Do You Respect Wood? I Respect Wood

Do you respect wood?

I respect wood, but-- luckily-- so does my wife, so I won't have to divorce her.  In fact, it's my wife who suggested that I run to TJ Maxx with some of our hard-earned garage sale money and buy a a shelving unit made of genuine Acacia wood so that I have a spot for my amplifier and loop pedal.

The piece of furniture is awesome, shelves on hinges, cool looking hardwood, but when Ian and I got it home, we noticed that there was a crack in one of the bottom pieces. So I took my respect for wood and put it to use. I got some wood glue and a clamp, and went to work. Hopefully, it will set.

All Hail The Town-Wide Garage Sale

It's over. We cleaned out, set up, and raked it in. All day Saturday and half of Sunday, my wife channeled the soul of an Ottoman bazaar storekeeper and turned our driveway and front lawn into a souk. Once almost everything was gone, we put up a FREE sign and hid inside while the vultures picked over the carcass of our sale. Then Alex and I packed up the remaining odds and ends and drove it over to Goodwill.

And while the cash we made was significant, the purging of the house was priceless (as were the arguments between my teenage son and her about exactly what constituted his stuff, the sale of which he could claim full profit on . . . I tried to stay out of the debate and just warned him that you don't f-@% with mom on garage sale weekend, especially since she does the bulk of the set up and organizing).

Never again, my wife says.

I hope she's right (but the fact that the same older son who got into all the debates bought a glow-lamp in the shape of a box turtle doesn't bode well for us keeping the house clear of garage sale crap . . . and I bought an ancient Bakelite View master, thinking it would be worth thousands of dollars, but I was wrong . . . I paid $5 and it might be worth $12 . . . so there's probably another garage sale in our future). 

Some Hard Things Are Harder Than Other Hard Things

I often see people running on concrete and I want to yell to them: "Don't run on concrete! It's much harder than asphalt!"

While I've never actually yelled this out my car window, I'm factually in the right. Concrete is definitely exponentially harder than asphalt.

But it may not matter. Running shoes and other factors may make the difference negligible. So while I'm going to continue to run on grass or asphalt, I'm not going to chastise anyone for running on concrete (until I finish my advanced materials physics degree).

 

Some Bueno Advice

Head down Woodbridge Avenue to the Edison Tex-Mex Deli and get the al pastor tacos-- I promise you won't be disappointed: the pork and pineapples are on a spit!

Dave Parks the Bus

Someone (or something) has hacked my Blogger account and so Sentence of Dave keeps doing weird stuff, which is as good a reason as any to start writing sentences over here.

I might write one sentence a day, or I might write several.

I might write nothing at all.

But the best thing about the whole hacking of my blog is that I was able to import all my brilliance from Sentence of Dave over to Park the Bus. So if you need to catch up, it's all here.

Being able to migrate all my sentences (and zman's comments!) is almost as awesome as listening to my son Ian dictate quotations from Catcher in the Rye into the journal entry he is writing on the kitchen desktop computer (he is doing this as I write).

Double Technological Miracle Sunday!

Freedom!

Yesterday, with the help of my wife-- who claims she is an expert in Velcro-- we installed a magnetic screen door behind our sliding glass porch door, and this is the best 15 dollars I've ever spent; it's an absolute miracle, and while it took a little while to train our dog Lola to walk through it-- at first she thought it was weird voodoo and didn't want anything to do with it, but the kids got down on all fours and showed her the ropes, and now she's got it down now and can enter and leave as she pleases . . . and then-- miracle number two-- I wanted to watch the US Open Finals but we don't have cable and it was on ESPN, but I was able to set up a free trial of Hulu Live TV-- which I will cancel today-- and I was able to watch the match with having to constantly get up and down to let our fickle dog in and out of the house . . . double technological miracle Sunday!

In The Meantime . . . a Bout of Namenesia

Blogger has been acting weird since Friday, and so I wasn't able to post yesterday or this morning . . . here's what went on:

1. Soccer practice was cold, wet, and rainy Friday afternoon and I wore my stupid blue jacket that looks like a rain-jacket but is actually just a windbreaker and I froze my balls off.


2. Saturday I did some rollerblading while listening to 90's instrumental guitar rock (Steve Vai and Joey Satriani) and this was the right music choice;


3. then, in preparation for the Grant Ave block party, Cat and I went to Cypress Brewery to drink a beer and purchase a growler's worth of 17 Mile IPA and the waitress in the little tasting room greeted us warmly and hugged us and I thought it was Rachel, a teacher from my wife's school and then the waitress left to get our beers and my wife informed that she was NOT Rachel, the teacher from her school-- though she admitted that this person looked just like Rachel-- and so we racked our brains, trying to figure out who had just hugged us, and while we were under a serious time constraint, we were able to discuss our namenesia aloud because our waitress had gone next door to check on a large party that was drinking in the brewing area and she literally had to leave the tasting room and walk outside the building and then enter by the large bay door-- so we discussed and used process of elimination and then I took a stab when she returned with our beers and said, "Are you doing girl's soccer again?" and she said, "No that's Rebecca, we always get mistaken for each other" and that's when I remembered who she was-- she had taught both our kids English in middle school-- but she was wearing a baseball hat and a Cypress Brewery tank-top and jeans, so it was tough to identify her-- normally we would see her in back-to-school-night clothes-- but I got it in time, no harm no foul, and my wife was duly impressed;


4.  today I went to the gym early and lifted, then played 90 minutes of soccer, but I erased all that fitness at lunch-- my son has had a Taco Bell gift card since Christmas (a grab bag gift) and we finally used it, he ate some large hexagonal shaped item with several meats and a giant tortilla chip inside, and Ian and I had quesadillas and tacos-- this is the first time I've had Taco Bell since college and I'll admit it was edible and it hasn't done anything awful to my stomach . . . yet.

They Might Actually Be Nice

I told my colleagues in the English Office that my students seem really nice this year, and Chantal said, "They always seem nice for the first two days, you idiot."

Barking Up the Right Tree

I couldn't figure out why my dog Lola was barking like mad, trying to scale a thick oak tree, so I took some time and looked through the branches very carefully and realized Lola's instincts were dead on, as there was a squirrel napping on a branch (something I've never seen before, the squirrel's eyes were slits, and it looked way more groggy than the squirrel in this picture . . . it was hugging the limb and must have been out cold-- until Lola rudely woke him).

Technology Marches On, Sweeping Dave Along With It

We've got new devices and new LMS (Learning Management Software) this year at my school and it's all making me feel very old: the screens keep getting smaller (now we're all on tablets) and they're threatening to take our desktop computers away (even though I can actually read stuff on that screen and my computer has the only DVD player in the room) and we've replaced the simplicity of Google Classroom-- which is free and seamless with Google docs, Google slides, and YouTube-- with an expensive program (Canvas) where everything is very small and every task requires a lot of clicks . . . I'm hoping I retire before this happens again.

It's Over (Except for the Crying)

Nothing coherent to report: I'm in a befuddled haze from endless first-day-of-school meetings, room preparation, running soccer practice, my older son's botched summer assignments, Taco Tuesday, and an endless argument about how much my kids tipped the barber today for their back-to-school-haircut . . . it looks like the summer is coming to an abrupt close.

Mrs. Bridge, Dave, and Socrates Walk into a Bar

I don't know how I missed this one, but Evan S. Connell's 1959 novel Mrs. Bridge is a weird and understated modern classic, funny and sharp, and a good book for me to read as I approach 50 years . . . Mrs. Bridge is a Kansas City country-club-wife and the book details her life and times in 117 vignettes during the years before and after WWII . . . and while the nation is changing, in regards to race, etiquette, social class, and the labor market, Mrs. Bridge remains the same-- and while she has moments where she almost introspects, she always avoids it, and lives the opposite of Socrates' most famous dictum . . . "the unexamined life is not worth living," and while I certainly get why she likes to remain ignorant and blissful, I'm trying to examine my life as I hit the big 50 . . . and I'm making some hard decisions-- fitness-wise, I'm switching from basketball to running (less injuries and I need to get fit, not beat up) and I'm playing a lot more tennis with my kids-- I won't be able to do that forever-- and health-wise, I'm trying to drink less beer (except on holiday weekends) and replace it with tequila and seltzer, which has less calories and doesn't make me gassy: I think these epiphanies would make Socrates proud.

Summer is Over (Time to Wash Off the Vaseline)

As usual, the greased-watermelon-rugby-polo-challenge signified another summer in the books-- and this was an especially epic summer (a trip to Costa Rica, a lot of soccer and tennis, a couple trips to the beach, and my kids had gainful employment) and an especially epic greased-watermelon-match (which my friend John decided to document, so perhaps this one is coming to a theater near you . . . hopefully his daughter/camerawoman caught the magical moment when I kicked my son Alex in the head) and now it's time to shower off all the petroleum jelly and get ready to enter the work week.

Getting Your Money's Worth Will Cost You

My friends were discussing the great museum scene in DC, and how there's no pressure to get your money's worth-- the museums and the zoo are free, so-- as the always sagacious Zman put it: "You can run into the Museum of Natural History for 20 minutes just to see the Hope Diamond, some dinosaurs, and a basilosaurus (and its tiny hip bone) without feeling pressure to get your money’s worth" and I'm a big fan of this-- not getting your money's worth-- as getting your money's worth almost always leads to frustration, injury and disaster; I have no problem leaving sports events and concerts early, to avoid the mad rush and the traffic; when I go snowboarding, I get off the mountain sooner rather than later, because getting your money's worth with a lift ticket leads to fatigue and injuries . . . and when we were in college, we were obsessed with the all-you-can-eat Wendy's Superbar and it led to some supreme gluttony (including a day where we were ostensibly studying for exams, but we started the studying at the all-you-can-eat Shoney's Breakfast Bar, then-- after stuffing ourselves on pancakes, sausage, grits, and French toast-- we took a long nap, then headed back out with our books and our bloated stomachs, and sat for many hours at the Wendy's Superbar, repeating the same charade . . . we got our money's worth and it cost us dearly).

Locke and Key May Be Coming to a TV Near You

It took a while-- in fact, I forgot all about it-- but then something jogged my memory (perhaps someone opened my brain with the head key and fiddled with my consciousness) and I remembered to seek out the rest of the Locke and Key comic book series and the boys and I recently read all six of them, in the nick of time, it turns out, because Netflix is about to release a Locke and Key TV series . . . the comics are compelling and wild, but I should warn you, they are also grisly, disturbing, and totally fucked up; Joe Hill-- Stephen King's son-- did the writing and Gabriel Rodriguez did the art and the combination is chilling and horrific, I hope the series captures the mood, as this is a good one.

Dave is More Right (and Almost Modal)

The new episode of Planet Money attempts something ambitious, to determine the "modal American" . . . it's easy enough to find the median or the mean, but the mode-- the most common-- is more difficult because you can't categorize things too large or too small-- there are more women than men, but that seems like too large a category and they had to discount kids-- because kids all fall into all the same categories-- they don't work, they haven't been to college, and they aren't married-- but once they narrowed things down a bit-- they were looking for age, marital status, income, college education or not, race and ethnicity, and where the person lives-- and the solution, spoiler ahead (you might want to listen to the podcast) is surprising and-- for me-- fairly relatable . . . the most common American-- and they are 2 million strong-- is a Gen X married white dude who lives in the suburbs, works full time, does NOT have a college degree and earns (as a household) an upper middle class income . . . they actually talked to a 47 year old guy who fits the categories, he works at a car dealership and is married to a nurse and has one kid and owns some plaid shirts (grunge!) and while I can realte to this guy, the big differences are that he doesn't have a college degree and he lives in the suburbs . . . although the definition of suburban and urban areas are not particularly well-defined and you can really go down a rabbit-hole trying to figure out which areas are urban and which are suburban, even within city limits (Alec, Connell, Paul and I had quite an argument about this on the way to the pub) but if you go by some data compiled by FiveThirtyEight, then Highland Park is definitely urban, as urban areas tend to have more than "2,213 households per square mile" and Highland Park is 1.8 square miles and-- in 2010-- it had 6,200 households and the town's population has grown since then, so while Connell is right to say that Highland Park is the outlying area of a larger city (New Brunswick) and thus sub-urban, I am more right in saying that the density and feel of Highland Park is more urban than suburban.

The End of Napping is Nigh

A good end of summer morning today: I got to ride the away bus with both my children and coach them in a JV scrimmage, and then we ate lunch out, but after all the fun and excitement, I took a two hour nap . . . I'm not sure how I'm going to pull off an entire work day next week (unless they work "nap time" into the high school schedule).

Music Review: Proceed with Caution

It's tough to recommend this album with a straight face, but Mannequin Pussy's new one-- "Patience"-- is awesome: fast-paced punk rock with chaotic squalls and compelling lulls . . . and I guess since our Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief brought back the p-word, it shouldn't be as difficult to tell your friends about this one (and the band is mainly females, so I suppose they're using it ironically).

Is There a Position Open for Doing This?

My friend Dom, who I just spent a week with at the beach, would like it to be known that-- in addition to his general congeniality, his ability to consume gin/vodka, and his formidable biking stamina-- he has an uncanny knack for identifying 80's songs in two or three notes (even Aldo Nova's "Fantasy").

No Ordinance For Offspring

Thursday morning, our peaceful vacation slumber was perforated, pierced and punctured (at 7 AM) by staccato bursts from several nail guns-- the crew framing the roof of the new construction across the street were getting an early start-- and while this didn't bother me, because I was up and ready to roll, Catherine thought the noise was excessive and so-- as she is wont to do-- she solved the problem; she called the Sea Isle police and they informed her that there was an 8 AM noise ordinance and they would ride by and inform the workers . . . and they did and the next morning the crew didn't start work until later; BUT soon after that, the three little kids set up a stand on the corner right below our front porch and they chanted-- for at least two hours straight-- "FREE POPSICLES AND LEMONADE! FREE POPSICLES AND LEMONADE! FREE POPSICLES AND LEMONADE! FREE POPSICLES AND LEMONADE! FREE POPSICLES AND LEMONADE! FREE POPSICLES AND LEMONADE! FREE POPSICLES AND LEMONADE!" and it seems there is no ordinance on the books to stop this sort of insanity (and the creepiness of the "free" aspect has really turned their patrons off . . . there's quite a bit of foot traffic and not one who walks by takes them up on the offer, as everyone knows there's no such thing as a free lunch, especially when it's offered by miniature towheaded redfaced sirens with high pitched voices).