Tag Archive for 'memories'

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30 is easy to remember

We’re right at the beginning of a new season of work, so I’m just getting to know the new staff. When one of the new guys asked me how old I was on Thursday, I told him I was thirty. It’s easier to say and easier to remember than all these twenty-something ages I’ve been going through for the past decade. I’ve never felt like any specific age, so all the early twenties seem to blend together and twenty-eight seemed to be the age that would pop into my head, even when I was twenty-seven and twenty-nine… I guess just because it was an even number or easier to say or something. But I’ve officially accepted thirty, a few days early, even.

Last night, Sarah put together a gathering of some of our friends. It was a mix of local friends of hers and people she went to school with. I think she felt bad that I didn’t have any of my own friends, but I’m not that close with the people I work with, really. Most of my friends at home were people I had gone to school with and kept in touch with or musicians. So, since there aren’t [m]any old acquaintances out here and I’ve yet to join a band, I just don’t have a group of local friends. Sarah’s happy to share hers, though, and I like them. Anyway, we had a bunch of food, all cooked here by us, and played some awesome games, including Bananagrams, which has turned out to be one of the most popular Christmas presents from Sarah to me.

There may be some pictures when Sarah’s paparazzi school friends upload some. Sarah and I were too busy cooking and entertaining to take any ourselves.

more vacation, please

I thought that the Dell had ended it’s extended lease on life, again, but it turned out to be bad drivers for my network card. It took way too long to narrow the problem from random freezing to maybe the Firefox beta to maybe just Firefox to anything internet to the new drivers from windows update. It’s been running normally again since I updated a few power management settings that were suggested on some forum. Acceptable solution, I guess. Before all that narrowing down was done, I opened it up again to make sure it wasn’t simply overheating. There wasn’t a whole lot of dust to blow out, though. Opening up laptops and fiddling with them isn’t as much fun as full sized PCs. Yet another reason my next laptop will be a Macbook Pro. Still don’t know when I’ll make that upgrade, but I thought about it a lot more, while trying to figure this thing out.

In other computer-related news, two of the hard drives I sent in for recovery have come back to be by way of a new external drive. Most of the data is intact and there are some original versions of photos from a couple events (shooting the house in Bedford, trip to Philly with Drew to see Olivia) from 2003 and 2002. The oldest drive was not recoverable, at least not by the company I went with, and should have all the photography from my first year or two with my Olympus and a bunch of other old band-related and website-related stuff that I’d like to recover. I’ll probably call around and see if anyone’s up for the task.

Adventure Ed starts up this month. We have a some new blood with us this season, so that should make things interesting. We’re also trying to shift the focus to skills training, which sort of sounds like what my last program was all about. There, we had a big long talk with the kids coming in to the program… explaining what we were going to work on. Here, we’re going to do it in a more subtle way, I guess, but there will be some frontloading of teamwork concepts, which I’m cool with it… just don’t know how it fits with the timeframe. We’ll see how it actually goes.

It’s been snowing a lot. I’m a fan of winter, I really am, but we’ve had enough of this stuff, now, I think. We still have rolls of film to finish, but there hasn’t been a great day to do it… either too cold or too gray. It was kinda fun to go through the House on the Rock stuff and get it uploaded. I think Sarah and I are both itching for a vacation. Maybe we should do another short road-trip. Montreal was suggested, but that’s a bit long for road-trip. I’m all for it, though. Sure it’s not the right season to go North, and sure the state of affairs with needing a passport/not needing a passport to go to Canada is still up in the air… but what’s the worst that could happen, we get stuck in Canada forever? Or take a road-trip and be denied at the border because our birth certificates aren’t notarized? It’s still sounds like a vacation.

my fault, sorry

So, I’ve been reading a lot more, lately. Reading instead of doing my homework for adventure ed seems to be my favorite pastime. I reread Childhood’s End around Christmas. I finally decided to give it another read after I heard about Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday. Sarah’s mom picked me up a cheap hardcover copy of Anansi Boys on the clearance rack of a book store in the Borders Outlet at Gurnee Mills and I read it almost immediately. Sarah challenged me to read a book I wouldn’t finish in two days and suggested House of Leaves. I think I spent five to seven days on it. I remember when Drew lived in Woonsocket the first time, He and Candace were reading it, maybe, possibly they were just admiring it, I never really talked to him about it, cause I wasn’t reading it. I suppose I should ask him if he ever did end up actually reading the whole thing. I started American Gods on Saturday. As I’m reading, I get to a part where they visit The House on the Rock, up in Wisconsin, and I can see each room as he’s describing it. I think about all the pictures that I took when Sarah and I went there and pop onto Flickr to check some of them out… and they’re not on Flickr. I somehow managed to not post any of them or mention the visit in my blog at all. I guess it wasn’t until November or so that I decided I want to write here more often.

Sometime in late September, Sarah and I took a trip up to Wisconsin to see a play at an outdoor theater. We booked a hotel stay with the tickets and then planned a couple little adventures around the show. We saw [most of] the Mount Horeb trolls and had a wonderful dinner there. We visited the House on the Rock and took two of the three tours. I really got a kick out of the 60s/70s vibe to all the rugs and appliances and the various collections were really awesome… There was also a life-size whale & giant squid battle that reminded me of Childhood’s End [and the They Might Be Giants Apollo 18 album cover], but the little plaque said nothing of taking its influence from the book. We saw the show at the outdoor theater… in the rain. It was very wet, but the show was funny. There were some near-spills due to wet stage and a complete false start, due to a downpour about a minute into the first scene. We also picked up some meat on a detour on the way home from a favorite butcher of the family. It was a mini-vacation, it was a lot fun and I still don’t know how I failed to mention it here at all.

spindleI went through the pictures last night and picked out some decent ones and added them to my flickr. As I logged in to flickr, I shuddered at the thought of it becoming a Microsoft-owned and controlled site. The Microhoo merger seems like an all around bad idea to me. Maybe I’m still upset about Microsoft taking over HoTMaiL. I certainly stopped using it for anything but junk after that and it’s pretty close to unusable, now, with all the crazy Windows Live crap they turned it into. Yahoo didn’t ruin flickr. Hopefully, if that merger happens, Microsoft won’t either… but their online track record is pretty bad.

Before going through the pictures, though, I watched the game. I formally apologize to all of my friends back east who care about sports and to the Patriots for watching the game. I was completely aware that every Patriots game I watch turns into a loss for them, but I really wanted to see if there were any really funny commercials. In my defense, they were still in the lead when I paused it for dinner. So they may have lost while I was eating and not while I was actually watching… but I did return to the TV and watch the rest of the game. So it’s most likely my fault. Sorry. I didn’t mean to ruin your perfect season.

Voegtlin Corporation and Companies

Just woke up from a weird dream. It was sort of a suspense/thriller feel, so I was kinda upset about waking up, only because I would love to know what was gonna happen next. The basic disjointed pieces were like this:

I’m in Dudley at my parents’ house, actually, outside my parents’ house and Dad is there. He tells me he’s heading somewhere, some weird location whose name I know was repeated multiple times in the dream, but that I can’t recall at all, now. He said he had to pick some stuff up, but that some people might come looking for stuff… and he started to say, “If they come, it’s…” but then he changed his mind and said just to tell them that he was out. Some people definitely came, and I don’t remember my exact interaction with them, but I do remember that they did finally decide to leave, but that there were a lot of cars in the driveway, so they proceeded to smash into many of them on their way out… one of them was in a little classic dodge caravan type thing and backed into this 80s Oldsmobile looking thing on the grass behind the house and somehow pushed it all the way across the yard and into the fence. I told whoever was standing next to me that it’s ok, “it doesn’t run.” Then he continued his many pointed turn maneuver and pulled in between some small trees onto the neighbor’s yard over their driveway and down to the road. I remember being thankful that my car (which was my current car, my Mazda 5) was parked way behind the house and out of his rage range. I was looking at some awful gold-rust colored Cadillac up on the hill that heads up to the barn and being thankful that they hadn’t hit this one. I think it was partly because it belonged to someone important to my dad and partly because that someone would’ve gone crazy and beat them up, or something. Then I was talking to someone, maybe the same person I had told not to worry about the car on the lawn, about my dad telling me where he was going and that people might come by and I mentioned where he went and they said, “oh, then he’s gone to get the paperwork.” And proceeded to explain to me that he was probably out getting whatever illiegal documents were needed to make this other guy into me, on paper. I don’t think there was good explanation why, at the time.

The next part I remember is a bunch of people gathered inside with Dad, and this guy who was going to become me, and they were all sitting around a table, maybe, but I think we were all on couches. I know that I wasn’t supposed to know about this identity thing… so there was some point in the conversation when my Dad asked if anyone had anything to say, or maybe asked me something directly… either way, I said something about not being able to ever start my own company because “he’s going to be me.” There was some shock, I think, that I knew.

And then it turned into a party, for this guy, because the cat was out of the bag, and my dad explained that he was going to take control of the Voegtlin Corporation and Companies. Somebody said something about him not really needing to be me to do that and whoever was sitting next to them said that it would be cheaper if it was inherited. I remember that I got really mad at Dad at one point, I think he had said something about playing music and not being able to start a company doing that or something, and from my position, half-lying down on a couch, threw a drumstick (a bass drum mallet, one of two I was twirling around in my fingers) at his head, though, intentionally missing by a couple inches. He paused and looked alarmed and after a while, threw it back and I caught it somehow with the other stick. I also remember that I was just lying on the couch and saying very little while this party was going on around me. At one point, this guy who was going to become me, who I’m not positive had a name until this point, was talking about how much he loved certain pills he was taking. There was lots of agreement, including from my Dad, I think… and then there was some mention of his birthday and someone said, “yeah, what are we gonna do for him on his last birthday as Eddie?”

Then some more science-fiction flair got thrown in, someone, possibly me, asked about how he was going to prove he was me, if it ever came into scrutiny, and wouldn’t it be easier to steal Ernie’s identity (my older, mostly incommunicado, brother), and so on… and while there wasn’t really any explanation, my Dad did ask me for a blood sample, and for some reason Eddie was drawing his own blood, too. And then I told them that this wouldn’t work because I didn’t take any pills and everyone took pills, so my blood would certainly show up as irregular and any investigator worth his salt could tell that (pointing at various people in the room) “you’re on…” this and that drug and “you two are both on…” these pills and so on.

And that’s about the time I woke up. Thinking about it afterwards, the weirdest parts were that I was concerned with starting my own business… but maybe I was just using that as an example of something I couldn’t do if I wasn’t me, anymore. Another thing that struck me as odd was that “Eddie” was hispanic. he sort of looked like a bald Carlos Mencia… Dad was just a little bit racist, and it just didn’t seem right to me that he would hand down his whole company to a guy like that, but it’s not like I knew the guy, this was a dream, but it did occur to me right after waking up, so maybe it was part of the dream, too. Then there’s the fact that I had my Mazda. We essentially bought our Mazdas with Dad’s life insurance benefits. And the room the party was in was not like any room in our house in Dudley. It looked like a small, white apartment… but there’s gaps, I don’t even remember Dad coming back from wherever he was, in the dream, it’s possible that we all went somewhere else between the time I found out about the identity theft and the party. Then, in true Mark Mandeville, Dream No. 1 fashion, I started wondering if any of it was true, while preparing my breakfast (Mark wondered if he would drop dead any moment from the poison he drank in his dream, while he was eating his cereal). I wondered if Dad had, in fact, set someone up as a fake me. Of course, then I remembered that Dad was not as maniacal as he was in my dream and that there was no Voegtlin Corporation and Companies to inherit.

Back in the real world, I have some sort of training for Adventure Ed, tomorrow. Not sure exactly what it’s about. But I’ve also got to finish up the stats from last season and eMail the students with the links to the pictures after the training. I miss working a little bit, but I’d much rather sit home and play Lego Star Wars on the Wii… or go out and take some pictures, but it’s still looking pretty gray outside. I put in that order for sunlight on Friday. No tip for the sun god this time, that’s for sure.

making a short list, shortening the long list

I’ve said before that I miss the windy hilly roads of New England. I can now make a short list a New England driving quirks that I miss: the need for high beam headlights on those windy hilly roads which lack streetlights, knowing when your crossing a town line by the quality of the plow work on the road, actual rotaries (roundabouts), the sense of urgency drivers feel when a red light turns green that causes them to immediately start rolling forward.

The visit home is going well. I probably won’t make it to the teen center this time around, I’m not going to take a ton of pictures of all my old haunts (which was on my mental list of things to do and not well defined, I think it was a flickr-groups-inspired idea and I can’t think of which groups/themes I had in mind) and I don’t think I’ll be able to fit in hanging out with everyone who wants to, since today is pretty much the only day I have and only Erika has come up with a time and place that works for her… and I pretty much slept the whole morning away. I suppose I could fit some time in with someone around our visit to Karen and the kids in Stoughton, tomorrow… or before dinner time on Monday. Heading out to Worcester this afternoon, most likely, with Mom and her good friend Joyce. I’ll probably take my own car so that I can break off and meet with someone, if they get in touch with me before it runs into my other plans. I guess I should go shower.

I leave, things close

java hutIt’s not as tragic as when I went to college and came back to find out Eleni’s Midnite Cafe was about to close, but finding out a couple days before a visit home that the Java Hut is going to close after this weekend is a little sad. I can’t say it’s shocking or earth-shattering, but it’s not good news. I spent a lot of time there. The Overtones were, essentially, born there, out of the ashes of Just For Sundae and our devotion to making the Open Mic happen by running the list and donating PA equipment. I’ve added it to my list of things to do while back east. I hope they can still make me a good sandwich. One myspace bulletin with a rumor led to a google search that brought up a surprising amount of blogs about the closing… so here I am joining the blogwagon again.

Here are some Java Hut related Overtones tracks:

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and here are some of my pictures from the Java Hut

get an amazon wishlist… seriously

After shoveling some snow the other day, I’ve decided that I want/need a new winter coat. I know I already have a giant winter coat, but I want something a little more plain, I think. The giant “zero xPOSUR” thing on it is just a little too close to wearing a giant POSER (poseur?) sign. It’s served its term as a jacket, time to hand it down or something. I have no idea what kind of jacket to get. I don’t know brands really well… I guess I used to like those three-quarter/parka length kinda things. I should probably get something with a liner or insulation made out of some cool new material with a funny name like Microfleece or Polartec or Polarguard or Windbloc or PrimaLoft or Gore-Tex or DriClime; I don’t understand them, but they sound cool. I also probably shouldn’t put a coat on my wishlist without trying it on… so gimme some suggestions. What kind of jacket do you wear? What’s good? What should I look at? I don’t need one of these, so don’t bother suggesting it.

Speaking of wishlists, if you haven’t received a gift from me in the mail, it either means that I’m gonna see you when I’m back east and have something specific in mind or you don’t have an Amazon wishlist and I have no idea what you want, or some kinda combination of those two things and just plain forgetting about you because we don’t talk enough. I love my wishlist. I updated it and rearranged stuff today. Every time I have a little computer glitch, I move the Macbook up on the priority list. It was almost a year ago that I originally mentioned switching to a mac. The Dell was given a new lease on life, but it’s just a lease, and I’m an own kinda guy. I don’t actually expect anyone to buy it, but I added a note about Apple gift cards. So, yeah, make a wish list on Amazon. It’s fun and they have almost everything. If there’s a new wish list system that’s cooler than Amazon’s… one with unbiased comparison shopping and coupons and referral links built-in or something like that … let me know about it.

mmm… yumminess

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I developed a taste (read: addiction) for apple soda way back in 1995, on a school foreign language club trip to Mexico. At all the cool little restaurants we ate at, we would ask what kinds of soda they had and apple was always on the list among the cokes and sprites and roor beers. Prior to that, I’d only had some sparkling apple stuff at holiday parties and such. I had a bit of a hard time finding it back on the east coast. the Jones green apple variety was way too sweet. The Izze apple was closer, but a little too much like juice. I was hoping to find some online a couple years ago, since coca-cola bottled an apple fanta… and my search didn’t turn up any american products, but I did find Sidral Mundet. Now, I tend to have a supply of Manzanita Sol in the house all the time. It’s a little sweeter than the authentic stuff, but it’s yummy, and probably closest to what I got in restaurants in Mexico. And it’s at a lot of grocery stores and gas stations. Yay!

shopping

After a short day of work, Sarah and I made a holiday shopping tour of several stores and the mall. We bought stuff for a lot of family and friends and got some supplies for Sarah to make her own wrapping paper. I got some ideas for some of y’all, so you might be receiving something from me this year, either in the mail or maybe when I’m back east for those few days just before Christmas. If you’re thinking about returning the favor, I have combined my immense and confusing Amazon wish lists into one enormous list so that anyone who happens to search for me gets to see everything.

Shopping for other people really does cause some neat warm-and-fuzzy feelings. I have a fond memory of an extreme example of that phenomenon. My dad took this guy named Danny, who did odd jobs for us because he needed the money, and his kid, Phillip to the mall and had them pick out everything they wanted to get for each other. Then Dad paid for it all. I took the kid around and helped him get over the urge to just stare at and touch things he wanted and think of things his mom and dad would want. It was really nice.

training at the Y

I don’t get paid enough to train people. I don’t get paid enough to empty trash and walk the building, either… I barely get paid enough to sit here and stare at a computer, though that really isn’t my job. There’s supposedly a new girl coming in this morning, who has never been here, and who I need to train. She’ll be sitting over at courtesy desk, so there isn’t a whole lot to explain to her. That half of the job is pretty simple, watch the check-in screen for notes, greet people, refill coffee pots, hand out towels, start loads of towels in the washer, file guest sheets. I almost get paid enough to do that job… but I’m not here for the money, I’m here so I don’t lose the retirement fund I’ve contributed to for the past however many years.

My headache disappeared sometime shortly after I got home yesterday. We put the tree up. The stand is a bazillion times better than those old overgrown ashtray with a retaining ring stands I remember from my childhood. Got a little tree sap on my arms and a lot on my hands. Getting it off my arms reminded me of the days at Camp when I was climbing evergreens for ropes course work almost everyday. I stopped wearing shorts and started wearing a long sleeve work shirt to avoid getting that stuff in the hair… it takes so much effort and/or so much really abrasive cleaners to remove it. Getting it off my hands was easy, but I’ve still got a couple little marks on my arm that I didn’t put enough effort into. The tree smells nice, though. I hope it lasts until Christmas, it doesn’t seem to be taking up as much water as I expected for the first day. It could just be a different kind of tree than I’m used to. Obviously, my “lottery tree” didn’t need water, and that’s all I’ve really dealt with for the past 6 years or so.

Back to the boring.




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