Today is some heritage foundation event in the UK where they are trying to collect a day in the life of the UK. I heard that on the radio while driving towards Needham this morning. They are planning on getting non-bloggers to write what they did today and submit it to their archive so that historians have the content in 100 years to learn things about how we lived today. It reminded me that I haven’t been able to write lately given all of the business of shuttling through life. So I’ll attempt to get back into the groove of things for the Brits. I might even send them some info from across the pond.

The last two days have been marked by a choice for movies that involved some depressing thoughts. The first was Interview with a Vampire. It was a pretty bad movie in terms of the acting or directing. It left me with the impression either that the book by Anne Rice must be much better than the movie OR that the book itself must be melodramatic and stupid. I just didn’t get into or feel any empathy for any of the characters. Then last night we watched Kids. Sarah had originally stated that we needed something less dramatic and a light comedy but changed her mind for whatever reason. Kids was the kind of movie where towards the middle of it I started to think to myself – I can’t wait for this to end. For me, the father of a soon to be one year old baby, watching children in New York with various drug usage and abusive sexual situations was very traumatic. I may have been better off watching a horror movie like Saw, Hostel, or some other graphic disturbing piece of content. Jeremy had asked me why I wanted to see it a few weeks back but I wasn’t dissuaded. I won’t try hard to dissuade other people from seeing it but it is quite a traumatic experience to watch it. In the interest of dissuading people from watching a movie I recommend that nobody rents the Butterfly Effect II. I saw the first one and when I saw that a sequel had been made at Hollywood Video I nearly went berserk running along the aisles knocking DVDs onto the floor or pulling the tape out of VHS cassettes. I refrained.

The main delay and hubbub causing my writing stoppage were the two weddings from the past two weeks combined with a trade show, marketing activities, and taking on some new work with Peter. Madeline hasn’t become the ideal sleeper that Ozzie and Harriet had yet. Last night she threw a little party for us at 11 PM to 1 AM. I got a chance to watch some TV on the recently hooked-up HD antennae on the roof. I don’t get channel 7 so I couldn’t watch Monday Night Football. Instead I watched some awful night version of a daytime television show where a video game developer was in love with some woman (good looking) about to marry a man (also good looking). The story had something to do with cheating on New Year’s Eve but I was mainly just trying to get Madeline to calm into sleep. Madeline is mobile enough to open doors and she opened the door to our bedroom while Sarah was trying to sleep. So Sarah went to nurse her as Seinfeld came on in the living room. I decided to go back to sleep rather than watch Seinfeld as a sign of solidarity with Sarah in our fight to achieve a regular sleep balance.

Saturday night was Hattie and Jose’s wedding. They were married at Trinity church in Copley. Madeline was sent out to Bedford for the night. The main result of that was a question from Sarah’s mother to ask us if we knew what “DaDaKiDa” meant. We don’t. But Madeline has picked-up some new language tricks. My favorite one is that the sign for time to go is to do the basketball traveling penalty sign followed by a tapping on an imaginary watch. I noticed when Madeline is a little bored or ready to leave where she is she will tap her wrist impatiently. It’s quite endearing to see and better than the normal squawks and shrieks we hear most of the time.

Today Annie Leibowitz was on the radio hawking her new book of photographs including a large number of personal photos of her family and Susan Sontag dying. It reminded me when Kate told me at the wedding that as a graphic designer that she shouldn’t be using stock photography but instead should use original photo art. At first I thought she felt that I should show her how to use a camera at which point I told her I could teach her everything I knew in a few minutes. Then she clarified that I should do some artistic photography and send her the photos as possible art for her graphic design work. I told her my main work is focused on countless shots of family members growing older and that I was less of an artist than someone who struggles with the concept of passing time, aging, and who clings to the positive or emotional memories of life. Maybe that’s what a photographer is anyways. I did let her know that I felt the plain blue stained glass with a shadow threefold of gargoyles at Trinity behind the pews would have made a good photograph if I had remembered to bring my camera into the church. Maybe I’d benefit greatly from some photography classes or to read a book about photography. I could benefit from almost anything to escape the humdrum of my regular routine.

My brand new Canon Elph camera broke only a day after I got it in the mail. It is already on it’s way back to Canon-land for repairs. It may not have been a great idea to take it out at Lisa and Dave’s wedding while partying hard near the dance floor but I’ll stick by the story that they should fix it because it is under warrantee and I didn’t even jump into the Colorado river or go caving with it.

Lisa and Dave’s wedding was a beautiful sunny fall day. The ceremony was in the Newton Centre Playground. Having it there made it hard for me not to raise memories from being 10-18. I basically used that park as a backyard for those years and remember meeting girls I had crushes on while sitting on a bench only a few feet away from where the ceremony was across from the hut where I had gone to camp one summer. We had swung on the swings cross country skied over jumps on the sledding hill. I ran home sweaty in my father’s button-up shirt after singing “Cheese glorious cheese” with the chorus of the Mason Rice School. I walked both alone and with friends on fences . Ray, our German shepherd jumped over the fence repeatedly. Some Chinese kid threatened to make me eat a worm. So I was thinking of these things along with random thoughts of what to say during my role as a toast giver during the backyard reception. The reception did borrow my well crafted and invented description of the meaning of the Chuppah.
…..
As always.. I ran out of time to chronicle things. Maybe next time…It’ll all be clear in the pictures of the weddings as soon as I can get them out.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am sworn to secrecy due to some bachelor party oaths regarding the precise events of last weekend. I am not sure why such secrecy surrounds bachelor parties given that it can only breed suspicion to not make it clear what occurs and nothing of great interest ever does occur at these events. At least nothing has thus far in my experience. I met DF on the plane in Denver. He was busy programming something in SAP and I had just finished reading the latest issue of Maxim. I had read Bar stool sports on the way to the airport and found one article of particular interest by the publisher. He listed the top 10 decisions in life that he should have made earlier. A big one was switching from a queen sized bed to a king sized one. Given that I have been scrunching into a corner of my bed to accommodate a growing baby I believe that the most important thing I can do in the next three months to improve my quality of life is to switch to a king sized bed. He also had other insights like the benefits of online betting vs. a bookie and how happy he was he didn’t get a racing shirt while in Montreal. I had also bought a bottle of Patron tequila on advice from someone that it would be a good item for a bachelor party.

DF and I didn’t sit with each other at first. I was sitting with three generations of women. A mother, daughter, and 12 month old grand daughter. It was fun playing with the baby given that she wasn’t mine and to compare books, toys, and stories. DF came back to inform me that there was seating in economy plus so I moved. From what I can tell they squeezed people who fly coach in one half and stretched a few extra inches for other folks in coach to create economy plus. While I am happy for the airlines for doing so it is quite annoying to be squeezed for cash to buy a few inches of leg space. They almost want me to be uncomfortable on the plane in order to upsell higher cost products.

When we landed in Reno we went to the rental car location we realized that nobody was policing our rental car selection. I had promised DK that I would rent a Viper or something more special like a Lamborghini but we settled on the best convertible that they had – the Mustang. Oddly I had a dream last night that I was hanging out with Lindsay Lohan at a party. She got too drunk to drive but we were having a good time and she was glad to have the company of a normal non-famous person. So she asked me to drive her Lamborghini. Unfortunately I don’t drive stick very well and it was a disaster. But all rental cars in the US are automatics so I didn’t have any trouble driving the Mustang with the top down at night while DF marveled at the view of the stars in Tahoe.

We arrived at the Northstar cabin and drank the bottle of Patron with DK, CS, and the host. The cabin was incredible with a huge open kitchen that connected to the dining area and living room. Downstairs they had bedrooms, predominantly with tons of twin beds. The cabin looked out onto the golf course but you couldn’t see the 4th green outside the large two tiered deck until morning. Upstairs, our host, DK’s future brother in law by marriage (he married DK’s fiancées sister) slept in a king sized master suite bed with a big bathroom and Jacuzzi tub. The evening was low key and we tried to come-up with as many embarrassing stories about DK as we could. MM, the best man, and Roc had shown up at some point to make Roc the 6th player for golf in the morning. CS held his liquor despite thoughts that he might not do so well with the tequila.

The next morning CS cooked some egg concoction for breakfast. He called it German pancakes and explained that it was like Yorkshire pudding. Since he didn’t have any milk he used the flavored creamer for coffee as a substitute. They came out well and tasted good with the bacon.

We headed out to play golf. 6 people played in two sets of three. Our group got a straggler from the course, a 70 year old named Dell, and his wife who wasn’t playing the second 9. He was fun to play with but made our plan to bring illicit beer onto the course in our bags a no go. The course was fun and despite not having played in a year I was still terrible at golf. After playing we all agreed that we should play more often while home and may actually begin some golf again in the fall. The crew then moved on to purchasing dinner at the adjacent supermarket and I avoided the decision making process and inefficiency of six grown men shopping for a barbecue by calling Sarah to give her the update on the fun thus far. I then forced my decision for blue cheese dressing upon DK when the time came and we rolled on back to the home front.

It was Friday night and DK’s friends from San Francisco were streaming in throughout the afternoon and evening. I counted about 14 people total but since they were moving around I wouldn’t bet on the actual number. MM, DK’s good friend and brother in law who married DK’s sister was the best man. MM is having triplets with DK’s sister through some fertility process. MM is also in a wheelchair so we all spent time pondering how fun it will be to get around with those three kiddos when they are born. I can barely keep up with one.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night we cooked dinner with some remnants of the four day weekend. I am looking forward to seeing zucchini, squash, rice pilaf, and hot dog on the cover of Gourmet magazine next month. After the grilling was done we were mostly left with the remnants of the vegetables. The fridge still is full of corn and asparagus. What’s for dinner tomorrow? Maybe corn, asparagus, rice and hot dogs.

On Saturday we visited Gloucester with Matt and Kate. When we arrived they were both hard at work mowing or chopping weeds somewhere on the property. We then sat, grilled, and chatted until Hattie and Jose arrived. Hattie mentioned that she had brought the regular desert and I told her that I was excited to eat her Rice Krispie treats before she informed us that the regular desert was apple crisp. We had brought some beers. I had planned to swim but it isn’t an easy proposition in Gloucester with the rocks and the cold water so I just walked around the rocks with Madeline up high on my shoulders.

I spent Sunday chasing girls and getting chased by girls in the pool. The girls were between two and five years old. It started when I threw some of the beach balls into the detached hot tub area, not hot, and we made a game of throwing the balls back and forth. The hard part was that the wind was strong enough that often a good throw would go far off to the left or the right. I suppose I was chasing more beach balls than girls. The other men were building PVC cannons and guns to launch potatoes into the air. I was more interested in floating a few inches beneath the surface of the pool. We were awaiting a storm advertised on the Internet with hail the size of golf balls that never arrived. At some point the kids and mother’s made home made ice cream in a ball from REI that gets super cold when you roll it and put salt and ice into it. Madeline enjoyed sucking down the bottom of the cone and munching on the sweet sugar honeycomb shell at the base.

We drove down to Marshfield for Sunday and Monday nights. On the way I was diverted to Home Depot to purchase a cover for the riding lawn mower because it was trapped in the mud. Dad was worried it would get rained on and rust when the hail storm that was supposed to come finally came. It didn’t. Monday was a good day to sit by the pool. Sarah’s friends came by including Jeff, Meredith, Matt B., Sarah K, and Sarah K’s sister. In their twenties there had been all sorts of drama among this crew of people with Jeff cheating on my wife, Sarah, with Sarah K. but now people were just floating in the pool having let the drama of their twenties out like a bunch of cooked vegetables. Matt got to drinking more than most and had an odd comment about everyone’s siblings but mine. I was too busy in the pool hiding under the water to notice. Jeff and I managed to move the lawn mower trapped in the mud. The new Mosquito Magnet my dad had bought had collected a few thousand bugs but it didn’t stop a few thousand more from launching out of the mud when the mower moved to attack Jeff and me.

Hattie and Jose came by on Tuesday afternoon. Hattie brought thousands of her famous rice krispie treats to appease me. I had liked the apple crisp. We talked about their upcoming marriage and having kids. It’s hard not to talk about kids when you have one. Not long after they arrived and we had eaten our grilled salmon steaks the torrential rain came down upon us. So we ran about putting away the umbrellas and hid inside to watch the downpour.

We took 3A home and the traffic was surprisingly light for a holiday weekend on the way home to Brookline. When we got home we had to unpack everything and drag those vegetable remnants back inside. The extra tax bill where the government had rejected some portion of our return was waiting for us as was the real estate tax bill that needs to be paid by August.

Gemini was sick from the beginning of the weekend acting lethargic and without her trademark constant bark. Sarah K’s sister was the new person on Monday and is studying to be a veterinarian. She looked at Gemini but I never heard the results. Gemini would barely be able to walk from inside the house to outside to pee so she just lay next to her food and water. She got the extra hamburger and some extra chicken. By Tuesday night, July 4th, my parents had taken her to an animal hospital. Mom said that the vet was clinical at first, letting my parents know that they could keep Gemini for observations, but the cancer was very far advanced. My mother asked if the vet would recommend euthanasia and that was the recommendation. So my parents were quite sad when I dropped off Madeline on Wednesday morning because they had just put a loved one to sleep. I gave my mom a hug but I wasn’t sure how to comfort them.

This weekend my family, parents and sister, are driving together up to Toronto to view the unveiling of my grandparents’ tomb stones. Sarah will stay home in Boston with Madeline. With death floating around I get to thinking that death is a great reminder to live fully and not waste healthy days. If there is something I want to do or see I should do it or see it without worrying about the wrong stuff, the reasons why not to do or see things.

I got another little dose of death by watching the Bukowski documentary Born Into This. Sarah wasn’t very interested in the file so she went to read the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada in the bedroom. The end of every documentary is usually the protagonist wasting away from a stroke or cancer. Maybe Hunter S. Thompson shot himself to avoid those slow dying scenes in his documentary. I was struck by a good poem during the movie that made me remember why I have recently come to fear Anne Coulter and her many raving fans.

The genius of the crowd

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art

by Charles Bukowski

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sarah and I have been married for a year now. We include the trip to the Bahamas as the major celebratory component of our anniversary but we also took a walk to Pho Lemongrass and ate dinner. I noticed on the door a shaggy picture of former president Al Gore with the staff of the restaurant from some time that he visited Brookline around the corner from us.

Sarah and I had included in our stack of DVDs for watching on our anniversary the movies American Beauty and the Squid and the Whale. Both are portraits of dysfunctional families and marriages that are eroded and falling apart. American Beauty was a much better movie of the two. The Squid movie characters were so annoying and idiosyncratic that it was painful to watch. Sarah fell asleep. The ending of the Squid and the Whale interested me though because the teen son goes back to the museum of natural history to look at an exhibit that he remembered from ‘The good days’ of his memories.

When I worked at ChannelWave I used to go to Au Bon Pain in Kendall Square on a regular basis. It wasn’t the closest place to get a coffee or a sandwich. Pete’s was on the way and the Bean Town was just downstairs in our building. But I would walk there particularly when I was frustrated with work, people, and the world. Au Bon Pain had placed an article on the wall in the middle because they were mentioned in it. It was a Newsweek article from 1997 that described hot high-tech cities for starting companies. The article mentioned Au Bon Pain in Kendall as a great place where techies hang out and build new ideas into businesses. The picture for Boston was a photo taken through the glass door at VirtuMall of Ron and me.

So Au Bon Pain in Kendall Square was the only place in the world where a picture of me hung, unbeknownst to them. Nobody ever noticed or recognized the picture while I was eating my asiago cheese bagels or ordering a sandwich with their herbed mayo, brie, and chicken. I just went there because it made me feel important for a moment. Maybe everyone has these private places? A few years ago they remodeled to improve the efficiency of the restaurant. The took down the article.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(Update -- I was outdone in price by someone else in April. See Mr. Cheap outdone by Mrs. Cheap.)

Sarah had her heart set on going back to Atlantis in the Bahamas for a relaxing spring trip. We were going to look into how to get there last night be we immediately ended-up looking at those ridiculously expensive projects in Dubai, The World, and The Palm and never got around to pricing the Atlantis tickets. I highly recommend watching the promotion videos for the Dubai properties. They remind me of the science fiction promotions from Vanilla Sky or Total Recall where people sell you on a fantasy mind vacation. Among the fun parts is their large focus towards the end on security to make sure you feel sure that those lowly peasants don't invade your private island and kidnap any of your wives.

But I digress. After realizing that going through the front door at Atlantis I was going to get socked with a bill for $2500 before they got their hands into my wallet I decided to google around for a back door. I was hoping for some sky auction or maybe someone selling scalped tickets to Atlantis but I did find a woman who was providing tips on getting a luxury Carribean vacation on the cheap. She had made specific reference to a hotel that is less than .1 miles from the Atlantis resort but is owned by the company.

"A stay at Comfort Suites Paradise Island, for example, includes a pass that allows you to use the facilities of the luxe Atlantis Resort and Casino. "

So I did my own little search for a cheap package fare to get me into this back-door for the Atlantis resort figuring that the room is going to be a hotel room with a bed regardless of what package I pick and with some extra cash we can splurge on a dinner, go scuba sailing, or buy more coronas from the hard to find liquor store. So I went online to CheapCarribean.com and hunted for a lowest price for the Comfort Suites. It came out with a price of $799 per person with flight for the hotel with a special offer expiring today. While I didn't actually believe the offer was going to be a problem I did want to put the booking behind us so that we could enjoy some fun in the sun with Madeline during a rainy May, if it is anything like last year. So I booked us on the cheapest possible days with the unfortunate layovers that go through Miami since Boston doesn't offer direct flights to Nassau. During the transaction they found a lower price than the one initially offered, not that I asked for one. They also tried to pitch the upgrade to the deluxe suite for $300 that seemed to offer the same luxury caramel colored furniture but with a view of the pool. I turned that option down.

So in all the trip cost $1944.94 for the three of us to stay 5 nights and six days. I had really wanted to find a "promotion code" since the taunted me with it during the purchasing form but I didn't think I would get a much better deal and have never been able to find good promotion codes when I needed them.

I'll know if I got a good deal or not in a couple of months.

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ron and Jenn got married today. I was a witness to it along with Sarah, Stephanie, and James and a bunch of people who I mainly didn't know. Most of the people in attendance appeared to be fantastic swing dancers. The pictures are available in the photo album.

Posted by Melody at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sarah and I went out on the town yesterday afternoon following a lazy morning where we looked at our navels, hers is almost an outee at this point, and eating outside in the backyard at Devlin’s. They had some trouble with the second order of Mojitos because they didn’t have enough mint to make the drink so they had sent someone out to the market to get more mint. They also didn’t have the ingredients for a virgin pina colada at first but upon learning of Sarah’s state they managed to whip a good one together.

In the afternoon we happened to have a gift that we needed to bring to Crate and Barrel from the wedding because we had a duplicate gift. We also had to purchase three wedding gifts for the multitude of weddings that we are going to or have already been to recently. It so happens that all three soon to be blissful couples all were registered at Crate and Barrel. After going through some shenanigans at the counter because we only had half the gift we were looking to exchange we determined that the other half was attempted to be delivered but because of our extreme paranoia of front entranceway thieves we hadn’t signed for it and they had gotten it back in the shipping department. We then proceeded to purchase three partial sets of three different china patterns. The Asian couple, Jason and Kathy, had chosen a nice Asian looking pattern. The two Caucasian couples had both chosen Caucasian patterns.

Upon leaving the store with two ready wrapped gifts and one to be shipped we were off on a quest to see Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith. At first we tried the Chestnut Hill mall but then we moved onwards to Fenway and despite there being a game that we had expected was at 2PM but was really at 7PM we were able to make our way into the theatre in time to see the previews for the Narnia chronicles. They look like they’ll be awesome.

While I am not sure if the Star Wars movie was going to give children who watch it nightmares, I did have a nightmare last night. Children would most likely have nightmares because of the scene when Aniken kills all the younglings. That’s a gruesome thought for a youngling looking to buy some action figures, even ones that can be melted on a summer grill to change from Aniken to a pre-bionic surgery Darth Vader. My nightmare may also have been influenced because I watched the movie Team America World Police the night before. The highlight and potential problem for small children in Team America was the scene where the marionettes are involved in a graphic sex scene including over seven positions. The dream also could have been influenced by the scene in Team America where two marionettes were eaten by black house cats called cougars due to the scale. The final problem may have been the many radio reports of the theft of thousands of credit cards.

The nightmare was as follows. I was walking in the neighborhood at night after camping with Falkoff. It was a nice night but very dark. Unfortunately it was so dark that I couldn’t see in any direction. I was essentially completely blind but I could tell I was in front of a house and standing on a sidewalk. Because I was frustrated by this I decided to lie down on the sidewalk. A few minutes later a police officer was standing over me and wondering why I was lying on the ground. He took me for a drunk vagrant even though I explained that I had laid down because I was unable to see in any direction and couldn’t find my way home. He walked me into the back of a house with a kitchen full of surly looking characters that I assumed were all criminals. He then showed me by unclamping the device holding my hands together that if I did unclamp it that alarms would go off. My first thought on entering this world was that it would be an interesting time for me to learn about this underclass of people who had been arrested. The police officer then left and the surly people started asking me a few questions. I admitted that I wasn’t there for any dangerous offense but instead for having slept on public property. I could tell that they were all there for doing deeds like stealing, raping, and murdering. Then one of them grabbed me and took off my pants. I was then pulled into another room and into a van with a window in it so we could see back into the original room. A group of us had all been pulled into this large van. Watching through the van I could see that the criminals were opening my pants and looking at my wallet. Inside my wallet normally wouldn’t be much exciting. Some old receipts, less than $200 in cash, two credit cards, and a lot of useless identification. I then realized that Sarah had given me all of the wedding checks and my wallet was full of tons of money that if they took the checks it would be impossible to piece the money back together and these thieves could probably figure out how to get the money from some of the checks that looked like travelers checks. I was in total shock, indignant, frustrated, and pantless.

So I awoke in the middle of the night with a shot of adrenaline running through me.

My thoughts on the Star Wars movie are as follows:

I didn’t buy the conversion of Aniken to Darth Vader. It was too simply played and I should have had more empathy for the decision. I had hoped that he would have done it in a moment of passion about Padome but instead it was in a moment of passion about the Darth Sidius/Senator and I just couldn’t see how he would suddenly throw his life to the dark side. There were plenty of areas to work with that could have made this possible since the movie pitted democracy against a dictatorship heavily and did a terrible job of providing the reality of why dictators choose to become dictators. The bottom line is that people become dictators to protect their kind (similar race, religion, etc.) because they find that democracy when corrupt has a tendency to discriminate terribly against minority. Democracy also tends to fail in the wake of a challenge from someone who acts decisively through force when the protectors need to respond. So in the case of the Sudan there can be genocide for months or years but the United Nations when split on keeping peace can leave people to fight against each other. Imagine the pain of being on the side of having your family raped and killed because nobody could make a decision. Aniken had these sorts of areas, a mother raped and murdered, a wife threatened but the causes were not elaborated in the movies and didn’t boil down to a believable character who could choose to forgo democracy for dictatorship of himself. I liked what was trying to be done but it just wasn’t clear and didn’t fit together. So I think the movie failed on the key area I was looking for, a clear answer regarding why Aniken became Darth Vader. Another annoying thing was there was a lot of set-up for other movies without giving a real role in the current movie to the set-up. Look Wookies, but what do Wookies do in this movie other than hang around with Yoda? The Ewoks had a major role in destroying the death star and they were the earlier version of Jar-Jar, cute but annoying characters. But the last Star Wars movie had it’s merits in that Jar-Jar never spoke and they didn’t have too much of the worlds worst love dialog between Aniken and Padome. The special effects were top notch. It was enough to give me nightmares.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I woke-up this morning with bad onion breath. Sarah and I had taken stock of our spending habits in a minor joint panic attack on Friday night after a dinner at Vintage in West Roxbury that cost over a buck fifteen. We self prepared a thrifty taco dinner last night. Initially we forgot the onion at the local Stop and Shop but I made a special run on my bicycle back to the market to pick-up one good looking white onion. We split it in half diced for the meal and I probably ate a third of it along with my tacos and salad. The bicycle was handy because we had to move the bikes out of the basement where they were fumigating for mice and they were going to throw out anything in the basement in the morning. I ate a big second portion of the taco stuff because Sarah had gone into the kitchen to see a mouse run away from the counter top. The mouse was probably a refugee from the fumigation. They don’t normally bother to come to our apartment on the second floor both because there isn’t much food and because it is easier for them to hide, nest, and munch on garbage in the basement. So I ate the taco mix in fear of the possible terrible diseases that a mouse could cause for a pregnant wife balanced against my extreme love of taco meat and extreme fear of food wastage. I’m going to wait a few days to see whether it is worth declaring war on the mouse population. For now we cleaned up any scraps that might interest the vermin.

We spent the day catching-up on sleep after a session of apartment work with Sarah’s parents. They had come over to do things like set the dimmer boxes better in the holes in the wall, put together the bed, and help to add to our window coverings. I managed to use the time to put the second high tech shade up in Madeline’s room. Sarah had changed her mind that she wanted curtain rods back in Madeline’s room so I needed to put them back in. We also spent some time putting a shelf above the desk in the bedroom and used the laser level that Sarah’s parents bought me last year during the holiday season. It wasn’t very helpful since level is a relative term in an old Brookline apartment and level with the floor, ceiling, desk, whatever is just a matter of making something look level. It is always fun to play with lasers.

I was doing fine until we moved on to putting a valence over the shades and curtains already in the bedroom. A valence is a decorative piece of fabric that is used to piss off men who want nothing to do with putting shades and other crap up on their window. It was the harder of the many items to put onto the window so I got stressed out about it and was ready for a six hour nap by the time Sarah’s parents left.

The nap was going ok until Sarah decided to read my high school yearbook. It is almost impossible to ignore your wife when she is paging through old pictures of you, your friends, and possible past crushes and lovers. So I took Sarah through the yearbook. With the yearbook and past relationships all stirred-up in my mind we rented Grosse Pointe Blank to watch while we ate our tacos.

It was a good day in the end including sleep, cheap food, hiding out in our little world, and some productive work.

Posted by Melody at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The weather this past weekend was terrific for a wedding so we were lucky to have been invited to Jen and Andy’s wedding on the beach in Dennis. They had rented out the whole resort at a small hotel on the beach for the weekend. The bride, Jen, played football on the beach in her wedding dress and I got a chance to catch-up on any dish from about men from the single girls. The red head just started dating an Israeli and wasn’t sure whether he really is the man he claimed to be. Wild dancer was on a sixth date with the Unitarian minister at a wedding. The cake baker was trying to figure out what to do with Ottowa, Ohio, and Quincy. Quincy was never going to turn into anything and who wants to move to Ohio. But Ottowa showed promise for her. The work contingent that Sarah was a part of was 50% pregnant women all beyond seven months so there was plenty of pregnancy talk to bore the single women and me at times. The beers were nice and cold and the fire pits by the beach kept us toasty warm. The pool in the morning was refreshing and I even figured out how to bind a pick-list to a SQL query using Visual Studio .NET 2003 for a web form control in a moment of goofing with the laptop before the wedding started.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night the Newton crew including Falkoff, DK, and Hillary went out to Central Square along with Sarah and me. Sarah and I had taken most of Saturday to recover from going out drinking late on Friday night to Kenmore square. Sarah wasn’t actually drinking but she gets tired from being pregnant so she was about as useless in the morning as I was hung over. We had managed to get out of bed just in time to make breakfast for twenty minutes when the doula buzzed the door early at 11:45 so I had to leave the omelet half cooked on the stove to get dressed to look presentable.

We then proceeded to talk about how in the hospital I was really the only person who could tell the nurses that I didn’t want the newborn baby on the warmer and could demonstrate this by ripping my shirt off when she was born and starting to hold her close to my body. Once again today was a long sex education class. While munching on our bacon and eggs Sarah and I learned things like that the baby is unlikely to turn from head-down to breach now that it is only 8 weeks away. The head is too heavy for them to flip and they are living in a room that keeps getting smaller as they get bigger. We also got to thinking about petossin, the induction drug that Sarah’s OB wanted to give her to make sure that the OB could be there for the delivery, and decided it was a wacko idea to give her a drug that would cause massive contractions intentionally when we knew that the anesthesiologist had already given her the news that she wasn’t going to have an epidural due to abnormal clotting factors.

The doula showed us a 30 minute movie showing various women having contractions until they delivered while jump-cutting cycling from one woman to the next. Her general description of labor to us was that it feels like being stoned. You have words in your head but you can't articulate them. Since we happened to have Kinsey sitting around with a Saturday due date we watched that in the later afternoon and learned all about the sex lives of sex researchers from the 50s and 60s. Kinsey let us know that it is quite normal for people to have extra-marital sex given the results of the survey and that people had gotten into all sorts of emotional troubles when they started wife swapping at the research headquarters.

The meal at Central Kitchen was fantastic. We split 5 appetizers, 3 main dishes, 2 desserts, drinks, and a bottle of wine among 5 people for a total of $220. Afterwards we walked up the stairs to “The Enormous Room”, a bar with cushions for seats with little back support. It was too loud there to talk easily but we couldn’t retract our drink order fast enough to leave. The waitress talked me into a pomegranate margarita. While we were sitting in some seats on the side I was soaking in the scene. The crowd included some of the typical beautiful people out on a Saturday night showing off their cleavage and Armani shirts. One woman was standing by herself wearing a top that tied closed in the front with a wide gap where the strings tied across and wasn’t wearing a bra. So the shirt gave a good look at her neck, breasts, and stomach down the middle.

She was standing alone and looking for something to do or someone to talk to her. I was thinking that if I wasn’t with Sarah that I would likely ponder ways to hit on her but instead I just pondered that I wasn’t going to because I had a good excuse. I was at a bar with high school friends and my pregnant wife. Sarah and I were commenting on how ridiculous the outfit was including her stripper like shoes. She kept looking over at us and we were afraid she had heard our remarks. Finally she walked over and asked Sarah when she was due.

The woman with the tied shirt asked Sarah when she was due and then proceeded to stick around giving Falkoff a nice view while explaining that she was a mid-wife working on Cape Cod. We then got a long repeat of the discussion with the doula in the afternoon and the woman, despite looking 20 years old, proceeded to tell us that she had two children aged 6 and 9, that tonight she had gone out on the town for once in a long while, and that she had been married for 10 years. She had come to Central square thinking there was something happening at Man Ray, which she learned had recently closed for good, after having done some shopping at Hubba-Hubba. She wore white because she heard there was a "white" party at The Enormous Room that turned out to be on Sunday night.

I kept wondering what was going on with a very attractive married woman going out alone on a Saturday night to a club dressed like she wanted to be picked-up for a one night stand and talking about her family while shaking a box of cigarettes. DK didn’t believe a word of what she was saying and was whispering in my ear about her being a compulsive liar. Sarah was getting annoyed about talking about pregnancy. I was asking her questions about how to feel the dilation of a cervix with odd hand gestures. Falkoff was just sitting back and enjoying the view. Among the theories whispered between DK and myself regarding why one of the beautiful people was at our bench area was that she was a lesbian with a fetish for pregnant women. I was quite happy and proud that Sarah was the most attractive person in the bar - even attracting a beautiful sexily dressed woman to come and talk with us. Plus we haven't been out to a bar and chatting with strangers in a long time so it held some excitement just to talk to a strange stranger.

But since it was loud and Sarah didn’t look too pleased we unhinged from her to move to a quieter venue.

When we got to The Field it was even louder than at The Enormous Room but we got to do a play by play on the compulsive liar mid-wife lesbian woman. Falkoff was angry with DK for having pulled us away and I thought the whole scene was one of the more funny things we had encountered in a while. Sarah and I had a chat about how we should have been a team and taken her home together but Sarah didn’t feel too into an adventure with 4 weeks to go before she delivers. We had to get out of The Field because it was so loud that we were worried about deafness and then Falkoff drove us all home in the his father’s new Passat station wagon. Sarah wanted the Passat station wagon by the time we got home.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For me depression is when my inflated ego meets the real me and becomes as disappointed as a school girl who upon meeting her boy band idol realizes he is a selfish sleazy drunken womanizer.

I got hit with a sudden panic attack starting last night through yesterday about my sudden fear of my loss of bachelorhood. I didn’t get this when Sarah and I got married. It started on Tuesday when I was trying to make some Captivate movies and needed to find an XML RSS feed. I went to feedster and started looking through the Red Sox blogs. I was happy to see that people were going to be able to purchase turf from the World Series for $150 but then I started to hit some web sites. I happed upon some website of a twenty-something woman blogging about the Red Sox from a location down the street in Brookline, Basegirl. I then started surfing from there to her favorite sites including The girl in Camo and This fish needs a bicycle. Then my mind started to go into a cloud of anxiety as I realized that the world outside is still moving around with women bustling about hustling men and vice-versa. Or I panicked that my blog was getting a thousandth of the traffic (not like I’ve tried to build traffic) of a blog about some girl who writes about the Red Sox. Should I just write about the Red Sox? Nobody reads my crap? Who cares? What the hell? Why do I write?

I went onwards down the spiral. At dinner on Tuesday Jeremy was there with Sarah and me at Vinny T’s yammering about his sex life and how he was bored with sex and all of his one night stands with Internet girls. Sara was talking about how nice the grotto would be at the Playboy mansion and that I should send my parents pictures of it as a model for the hot tub area in Marshfield. Jeremy hit me with some dagger about never having left Boston and living a few miles from my parents house. That isn't about the change any time soon.

The cups at Vinny T’s had shrunken from better days so the drinks were smaller. They didn’t even do the shake the wine bottle with little chips in it to win a free meal game. Things have gone down hill at Vinny T’s. The maitre d woman who seated us was on the job for the first night and she was flirting with me and I was flirting with her and it was clear that in another world or time that I would have been obsessing over her for months. But I have a pregnant wife and we went home to watch Raising Helen, a movie I had already seen on a plane and hated the first time about a New York socialite who has to raise her sister’s orphaned children. That’ll cheer anyone up in the middle of a panic attack but the worst was suffering through the scenes with the models, New York parties, exclusive clubs.

So I didn’t get much sleep. I woke-up early in the morning. I went through some meetings and then drove out to Burlington. During the drive I listened to an interview with Brett Easton Ellis who wrote Less than Zero, American Psycho, The Rules of Attraction on NPR. He was talking about his new book that is a horror novel that fictionalized his abusive relationship with his father. Mr. Ellis felt that the reason that the father had become abusive was because he had never really wanted to become a father but had gotten caught-up in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s pressure to become the family man and would have preferred a single life like the one Mr. Ellis was leading. Ellis wrote Less Than Zero when he was in his teens. So I’m thinking about myself as a writer and dragging a mile behind basegirl and the girl in camo because I lack a specific subject to write about and don’t have the same anatomy to intrigue the reader about my thoughts. So I must be about 100 miles behind Mr. Ellis in a 26 mile race to reach some kind of constructive synthesis of creation. And with Less than Zero and having watched 16 Candles I was back in the ‘80s swimming in the regret of not having been confident enough to ask out the twenty girls I had a crush on in high school.

Hunter S. Thompson had a funeral and I wasn't invited. I am mad that he is dead through a suicide and nobody knows why he killed himself. I am mad because the gonzo journalism died and was reborn as drugged out teen Internet bloggers around the world writing the same drivel as me are turning the world into a big annoying cyber-attic to store crap.

We had our best day in terms of sales ever at VP with three $49 orders coming in over the Internet. This was a good thing but I could watch the downloads and they were going down already. Maybe we peaked at $147? I was in a funk and tired from lack of sleep so it was hard to appreciate. By the time I got to improv I was ready to sleep or crawl under some object. I did a scene as a miserable hot dog vendor who hated his job and life. But Joan had brought her baby Henry and that perked me up a bit. I later managed to do some scenes that woke me up. I got some email from Stephanie about a mother who had died of cancer.

I have a lot of nervous self-doubt questions sometimes and I was thinking that as a person I don’t ever get satisfied or stop asking questions. I can see the appeal of God and the church since people are in this nagging dull pain of questioning themselves and their decisions and their lives. So when you are in pain you can always turn to the people who claim to have the solution.

The church says – “Just listen to us and we have the answers. You won’t be lost anymore. You won’t even need to ask the questions anymore. It will all be good from here on out if you stay on this path.” But as an atheist and a masochist I’ll stay on my route. I talked to Sarah’s belly for 30 minutes last night. She is coming into my world very soon so that could be the cause of all the panic.

Change is never a comfortable feeling but hopefully once it has worked it’s way through me then I can be calm and happy again.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sarah and I constructed our own wedding ceremony from a rough template offered by Jeff our justice of the peace. I wanted to put ours up for people because when I went looking for wedding ceremony templates I didn't find anything other than a few sparse sites. The one that I did find that I liked and bookmarked isn't even available as a link anymore. But if you are a scavenger looking for some pre-made components to improve for your own wedding or if you have some other nefarious purpose please feel free to look at the planned transcript for Dan and Sarah's wedding ceremony. The bits that aren't available in that file are the readings since they were a surprise and the song written special for us on our wedding day, an adaptation of Wherever you go, sung by Lisa and Dave (Lisa is my sister). The song in MP3 format is apparently currently unavailable from their site but that will hopefully be fixed shortly. At least the lyrics are available. If you can get your sister to adapt one of her folk songs for your wedding I highly recommend it as a personal touch. The readings were some content from the Song of Songs by Bruce N. and my mom read these quotations.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sarah and I took a road trip to New York to go to Jason Lin’s, Stephanie’s brother’s, wedding. We took most of Friday off in order to get down to New York. The plan we had created involved going out to the Chrysler dealership in Concord to pick-up my PT Cruiser from the shop, driving to Bedford to drop off the Passat, then driving into New York City to check-in to the Hotel Pennsylvania, followed by driving back to the New York Botanical Gardens for the wedding at 6PM. The day started out fortunately enough. My three way Skype call between the US, UK, and the Netherlands started at 8am instead of 9am. Nothing says “wake-up” like a ringing computer next to your bed. The call went to 9:30 which was when I had expected the call to end in the first place but I got a 90 minute call in and felt good about doing it on the Internet dime rather than paying the phone company. Sarah and I then proceeded to run around packing random things. We had to get a stain out of the tuxedo, figure out how to bring the portable DVD player and DVDs, get bathing suits for the pool, and get my contact lenses.

Finding things in the apartment can be very annoying. The other night I lost my glasses and spent a panicked hour looking everywhere for them including going back and forth to the car in flip-flops and tearing off some skin from my arm reaching under the seat of the Passat. I have been more than patient enough with the RFID and nanotech folks and I deserve my HomeID system so that I can find all those HIDden items with a tricorder-like device that points like a divining rod to my lost items and lets me know what inventory of junk I have throughout the apartment. When is this technology going to help me out around the house? There is one product out there from iautomate – I guess I should have registered for it. ( ). The glasses were found in the bed where I had taken a nap earlier in the day and lost them in the folds of the comforter.

The PT Cruiser had $745 worth of repairs. The steering pump had been replaced because it had broken and they had decided to not only fill the air conditioning system with Freon (good timing at least) but also to run some expensive fluorescent dye test that didn’t appear to have had any results according to the payment slip. We were in a hurry so we pushed out of the dealership and I figured I wasn’t going to get anywhere with the dealership staff and I was lucky they hadn’t found some other awful problem like a broken flux capacitor or that a mafia don had installed an explosive device underneath that I would need to have removed. The dealership loves to find problems with the car that I can’t possibly ignore. In general the answer to what will happen if I don’t fix something is “You might die!”

So once we hit the road at 11:40 we figured we were in good shape for a 6:30 wedding. I was listening to the phone religiously because I had told a VC friend of Brad’s that I would be in the city on Friday and he had left me a message via email to ask if I was in town. But the phone never rang so it was all about the wedding.

We didn’t expect it but we hit severe rush hour traffic when we got close to New York at 3:30PM. When we thought about it we were near the Bronx, where the Botanical Gardens are, so we made a significant change of plans to avoid the traffic. Sarah changed our hotel reservations to Tarrytown, and we drove straight to the Botanical Gardens. The major worry that Sarah had, since this new plan didn’t involve stopping at a hotel, was that among the hundred things we had done before leaving for New York, the one she should have done was to iron her new wrap that was likely wrinkled. Since we were going to change somewhere at the Botanical gardens this wrinkly wrap would be unacceptable and she might freeze to death in the 90 degree heat of an unnaturally hot June.

So we walked about the botanical gardens from 4:00-5:45. The botanical gardens are very nice but I noticed that all the signs were pointing in directions that led to gates rather than being like the arboretum where once inside you actually reach the nice flowers when you walk around. The secret to the arboretum is that they charge you multiple times. The initial fee of $6 gets you onto the grounds, but to see a nice rock garden it costs another $1 per person. We enjoyed the rock garden since we were the only people there and it was nice and romantic to walk alone. Sarah wanted it as her backyard since it was maintained in a natural state filled with flowers of all sorts, with waterfalls, and trees. One section of the rock garden area was filled only with native flowers. We stopped on a bench for a while there and enjoyed the warm weather.

They also had a big white building that cost $7 per person to enter and with a AAA card we got some deal that was $7 for two people. The building was advertising the spring flower show so basically if you wanted to see spring flowers at the botanical garden you had to fork over the cash. It was actually very impressive inside of the big greenhouse building since it had multiple mock climates including a desert, rainforest, palm forest, and lily pads in a big pool. I was impressed and thought we got our extra seven dollars worth.

So at 5:45 we suddenly needed to change and drive over to where the Lin/Moy wedding was to be held. The wedding was at the Snuff Mill. I assume that is where they mill snuff? We were parked at the main gate and sweating heavily from our walk out in the heat. So we cranked the new air conditioning on to keep our clothing from sticking to our skin and then changed comically in the car. I had never put a Tuxedo on with a steering wheel in front of me but the secret is to periodically leave the car and return. It took about 20 minutes to change completely and I wasn’t much faster than Sarah despite her need to fuss with beauty products and worry about how ironed her wrap was despite the irrelevance of a wrap on a swelteringly hot evening.

So we arrived at the wedding at 6:25 and were just on time. Lots of other folks hadn’t adjusted well to the traffic problems so there was a commotion about how to handle some of the gaps in the guest list since any delay at the beginning would cascade through the wedding activities throughout the night. They started about 15 minutes late, just like we did at our wedding, and plenty of folks had arrived in that extra window. A few stragglers processed by accident behind the bridal party walking to the stage but it wasn’t important. The ceremony itself was lightning fast. Both Jason and Kathy said some words that they had written themselves. Sarah and I had a good time although we didn’t know most of the Chinese/Taiwanese family members at the wedding. After the wedding we tried to caravan back to Tarrytown behind the Lin family Prius. The Prius contained a GPS device that led us through some crazy back roads to avoid a detour but after about half an hour we arrived back in our hotel room and got some sleep.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Wednesday night I met with an influential potential business partner and Aaron in Concord over dinner by the bar. It was unfortunate that I had to skip out on my Improv group practice for this occasion but it was a case where prioritization worked out. The guy was the number two person at a start-up in California with venture financing and their CEO was on the cover of Newsweek last month. At dinner Aaron and I learned all sorts of interesting stuff about our potential business partner. He was an eccentric man including a stint in military school as a child, then becoming an Olympic jujitsu fighter in Korea, getting shot in the gall bladder as a paramedic, working as a recruiter for Cisco stock per hire when Cisco had 35 employees, owned a fight gear clothing company, and finally became a good buddy of the venture community by rescuing some failing start-ups. He also would go crazy if he didn't work 20 hours a day, said "GOT IT" whenever he understood something and loved the restaurant we went to in Concord because to him it was the Cheers of Chinese restaurants.

Upon arriving the partner was drinking a fruity looking beverage in a tall blue Chinese restaurant mug with a naked woman embedded in the side of the mug. I asked him what it was called and he called it a "One of these". This was the name that had been given to it by Paul the bartender, a tall Asian man with large Elvis sideburns who had created the drink for my new friend the partner eleven years ago when the partner was just a kid. The partner used to come in with the most beautiful woman he had ever met but they then moved to California and she had stumbled into a Less than Zero situation before marrying a biker. The partner was now married to a Dolche-Gabana Japanese model who he couldn't love any more and is now living atop Pacific Heights in San Francisco. He only was attracted to Asian women and spoke fluent Japanese. At one point he picked-up his Treo phone and answered is "Moshi Moshi" because the ring was the one for a Japanese country code call. It turned out to be an engineer for his company working in Japan who didn't speak much Japanese. He was sending his kindergarten age kid to a fancy school that cost $30,000 a year and the partner thought the kid would be getting the same education back in Concord. That's why I got in touch with the partner. I filled out a form and despite there being a lot of forms being filled-out on the web site, mine came with a 781 area code. So I guess I won the lottery?

I decided that I had to try the unique concoction in the girly glass so I ordered a "One of These" as well. The "One of These" was a potent drink and despite it being a unique concoction for the partner it was very similar to a Scorpion bowl in an embarrassing Chinese restaurant mug. Aaron arrived and soon we were all drinking these beverages and chatting away about the adventures of the partner, who he knew in common with Aaron. We did talk enough about business for me to get that the partner felt we had a good shot at success but that we should raise some money to execute faster. "GOT IT".

Paul, the bartender who has the Elvis sideburns, is an amateur singer. The partner had taken his Dolce-Gabana Japanese wife to this restaurant and Paul had sung for her and she had cried for three days. We had gotten there at 5PM but by about 7PM we had already imbibed two "One's of these" and were ordering dinner including a the partner special and an Earl special. Earl was the guy that the partner brought to the restaurant when he owned a landscaping company in the area eleven years ago and was cutting his teeth in business. Earl's claim to fame, other than the aforementioned Earl special was that he could drink 48 beers at a sitting. Now this is quite impossible and he would likely die. Earl's secret was that he would drink them and would throw-up in the middle of the drinking multiple times in a Romanesque vomitorium style. Both of these dishes were off the menu and had been created those 11 years ago when both the partner and Paul the bartender were just starting out and the restaurant had just opened. The Earl special was a seafood dish with scallops and shrimp in a viscous sauce with vegetables including mushrooms and chinese broccoli. The partner special was a fried chicken dish also with vegetables in a viscous sauce.

When the third "One of These" arrived the glass was changed from the blue naked woman to a flesh colored Fu-Man-Chu bearded guy mug. The drink itself was getting stronger and Aaron dropped off drinking, his 50 years experience kicking in. We were chatting a bit with some executives at a table next to ours and it was fun to see the partner talking to an executive who had never heard of their company. That was when I learned about the Newsweek article. The partner convinced Paul the bartender to serenade a woman drinking at the bar and he sang what seemed to be an Elvis song with a great southern twang to his voice. Around 9PM Aaron brought the leftovers home to his kids and the partner and I moved to the bar.

We chatted a bit more about life and getting married. I could tell we weren't birds of a feather because he thought he would slit his wrists or jump off a bridge without working for 20 hours a day and wasn't that involved in his home life. I gave Sarah some glowing marks for having her head where mine was and us both wanting to chill out and enjoy being parents a bit. After the fourth "One of These" it was 10PM and time for the restaurant to shut down for the evening so we parted ways. Paul gave the obligatory warning to drive home safely and I walked out to my car smelling like I had just raided a liquor cabinet. My calculations were that I had four drinks in five hours so I was probably not so drunk to drive but might be close enough to play it very safe.

So as I started to drive home I felt nice a paranoid that I was going to get pulled over by the local police out hunting for DUI cases to throw in jail. Because of this I switched to the slow lane on Rt. 2, which was the only route I could figure would lead me home. Being in the slow lane is an interesting experience because you see more police in the slow lane. They hide in the bushes, pass you in the fast lane, and generally make a very good appearance when someone is up late and night and praying to not get pulled over. One of the police cars that looked like an SUV drove in front of me and then pulled himself over to the side to form what looked like a speed trap. I sighed a good sigh of relief because if he wasn't there when I passed then he probably wasn't looking to catch me speeding or swaying like a snake on the road or whatever else I might have been doing to alert someone that it might be fun to make me blow into a DUI tester or walk a straight line while touching my nose. I don't think I can do that sober. But the same police car appeared behind me only thirty seconds later with lights flashing to pull me over.

I have seen the show Cops many times and I always wondered why any criminal when pulled over by the police for an unknown reason, except for Timothy McVeigh, would get out of their car and run as fast as they could into the woods of Lincoln. The answer was suddenly clear to me as I was pulled over, not for speeding, with alcohol coming out of my sweating pores. Adrenaline! I don't often get shocked with an extreme dose of adrenaline but this was a case of pure fight or flight super-high. I was ready to pop someone in the face, run away from the saber tooth tiger, do whatever it took to get out of that situation as fast as possible. My life could be ruined. This was going to be the most embarrassing incident of my young and foolish life. There goes the presidential nomination. I had just been thinking about how I could try to run for president as an atheist and I could at least say that I didn't have DUI charges like George W., wasn't a coke addict, and after eight days of marriage, hadn't proved to be a serial adulterer. Granted all of those traits actually qualify you for the presidency so I shouldn't have been worried. Now here I am, my own deep throat admitting everything anyways.

So I fumbled my license out of my wallet and tossed the wallet into the seat beside me, grabbed the registration from the glove compartment and greeted the officer when he arrived at my rolled down window with a smile while trying hard to hold my breath and control my breathing. This would be easy if my heart rate wasn't around 205 from the adrenaline but most people appear a bit fidgety when they get pulled over so I may not have seemed that off to the officer. At the window of the car he asked me a question and I was sure it would be "Sir, have you been drinking this evening". But somehow those words had morphed through an act of science fiction into "Sir, do you know that you have a broken tail light?". I answered "Yes." He wanted to know how long I knew it was broken and I said that it had been about a month. He then let me know that I should get it fixed as soon as possible and then turned back to his vehicle to write me either a ticket or a warning.

The return to your vehicle for a cop with this mystery ticket or game show warning is always an interesting experience as the driver. It is basically a horror game show. Will you get a ticket that will effect your insurance premiums permanently or a warning that will make you want to hug the officer? In my case I still wasn't sure whether I was being observed for signs of drunkenness so I was just sitting on top of the brick underneath me that had been extruded from my anus and was staring into the mirror trying to see what the officer was doing. The new jumbo LEDs that have been installed into emergency vehicles are very compact and very bright. They are bright enough on a dark new moon evening to cause significant temporary blind spots in your vision. So as I looked back in the mirror my field of vision was slowly turning into a fun, 60's fantasy world of lights and colors no matter what direction I looked in. My cell phone rang and I decided to ignore it, knowing that it was probably Sarah, my pregnant wife, wondering when I would be home. I didn't pick it up figuring that the police probably think of calls by waiting pulled over drivers to be calls for the gang to ambush the officer or spot legal consultation suggesting guilt. I considered closing my eyes to avoid the blindness and pondered how I would drive off blind and potentially DUI in front of the officer if he did let me go and imagined ending-up in the blinking ditch twenty feet in front of the car.

When he returned to the car I smiled again as he gave me the "warning" for the broken taillight. I nodded and gave a guttural OK to continue my policy of not breathing on the officer. Finally he turned back to his car and I pulled out in front of him. Cops love to follow you for about a minute while you drive the speed limit and then pull off ahead of you approaching the speed that a Delorean uses to go back in time. He did this and when he sped into the distance I called Sarah back.

I gave her the scoop on the situation and she offered to come out to pick me up but instead I decided that I was fine driving but totally freaked out by the experience. So I held Sarah on the line as I was driving home, recounted the story, and let her know about the two hundred cops that seemed to be out on the empty roads leading all the way home on Route 2 including two motorcycle cops who kept stopping at lights next to me for three straight red lights. I was happy to catch the red lights for a change and one of the lights freed me from my motorcade of unrequested police escorts. I just dragged myself through memorial drive, storough drive, comm. ave., and Saint Paul Street, until a breathed a heavy sigh of relief upon arriving in the driveway of a private property at which point I yelled into the phone to Sarah that I was free. She was probably home rubbing her belly the whole time wondering why she was on the other end of the line of the late Hunter S. Thompson reincarnating himself in me for some fear and loathing on the way home from Concord on a Wednesday night.

She welcomed me home and let me know that I smelled like I had raided a liquor cabinet before we went to sleep.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wedding Memories
I got up early on the wedding day around six thirty. I had been playing with the music downloads from Yahoo! Unlimited down to my media PC and was trying to get some key staples for dancing like Baby Got Back and Milkshake in case we were able to pull off the dancing side of things. I also was simultaneously working on the photo slideshow by arranging the pictures into a more logical order for chronology.

I kept clicking on and off at the Weather.com web site to review the strange predictions for Bedford. According to the forecast it was a 20% chance of rain for the whole day but hour by hour there were supposed to be 60% chance of showers every hour until a mysterious clearing between 3 and 6 AM. So when Jeff, our justice of the peace, called on the phone to check with us on any potential edits to the ceremony I told him that we might have to push the ceremony back a bit to catch the rays of sunshine since we preferred the outdoor setting. He told us that he had to leave at 3PM to make his next appointment so we realized that we were going to have to go with whatever nature dealt us in the cosmic rain or sunshine shuffle. Sarah considered praying for good weather and I told her that she should be responsible for that since I don’t believe in God.

At around 9 we began to gear-up for the wedding in Brookline. I called my dad to let him know that I had a sudden vision of guacamole from Whole Foods for the wedding and since Sarah and I aren’t near a Whole Foods that he might have a better shot at getting it. I had made arrangements with Zaftigs for a deli platter for 20 to be ready for us that would be ready at 9:30 AM. At first we had been thinking that it would make sense to get the deli platter first and then return to load the car but since we were wide awake we got to loading the car with the various things we needed to take in the car. The contents included the Media PC from the living room, a giant 19” monitor (not a flat screen), the old Dell Latitude laptop, a mouse, a keyboard, a camera battery charger, a set of computer speakers, a tripod that didn’t have the top to it, a card table, an overnight bag for the bed and breakfast stay, a recently printed copy of the ceremony, a tuxedo, and my recently dry cleaned suit in case my tuxedo either didn’t fit or spontaneously combusted.

We had recently taken a bunch of boxes and removed the peanuts from them and taken them apart so I couldn’t find a box suitable to carry the small stuff. I tried to reconstruct one of the boxes but there was only scotch tape to hold it together so I figured I would just be careful with it. As I went to place the components into the box and rushing I knocked a Medieval Manor glass over that had survived many purges of glassware and it shattered on the floor after cracking on the lower lip of the coffee table. I yelled Mazeltov and kept gathering goods to stuff into the car.

By the time we got to Zaftigs at exactly 9:30 AM the deli platters were tricky to cram into the mix. The Zaftigs platter was more types of food than I had intended to get. I probably should have just gotten deli meats because it came with cole slaw and potato salad in a huge bowl. Sarah was worried that my mad quest to add more Jewish food would offend her mother and it had been somewhat subconscious. I had asked my dad to pick-up a bunch of bagels with lox and cream cheese and to grab a lot of deserts and pastries from the local bakery the day before.

Throughout the ride to Bedford passing through sunny patches and deep rainy patches the contents of the back of the PT Cruiser needed to be carefully monitored to not fall through the edge from where the seats folded down allowed items to fall into. So I was driving slowly through the country roads in Bedford. We arrived finally around 10:15 expecting to see a bunch of folks soon to run through the rehearsal of the ceremony around 11AM but in general it was a quiet day in Bedford where not much was going on.

Sarah’s dad was carting the rented folding chairs into the yard to a back corner where the ceremony could point. He did this by attaching his gardening cart to the back of his John Deere mower with a full stack of chairs held on the back of the cart. Since I wasn’t dressed yet I helped to move the chairs from the cart along with him to make some rows starting in the back. We quickly realized that we were going to be wrong about the chair arrangement no matter what we did so we just kept unloading the chairs. Eventually Sarah came over to help us and we built our own little rounded seating system with an aisle down the middle with the chuppah that Matthew had built as the stage in the center that we used to orient the chairs to.

I also was responsible for Canon in D and Dance Me to the End of Love to play in the background during procession and recessional walks. To do this I had placed both of these onto my laptop and was planning on hooking-up the laptop to the speakers. Matthew, Sarah’s brother, retrieved a power strip for me that he hooked through a window. He was exhausted at having worked on a new bathroom all week and having MIT finals. Upon setting-up the laptop I learned that the laptop wasn’t that happy with playing the Dance Me version I had loaded because it had some form of protection on it that prevented it from playing. I hadn’t anticipated this and I started cursing myself for not having picked-up an iPod shuttle when we were at Costco buying liquor. But someone had mentioned that they were getting Sarah and iPod for the wedding so I had been reluctant to get a second one. The laptop was better designed for playing the slide show so I decided to make the switch to the full set-up with the media station PC, full 19” monitor, mouse, and keyboard in a station behind the aisle of chairs. Matthew helped with it and we covered it with some plastic to keep the monitor from rusting from the rain. The music played a bit but it had been choppy all night on that machine when I was loading it with music. How does an MP3 skip? But at least it played the right version of the songs.

I then went inside to set-up the slide show but now I needed a monitor to connect to the laptop. Matthew was moving back into Bedford for the summer and hadn’t set-up his computer and he had a great Dell wide screen flat panel monitor that I could set-up in the living room with the laptop. But as soon as I set it up I realized that it didn’t work very well with regards to staying live and the screen was stretching pictures to make them look very unappealing. At that point my dad had entered with my mom and Rosie. Lisa and Dave had arrived and were in the yard worried about the effects of the rain on the amplifiers they had brought since if either broke or even a microphone broke they would be out a thousand bucks. My dad wanted to fix my mom’s memory card with the laptop so I set it up for him to play with the memory card but that didn’t fix it.

When Jeff, the JIP, came he arrived at 11 instead of 10:30 and didn’t arrive with his partner as he had suggested before. He wanted to know if we wanted the two hundred pound trellis behind the chuppah. I thought it was worth a shot so we dragged it over. We could hear children playing the yard behind us after having heard what sounded like a leaf blower having made noise all morning. My dad walked over to ask them if they could do something to keep things quiet during the wedding but the reality was that the neighbors had planned a birthday party for a group of four year olds where they had rented a Spiderman trampoline.

I had asked Sarah ask Nick and Christina to bring their wireless router to see if it could give us a network to download a fix for the music onto the laptop but that wasn’t something I could focus on since the time was ticking towards the time for the rehearsal run through. Lisa and Dave were looking for a screw driver which I asked as a relay for Nick to bring and by the time he brought it they said they didn’t need it. Then the trellis fake flowers weren’t lined-up correctly so Jeff asked for a staple gun. I asked Nick to find one of these for me which he did but by the time we got back with it Jeff had fixed the trellis himself somehow without the staple gun.

With things stabilized with a stage it was time to rehearse. I couldn’t rehearse and fix the slide show so Nick worked on the slide show with some vague instructions while I started to corral the crew for the rehearsal with Sarah. We did OK trying to get the crew together to rehearse but were unable to get Matthew because he was taking a shower and we kept looking for Falkoff who had decided to take a nap in his car and was nowhere to be found until I saw his profile in his Volvo. The herding cats then led to the who is in charge problem as we went to line-up for a practice of the processional. Lisa and Dave were still working on the sound set-up. We decided to make some changes to the ceremony as printed including placing Matthew on the start button for Canon in D and the processional. This meant Nick was to take his place. Jeff, who was being a little anal about marking everything on his chart of the procession slowly took out a pen to mark the various aspects of where people would stand and then proceeded to call me David a few times as he talked. During the rehearsal we realized it was already past 1:15 and we were running out of time but that didn’t stop Jeff from trying to read long paragraphs very quickly (as if that would have helped him) or my dad from stating that a light bulb would make a loud popping noise. I snapped at my dad that now was not the time to debate the physical results of a light bulb vs. a wine glass. After that we ran quickly through the procedure again while guests began to arrive and key guests in the know were instructed to ferry them into the house instead of the backyard lest they get confused that they were late and missing the actual ceremony. The whole time as we practiced the entrance, ceremony, and exit, Robert was following us with his camera to either take practice photos or to plan the shots he would take.

So Sarah and I went upstairs to get dressed and Sarah was already miffed because she wasn’t going to have enough time to become beautiful in her dress. I went to put my tuxedo on and realized that I have great difficulty placing a cumberbund and bow-tie on even when they both include simple latches. Robert tried to capture this for posterity as the wedding photographer. At this point we also needed to get flowers placed on us and there were some friends of the Carvey’s with the flowers. I got mine pinned onto my lapel and was ready to go downstairs. On the way I asked someone whether drinks were already being served since I could see a hungry and thirsty crowd gathering downstairs. I was told that it was my option to drink so I figured I could forgo the drink if nobody else would have one. I then was put in charge of locating Falkoff so that he could get his official flower as the best man but he was once again nowhere to be found. So I kept bumping into guests to quickly greet them and then ask them if they had seen Falkoff anywhere. One woman figured out who Falkoff was when told that he was Zoe’s husband and they got him pinned.

As I wandered about it was already about twenty minutes past two so I could feel the time flying by with Jeff needing to leave at 3PM. We couldn’t start until Sarah was ready since a wedding doesn’t start without the bride. I looked around downstairs for Molly and Yuval and found Ami and Ilana instead. Ami had said they wouldn’t be able to make it for the ceremony and I suddenly worried that folks had come all the way from California and wouldn’t be there to make the wedding. It made me remember how Ami and Ilana had missed a part of Yuval and Molly’s wedding because they drove down to Connecticut too late.

I was trying to figure out where I was supposed to see Sarah since I apparently wasn’t supposed to see her until a certain point but we all needed to process together. Assorted in the know Carvey family helpers gathered the guests into their chairs and we gathered behind the back deck in our little phalanx attack procession formation. Sarah finally came down looking beautiful in her wedding dress through the back patio door. I asked her if she had the rings and she had forgotten them upstairs. So someone went to get the rings for her and Christina held onto them by placing them on her fingers. There was a rush to do this since Lisa and Dave started playing as soon as Sarah was sighted in the doorway and we didn’t want to leave a lot of time in the middle.

The music queued fine by Matthew and since I was first-up with my parents I took a good look at Matthew as we passed by. Canon in D didn’t do too well with the Media PC by skipping. I learned this Tuesday, two days after the wedding, after I took a look at it that the media PC was infected with a spyware worm that was probably causing all of the performance trouble. Headline: Hacker screws-up backyard wedding. Sarah was calm once she had walked down with her parents and her father offered her properly. Things went silent for a moment and we could hear a very loud cardinal enjoying the break in the rain to call for mates and the children giggling and laughing as they bounced on Spiderman. A plane flew overhead and low coming from Hanscomb airfield that we credited ourselves as having hired to do a flyby. I did a duck and cover in the chuppah to protect myself and Sarah from the plane.

The wedding ceremony itself was lighter than expected. It was hard not to be silly with all of the serious stuff going on. Mom read three pieces of poetry and Bruce Nickerson read a passage from the Song of Songs. Jeff seemed more nervous than anyone else on stage and had trouble reading the ceremony as he rushed through reading it. Lisa and Dave sang a customized version of Wherever You Go with the lyrics changed based on Sarah and me. Sarah and I sounded like the cone heads during the part where we had to speak together. At one point during the vows I sounded like Darth Vader claiming all of hers would be mine or something like that.

Finally the ceremony drew to a close as we were announced as Mr and Mrs. Daniel and Sarah Housman and we tried to go out slowly to Dance me to the End of Love but it was very jumpy music and we were excited to be married so we did a little dancing in the aisle on the way out. That lasted until the music crackled out because the media PC wasn’t very healthy and Matthew quickly drew the song to a close.

We then were greeted with the long receiving line which seemed to take about an hour. It was nice to see and meet everyone in the line but I could see people wandering about with glasses of champagne slowly fizzing. I was worrying that we wouldn’t get to see Ami and Ilana but they cut into line to say hello.

After the receiving line Falkoff gave his toast. I remember that he was happy to not have me interrupt him and that we would probably debate what he said for quite some time. He also thought that Sarah was the perfect woman for me since I am such an optimist, exemplified by a tennis game at 5:30 AM on a summer morning when Falkoff told me to meet him first thing in the morning for tennis. What Sarah had to combine with this was that she had chosen to get married outside in May. Falkoff’s toast was well received and then folks started to wander off to the bar and eat the food.

Sarah and I got a chance to mingle with guests but we were quickly separated and wandered about saying hello to everyone present. People knew where to go, where to be, how to have fun, and we just hung around with them. Sarah’s feet were cold from having stood in the wet grass as were many of the guests. Kate had invented in her mind a tool to place on the bottom of a stiletto heel to prevent them from sinking into mud during receptions in May.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)