I went to the MIT web site today because I was thinking about recruiting some MIT folks for my company. We need some young blood to grow the software development team. Upon looking at the main page I saw an interesting video about the innovator of the year about using cells to produce petroleum like products. On the screen came Dave Berry one of Sarah's good friends from college. On closer review he was voted innovator of the year and was working on all sorts of interesting stuff. I must congratulate him the next time I see him in person. If you poke around the site or look at the MIT home page the video is easy enough to find.

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:14 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)

Yuval took a chance and pulled together a company around an idea he had a year ago. I recall chatting with him about the idea only about a year ago and he already has what appears to be the big IT bloggers excited with a product that is already headed for an alpha test. I can't say more than what is on the web (not that I really know more!) but I am wicked proud of Yuval and his team for following through with a good idea, refiniing it, and turning it into what appears to be a going concern at Eye-Fi.

Just yesterday Robert Scoble wrote a piece on eye-fi that basically says that once their device hits that he advocates it and I am sure many more folks are to follow.

Awesome... Totally awesome. Congrats Yuval!

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In my all encompassing wisdom to replace the missing part from Babie's 'R Us I failed to notice that step 11 required another major part that we were missing. So we are once again stalled in our effort to assemble the Exersaucer. It looks like we are going to go with the government contractor route with the delivery of the replacement unit to Bedford later this week. Why build one when you can build two for twice the price?

In other news Jeremy is stuck at Emerson hospital after having tried to learn to snowboard at Nashoba Valley. Amazingly Emerson hospital has a large team of people dedicated to emergency head injuries, torn ACLs, and broken wrists. In Jeremy's case he fractured his wrist after falling on it instead of falling on his head like I told him to when he asked whether to go snowboarding or skiing. Snowboarding is not a very kind sport to the newbies. So he's getting repaired with pins tomorrow that should have his hand out of action for six months with an injury similar to the one that I had when I was playing basketball. Since us Jews tend not to tattoo he'll at least get a great scar out of it. He was probably just jealous of my scar.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an odd twist of fate Joe Adler from my AEPi fraternity days wrote a book on Baseball hacks. I have a copy of it near Madeline's crib but thus far reading from it has not been satisfactory for putting Madeline to sleep. She is a fan of the page with Chernoff faces on it (pg. 188) although I believe that Joe made a special effort to make the Boston Redsox look more evil than the New York Yankees bassed on his personal bias. At a minimum that page could be used for creating a new cartoon series about each baseball team. Toronto and Tampa Bay both look like worried midgets, Anaheim looks like a chinese coolie, and Cleveland is the only team that really looks like a human but looks mostly like A Rod. The book is quite good not just for baseball fans but also for some fun exercises in statistics that could be used to help president Bush to get kids more interested in math and science through the guise of baseball and gambling.

Joe was interviewed about his book on NPR and it can be found temporarily at Future Tense and should be archived at the February 13th episode page.

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was good to see the Steelers win the Superbowl on Sunday. We had a little gathering in Newton but it wasn’t nearly as intense as the past few years with the Patriots in the big game. Before the game Sarah and I took a walk around Crystal Lake with Madeline. At one point on the lake just after getting off of Beacon street there is a cove where you can climb into the water. I have some good memories of that cove like the time that I went skinny dipping with Ami and Ilana after college and getting covered with leeches. It also was the site of the closest I ever came to getting arrested.

A friend and I were swimming in the late evening on a hot august day. A police officer spotted us swimming in the lake outside of the designated public swimming zone. He waved us in and then gave a long speech about how illegal it is to swim in the lake and went over the potential for it to go onto our permanent records and ruin our future lives. The officer then called my parents to let them know that I had been breaking the law. My father had a chuckle about it when he received the call since he is no fan of the policy that people can’t swim in lakes. I think the officer was just collecting every high school student in town into his little arrest book. I bumped into him at a wrestling meet a few years later and he bragged that he had every student in the high school in his book with the crimes they had committed. I challenged him because I thought I was enough of a goody-goody to be in his book. Sure enough he had me in the little notepad with the date and time of the lake swimming incident.

Sarah noticed a beautiful house across the street from where I had been stopped for swimming. I remember that house because it was Anna Rosenblum’s house. Her father was a famous sculptor and in 9th grade during French class I had developed a crush on my partner – Anna Rosenblum. We had gotten together to study, practice, write a sketch or something in the house. It had been the closest to a date with a girl that I had been on so I was flush with hormones, pheremones, and insane developmental illnesses. She was wearing a pair of 80’s pre-faded and pre-torn blue jeans. Due to an intense mixture of fear in all directions I panicked and pretended to hate Anna in front of my friends to avoid embarrassment. I then played a prank on her that roughly equated to providing an imaginary secret admirer. Since I was too chicken to actually be the secret admirer it was easier to make it into a mean prank than to be straightforward about it. The massive fear in all directions is the odd thing about being in 9th grade. You are afraid of girls, being unpopular, failing in school, disappointing your parents. It’s a scary time. You do very strange things that one would only expect to see in a bad teen movie. For this reason alone I am willing to believe any motivation for a character in a bad teen movie.

I have been thinking often about fear lately. Maybe it is because the US is so focused on these people called “terrorists”. Terror is the extreme of fear. But using fear to control behavior is nothing new. In marketing we don’t focus on what products can do but what pains the products can alleviate. People don’t buy things –five blade razors, luxury motor cars, political mantras, or enterprise software unless they are convinced that the purchase will alleviate a fear that has been nagging them for ages. So us marketing folks try to highlight the chronic pain that they or their organization is in and suggest the potential circles of hell that they will land in if they don’t purchase our product. Some people tend to think that only a dictatorship can be run on fear but a pure democratic capitalist society with everyone marketing their own personal messages of fear are bound to accumulate a large collection of fear. So do we really fear the terrorists because of the murderous crimes that they perpetrate or because of the media machine, politicians, and corporations have something to sell and the fear is the easiest way to get us to buy?

So just to return to the big marketing event - the Superbowl. We do get some football sugar to help the medicine go down. But the medicine this yaer is to buy cars that run on corn power. Somewhere hidden between the State of the Union and the Superbowl is some secret pact between the politicians, the farmers, and the automotive industry to give our American car manufacturers an edge. We're moving to corn power according to the Superbowl advertisements and it is coming too fast for the foreign car companies to make better cornmobiles. Since we control our own super economy we may as well take advantage of the monopoly by adjusting the scales. Maybe we can avoid some foreign wars this way. Isn't that the idea behind the cornmobile. Go daddy go!

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

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My grandmother Louise was a school principal in New York City. The job is tough and you weren’t always dealing with the most well behaved of children. One disgruntled kid managed to get a copy of the key to the family apartment at 500C Grand Street. The kid broke into the apartment when nobody was home, went into a back room and ransacked the room. It was an odd crime or at least an incomplete story regarding why he did it but the most likely reason was that he was angry with the principal. When the police arrived they entered the apartment and looked at the main room with clothing strewn on the floor, papers scattered everywhere, books in makeshift piles, and general anarchy in the main room and they said “Man, whoever broke into this apartment really did a number on it”. My grandmother then needed to correct them that the criminal hadn’t broken into the room they were looking at and the mess in the room was normal before pointing out the criminally messed-up room. So at a minimum I have heredity to thank for being a bit of a slob and packrat. I have been requested to review the items at my parent’s basement in Newton ASAP because they now have a dumpster in the back yard that is ready to junk items that are no longer necessary. The effort is part of a Feng Shui quest by my mom that may have been brought on in part by the planned arrival of the next generation of Housmans. Make way for Madeline.

Apparently Alice also had a run-in with the police one day. She had come home to her apartment to find that the door was empty. Since she was afraid that there might be a dangerous criminal inside she called the police and asked if they could go inside to make sure it was safe to enter her home. The police carefully entered with guns drawn and peered around. A minute later they came back out with a sorry look on their face. They told her “The good news is that whoever broke into your apartment isn’t there anymore. BUT the bad news is that they stole your television and your VCR." Alice then had to inform them that she didn’t own a television and VCR.

Posted by Melody at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I think baby Madeline has been sending secret encoded messages in the form of invisible pheromones to me. The major effect has been that I don’t sleep well through the night anymore. I get very anxious from 1AM through 5AM about a range of topics relating most often to work and the future of software.

Last night I found myself sending emails to Yuval in California at 3AM about the future of photo management and chatting with Aaron at 4AM. Yuval had sent me a link to Phanfare, a photo publishing tool that posts your photos automatically to a web site in the background from a taskbar tool. I thought it would be cool to avoid having to go through the manual work of publishing to my photo library with HTML editing etc. but since it overlaps rather than integrates with Picasa it looked less appealing. So I was trying to figure out if and when Picasa would finally create a public API/SDK to build these sorts of things and dreaming of creating a software application that would generate a similar feature set for people like me.

Among the areas I was losing sleep on was whether I could organize photos based on a clever algorithm included in a Picasa plugin to pick faces out of photos and learn from past filing which person was which. The basic user interface was going to be a gallery of faces that could be moved between buckets with the software trying to guess the right face match from prior experience and the user being able to correct it where necessary. I may be the only person who wants to organize my pictures by the people in them.

The sleep deprivation apparently will be good preparation for when the baby is born and she wakes-up every two hours for feeding during the first month or two. So my not sleeping through the night is going to be very likely in late October and November. Madeline has started to hiccup periodically and it is interesting to feel the rhythms of the hiccups through Sarah’s swollen belly. Sarah can barely fit a meal into her stomach with all of her insides squished, squashed, and moved around.

The insomnia could also be because I can see the world is moving very quickly in information technology with WinFS coming further along, lots of buzz about the extensions to the desktop search providers from their tool bars and side bars, and our need to make a business breakthrough into a vertical market. I get the feeling that I would sleep better if we had a Salesforce.com adapter both for connecting it into desktop search and into our product. But since we don’t have one I can only worry about items. I also worry about the complex issues of getting the business weaned off of good paying consulting engagements since they make me nervous in that they are inherently unstable. I don’t worry so much about job security but about company revenue security. If we don’t have a strong diversified revenue base from products and services then at any point in time everything can blow-up and require rebuilding. Right now the balance is on only a few clients for services and the product is growing from a revenue perspective at a snails pace. So I lose sleep on that every night and every hiccup that occurs in our consulting engagements.

Posted by Melody at 04:15 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)

While nesting and moving lots of stuff Sarah dug-up this email. It was the first communication that I ever sent to her and now she is my wife. So if you are looking for a wife and meeting somone through your Asian yenta downstairs neighbor then this message may be a good template to use. It worked for me.

====
From: Daniel Housman (dhousman@channelwave.com)
Sent: Friday, August 8, 2003 3:46 PM
To: Sarah Carvey
Subject: Do you know someone named Waichi

Sara,

Hello. I am Dan Housman. Waichi introduced me to you and you to me although we haven't met yet.

I was spending much of this evening eating ice cream with Waichi in order to console myself after the Celtics lost to the Nets again. Waichi game me your email address and said that we would likely enjoy meeting each other. She thought that the best way to get started would be for me to send you an email to introduce myself so this is what I am doing.

Introducing me:

I am 29.
I live upstairs from Waichi.
I work in Cambridge at a software company that I started after I graduated from MIT.
I recently returned from Africa.
I have always lived in the Boston area but grew-up in Newton and Watertown.
I love to read. I love sports. I love to travel when I can.
I like to laugh. I am going to my improv comedy class tomorrow. It's fun.
I want to wrte although I haven't in 10 years. I am going to a class on how to write a novel next Wednesday. Maybe it will inspire me.
I have a friend named Jeremy who is coming to live with me for the summer.
He was a fraternity brother of mine from MIT from AEPi. He normally lives in St. Maarten.
My sister is a folk musician who plays all around Boston but mostly on the subway. She is teaching me to play the guitar.

I'll bet Waichi already told you most of this.

Tell me about you?
Is your name spelled Sara or Sarah?

I'm looking forward to hearing back from you.

- Dan

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This weekend was dedicated to nesting activities in preparation for the impending birth, in November, of baby Madeline. The big plan for months has been to finally paint the condo, after seven years of living here the only time the place has been painted was when I moved in. Painting is a sport also known as opening Pandora’s box because you need to clear each room before painting it. That was part of our plan. We wanted to try moving items around in order to determine whether we needed them or not. That way we could chuck the things we don’t need out the window, give them to family members, or move them to offshore locations. The first room we decided to paint was Jeremy’s old room. It sounded like a small size Pandora’s box since it was supposedly an empty room after Jeremy moved out. But it actually still had a closet full of items, three bookshelves with drawers and cabinets, and an entertainment center that I have been trying to get rid of for over 12 months now. Want one?

It is unbelievable how much stuff is hidden in bookshelves and closets. The living room is now full of all the junk that was formerly in the empty room. I called my parents to ask if we could drop off the many photo albums that we had borrowed for making the wedding photo montage. My dad let me know that he had rented a truck from Zip car, the place that gives you wheels when you need ‘em. Apparently he and my mother had also been infected with nesting instincts due to the coming second generation. They were clearing out all of their bookcases and having all of the floors sanded down and stained in their Newton house. Sarah and I saw this as an opportunity to unload our three not too attractive bookcases so when we dropped off the sixty-two photo albums in boxes in Newton we also looked at the fourteen or so empty book cases that they had emptied out into their significantly larger piles of boxes into their living room, study, and bathrooms.

I offered my mom a swap and she said she wanted to see our bookcases. When she arrived in Brookline she decided she didn’t want ours but did offer a couple sets of theirs for us to take. So my dad and I schlepped an old recliner that I bought at the giant church yard sale across the street in the back of the truck they had rented back to Newton thinking we might take it out to Marshfield. On reaching Newton we decided to throw it out so we just left it under a lilac bush near a fence.

According to my parents there is an underclass of scavengers in Newton who professionally take furniture left on the street by wealthy Newtonians and sell the furniture on eBay, craigslist, or in showrooms. I can imagine that these strange third wave, think Alvin Toffler renewable usage of energy, people will ultimately get highly organized and become a major corporation themselves similar to the Kentucky Fried Movie company that makes energy from pimple oil, used combs, and farts from Mexican restaurants. So my dad was confident that one of these people would take the dingy old recliner despite the fact that it was really second hand garbage.

Once in Newton we carried out two heavy, long, and attractive bookcases into the back of the pick-up truck and realized that they were longer than the flat bed of the truck. The only way to fit them was to take the gate down and tie them in. Tying them used to require lots of skill with knots but the truck came with some odd screw things where you can thread rope through them and tighten them. A secondary rope looked like a good insurance policy to avoid having someone behind the truck have their last memory be of a large bookcase flying through their windshield.

Figuring that I was a sailor I tried to make a useful knot but realized that I was hopeless. I called Jeremy because he is a real sailor and he let me know that it would be impossible for me to get walked through a trucker’s hitch knot while on the phone. He said it was two half hitches and a bowlin’ or something like that. I turned to the Internet hoping that a trucker’s hitch was doable by a mere mortal. I found scary animations that looked like this.

I tried to do this for about twenty minutes after printing out a copy of it. My dad then helped me try as well claiming that he had been a boy scout as a child. But we finally both gave up after making the realization that it was a good thing neither of us went into a profession where we needed to make knots regularly. So I tied a granny knot and called it good enough and we trucked the newer book cases over making sure that I wasn’t driving behind the truck in order to avoid having my last memory being of a large bookcase flying through my windshield.

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was watching Animal House with Sarah tonight. We noticed that Donald Sutherland as an English professor looked a lot like Matt Swift. Here are a pair of photos to compare. Just imagine Matt with a haircut, some hair above his lip, and dressed with a scarf and peacoat and you have a dead ringer for Donald Sutherland. If you know Matt I highly recommend Animal House just for the potential comparisons for the stoner English professor.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Liz sent me a note this morning that our old drivers ed teacher is in some hot water. The folks at Boston.com wrote about it in an article about Drivers ed rape allegations. I remember Mr. Swerling as the guy who ran the movies like Blood on the Highway. He was famous for his extra brake in the passenger seat and saying... "Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up-up-up-up-up, STOOOOOPP!!!".

He never tried to sexually assault me but I wasn't a very attractive child. In general I would have to place drivers ed teachers, sorry to malign the entire profession, in a similar category as priests. People who show movies of bloody boodies to teenagers and have the teenagers drive them to the donut shop to get coffee are definitely suspicious.

In Mr. Swerling's case the courts already decided his fate. According to the Daily News Tribune he was acquitted. I think I believe him.

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

Sarah and I tried to see Charlie and the Chocolate factory at the IMAX theatre on the way back from Gloucester last weekend. We had gone to Gloucester to see Matt and Kate in their natural summer habitat after having missed their annual party the week before. I am batting .000 with regards to the Gate House party due to a trip last year to Japan and a wedding in Long Island this year.

The Swift house in Gloucester is on the waterfront and is a shell of the former glory of the house that once was on the property. The first main house was demolished in 1972 after about fifty years of fighting with New England storms. There was another small house that once was on the property that was destroyed during The Perfect Storm. So Matt and Kate are staying in the remaining house, the Gate House that used to be the little one at the entrance to the property. When we arrived we couldn’t find people at first but it turned out that folks were at a table by the ocean at the end of a winding grass walkway defined among the grass and sea rubble by a series of stones.

One of Matt’s friends, who is a poet was there with his girlfriend. We got into a nice long debate by the water about whether bicycles are a better mode of city transportation than automobiles for city transportation. The poet was good at presidential impersonations and had a long list of opinions about politics including that George Bush was smart enough to pronounce the word nuclear properly but that he pronounced it newcular to appeal to voters in blue collar jobs despite his very rich boy background. The poet also thought that Hillary Rodham Clinton was the only possible candidate that the DNC would bring as a presidential candidate in 2008.

Kate was worried about her art homework project due Monday where she needed to interpret a story written by a fellow classmate. The story was about a child’s blanket/blanky and the poet gave a full red pen mark-up. He wasn’t fond of it and thought that deceptively anthropomorphizing objects and then later trying to appear clever by revealing that the person is really a beloved object was something that should be beaten out in seventh grade. He gave it a name like fools deception.

The only drawback of the ocean property in the northeast is that it lies near marsh. The mosquitoes are especially fierce and represent a good portion of the variation in the mosquito kingdom. I got a good look at one little mosquito biting my arm and she had yellow racing stripes. Sarah and I slept in a twin bed. In the past this has worked well for us but with the extra half person growing inside of Sarah we kept trying to find a comfortable equilibrium in the bed but were tossing most of the time. At one point of getting bitten we turned on the light and it was like a scene out of a B rated horror movie where worms suddenly come to life after an electric line is left in the swamp or just an epic battle against bugs like Starship Troopers. The bugs were everywhere and the room was filled with a swarm of enemy bugs trying to slowly attack us in our sleep. The mosquitos must have seen us as a welcome treat nicely delivered. I fought them valiantly by swinging a towel at them crushing as many as I could and then went to sleep with Sarah in the bed for 30 minutes before she moved to the other twin bed because I was snoring too loud.

In the morning when we awoke a little after noon we had a Wimbledon breakfast of berries with cream and bacon. It was quite tasty and enjoyable. We thought about flying the kite but there wasn’t any wind. So after a bit Sarah and I took a look at the tide pool that most years had been used as a swimming area but was out of commission because of a combination of low tide and a mysterious fast draining problem. Matt explained that the tide pool is mostly a natural phenomenon where the cold arctic water collects in the rocks to be warmed by the sun. To keep the water in people have plugged the draining points with concrete and rocks. Since every year storms, ice, and the tides batter the pool it develops leaks both in the natural rocks and where the concrete plugs the open holes. This year the leaks are particularly bad and they haven’t had the will to continue plugging them so the pool was empty.

This was fine as Sarah and I were just trying to walk around. We walked down some roads to a lighthouse and a break water and then lay on the break water for a while napping on a flat and wide bed that was comfortable for the two of us. When we returned Kate had been working on her art homework having decided to make a final panel in her interpretation of the blanket story that looked like a child’s drawing.

Sarah and I then tried to attend Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the Reading IMAX on the way home. Unfortunately it was sold out but we did manage to get to see it on Monday night instead with Lisa and Dave. It struck me that the movie and most other children’s movies in America was very culturally American. Like Robots it professed the importance and high status results of being an entrepreneur. The best example of this was when Charlie had his Golden ticket in his hand and he decided he didn’t need to visit the factory since someone would pay him money for it. His grandfather’s response to it was that you should never trade a once in a lifetime opportunity for something as ordinary as money. Translation – In America you will be rewarded for being a risk taker and an entrepreneur but people who just work for money live plain and boring lives.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Waichi came over last night to say hello and because she has mice and a leak staining her ceiling. As a downstairs neighbor these are reasonable reasons to visit and say hello. The benefits of a second floor apartment include that mice don’t tend to go beyond the first floor and the climb up the stairs isn’t as bad as the third floor. It also doesn’t get damp and flooded like a basement. But the second floor apartment dweller does need to worry about how to escape in a fire since it is a long jump down, potential babies falling out of windows, and solving mysterious problems of leaks and mice. The solution we came-up with for the mouse problem was for Waichi to borrow Jeremy’s cat. There is no solution to the ceiling leak problem but I’ll continue to investigate it.

Waichi is winning an award for being a good doctor and volunteering with doctors without borders. They are flying her down to Washington to be pinned with a medal by George W. Bush in the rose garden of the White House. I was wondering whether the president actually pins things onto people or if he just hands them the medals and walks away. I would imagine that people wouldn’t be allowed to get too close to the president with sharp objects and a doctor might be able to sever a key artery with a pin so I don’t think they will be giving her pins.

Waichi also told us a funny little true story. It was about an emergency room doctor and his wife. The doctor receives a call on the phone from the emergency room and calmly talks to the person on the other end of the phone. His wife then asks him whether he will need to go into the emergency room. He tells her that he does need to go and that she ought to come with him as well in a calm and collected voice. His wife starts to get worried and frantic and asks him what the problem was. He calmly lets her know that their son had been drinking and got into a motorcycle accident while driving home. She then started acting hysterical and wanted to know why he too wasn’t hysterical as well. He then let her know why he could remain so calm in such a terrible situation with this statement - “I have been waiting for that call my whole life.”

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Scorzelli family goes back to the future
I learned in an email from DK that the Scorzelli family has been hiding a Delorean in their garage for the past few years. They were interviewed about it in Town Online This Car's a Throwback to the Future. The article contained some great quotes from Chris' dad and mom including:

"I don't know what I'm going to do. The car's become an albatross around my neck, to be honest with you," Scorzelli said.

"This car has taken on a life of its own. It's ludicrous," said Reinke-Scorzelli. "The idea of having it was more fun than actually getting it. It became such an obstacle."

In other news, Ron and Jen are finally getting married which brings the summer of weddings total, including the wedding we missed in California due to morning sickness and our own wedding, to seven. I think we will need to watch the movie Wedding Crashers to figure out how to better optimize these events.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:19 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)

Behind hidden doors...

One of the main draws of New York City are the Broadway shows. So the first thing that we did when we arrived at the Hotel Pennsylvania across the street from Madison Square Garden was to ask at the ticket desk whether any of the great shows like Spamalot or Chicago had tickets available for Saturday evening or Sunday. They came back with a bunch of offers for shows that sounded like they had finally put the music of Brittney Spears into a musical (actually that would be pretty cool). So Sarah and I checked into our non-smoking but smoke ridden coffin of a room, the door looked like the entrance to a mausoleum, and opened the window to air it out. We then rushed back downstairs to where James and Stephanie were waiting for us in the car so that we could go to the other major attraction in New York city – illegal knock-off bag shopping. I better get used to the world of designer bags since I am going to have a daughter.

After parking in a faux little Italy in SoHo we walked the fifteen blocks in a sudden torrential rain shower that was a good change from the hot 90 degree weather. We did manage to buy two umbrellas for the four of us and I had to hold the one for Sarah and me because I am the taller one. I tried to cover mainly her because she is pregnant and might dissolve in the acid rain of New York.

Upon arriving at Canal Street we began the quest for the knock-off bags. As someone who doesn’t understand bags as a fashion statement I mainly was there as a consultant on illegal activities and getting into trouble, which I am better expert for. I was also the only one who had seen the illegal bags before so I was an expert on the process. My former experience was in the winter of 2003 during a massive blizzard that buried the PT cruiser for a week. In 2003 the shops had giant rooms full of knock-off bags. During that blizzard there had been one incident when we were in a big store full of bags and the police came past and the store had completely closed with us trapped inside for five minutes before some fashionable and Jewish looking fashion label enforcement police had busted into the door and started yelling at the proprietors. Times had changed and the stores were tiny and brandless so I figured that either the Internet bust had broken down demand for these bags, the shops shrunk in an inverse proportion to the temperature, or the crack down by the Prada police was taking it’s toll on the industrious Nextel phone and walkie-talkie wielding immigrants of Chinatown.

So we entered a number of these smaller establishments and looked at their bags but unlike the last time I was there the bags didn’t have any labels on them to identify that they were Prada, Kate Spade, Gucci, or Coach. You had to know the style before-hand to figure out which was which. Sarah was quite unimpressed and was looking for a black Kate Spade diaper bag and would settle for nothing less. You have to have standards in these things. We entered a number of shops with all four of us but the bags just weren’t the knock-offs we were looking for. Disappointed we split apart for a while. James and Stephanie ate Lychee nuts. One industrious illegal bag salesman popped out of a basement door bulkhead and started waving a catalog of bags in front of a fashionable teenager in front of us. Sarah walked past and let me know that she didn’t want to go down into a bulkhead to buy a bag. We then found Stephanie and James wandering in a daze and since the heat had returned we stopped into the local Chinatown Hagen-Daaz outlet for some smoothies because James and Stephanie couldn’t find the place that had the perfect Boba-tea drinks.

After the refreshing tropical mango smoothie we were considering leaving Chinatown when we stopped in one last shop to see if there was a chance that they had different merchandise. It was the same crap but this time Sarah asked the magic question. “Do you have any Kate Spade bags?”. The small Asian woman put her finger to her lips and told us to be very quiet. She then pointed to the wall and told us to follow her. We followed and in the wall was a cut-out shape of a hidden door. She opened the door and Sarah, Stephanie, and I all walked into the secret room filled to the brim with illegal knock-off bags of all kinds along with another woman who had been shopping there before we arrived and we had never noticed. So the reason why the stores had gotten smaller was because they had subdivided them into the legal storefront of bags without labels and the illicit labeled back-rooms with hidden doors.

Stephanie wasn’t looking for a bag but she found a shiny gold bag that matched her shoes and was probably a thousand dollars retail. She paid $30 bucks for it and the woman carefully wrapped it and warned her to tell nobody about what had transpired. Sarah was inspired by this but she hadn’t found her Kate Spade black diaper bag yet so we had to press on throughout Chinatown seeking out the illegal door with the secret brand name password in every shop we could find. We had to leave Stephanie and James to eat more Lychee nuts on the street while we pursued our mad lust for this bag.

We tried over twelve shops and found back rooms in so many different shapes and sizes all filled with various Whitman’s samplers of bags. I envisioned that there might be other rooms behind these rooms where the illegal activities kept getting more illegal. If you asked once in the bag room for drugs a smaller door would open. Once in the drugs room you could ask for prostitutes and climb into the basement. Finally you could ask to be transported to another dimension and a strange portal would open taking you to Zeta-7, the planet in a distant solar system where all stolen articles go.

Eventually we came upon a shop that had hanging above the counter a bag that looked just like the Kate Spade black diaper bag that we were desperate to find. So we asked the Asian woman if they had Kate Spade and walked through a display area filled with clothes and through a door behind it into a large back room with two mothers with their two daughters. The back room also contained someone in a hidden toilet who walked out of a wall so I asked whether I could go to the bathroom. The back room didn’t hold the bag we were looking for so Sarah asked her specifically for what she wanted and the woman though about it and said that we needed to wait for five minutes. We spent the five minutes discussing the features of diaper bags with the two mothers who had been through the experience since they had their daughters in the back room with them ready to be sold into white slavery. The Asian woman buzzed someone on her walkie-talkie in Chinese and after five minutes the same tagless bag we had seen came back with a Kate Spade label carefully superglued to the front. Sarah examined it with the mothers for quality and compliance with the standards of the manufacturer and then negotiated a $35 settlement with the woman. We left the store and found Stephanie and James.

I highly recommend the experience.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:26 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)