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)

Lisa and Dave have a live band show this Saturday night at Sally O'Briens. I chatted with Kilimnik today and he is likely to attend. Falkoff and Zoe ought to be able to make it too. The band can use all the crowd that can attend at Sally's this week to keep them booked on a regular basis so I won't take excuses from people who have nothing better to do on a Saturday night. It will be our own personal party if we all pack into this bar and have a good time. I'm heading out to Marshfield with Sarah and Madeline if anyone wants to hang out by the pool before the big show. Drop me a line if you want bicycle directions or a ride.

Info on the show is at the Sweet Wednesday web site.

Posted by Dan Housman at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Because my parents acquired a second home in Marshfield to be near the ocean I took it upon myself to be the official owner of solving pest problems at the seaside location. The primary pest situation due to a town named after a "marsh" are moquitos. They like to breed in the 11 acre lot behind the house and come out in force by the pool. The solution that I had heard about was the Mosquito Magnet. It is a little contraption that eats propane and converts it into energy to run a fan and puts out CO2 along with Octonol from a special insert to lure unsuspecting mosquitos to their death in a trap. It ultimately is like a lobster trap where the bugs can get in but they can't get out.

When I first installed it I had all of the troubles of getting the pieces aligned from a distance. I had it delivered to a location where I wasn't, needed to buy a propane tank, and then had to get it running. The initial problem with the design of the mosquito magnet is that it requires 24 hours of charging the battery before you can start it. So I had to put it together one day, plug it in, go home, and then test turning it on the following week. I did finally get it working after a few weeks going back and forth in year one and it killed a forest full of mosquitos. So I believe it can work.

The following year was also pretty good. Despite the winter meaning I needed to charge it again I did so and then took it out again this year. But this year after I got it running on Memorial day it was dead a few weeks later. So last weekend I spent countless hours trying to figure out how to get it running again. The product comes with two odd gadgets that I hadn't needed to use. The first is a plastic fitting that connects to the propane tank and to the regulator. The instructions for it claim that it purges something. So I tried using that and heard a slight hiss when I inserted the reverse threaded and therefore confusing plastic fitting. Hoping the Magnet would turn on I got it to run for a few minutes and then it crapped out. Now this presents a problem because it is supposed to charge for 24 hours each time, but when it doesn't work it is a nightmare since I can't exactly go back and forth 45 minutes every time I want to charge and test it. So I dragged a different propane tank in and tried again. It worked for a few minutes and then crapped out again. Figuring that I might not need the power to charge as much I dragged everything into the basement so that I could keep the Magnet plugged into the wall charger while testing since it would have constant power (sorta) if it were connected to the wall. I then began a series of tests with it purging with the fitting, plugging it in for a few hours, overnight, while at brunch, and had it going once for an hour and a half until I tried to roll it out the door to where the mosquitos were. At this point it died again.

So out of desparation my dad and I went to the store to see if we could either get a new one or get advice on getting this one to work. At the store they mentioned that I needed to "purge the lines" with the other attachment, a little orange thing that connects to what looks like a bicycle wheel air gauge. I was certain that I had the other attachment because I had seen it hundreds of times so I told my dad we didn't need to pay the $12 for it but did need to pay the $10 for the three special CO2 cartridges that you connect to the orange thing that adapts the CO2 cartridge to the bicycle wheel air guage thing. So when we got home predictably I couldn't find this part, which was the size of a screw and proceeded to wander through all occupied zones of the 11 acres looking for it because I was convinced that I hadn't been stupid enough to lose this essential piece of hardware.

So finally on Sunday I tried a few more times to trick it into running only to have it crap out on me again. So I plugged it in for the week, went home, and vowed to return next week with the orange adapter and CO2 cartridges. The net of it was that I would probably have killed more bugs standing in the field swatting and kiling the bugs whenever they landed on me than I have this year fighting with this difficult to maintain bug execution chamber. But I hate those bugs and I will probably try for the next 10 years to get a better bug trap system in place.

This is a good example of how if someone, me, wants to accomplish a certain task with a product that no matter how ridiculous the user experience is the user will still go through it in order to accomplish the task and if it works after doing all of those painful annoying and ridiculous things to accomplish the task then the user will swear by the product and recommend it to all of their friends. I do urge any company to build a similar device to the Mosquito Magnet that avoids all of this maintenance crap. They could make a killing!

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Lisa and Dave came over last night to eat some dinner and hang out with us. The munchkin had eaten an entire stage 2 jar of sweet potatoes that left a scene of spattered red looking reminiscent of the violent gun fight scene in Taxi Driver. Lisa mentioned that they had gotten an email from someone who congratulated them on their attractive web stie. It would be great if I had the time and energy to clean my little space - fix fonts, tidy up pages that don't make sense, use a uniform style sheet/design, track down the 404 errors, etc. But it isn't going to happen.

Lisa also mentioned that they are planning a big European trip including some gigs. They will be playing in countries and will leave when they get deported. Someone heard them the other day who is involved in corporate events and thought they would be great for the events. The woman called them frantically with a need for help with a dead crowd about to go on a harbor cruise but it was too late to provide support. Coming soon will be the corporate event bat signal with SW shining into the clouds so that wherever there is a dead crowd - Lisa and Dave with or without a full band will be there to liven them up.

I also was chatting with Phil on my way out the door from dropping Madeline off. We were dicussing whether it would be good to walk Madeline today. He thought she was happiest when she is in the baby bjorn and I mentioned that she is happy when she gets people to pay attention to her. Phil bent over as if in a whisper and said "We all are."

Posted by Dan Housman at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Thursday night I finally got out to see Lisa and Dave’s Sweet Wednesday full band show play at Sally O’Brien’s. Sweet Wednesday after more than three years of work, probably a lot more actually, just released their first CD as a band. The CD is called Wherever You Go and the tracks are available for listening through the web site as well as an option to buy the CD online.

The show included some great moments. I heard the song that they wrote for Madeline for the first time and it was a rockin’ tune that I’m sure Madeline will come to love along with plenty of other folks. Unfortunately I don’t have a recording of the song yet but I am hoping to get one shortly from a live set. Sarah would have loved it when the band played “Take a load off of Annie” later in the evening including a strong showing from the audience, at least me, singing along. The Sweet Wednesday band shows are a ton of fun and anyone who is missing them is just missing out. American Idol was playing on the television behind the bar with nobody wanting to watch it while a real band, with songs written by the people playing the music was standing on a small stage making a lot of great sound. America needs to dropkick the synthesized Nick Lachey pop idol crap and start getting out of their homes to see some real people play music at their local bars.

That song from Hustle and Flow (Whoop that trick) has been stuck in my head since I watched the film. The basic notion from that movie was that this pimp puts his time into making music and creates a demo tape to show to a rapper who was successful. The rapper doesn’t give him much help but one of his prostitutes does promote the tape and it becomes a hit. So this is where Sweet Wednesday is now. They have the music mixed perfectly and it needs to get fed into the media machine so that people can realize that it is just some great music that needs to be put onto the radio play lists.

We also watched The Hotel New Hampshire on Friday night, probably the eighth time I’ve seen that movie. I never before noticed that the actor playing the younger brother named Egg was Seth Green. The story line has the father chasing after his dream of running a hotel only to have two failed ventures. He is described as wanting to start a hotel no matter what happened because he was a Gatsby, someone who chases their dreams even when they are failing over and over again. So being a musician or an entrepreneur like my sister and myself are puts us into that category of the American’s who keep trying and failing despite the more conservative folks providing sage discouraging advice to get a real job. It’s a long, suffering, depressing road full of nos and occasional maybes.

Why do we do it? What keeps us coming back despite the discouragement?

To find out listen to the Sweet Wednesday CD. Buy a copy for yourself and ten copies for each of your friends for birthday and holiday gifts. Get the barrista to play the music in your local coffee shop. Tell your friends they need to hear this music. Request Wherever you go from your local radio station. Complain that the CD isn’t in the shelf for local musicians at your local record store. Review the songs and put your comments in a podcast. Do something to get this CD heard and then drop me an email and maybe I’ll give you a hand the next time you have something that needs to be heard.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wouldn’t try to argue with my grandfather Eddie from his grave but I am not sure that is what he would have preferred. He might disagree about anything I have to say about him. Eddie was one of those people who derive pleasure out of an intellectual debate and was always hungry for a smart hour with a worthy adversary to discuss a subject shrouded by opinions and complexity. I am a genetic disciple of this stubborn argumentative trait. My sister Lisa can easily confirm this having debated with me in the back seat of a car and then after having me get close to convincing her of my point of view being asked to switch sides to argue the other side of the argument. My friend Robert wanted to create an event called Bringing Down the House where people could get a chance to rise from the audience to debate me.

I don’t know if I received love for debate and being contrarian from frequent interactions with my grandfather or an intellectual gene put into place through years of genetic selection of rabbis and philosophers. Eddie’s family, the Wigdor’s, are descended from the Rabbinovich family, one of the longest lines of rabbis so it is likely that this is the case. Eddie was cynical. It may have been his age and often times it was just from having been a business person for his whole life with the experience to spot crap when he saw it. When I went into business selling products over the web with VirtuMall he was astounded by the value of Netscape and other free Internet services. He kept asking “How can you make money on the Internet if everything is free?” It took the crash of 2002 to see the wisdom in his cynicism. He also challenged me when I was dating Nadia, a rabbinical student. He knew I was an atheist so he would ask “How can you be an atheist and marry a rabbi?” Nadia and I broke-up over this issue a few years later. Like me, Eddie was likely an atheist. He was skeptical of what claims had been made about God. But that didn’t change how he felt about his culture, history, and religion. He lived in a house with two sets of dishes and ate Kosher meals every day of his life.

I don’t remember Eddie as much from his youth other than from what I could gather he might have been like from stories he told or stories told to me about him. I remember him mostly from my own youth. It seems that from the perspective of a child grandparents start out antiquated and are born balding with grey hair. My grandfather liked to say little phrases to me playing with words and numbers and would say them to me even when I was beyond the age to just giggle about them. I can still hear him say “ABC Goldfish. MNO Goldfish. SAR!” or “Why did six eat seven? Because seven ate nine!” He also would ask questions that could confuse a little kid like “What would happen if a snake ate it’s tail?”.

When I came to Toronto he knew that I liked to play baseball but wasn’t a sports fan himself. But he took me to the Toronto Blue Jays game when I came to town and marveled at the new stadium and how much it cost the city. He liked to give me updates on how well the Blue Jays were playing, especially when they were playing well during the Red Sox poorer years in the eighties. More than once I received a blue jays jersey that I wasn’t sure whether to wear or not. He would also, with my grandmother and aunt, take me to the science or art museum in Toronto to look and learn about the world. When I came to town he and my grandmother would look for an event that might entertain me during my stay. He always wanted to know how I was doing in school, what I was studying, and to talk and compare how different things were from the US and Canada.

We didn’t go out to eat very often when I visited Toronto. We would sit at the long table at 260 Heath Street Apt. 1004 and discuss matters of great importance like the origin of life, what the meaning of quantum physics was, the cause of the middle east crisis, the benefits of socialized health care. While at the dinner table he was always very fired-up to talk about something that had just come fresh from the newspaper or radio. It was a contrast to when I would call him on the phone to wish him a happy new years, happy birthday, or to thank him for a gift. On the phone he was a man of few words thanking me for the call and then saying he had to go. He probably never got into the habit of low cost calls to talk long distance on the phone. He likely remembered back to the days when you paid by the letter for a telegraph whenever I called.

We did go out a restaurant a few times. I recall one place that was specially designed for children. The restaurant was decorated like a circus like atmosphere with an organ in the center and fresh popcorn on the tables. While we were sitting there was a man at the table next to us who was smoking. While this was long before the days when smoking was disallowed in bars across America Eddie took offense to the man and challenged him by telling the people next to us to stop smoking. I could see he was protective of us and willing to stand-up to make it known what was and was not acceptable regardless of what was allowed by laws. I am a non-smoker as is everyone in my family and everyone I have ever dated. He was a non-smoker in an earlier era when people smoked in their offices and doctors recommended brands of cigarettes.

He liked fresh air like the kind he breathed while traveling through the National parks in California with a travel companion he met on the way. While looking through some old photographs I found a carefully annotated journal of this trip with photographs next to descriptions of the journey. I don’t picture him as a young man needing a large social circle so much as someone with an urge to explore and to do so predominantly alone.

I can’t remember my grandfather without my grandmother. They were only apart after she died and he was crying, lonesome, upset, and worried about what would become of him. He looked different than I had ever seen him before, vulnerable. Part of him, something that propped him up every day was his relationship with Evelyn, his wife and companion. I had traveled to visit my grandparents while looking to make a movie called “Manufacturing Attraction”, a documentary on the shift to more mechanized forms of people meeting, dating, and connecting. I wish I had taken a video tape of him telling the story of how he met my grandmother. He loved to tell it. He had met a girl in New York and been interested in going out with her on a date. When he went to find her she wasn’t there but Evelyn, her roommate was available and he fell in love with her. He had found a soul mate and they stayed married for the rest of their lives, taking many trips together in their seventies and eighties and then propping each other up and caring for each other as they aged once they could no longer travel.

Eddie was a lover of the world who posted an Atlas in his bathroom and would buy detailed coffee table sized Atlases to look at. He had during the course of a lifetime traveled to the many places he had seen on the maps. I remember as a young child getting presents from these travels like a small wooden boat he had bought in Fiji. Among the books he raved about was John Irving’s Son of the Circus, set in a foreign modern landscape of India.

He was an early traveler doing business in Japan and China as an importer looking for electronics lines to represent in Canada. Because he was an individualist he had set out to build his own small business, as a lone salesman pitching a unique bag of goods. I know of two product lines that he sold that were very successful. One was the take a number systems available in supermarkets, bakeries, and deli counters where you take a number and go to the front of the line when your number is called. He also sold the type of intercom systems that were installed in high schools to announce to everyone that homeroom would be five minutes longer, or at the airport that a flight had been delayed.

He had later in his business life gotten interested in some more esoteric lines like a camera that took 3-D stereoscopic pictures, and a pencil with a series of discardable plastic tips with short sharpened pieces of lead in them. Like many other men, he was a gadget fan, the remnants that I could see in the Toronto apartment when he was so fragile were multiple reading machines for the blind. He was trained as an electrical engineer and even went to work for the army to help fit fighter planes to work properly in World War II. Apparently planes built to American standards wouldn’t always work for the Brittish so they needed to make sure certain parts, like the part where they drop bombs through, was aligned properly so that the bombs would drop on their targets rather than explode in the plane. On one of his missions they were testing the bomb release areas using explosive flares and the problem did occur that the bomb wouldn’t release. So he was flying in a plane above a flare he had just dropped into the chute that was capable of blowing-up a large chunk of the plane where he was sitting to do the experiment. Luckily the flare was a dud and didn’t explode even after landing, but it was a close call for him and myself (born two generations later). When he told stories of his work I could tell that work and engineering was a real love for him.

He was an athletic man who enjoyed swimming throughout his life. I recall one story that he had gone swimming one morning in the Fjords in Norway in water so cold that the locals didn’t dare to swim in it. He was a good structured lap swimmer who, even as his health was beginning to fail, continued to go daily to the JCC for a swim. I heard that he also was a tennis player. When he turned 65 he made some new friends who were 40 at the time and gave them a run for their money when he played tennis against them. It was only a broken hip that slowed him down and even then he continued to walk in the halls of his building despite failing joints.

In his final years he still loved to work and was looking for products for people handicapped like himself with limited eyesight or progressing deafness. I wonder what he would have been involved with had he been an fresh entrepreneur in the internet age. For me, having followed a similar path as an Internet entrepreneur his first question to me whenever we would meet would be the familiar inquisitive version of hello to a business person “How is business?”

He died of shock in the hospital after asking for his daughter Nancy to bring him his transistor radio so that he could listen to the news. He wanted her to make sure there were batteries in it.

I am very much his grandson.

Posted by Melody at 02:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My grandfather died on Saturday night. He was the last of my grandparents to die. Like his wife, my grandmother Evelyn, he died suddenly and unexpectedly. When Madeline was born Sarah and I intended to make our first trip with Madeline to visit him in Toronto so that he would get a chance to see his first great grand daughter before he died. Just last weekend Lisa, Dave, Mom, and Robert made a trip to Toronto with large size prints that Sarah had scrambled to print so that Eddie could see a picture of Madeline large enough to be visible through the haze of his macular degeneration. Had we heard about the visit to Toronto sooner we likely would have traveled along with everyone else. But we put off our trip for a week too long and so without knowing that death was coming so soon we missed the narrow window of opportunity for the generations to briefly meet.

Saturday, the day that he died, was also Sarah’s 30th birthday, a major milestone of itself. For my 30th birthday I gathered together a large group of friends, including Sarah, for a wild trip to Vegas. For Sarah’s 30th birthday we went out on Friday night to celebrate with her friends from college and my parents had gotten their first taste of babysitting Madeline. Then on Saturday Sarah and I were sick all day with the flu and/or hangovers and debated going out for a birthday celebration at the Falks’ house where Lisa had procured an ice cream birthday cake to commemorate the occasion. When we finally decided we couldn’t go out the group celebrating at the Falks gathered around the phone to sing Sarah a Happy Birthday. About an hour later my mother called to let me know that Eddie had died.

On Sunday Sarah and I walked through Brookline to Matt and Kate’s to watch the Patriots get trounced by the Chief’s. Tom Brady had a career high stat, 4 interceptions. On the way we bumped into Gadi from ImprovBoston and we stopped to chat about the baby, Thanksgiving, Arizona, Boston, whatever. It took about an hour and a half to walk down Harvard Avenue to Allston. We always seem to meet people in Coolidge Corner. It’s one of the reasons that Sarah and I don’t ever really want to leave the city to move to the suburbs. We love bumping into random people we know.

At night we watched Layer Cake, an ok movie along the lines of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The movie was mildly entertaining but what I was more than amazed by was that Madeline fell asleep on my chest with her face down. Her arms were wide around me holding me like she was trying to hug me but with such a small body I felt like underneath her I was her whole world and that she knew enough instinctively to enjoy embracing me. Although I should have moved her to the bassinet I preferred having her there on my chest because it was such a great feeling. Instead I asked Sarah to get some photographs of the event. I am not sure yet since it happened so recently but it will probably remain a major highlight in my memory.

I flew to Toronto on Monday morning on a small plane that made me a bit dizzy from the turbulence. Because we had been to Toronto less than a year ago for my grandmother’s funeral the chain of places and events were familiar this time. We were going to the same funeral home, the same grave site, and then see the same relatives and friends who were there to comfort us. It feels odd when a funeral becomes something familiar since death is such a singular event.

At the funeral I was the person with the six week old baby, the new hope and generation to contrast a sudden end of an older generation. People were congratulatory and interested in looking through the short stack of pictures of Madeline that I had quickly cut out from a printout on the ink jet printer at 4 am on my way to the flight. People had all heard that there was a great grand daughter that had just been born before his death. It made things at least a little more fair and mirrored the standard messages in the prayers for a funeral – Adonai giveth and Adonai taketh away or life is a journey and the journey itself is eternal even if the traveler is not.

This year has been a very major year for me. I lost my last grandparents, started a new job/company, got married, and had a baby. Those weren’t the exact list I had put down at New Years when one of the items that made my top ten list for annual to dos was to become a male exotic dancer and another was to appreciate Sarah more often. I didn’t actually go anywhere exotic like in prior years. This year all of the events occurred around me, some of which I could control and others where I was mainly a spectator. So I feel like an alien life tourist, inhabiting a human body for the period of one life, on a trip I bought in a sci-fi mall, to experience what it is like to be a human.

We looked through a number of pictures from older days. Some had the amazing look of being perfectly set in another era. One had the 1930s with young campers dressed in clothing from the Great Depression looking vaguely like the Little Rascals gang. Another picture showed great uncle Jack with a military uniform on and a rifle in his hand for World War II. He had been 26 but drafted for war anyways. The century has been a big one where at my grandfather’s birth the horse and carriage was commonplace and beginning to be replaced by the automobile. Now at his death I could take breaks from the relatives and friends to review my life by flying like Superman, through the satellite imagery of Google Earth first by looking from above at every address that I had ever lived and then to escapes to Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Grand Canyon, and Venice.

Posted by Melody at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays because it is so simple. The basic structure of the holiday is that you get a day off from work so that you can eat dinner with your family. The funny thing about this is that because the structure is so simple people get very stressed out about the holiday. You should be able to eat dinner with your family once a year, right? My philosophy about Thanksgiving, having experienced the odd phenomenon of people having near nervous breakdowns on this simple holiday is as follows:

“Don’t take Thanksgiving too seriously.”

The basic challenge as I see it is that Thanksgiving makes each person answer a number of major questions in a social situation that tend to linger unanswered for a long period of time and once opened lead to a number of painful discoveries.

Tough question number 1: Who is in my family?

While this may seem to be a simple question there are a number of situations in everyone’s life that tend to make figuring out this question a sticky proposition. The first category of these is whether estranged people should be considered part of the family. Some families I know have to split Thanksgiving into the two estranged halves of a pair of sisters or a child and parent who no longer get along. When a father doesn’t approve of the lifestyle of their gay, drug addled, or politically contrary child Thanksgiving is the perfect time for the child or parent to express their distaste for the other’s lifestyle by not inviting them or refusing to come to Thanksgiving. If the invitation does get extended in a hope to patch differences then it is a good way to create some fun fireworks at dinner once the source of conflict is raised.

Single people in a relationship face the tough decision of evaluating their current boyfriend or girlfriend to determine whether they are ready or appropriate for provisional inclusion in the family. I have seen Thanksgiving break-up relationships because suddenly two people realize that their significant other is not really significant enough to make the transition from a cool friend to a family insider. One friend of Sarah’s made a realization about her relationship when neither she nor her boyfriend even discussed whether they would go to each other’s Thanksgiving meals.

For those people orphaned from home or orphaned from their whole family they need to figure out within their circle of friends which family they can latch onto in a pinch. At the same time families, who know who the orphaned roamers are can get competitive for the roamer to commit that their extended family is theirs. In general these orphaned roamers are the easiest component of Thanksgiving but they present an interesting wild card just in case everything looks like it is going to work out.

People also face the challenge that they are often in a relationship where they have more than one family to tend to. So if each person has a significant other with their own family to define then a family of 8 people can quickly balloon into expanding this question into 16 different families causing a massive web of conflicts when it comes to including all of the families in one place at one time.

Tough question number 2: What is an acceptable family dinner?

Every family that I know has a group of people who don’t agree on the ideal food. Vegetarians generally don’t like turkey and can be disturbed by the focus on killing animals either in general or in non-humane anti free-range fashion. So there is always the added stress of whether the whole family, once it has been determined, can sit in the same place and eat the same meal. Meat eating people like myself don’t want to be downtrodden by the vegetarians and vice-versa leading to some fun food related tensions around things like segregation of stuffing, gravy, and seating. Ethnic differences can often come into play. The movie “The Feast” shows some of the variability of conflict in action. People also make mistakes with the food. At one Thanksgiving, an Asian one, they accidentally purchased a smoked turkey instead of a plain one and it tasted awful to everyone there.

People also never can collaborate to pick an appropriate time for dinner. The party people want to go out in the early evening to see their high school friends who are in town to see their family for a few days. The general variability of eating schedules for a large number of people makes it tricky to schedule the whole family. Some people won’t eat before dinner time out of fear that they will throw off a carefully constructed diet conscious eating schedule.

The schedule challenge often gets complicated by question number one challenge of people being included into multiple families. In my case the basic issue is that you can’t be in two places at once so I need to go to two different Thanksgivings that by logic should be at two different times. This is doable if both families are in the Boston area but never worked too well when my girlfriend's family was in upstate New York. One solution to this is to move the holiday a full day or week away for one family which is often my preference.

I can imagine that a gigolo lifestyle or a couple of family divorces could lead to the split problem on a far larger scale. It isn’t just a logistical challenge because not appearing is an admission that one family half is more important than the other which also can lead to flying cranberry sauce.

Tough question number 3: Can we pull off the logistics?

The logistics of the Thanksgiving meal are already handicapped by the complexity of the planning process around the holistic questions of defining families and meals. But the meal itself involves a lot of timing on many people’s parts. The advent of cell phones may help to co-ordinate people who are late but it also has led to people trying to time dinners more precisely to come and go near meal times. I would like to see the cell phone usage chart on Thanksgiving. I used mine about twenty times this year because it always takes more time than expected to get the baby out the door and we had a little problem walking a Husky. I can only imagine, having seen Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, how complicated traveling during peak travel dates from a foreign city to see my family would be. Someone also thought it would be a good idea to have people cook things that take over seven hours to prepare like turkey in order to complicate the logistics so that while people are already stressed out about their complex web of interpersonal relationships they also get further stressed when the expected food to calm them down is still raw because it wasn’t placed in the oven soon enough.

So Thanksgiving is an anthropologists dream to study the American human getting stressed out over the simple task of eating dinner with the family. I have enjoyed it more than ever the past few years not just looking for trouble but seeing people together and having fun chatting with people in my family who I don’t get a chance to see every day. I also love complex logistics and enjoy watching a good fight every now and then.

Posted by Melody at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a Yom Kippur tradition we went out for dinner the night before the fast. I was rewarded at dinner with a reunion with my expensive $350 rain shell that had disappeared for the past six months. My dad was wearing it to get out of the rain and hadn’t connected that the coat he had found in a closet was my famed rain shell that had climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and rafted down the Grand Canyon. At dinner we spent a long time discussing energy as it is the topic du jour of interest to everyone now that we have a new energy bill. The general result of the discussion was that I convinced my mother that hydrogen fusion is the answer to all of our energy problems as soon as we can get it to work and that if we can’t we’ll go into space to harvest the energy of the sun’s fusion to bring home to earth in a consumable energy form.

I probably will skip breakfast tomorrow but will eat lunch. Since I don’t believe in God this shouldn’t cause too much problem other than the part of me that as an atheist struggles against religious stuff. But the part of me as a historian and cultural person who wants to use traditions to help transfer valuable time tested moral codes on myself and my family I can stomach not eating for a few hours.

Today I became very excited about how soon the baby is coming. This came mainly from misreading my cell phone to make me think today was the 15th while it is really just the 12th . The 15th is meaningful because it is the day after Sarah leaves work to go on maternity leave. She isn’t technically due until Halloween, but the official alert level goes up a notch the day that Sarah officially stops working. That day means that we are ludicrously close to becoming first time parents for real. A baby outside that belly is a different situation from the baby inside. That’s my hunch. I also got anxious because my cell phone at work didn’t ring so when I was driving home I had four messages. That made me think that if Sarah were in labor I would have been very hard to contact and I might miss this whole birth experience.

So when I got home I was poking around Sarah’s belly and getting generally impatient that the apparently full sized baby inside wasn’t starting to make her way out. We thought about how we could start to go down the list soon of home remedy induction processes as soon as the 15th came around. We don’t want to have to go to the hospital for induction. Stay at home as long as possible is the plan.

This weekend on Saturday morning we took care of one of the last big steps in getting ready for having a baby. We got our car seat installed and inspected by the Brookline police. The location for the inspection is the same place as the public works building. We had scheduled the appointment for 9:30 in the morning but awoke at 9:29. So we knew we would be late. The plan had been to install it in the morning before we went and to clean out the back seat of the car so they didn’t tell us things like “You are going to be terrible parents because the back seat of your car is filled with garbage, pens, and flip flops that could kill a baby if they were traveling 30MPH after a head-on collision”. That was the least of our worries as we were panicked on being so late that we would have to fall into the next window of opportunity for car seat installation inspection two weeks, and potentially, too late.

So we drove based on the directions that the address was something like 877 Hammond Street and near the Putterham golf course. I have played golf at Putterham so we had no problem getting there but we then drove around in circles through a series of connected rotaries that spit you out in random directions like a pinball for forty minutes looking for the “Works” buildings. We first went into the back lot behind the firehouse on Hammond street. It’s very cool and worth checking out because they have a practice apartment building that they probably torch on a regular basis and some other practice burning things. But nobody was there so I made Sarah ask for directions at the golf course. They directed us to a hidden gate after the firehouse that led up a hill to the building where they inspect car seats.

At the inspection the officer who helped us informed us that it was OK that we hadn’t installed the seat yet. From what I could tell nobody gets around to installing the seat themselves before going to see the officer for installation. He borrowed the PT Cruiser owner’s manual and was amazed that my 2001 car had a non-mandatory safety feature of middle-seat clips for connecting a car seat into. So he installed very quickly and then gave us the lecture on cleaning out the car so we wouldn’t have flying garbage kill our baby after seeing the flip-flops, pens, gadget refuse, and McDonalds paper waste in the back seat.

Posted by Melody at 03:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave and Lisa are having their first band show next week on Thursday.

"On Thursday, October 6th, 9 PM,
we will have our first ever full band show
in Union Square, Somerville, at Sally O'Brien's."

It should be a rocking time so hopefully everyone I know will appear at the show and have a good time. Sarah and the baby may be too tired to stay awake but it should be a good time to catch up with Froggy and others who are likely to be in attendance.

I awoke from a strange dream this morning. Sarah was in labor unexpectedly early. I left her where she was so that I could get the proper supplies from the apartment and then return to drive her to the hospital. When I arrived home it wasn't the condo but another apartment that only exists in my dreams that was attached to 930 Mass Ave. and was a luxury location. I walked in to find a new family had moved into it and when I looked at them in a panic I realized that I didn't have my shoes. So I ran back to the real condo and couldn't find my shoes. I wanted to get back to Sarah but the more I looked for my shoes the more naked I became losing pants and shirt and then running around naked so that I couldn't go out until I could find a towel. I couldn't find a towel and the towel was something I had thought I needed to bring back to Sarah. I awoke still struggling to keep from running around in circles in the condo madly looking for my own clothing.

This dream has obvious roots probably closely linked with worries about the pending events in the near future and my level of preparedness for the big change about to occur. I also need to take more responsibility for the location of shoes and other articles of clothing I can never find in real life.

Posted by Melody at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday we went back to the natural childbirth class. It was a little less interesting in the second session as the teacher went through areas like packing bags filled with mood lighting, post-partum, massage, two meditation sessions, and another labor movie. Sarah was amazed at how calm the woman was giving birth in the movie. The more low key session was fine because I wasn't up for taking a drink from a firehose on Sunday morning as I was falling asleep. We had been painting on Saturday all day and then watched Bubble Boy until late at night.

In the evening my family including mom, dad, Lisa, Dave, Sarah and unborn Madeline walked to Fenway to see the Rolling Stones open their 2005 tour. On the walk over my mom told us about her labor with Lisa and me.

When Lisa was born in 1971 it was difficult to find a hospital in Boston that allowed fathers to be in the room during the birth. So they went to a religious hospital that did allow it. My mother had Lisa naturally with no anaesthesia. She went to the hospital at 2:30 AM and was laboring about 24 hours. Including sleeping after the labor she had gone for about 36 hours without food. The next morning someone was ringing a bell as they went from room to room. My mom thought the bell meant that it was time for breakfast and was ready to put her order in for a big mound of food. A man walked in wearing a frock and he bent over to ask her "Do you have any sins to confess?" She just replied "I'm Jewish." and waited for the priest to leave to exclaim to my father how ravenously hungry she was.

I was a faster baby as the second. She went to the hospital at about 2 am with me and I was born the next morning at 8am. They gave her an epidural for the last 15 minutes of pushing, which in retrospect didn't seem worth the trouble.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In passing I was wondering what my first words were as a child. Unfortunately these words were not carefully collected so I can only guess that they were as follows:

Food, doggie, mama, daddy, football, milk, candy, hamburger, photo, computer, movie, tv, lisa, grandma, walk, money, car, truck, and poop (or a derivative of the word), down, hungry, funny, giggle, tickle, coffee, and bye bye. I also have always had a fondness for the word gulag because it sounds like a beef stew but I doubt I knew what it meant or used it often as a baby.

I am not sure what our daughter's first words are going to be. I hope they aren't anything out of the ordinary. I am going to try to edge out Sarah in the first words race and try to get the little one to say daddy or dada before she says mommy or mama. It is a noble competition and while there is no bet between Sarah and myself I'll be happy to announce the winner for anyone else who would like to bet.

We went to the doctor again for a check-up today and saw the little girl floating around inside of Sarah on the ultrasound. She has grown to be 2 lbs, 8 oz putting her in the 66th percentile for her developmental stage. I hope this doesn't hurt her chances of getting into certain pre-shools since I heard you need to be in the 90th percentile or above to get into something exlusive. But this isn't actually measuring anything other than weight and people would probably discriminate against her if she was too big. So this weight is just perfect for us for now.

My father's first words were carefully recorded by my grandmother. They were sent to me by my mother today in an entry from my grandmother Louise's book called Babyhood. She also has a list of Judy's words at 15 months.

David Housman's vocabulary: 15 months old -- October 31/47

mama, daddy, Mary, Louise, bottle, milk, cracker, apple, books, egg, dig, hair, hot, up, shoe, diaper,Jackie, bye bye, doggie, see, light, socks, baby, car, no, no more, I see you, foor, dirty, pussy, plane, bus, soap, ball, hello, this, what's this, rain, water, soon, tickle, thank you, down, good

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 4th weekend was a lot of fun. We didn’t have a lot of time to spend in Chicago downtown but there are some highlights of downtown Chicago worth noting from the small amount of time we did spend there. The Museum of Science and Industry has an exhibit called Body Worlds at the moment where they plasticized 200 cadavers in various ways including posing them on horses, cutting out different layers (cardio-vascular system, bones, muscles and bones, nervous system, etc. They even had a cadaver which was a woman with an unborn child. That one was a little tough to avoid thinking about the horror of the circumstance prior to plastinization. But for the most part the cadavers were artistic and I felt like I learned a lot about the world of the body that would otherwise have been too intangible to learn. The museum also has a great train set model of Chicago and Seattle with a train going through the mountains to reach in between. The robot exhibit was terrible. It didn’t have any robots, just a lot of toys from the 1950s and a video promotion from the iRobot corporation.

On the drive to the museum Sarah’s uncle Paul and I were talking about potential treatments for Alzhiemers and Parkinsons. They are starting to test nanotechnology spheres that can cross the blood brain barrier. The localization of them is done through tricks with the immune system and antibodies to locate certain blocks of cells and they can then release the key missing enzymes (nerve growth factor) back to only the areas affected by the neurodegeneration. It sounds like a workable idea although I can already imagine that the next few science fiction novels will start to go for robotically controlled brains through nano-technology that locates a region in the brain and can then be controlled by radio signals. Such an application would allow someone to make a person feel orgasmic when doing a mundane and unattractive task like sweeping a floor. That could lead to an ultimate state like the one in Brave New World where people were bred for different castes.

After the museum we pressed onwards to a bar where we learned that Chicago hasn’t outlawed smoking in bars yet. Sarah asked for non-alcoholic versions of Mohitos or Pina Coladas but they couldn’t figure out how to do it. After the food we walked to the Hancock building to go to Top of the Cock, a very nice art deco bar that overlooks Chicago and lake Michigan. When we were there it also overlooked the sunset. It looked like a scene out of the Aviator with the big styled art deco ceilings, elevators, and bar areas. We only had drinks there but the dining area is visible below and you can see how prepared and dressed people get to go there. I could imagine the women going out with their boyfriends dressed fancily and wondering whether their boyfriends would pop the question. I think you would need reservations in advance to go but it beats the skyline restaurant in Boston Top of the Hub that is very cheap in comparison.

On Tuesday morning we went back into the City for a half-day to see some sights. We went to Navy Pier. The pier itself is a bit of a tourist dive with overpriced un-refilled drinks and a big mall. But boats leave from the pier for various cruises in the harbor and through the city canals. We took an architectural cruise for an hour and it was awesome. The boat went through the east river and the tour guide pointed to all of the skyscrapers to describe the style they were in, when they were made, why they were made, and who made them. The architecture reminded me of Ayn Rand’s the Fountainhead and it was very grandiose. The Mesian boxes were pretty but not very interesting while the post-modernists had warped the same boring rectangles into prisms and curves that hugged the river. Many of the skyscrapers are built above the original train system because there was no other way to negotiate the rights to the land. It led me to believe that Chicago is a ripe city for a scary terrorist attack by exploding a train underneath the skyscrapers. This was on Tuesday, two days before the attack on London’s transit system.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Summer is blurring away fast. I’ve been living on the fast forward button for a week now. Every day there was something leading to the next thing and onwards.

On Thursday night we went out to the Parrish Café to meet with a crew of people to celebrate Canadians in America day. It was a beautiful night but also too busy of a night so we had to wait for a few hours to get a table outside. I decided to go on a mission to the Rattlesnake across the street to ask about their upstairs patio. The bouncer at the door decided to give me a hard time because I was wearing a red construction paper maple leaf on my chest. Once past him I found the line to go upstairs. The bouncer in front of that door was useless and being a jerk. I asked him how long he thought the wait would be and he told me he didn’t know but I could look at the line and figure it out for myself. I then let him know that his job is partially to answer questions and that it was a reasonable question. Based on his experience, he had admitted to working that door for five years, I asked him, could he estimate how long it would take for the line to pass through to upstairs. He told me no. So I told him that it was fine. I didn’t need to buy beer from their establishment if they didn’t want to be helpful. The next time it is a crummy night and empty at the Rattlesnake I’ll be going anywhere but there.

Sarah and I drove back from work on Friday and then to Olive’s for a fantastic dinner with Hattie, Jose, Matt, and Kate. Kate’s friend Meredith is a chef there, actually an apprentice chef who used to be an intern who works the pasta station. Meredith sent over a sampler of pasta after we had our appetizers including some pasta with truffle oil. I don’t know what is in truffle oil but I am surprised that nobody has made it into a narcotic. I was then far too full to eat my short rib until the next morning but did make room for the assortments of desserts that Meredith sent out after the meal. Kate has been going to art classes where they ask her to draw with non-traditional media. This boils down to decorating with beard shavings, drawing with celery, or making a picture out of the sharp end of thumbtacks. It sounded fun but won’t help in my quest to be a better digital artist.

At the wedding on Saturday afternoon I was looking forwards to a long day of meeting and greeting strangers playing the role of new but unfamiliar to everyone husband. I didn’t know anyone there but Sarah since it was her college roommate’s wedding. We got lucky and sat next to some fun people at our assigned table. I chatted for hours with an animator who worked on the movies Ice Age, The Polarbear Express, and Robots. His job was to move the models like a puppeteer to create the sequences to look realistic. He answered all of my questions about when they do the sound, how they inspire the actions. For example, in a board room scene with Ratchet, the actor pounded his hand down on the table when he delivered the line. The animator saw the tape of this and edited the motion to mirror what the actor had done. He wasn’t a big fan of how they did the Polarbear Express with the motion capture stuff because for him it wasn’t really animating. They were just trying to fix the jerky strange movements from what they had captured. Another wedding highlight was the fountain of chocolate. A company in Waltham rents out a chocolate fondue fountain where they send an attractive college student to help you dip an assortment of items including marshmallows, strawberries, pretzels, whatever into the chocolate. We drove from the wedding to the Marshfield house at 11:30 after trying to dance to some music that we weren’t very fond of. Sarah was feeling a bit self conscious about being pregnant. I kept looking at the little girls dressed in their formal wedding dresses dancing with their fathers and cousins and thought to myself. When I have my little daughter I’ll be dancing with her whenever I can.

In the morning when we awoke in Marshfield we decided it would be easiest to go to town for breakfast. We found a nice place that had a deck overlooking the water and an all you can eat buffet. After that we went back with our bellies full and made a full assault on cleaning the swimming pool. The pool was murky and had leaves at the bottom and flies floating on the surface of the water. The pump didn’t seem to be clearing most of it. Mom went after the flies from the edge and I figured out, while in the murky water, how to set-up the water vacuum attachment. Even that wasn’t working too well so I checked out the big hole in the bottom of the pool where the water gets sucked through and it was clogged by leaves and twigs. So I did some little dives to clear it and that started to move things along. The pool should eventually filter itself through but it needs to be able to pump the water through the bottom to get all the organic material that settles to the bottom. I think that next time we go the pool will be very clean.

Lisa and Dave came out to Marshfield as well. It was Big Papi Day, F-Day, however you need to put it. We were there because of dad. Lisa was learning some Dylan songs from Dave. Sarah and I put the bed together in our designated room. From our construction method of using a drill to screw in and strip the 40 wood screws holding the slats together I think the bed will need to be disassembled using karate. Mom and dad were discussing whether to take the architects advice and put the kitchen where the living room is or to go with their instinct and leave the kitchen where it was. Sarah was working on an eval using my laptop that needed to print on our dysfunctional printer this morning.

A barn swallow had moved back into the porch so mom wasn’t allowing people to walk out the back door to disturb the barn swallow and her four babies. The swallow was moving back and forth into the woods every thirty seconds to return with a new live insect for her children. Mothers work hard to keep their children alive. Dad made some tasty margaritas in the blender with fresh limes.

We grabbed some BK on the drive back to Brookline and then hurried over to the MilkyWay in JP to watch Faith Sollaway’s latest schlock Opera – The F-Word. We arrived about twenty minutes early and given that Sarah and I weren’t the core audience segment, lesbians, we were mainly just sitting in our seats trying to look as normal as possible in a room packed with women wearing shirts like the one that said “Dykes against Bush”. I was surprised by the wide variety of lesbians in the room and thought it would be interesting to perform a anthropological study on the whole society of lesbians in JP to understand the culture. All cultures are formed out of a common bond and a need to band together to protect that bond. In the case of lesbians it is a sexual preference.

This means that their rituals like going to the Milky Way to see a Schlock Opera are bound to focus on this common bond. The show delivered on this promise. During the introduction to the musical faith did a little audience participation where she asked “Only the lesbians” to sing the line from the song then she asked “Just that guy in the corner” to sing. They also had some choice visits to the sexy OB/GYN office where the female doctor was asking questions normally delivered in a professional manner with cruder terminology. The schlock included some funny bits about repressed Jewish memories of uncle Hyman and some cruel angry Chasid telling a little girl that she would never get gimmel on the dreidel. We exchanged gifts for dad’s day after the show as the crowd was dying down.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:24 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)