Out of my league

Last night our neighbors invited us over for dinner, which was especially convenient because we were just getting back from Birmingham and didn’t have to figure out what we were going to eat. After eating at their place (and drinking a bottle or two of wine) we then headed back to our place so they could try out Rock Band.

[This is the same family that went out and bought Guitar Hero right after they played the original at our house…so we were pretty confident that they would appreciate Rock Band.]

We got everything set up and they started to rock out. During the second or third song we were playing their son (~ 11 years old) failed out. Dawn turned to him and asked if he had bumped the difficulty up to medium. He shook his head no….he wasn’t playing on medium. He’d been playing on expert. He got about 85% through the song. My jaw hit the floor. Expert!?! I said something to the extent that I could only do some of the songs on hard. I’m not sure if he was looking at me with contempt or with pity but he declared that “if you aren’t playing on hard or expert then you aren’t having any fun.”

Fortunately Rock Band comes with a drum kit to help humble Guitar Hero savants. I spent the rest of the evening pointing out that he was forgetting to press the kick drum as he struggled through songs on easy (I can play most everything on medium!) Of course that is only a temporary fix. If they actually go out and buy Rock Band it’s only a matter of time before he comes over and plays everything on expert. I can hardly wait for him to wryly point out that he hasn’t seen my band on the Rock Band leader boards. I’m sure I’ll be able to see his at the number 3 spot.

Postscript
Not to be out done by a mere child Dawn decided to show them tough. She proceeded to play Tom Sawyer on drums while singing, both were set to medium. She finished with the drum score in the 90s…

Project Runway Part II

So Dawn and I ended up further discussing Project Runway over lunch. She is of the opinion that the correct dress won because it is most in step with current fashion trends and color pallets. I still maintain that you might as well be wearing a potato sack.

We were talking about how tricky these type of challenges are to judge. Which considerations should be weighted the most? How much the model likes the dress? How much the dress represents the designer’s style? How much the dress shows technical competency? How much the design is innovative? While I think most people would agree that all of those factors are important it seems like you have to decide which is the foremost criteria in order to rank submissions.

Dawn thinks the judges should have used how much the models liked their dress as the foremost criteria since the challenge was essentially to make a custom dress for each model. She also thinks they instead used the industry’s definition of what is innovative. She also sees it as an unavoidable conflict of interest in judging being that Nina is in the business of trying to dictate what fashion is instead of reporting on what people want to wear. Giving credence to what people actually want to wear to prom is less important than selling the editorial idea of what they should want to wear. [I’m sure if I’ve mischaracterized any of Dawn’s thoughts she’ll correct me in the comments]

I know better than to care if the model likes their dress. In Project Runway world that’s a sucker’s game. I think we’ve seen more than one challenge where a designer has made an outfit for a client that they have loved….if the client were paying for it they would have been happy…and that designer gets crucified for sacrificing their vision just to make some worthless client happy. How dare they. If you have reasonable construction you just have to scream and yell that this is your vision. How dare the judges not respect a designer with impeccable construction and a strong vision. Taste is subjective.

That’s a regurgitation of my earlier rant…but so be it. Ranking how I would judge things is a bit trickier. For this challenge I think I would have ranked designs by technical competency, personal style (designer’s), innovation, and finally whether or not the clients like it. Although I can see how a persuasive argument for a different ordering might be made.

I guess I’ve never really thought about judging this carefully before. It hadn’t explicitly occurred to me that the judging criteria might change from challenge to challenge.

[Dawn commented on my other post while I was in the process of writing this one]

Project Runway Post

I was going to post this yesterday, but decided to hold off a day in case anyone was waiting to watch the episode via Tivo. If you’re poky and read any further than it’s your own fault.
Last year I read an article containing quotes from Tim Gunn about this season’s Project Runway. One quote in particular caught my attention. Take it away Tim…

"There was one case in particular where I said to the producers [...] 'It's really too bad that so-and-so's design is so terrible, because the audience will know right away. The minute they see this, they're going to know that he's going home. And I'm just sorry that something else isn't almost as bad, almost as challenged. Everything else looks really good!... He wins the challenge. He wins! It's inconceivable. So I went backstage to tell the designer who was out that he or she had to go home, and I turned to him and I said, 'And you know, I'm stunned and shocked that you won this challenge' and he said, 'Well, no one's more surprised than I am.'"

Since I read that I’ve anxiously been awaiting an episode which fits that description. I’m wondering if this week’s episode was in fact the one. I suppose the fact that he mostly uses the pronoun “him” precludes this episode…but he throws in a quick “he or she” at the end to keep us guessing.

I suppose it’s obvious but I’ll explicitly state that I hated this week’s winning design. I hate it because I hate sacks. I don’t like baby doll dresses and I especially don’t like sacks. The winner was as sack. Perhaps sacks are popular because they are the great equalizer. No matter what you’re figure a sack will make you look like crap. Hurray for the lowest common denominator.

But this week’s winner is worse than that. In addition to the oh-so-unflattering sack shape the dress..er..bag is also a bright saturated blue color. There is only one destination that this outfit can possible be suitable for. It’s clear that this young lady is in fact going to prom as one of the Fruit of the Loom fruits. Perhaps that was a crucial piece of information that accidently got edited out of the show. Their prom is a costume party and the ladies were supposed to go dressed as some sort of advertising icon…. Oh wait. I’m thinking of last year’s Boo.

Of course maybe this isn’t this episode that Tim was talking about. Perhaps we’re all in for a wild ride this season. If the designers can be criticized for making something too sophisticated I guess anything is possible. Maybe someone will get criticized for constructing an outfit too well…..and maybe someone will punch someone in their nasally gob.

Objects of My Annoyance

I really hate the shopping cart + kid carriers at Publix. They’re the ones that are designed to look like a race car or some such nonsense. Basically they take a shopping cart and add a big plastic addition to the back for kids to sit in….and ostensibly pretend to drive. I hate them because they are larger than normal carts and take up more room in already cramped aisles, thusly, being more inconvenient to fellow shoppers. The fact that they are sometime populated with loud children does not help further endear them to me.

I say they are only sometimes populated with loud children for two reasons. Occasionally they are occupied with good children being quiet. In which case, I only find the uber-carts to be just mildly annoying. I’ll concede in this instance the child carts are doing their job, which is to keep small children from being underfoot, even if the massive cart is blocking the particular area of shelf space I’m interested in.

However, for every ginormous cart filled with a good quiet child, there appears to be three ginormous carts filled with no children at all. That’s because the little brats complained about being stuck in the cart so the parents set the little hellions loose on the public at large. This is the worst of both worlds. The parents are taking up an inordinate about of aisle space with their shopping monstrosity and their noisy little brats are underfoot. I dare not type the dark intentions I wish upon such parents.

Reflecting upon the Publix child-car shopping carts I am reminded that there is still a worse option which gratefully has not taken root in this area (yet). In Indiana some grocery stores provided separate miniature shopping carts for children to push while the parents pushed normal sized carts. I can only assume the desired effect was for children underfoot to be even more of a nuisance than they already are. Yes, reflecting back on the visceral reactions this little chaos buggies evoked I’m almost grateful for the child-car-barges. Almost.

Bookcase Update

One of the things I did over the holidays is spend a considerable amount of time working on my bookcase project. After spending a few days in the garage working on the bookcases I got them to the point where three out of four sections of the bookcase are ready to stain. I plan to install the bookcases in four sections. The first section will be the four foot by eight foot framework that consists of the major shelves. Then inside the major framework three smaller sections stack upon one and another Tetris style.

I’ve completed building the major framework and the bottom and middle interior sections. Those three pieces are ready to stain. I’ve made considerable progress on the last section. I have most of the subcomponents for it already built. I have decided to postpone connecting all of the fourth section’s subcomponents until I have the first three sections installed. That way I can take measurements of the space left for the last section and make sure that it will actually fit!

This last weekend Dawn and I actually stained the first section. It’s currently sitting in our garage awaiting transfer to Dawn’s library. We went with a dark wood stain (Bombay Mahogany or something like that). It looks awesome. Once I get the first section installed we’ll be able to stain the second and third sections at the same time. I can actually see the finish line on the bookcase project. There still some work to be done, but man, does it feel good to feel like I’m actually making progress on that project.

Check out the house with the spiffy new roof.

Huge strides forward in the de-ghetto-fication of our house were made this weekend.

Saturday morning we experienced an extremely odd way to wake up - to the sounds of someone walking around on our roof. Actually that’s not entirely accurate. We woke up to the sounds of many people stomping around on our roof. When we went to bed on Friday night we knew that our new roof was approximately half done and that workers would be coming back on Saturday morning to finish the job. It’s all fine and well to know that Friday night when conscious. However, that knowledge is inaccessible in the very first few moments of semi-consciousness. It doesn’t help to know that the night before when your slumber has been interrupted by an untold number of interlopers. Nightmares fueled with actual verifiable sensory feedback. Ahhhh. Then the brain finishes rebooting and decides that today those noises are acceptable - even expected.

Riblet was pretty funny. By the second day of roofing she had gotten well past wondering what could possibly be on the roof. She had reached irritation. There would be a burst of pounding and she would look up at the ceiling in contempt. The incessant noises had become nuisance and a distraction to her regularly schedule napping. She was so over getting a new roof.

They finished up the roof on Saturday afternoon and it looks great, even more surprising is the ground surrounding the house still looks good (or at least as good as it did before). I am very pleased with how careful the roofers where not to make an impact on our yard. They didn’t drive any vehicles on the grass. They laid down tarps by the house and made sure to drop all the shingles on to the tarps, then they dragged the tarps to a trailer they set up to haul away the debris. There was no collateral damage to our yard in the process. Classy and professional.

In addition to a new roof we also have a contractor working on our soffits and columns. He finished repairing the soffits on Friday. There is no longer a 2x4 holding up our house (I suspect much to our neighbors’ relief). Our old decrepit columns already been removed and replaced with actual structural columns, as in, they have a 6x6 wooden post in the center instead of absolutely nothing. He’ll be back on Monday to finish up the cosmetics and painting them.

All and all a pretty successful weekend.

Perhaps today it will be too foggy.

In preparing to write this I looked back to see when I posted the picture of the 2x4 that held up our house. I was shocked to discover that it was October 1st. A 2x4 has been holding up our house for a quarter of a year. I am dumfounded. To be honest I’m surprised I haven’t woken up to find the 2x4 crashed through the bay window and poking into the dining room. It’s sitting right outside the window…that’s the little tragedy that I see played out in my head when I look at it. I guess that fact that it has remained firmly in place through thunderstorms and gales is just a testament to how much weight the crutch is actually holding up, or alternatively, how much weight my roof is shrugging off its responsibility to hold.

Yesterday was to be the day that the sins of our house construction were to be once again hidden from the casual observer. A nice contractor person was supposed to show up and fix the soffits by the bay window so it would not be necessary to have a 2x4 crutch prop the roof up. We were to become a respectable household once again. Too bad that’s not how it turned out.

To be fair, yesterday it was cold, really butt cold. If the contractor had called us up and said, “Bad news. It’s butt cold out there today and I don’t think quality work will get done when my fingers are frozen.” I would have been sympathetic and agreed. But that’s not what happened. We received no calls. Dawn and I both rearranged our schedules so we could be home during the day to see that the project got started off right and the courtesy of notification was not extended to us, the home owners, who are paying the bill. Instead Dawn had to repeatedly call and try and figure out what the hell was going on, or more to the point, not going on. Eventually we were told that work was not going to start because it was too windy. Too windy? Dawn looked out the window at the still trees and informed the contractor that it was not in fact windy at the job site. No dice. It was too windy.

I don’t understand manufacturing a flimsy excuse when a much more understandable and verifiable one is present. It’s the coldest day in recent history. Nuff said.

Perhaps today they’ll start work on the house. Dawn tried to work from home again, but the ever present threat of meetings may pull her in. I’m at work and clueless as to how ghettofide our house currently is.

I know our neighbors also have a vested interest in our little project. They are getting ready to put their house on the market and would appreciate it if our house did not give the impression that their home construction may in fact required exterior braces to keep from falling to the ground. You and me both.