and off in front of us during the game. We talked to him a little and he seemed like a nice fellow. I was dying to come up with some obscure literary reference involving Kafka and baseball or team sports or throwing things but my lack of familiarity with Kafka and his work prevented me from doing so. Shucks! Next best thing, I captured the moment on digital whozits so I could throw it out to you guys. Maybe one of you book-types can come up with a caption…like…”Now batting for The Existentialists…” something like that. Write it in the comment area. Just for fun. My fun. I’m not offering a prize incentive because I don’t really expect anyone to do this. Just because I’m not offering one doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be one if someone came up with something really clever.
Hello everyone. Beer fest is over! Yay! As always, it was an excellent time. I went with Erika and her fiancee Aaron. Social engagements are good. Know what we saw a lot of this year–kids. Like, children…little ones. That didn’t seem like such a hot idea to me. Even though adults at this event are remarkably well behaved, it seems like someone could accidentally fall on a kid pretty easily. Kids like to dart around. And the people at this event have pretty slow reaction times. They might not even notice it if they fell on a small one. Fortunately, nothing like that happened. It was all good.
Aaron made a pizza when he got home.
It’s curly like a taco shell. It looks like he followed the same recipe we did after the beer fest in ‘05 (which is: put pizza in oven then either leave or fall asleep). The pure carbon pizza we made that day is no stranger to the blog. It’s still sitting in our living room. So is this one, now. Erika brought it over to our house.
Speaking of America’s couple, Erika and Aaron are getting married next month. This is the closest I’ve been to another person who is planning a big wedding. (I was a part of my own wedding but there wasn’t really any planning involved.) That’s a lot of work, wedding planning for hundreds of people. Count me out of that one.
Here’s something funny–Don is performing the wedding ceremony, bringing the beer and playing in the band. He likes to help, that guy. Here’s something else that’s funny: the ceremony is being held on a mound in Aztalan State Park because Aaron wants to get married on an energy vortex. Aaron has talked about this vortex thing for a while. I hope we’re on the right mound ’cause I don’t want to end up in hell or anything.
So that’s the next big event and it’s not for a while. Plenty of time to plan out what we’re going to tie to the back of their truck after the ceremony. That pizza is definitely going on there.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: bottle cap beads, cathy colision, glass gardens, wiener dogs
Do you hear the crickets chirping in the glass world? I guess everyone’s at the Gathering by now. I’m going to take the rest of the week off too. Why not?Gotta attend things and get the house clean in case folks come over on Saturday night.
That Taste of The Midwest thing that’s going on this weekend is the craft brewer’s equivalent of the Gathering. It’s a large deal. For a few days you’re around all these people you really like and never get to see but they’re too busy to hang out. After the event everyone is pretty incapacitated. Some come over but most can’t. Everyone goes home the next day. Sad for Don.
Sigh. I’m bored. Anyway, last night, because I like to give people stuff at these shows, I beaded up a nifty necklace to give to someone in the Three Floyd’s clan when I see them on Sat.
That’s one of Cathy Colision’s bottle cap beads. She made this one for me after I gave her a box of caps. Otherwise, I don’t think this design is available. OOAK, friends. 3 Floyd’s artwork is the best. So is their beer.
I made myself a similar multi strand necklace out of an angry flower bead.
That photo turned out nice! My flower is missing a petal. It got caught on a seat belt strap. That’s why he’s mad. There’s one of these flowers up on Etsy right now, if you want your own. I think the beer show folks will like this bead. Drunk people get me. It’s why I like being around them.
How else to kill time today…the garbage picking is getting good with all the kids moving around. I found some really cool material with an interesting print on it:
Wiener dogs! Not very much of it, though. Also in the garbage Don found a copy of Beck’s “Odelay” cd which is great because I like that cd and I think I lost the copy of it that Don bought. Wa-wah.
Well, that’s about it. Be back on Monday, or maybe sooner, I just don’t know.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: great taste of the midwest, lost school, national poetry slam, venice gas house trolley
Well, we’ve got all kinds of activities on the activity pile this week. In addition to assisting people who are moving and picking through the garbage they leave behind, we’ve got two music shows and a giant beer fest to attend.
Brought in as entertainment for the folks attending the National Poetry Slam in Madison this week, Venice Gas House Trolley and Lost School ( Don, James, Sean and Dave) , the band from our living room, will be playing at The Mercury Cafeon Thursday. If you dig that spoken word with musical accompaniment thing, Venice Gas House should be right up your movie. I saw them a few weeks ago and they are highly entertaining. Lost School is doing some of the spoken word and some tunes. Since I started doing monkey work days on Mondays I’ve been absent from the practices but I think they are performing a piece James wrote about Bob Foster that’s pretty tangy. And other stuff too! It’s all good what they play. You ought to stop by and see them.
So, then, on Saturday, August 9, Don’s other band, Retro Box (Don, Kent, Rick) is playing at the Great Taste Of The Midwest. I’ve been attending and blogging about the taste for several years now. It is a blast. Truly the happiest, drunkest, people you will ever see in public. This year they are discontinuing the valet bicycle parking due to concerns about patrons trying to make it home in anything other than a cab. It is a safe, smart, well-organized event. What better a venue to play a bunch of 70’s covers than the happiest, drunkest place on earth? Tickets are still available on Ebay if you want to go. And you should go.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: scrap glass, peyote stitch, mosaic, delica, bead bin, beadweaving
About six weeks ago I decided to switch my scheudule around so that I would work two really long torching days on Monday and Wednesday and two regular days on Tuesday and Thursday. This would free up time on the weekend so that I could crawl out from under my rock and go outside. I seem to have a lot of extra time now so I got that scrap tile mosaic thing finished in the bathroom:
That took hours of my life. I was using one of those puny Rapid Fire kilns to fuse everything 5 square inches at a time. Nothing is annealed but there’s a ton of grout holding it up there so it doesn’t really matter if it cracks.
This tile ended up in the upper right hand corner:
I had other pictures too but I don’t know where they went. For some reason I’m incapable of entering picture titles into my image host in a logical manner so I can find them again. I entered that picture of the finished window several weeks ago not under “mosaic” or “window” or “finished” but rather under the word “grouted”. It’s a wonder I found it at all.
But anyway, after finishing that mosaic I became interested in adopting another time sucking activity. Having actual objects made at the end of the day is really the only thing that makes me feel as though I’m utilizing well my time on earth. I decided to learn the biggest time sucking activity of them all–beadweaving (off-loom, peyote stitch and that sort of thing). Beadweaving…beadweaving is what it is-it’s extremely slow going and very futsy, but you wouldn’t do it if you weren’t gleaning a certain amount of satisfaction from it and I really like it. Personally, I’ve never pictured myself sitting down and learning it unless I was incarcerated or something, but now that I’ve figured out a thing or two I think it’s pretty worth while.
So far I know flat strip and long, wormy tube stitch. Yup. I’m more impressed with my new-found ability to comprehend beadweaving instructions than anything else. It seems like you have to know a lot of different things and be proficient at them before you can do anything really cool. You also have to have an idea of something cool to make, which I don’t, probably because I don’t know enough yet. So for now I’m just filling a cigar box with wormy tubes of different lengths and colors. Maybe I’ll sew them all on a hat and then jump around wearing the hat. That might make a cool sound and be good exercise. I don’t know where any of this is going. For some reason, I do rather enjoy having a new wormy tube done at the end of the day.
What’s funny about the new hobby is even tough I had a ton of beads that I purchased for my former next-sore neighbor, Jade Mountain, I don’t have many of the right kind kind of beads for this type of stuff. Because they’re very uniform and have large holes, what really works well are Delica beads. Much as I imagine crack is packaged, Delicas come in little vials in gram measurements. Oh how you want more and more of those little vials.
Anyway, with Jade Mountain closed I have to go downtown or to the Bead Bin at the mini-mall. When I had my retail business I used to see a lot of rather morose husbands accompanying their wives to Jade Mountain. I would always praise the husband for being supportive while thinking “You poor bastard” and wondering if he was going to be subjected to the ribbon and yarn store that was on the other side of me. Don and I were out on the bike on Sunday in the vicinity of the Bead Bin so we went there and I minced around buying a bunch of crack vials while he read Bead Style magazine. We were they. That really weirded me out.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: mad city chickens, backyard chickens, coop tour, frank lloyd wright
As I mentioned before, Don and I went on an backyard chicken coop tour on Sunday. The event is sponsored by Mad City Chickens who’s aim it is to educate the urban population about the benefits of raising poultry right at home, here, in the city. I hadn’t heard of the organization until I read about them in the paper this week but they’re really organized and have even had a documentary made about them.
Do you know how many people there are raising chickens in your city? I didn’t think there were any here but apparently there’s a whole bunch. Coop quality varies, I am sure. Of course, the coops on the tour were probably much nicer than average. Kind of the livestock equivalent of the Parade of Homes.
If I had a chicken coop I would make it look like a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Something with recognizable features but more energy effecient and raccoon proof than Frank’s real houses. Then we could dress up the chickens in little black fedoras and train them to peck at peoples wallets. What a worthwhile way to spend my time that would be! That dream will have to go unrealized because, due to houses in extremely close proximity (less than 25 feet), we can’t have chickens, or even a duck, where we live (unless we keep it inside. I’ve asked and I don’t think that will happen). The first time someone contracts any kind of illness you know who they’re going to blame-the people who built a chicken coop 22 feet away from their kitchen window. That’s why the law is there, I guess-to protect everyone.
But just because we can’t have them doesn’t mean you should count yourself out of the urban chicken raising game. Chickens are in. I think they’re the new pot bellied pig, except better. They eat corn and the excrete eggs and compost-able material. When properly maintained the coops have no discernible odor. Chickens can be very friendly, pets even–but unlike conventional pets, you have the option of eating your chickens should they vex you or become a load when they stop producing eggs. It’s a win-win situation.
According to Madison law, each household is allowed up to four chickens. Here is what four chickens look like:
At one of the stops I took a picture of a little girl holding what was obviously her chicken. It was similar to the caramel colored one above. Chickens are surprisingly large–from toe to crown it was almost half the girl’s size. Unfortunately, I didn’t ask her mom if I could post the photo so I’m not going to. That chicken was subjected to a barrage of little girls bent on petting it, and the chicken was chill. When the little girl’s mother called it, the chicken came running. That one is not going to get eaten, ever.
Some coops were cute:
Some were more basic:
All of them functioned well and were home to very clean and healthy looking birds. From looking at the front of any of the houses you would not guess that there were chickens living in the backyard. They really don’t take up a lot of room or stink or make that much noise. You can only have four, remember, so it’s not all that much work to take care of them.
I bitch about this city a lot but there are some really cool things here–like that coop tour. I like listening to people talk about stuff that they’re really into and those people were really into raising chickens in their backyards. It was a fun day.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: albania, aol, clintons, patriotic, vacation
I was going to finish up my chicken blog today but then I ran across something funny (extremely) in my AOL news. The headlines continue to grab me long after the article disappears. This morning’s was “Where People Love Americans”, which I read to mean “Where People Don’t Hate Americans” so of course I clicked on it because, where would that be anyway? Americans don’t even like eachother all that much.
The story consisted of a list of ten places left in the world where people still like us, and hence, may want us to vacation there. Number one on the list was Albania, which, if you don’t know, is located directly across the Adriatic Sea from the heel of Italy’s boot. It looks like a nice place to visit. Besides the part about scratching around for ten places where people want Americans around, this is the funny part: According to AOL, not only are Americans welcome in Albania, the natives there are “quick to recount the story of how their country was saved by Woodrow Wilson.” (Of course they are talking about the Paris Peace Conference after WWI when Wilson vetoed a plan to partition Albania among it’s neighbors. This was around 1919-1920.) I guess I can kind of see that fact coming up at a cocktail party–an Albanian runs into an American and wants to say something positive so they dig back to 1920. I guess that could happen. The other ”fact” (note questionmarks of scorn) proffered by the story is that Albanians have been known to name their children “Bill” and “Hillary”, presumably as an homage.
I know little of Albania or her people but, are they really doing that, naming their kids after the Clintons, presumably as an homage? If they’re not, it means AOL is making shit up. And if they’re making shit up, that means AOL is risking alienating #1 on the people who like us list which, if dropped off, would leave us with only nine lesser vacation alternatives, for whom we have done even less lately than we have for Albania 88 years ago. That’s kind of a dangerous game.
So if anyone’s got relatives or friends in Albania, find out if they’re really all that ape shit about us. I’m just curious. They also may want to know how they are being represented to the spoon-fed news crowd vis-a-vie the baby naming. Albania may not be using Google Alerts so they may not know.
American loving runners up in the article were Tanzania, India, Vietnam, England, Japan, Ireland, Poland, Ghana and Canada.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: chickens, lake louie brewing, mama mia, movies, wienermobile
On Friday Lost School had a discussion about how much we would have to get paid to go see the movie “Mama Mia!”. Bob Foster said he’d go for fifty bucks, popcorn and a drink and Aaron said he’d go for fifty bucks if we got him really drunk first. No one else made an offer.
I thought that was kind of out of my price range until I saw a review for the movie on CBS This Morning. Apparently, since many of the cast members are not singers and dancers by trade, the singing and the dancing in the movie is not very good, or in the case of Pierce Brosnan, it is quite horrible. So now I’m thinking that it might be worth 50 bucks to hear Bob Foster describe the movie in his own irascible way. I’m not sure if this makes me a good friend or not. (This week’s vocabulary word, irascible, is worth bonus imaginary points when used in reference to Bob Foster.)
I’ve been involved in a number of different bloggable activities lately. One of them was a “parade of coops”, as it were–a walking tour of Madison homes where the owners keep chickens in their backyards.
Chickens sure are great. That’s going to be a seperate entry.
Meanwhile, I took a picture of our friend Tom Porter’s (he owns and operates Lake Louie Brewing) tiny electrical car and it looks like a spirit is escaping through the passenger side window.
Eerie! It has kind of a Wienermoblie quality to it. (I didn’t know how to segue into this one so I just threw it in. )
I gotta get up on the torch now.
