Gardening and Grilling

It's been a while since I've posted. I've had a busy couple weeks. Last week I attended the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association yearly conference. I received a scholarship to attend one day of the conference through a new organization that I just joined, New England Women in Energy and the Environment. I met tons of successful women at the group's launch and went to three great sessions of the conference. I won't bore you with the nerdy stuff that I learned, I already bored Rick! I was all pumped up after the conference. It's so great to see the advances that our region of the U.S. is making when it comes to energy efficiency and our carbon cap and trade program.

I've also taken on a few more tutoring students. Algebra 2 is kicking my butt! I forgot that word problems about gravity and trajectory using the quadratic equation are hard. My 8th grade student is reading To Kill A Mockingbird. I've been saying for years that I should really reread the book. Since I am responsible for discussing the plot and concepts of it with him, I picked up the book from the library yesterday. I've become a bit of a book junkie during my unemployment. I've even dipped my toe into a couple self-help books. Not like "I'm crazy" self-help books but "working on my career strengths" type of stuff. And a little Suze Orman, I've got to have a plan for the money I'll start raking in one of these days when I get a full time job.

We purchased a grill Tuesday night from the Sears a couple miles from our house. We were very excited to get it home and put it together as soon as possible since we had heard the weekend was going to be nice. The sales person who helped us thought it would fit in our car, mind you we drive a Toyota Corolla. Not a chance. He suggested that I come back the next day, since it was almost closing, and take the pieces out of the box and load them into the car. So Wednesday afternoon I went back to Sears. Two of the guys in the pick up area took the very large pieces out of the box. Still no chance. Arrrggg. It's a problem when you live somewhere were you don't know anyone who drives a truck or SUV. I had to go next door to Lowe's and rent one of their trucks. When I was filling out the paperwork to rent the truck, the sales associated informed me that I had to transport a Lowe's purchase in order to rent the truck. I batted a few eyelashes and he told me I could buy a bottle of water and then I technically would be transporting the water. Nice. Off to Sears where the guys loaded it onto the truck. Luckily, the neighbor and his son were home when I got to our house and they carried it up our gazzillion steps to our deck. Wonderful! I returned the truck and was thrilled I had accomplished the mission at hand. Rick was pleased that we had a grill at our house when he got home.

Here are a couple pics of us putting it together...

So we thought we were pretty smart. We left the side burner and the other side off until we moved the grill outside to install.
Saturday was sunny and beautiful outside. Rick and I picked up some steaks from Costco and accomplished purchasing a propane tank and propane. We worked in the yard a bit and the attempted to put the rest of the grill together. The instructions told us to loosen a screw, slide on the side, and then retighten the screw. Sounds easy, right? Not if the screw is completely stuck into the side of the grill. Three calls to Sears later and no one had an answer for us.
We called it a day and made our way down to the Omni Parker House for a cocktail with some of our friends who were in town. We then went to dinner at one of Rick's co-worker's who had made a traditional New England Boiled Dinner in honor of St. Patrick's Day. It was delicious! Sunday was gorgeous again, near 65. We were determined that we would grill steaks for dinner come hell or high water. I decided if we wanted to get this grill situation taken care of we had to go to Sears ourselves. They can't hang up on you or transfer you to an answering machine if you are standing right in front of them. The manager on duty was great and got us a replacement screw from a model. Rick had to get handy when we got home and drilled out the stuck screw. A few more steps in the assembly and a few broken drill bits and we were done!
We knew we were inheriting quite a few gardens with the house but we really had no clue how much was planted out there. We didn't do any yard work besides bag some leaves this past fall. We had been busy painting and unpacking. Last week we began noticing little green shoots poking through the soil and the masses of dead plants from last season. Sunday we bagged leaves and tore up old plants and pruned. Here are a couple pics of what's coming up around our yard:

Even Phoebe enjoyed the day!

We also made a new friend:

The weekend ended just as we had planned...

Eerie

A potentially very strange thing happened to me when I was walking in to work last Friday. I was walking behind an oldish man on the sidewalk who was having an animated conversation with himself. I checked for Bluetooth. Negative. This in itself wasn't all that weird since I work in a hospital complex that includes a mental hospital. But it got weird after I passed him. He stopped the flow of his conversation and three times repeated something that sounded an awful lot like "Rick," which happens to be my name. I wasn't wearing my Rick jacket or Rick pants so there's no way he could have known my name. I turned off the sidewalk to enter my building before the potential implications of what I thought I heard had fully sunken in, but for the rest of the day I was kicking myself for not stopping and asking him if he was, in fact, saying my name. He was probably just saying something that sounded like Rick, or I may have missed my one opportunity to have had a magic friend. Oh well.

My dad used to tell me about how his dad used to enjoy giving away the last of his money since then he didn't have anything to worry about (freedom just being another word for nothing left to lose, etc). So on my way home, probably due to some guilt over not stopping to talk to the magic and/or crazy man earlier, I gave a panhandler my last dollar. It wasn't, strictly speaking, my last dollar on earth, but it was all I had left on my person after eating sushi for lunch. Anyways, it still felt sort of good, if for no other reason than the look on the guy's face when I told him it was my last dollar. He looked a little taken aback and maybe he didn't spend it on booze out of guilt. Maybe he started a savings account and turned his life around. I gave another guy a buck the next day to get a bus ride to Worcester, increasing my total Boston charitable contributions by a factor of approximately infinity.

5 cents a bottle

For two days in a row now I've seen discarded chicken bones on the sidewalk during my train-work walk. It made me miss St. Louis and reaffirmed my belief that peoples is people. I suspect the circumstances by which bones come to rest in the street are different in STL vs. Boston, however. In STL, I think people just throw them out their car windows. I think in Boston it is because we pay a deposit on cans and bottles. Every garbage day the city streets are literally littered with litter because a horde of entrepreneurs tear apart peoples' trash bags to fish out the discarded cans and bottles (5 cent deposit on each). It's sad and annoying. In STL, we saved our smelly bottles and cans and less smelly cardboard and hauled them down to some bins several blocks from our house every few weeks. When we moved here, we were excited that we had curbside recycling so we wouldn't have to keep the stuff in our living area or leave the house to arrow triangle. Turns out we do unless we want the government to steal our nickels. It's a super lame system. Most grocery and liquor stores have machines where you can (one at a time) load in your cans and bottles and it spits out a receipt. The problem is that most liquor stores won't take bottles for beers they don't sell. If you have eclectic taste in beer, you may have to visit 3 different stores to get your money back, which is super uncool. Also, liquor stores only take beer cans, so I can't recoup my Diet Coke losses without a separate trip. And finally, if anything happens to your bar codes or your cans get slightly crushed, SOL. I guess I could just come to terms with losing a few bucks a month and quit whining, but it's the principle dammit! What's more, there was a recent newspaper article saying the state loses 12 million dollars a year on people bringing their bottles, Neumann and Kramer style, across state lines to collect our hard earned nickles. Outrageous. I know the point of deposits is to reduce waste, and it works (see hordes of human raccoons making sure nothing worth 5 cents makes it to a landfill), but why do you have curbside recycling then!? To tease us? To make me feel like a cheap loser for not wanting to throw away change? For paper recycling? (Shut up, brain)

U2

There's been a buzz about town that Irish supergroup U2 was going to be playing a top secret concert at an undisclosed, intimate Boston location tonight. They announced on the news this morning that the venue was going to be the Somerville Theater, mentioned two posts ago for its awesome museum of bad art. The news did not say whether U2 would be performing in the theater or the museum. Zing! Take that, Larry Mullins Jr.

Actually, I used to like U2 quite a bit, and I believe the show Liz and I went to after All That You Can't leave Behind was released the most I've ever paid for concert tickets. It was a great show and at the time I said it was one of the best I'd ever seen. Sometime between then and now I've started hating them. Their last two albums have been, in my humble opinion of course, crap. The songs I've heard off them have annoyed me to near Dishwalla levels. I still love 10 or so of their songs, but there may not be another band with so many songs at both extremes of my love-hate spectrum. Dave Matthews would make the list.

Pretty Nice Weekend

In between bouts of despair brought on by the faltering world economy, we had a nice little weekend. Temps were in the low 60s, and so we jogged a section of a system of connected parks in Boston called the Emerald Necklace which we hadn't seen before. The section we saw is called the Back Bay Fens (near FENway Park), which I first heard of in the movie The Departed. In the movie, Jack Nicholson's character berates an underling for botching a body disposal in the fens. I didn't really see any place in the park that I'd consider safe for stashing a body one didn't want found, especially with the ocean just a short trunk ride away. But hey, what do I know about corpse disposal. Nothing, if anyone asks.

We also did some preliminary gardening as we noticed some green shoots were coming out of the ground. Liz tells me these are known as perennials. Less work for us. Thanks, botany. It's snowing like mad today so hopefully those precocious little shoots know what they're doing.

Remember the first few days of a new semester in high school or college, the anticipation of walking into a new class to see if there were any pretty ladies to look at to help pass the time? That's what getting on the subway is like only you never go to the same class twice. Getting on the bus is similar, assuming you took special ed classes in a high school for kids with tuberculosis.

And finally, you know who I've about heard enough out of? New Zealand. We get it, you're an island paradise with glaciers and rain forests and mountains and Sauvignon Blanc and volcanoes and Hobbits. Well guess what New Zealand, I did some checking and your days are numbered. Turns out the North Island and the South Island are on divergent tectonic plates. So the North Island will soon rear end Australia after it crashes into Asia while the South Island has a geological date with Antarctica. So enjoy being overrun by the Chinese, North Island. Meanwhile, your "mates" on the South Island will be living in a frozen wasteland. You won't be so smug after that, now will you. I can't wait to see the looks on their stupid Kiwi faces.

MOBA

I haven't updated in a while because I was waiting for a cable I ordered which allows me to download pics off my phone. We've kind of been coasting around here for the past few weeks, although we have done a few funs. A couple weeks ago we (I) went to Cinematic Titanic, a live performance by the writers and performers of Mystery Science Theater 3000. If you are unfamiliar, please turn in your MN citizenship card. It was a show from the 90s where the silhouettes of a guy and two robots in front of a movie screen showing horrible movies make wonderfully snarky and sarcastic comments about the film. I still remember the first time I randomly flipped it on the TV. I at first wondered what in the world was going on, but when I caught the gist it was an epiphany. The intrinsic humor of a horrible monster/sci-fi/60s movie combined with their razor wit and numerous MN references was an often magical combination. It provided several hours of weekend morning entertainment and played no small role in shaping my sense of humor. My other early influence was having my dad read me the Little Golden Book We Help Mommy with different interpretations of the pictures. In his version the kids were little bastards and were out to destroy their home and parents. Comedy gold to a four year old.

The live performance was of a movie called Blood of the Vampire, in which Filipinos playing Mexicans (including slaves in black face) did battle with ridiculously underpowered vampires. It was worth the price of admission. Liz saw Gran Torino instead. The theater where it was in Somerville has an added incentive to visit, the Museum of Bad Art. It featured bad art. Some examples below. Hopefully you find them as entertaining as I did. Look up MST3K on Youtube if you want a primer.



Why is Elvis crying? Maybe he had a premonition about his own toilet death. Or he was performing "In the Ghetto." That song is a tear jerker.




The previous two speak for themselves and defy explanation. One of the artists has a good grasp of how to paint 80s hair.

The following two were from a collection titled Pointless-ism:




The caption on this one was something about her apparently being half Swedish and half Polynesian.



This one was my favorite, I've included the gallery's interpretation.



In "He Was A Friend Of Mine," the cat seems to be remembering the family Husky, who has passed on to the great kennel in the sky. However, the Exorcist-inspired look in the cat's eyes seem to suggest that the cat resents the fact that the Husky was always the family favorite.

It speaks to me.

When I downloaded these from my phone, there were others from our trip to the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Ironic.