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Running a little sum in the back of my head, there are no less than 35 places with five blocks of my workplace from which I can get a chicken or antipasto salad. This ranges from the Hilal lunch cart two blocks south of me where I can get a salad and a can of soda for $5.00 to Pain Quitidien where I will pay closer to $20.00. There’s a stop on that spectrum every two dollars or so with clusters around $7.95, $10.00, and $12.50.

Today I went to Joe’s Pizza for an antipasto salad and a man looking the acme of Irishness with lily white skin, red hair and freckles to the point where the name “Kieran Patrick McO’Connor” would have been appropriate took my order with a thick Sicilian accent. I asked if they offered drink refills and he gave a knowing smile and said “yeah”. When the salad was done, I was called up and asked what dress I’d like. I said “caesar or blue cheese” and the server put down his bottles of Italian and Ranch and pulled out a dusty box with Velveeta signage on it and fished out a packet of Newman’s Own that looked kind of beat up. It was unexpired and unpunctured so I tipped a packet to adventurous eating.

THe salad was fine and reasonable as part of an $8.00 lunch. When I returned to have my drink refilled, it was done by a chesty middle aged woman who gave me the same knowing smile as the guy who took my order.

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My Team Fortress 2 team uses a reference copy of the game that it’s created to make new servers. This Gold Master (GM) tends to accumulate cruft over time and needs to be periodically rebuild. Janine came over yesterday with the intent of making a new one with me. Building a GM is usually something I start at 10pm on a weekday because I can’t sleep and ends 10 hours later in a fugue state before I head off to work. This go was much more methodical and ended with a rib dinner. I much prefer this method of doing it.

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I have purchased four recipe books in my lifetime. Two are by Alton Brown, one is Ratios, and the last is 125 Best Cheesecakes. The last of these makes a barely passable doorstop let alone a cookbook. The metric measurements it lists aren’t by mass but by volume leading the reader to add 125ml of sugar or 200ml of eggs to a recipe. This is practically less than useless as it takes up the space where I could have written measurements by mass. Its recipe tips are a list of near tautologies like “to change the texture of the crust, adjust how long you crush the graham crackers”. This man is the Gauss of cheesecakes… Internally, there are pictures of some of the cheesecakes but they are nowhere near the recipe to make that cake and the photos don’t even include a cross reference to a page.

My final criticism is in its “aspirational” bake times. I’ve yet to prepare something from this recipe book that didn’t require at least 20% more bake time. Today’s recipe was off by a factor of 2 and I was rather late to a surprised party because of it. I suppose it being a custard I could have left and come back to it but I leave no cake behind.

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A friend and I met at Yakitori Boy for Friday night karaoke and yakitori, a type of Japanese food which is meats and other things grilled and served on a skewer. I tried the bacon and quail, pork, and short rib skewers and each was tasty but an expensive way to put together a meal.

The initial karaoke crowd was mostly black women singing standards every few minutes rotated in with some J-pop that was inscrutable to me. The crowd built over the evening and my partner and I spent about an hour going through the list of available songs and talking louder and louder at one another as the crowd built. Small groups came in and the average BAC grew. Every third song was dominated by a large white man who would “aide” the person singing. He was loud and largely in tune and at a critical point, it’s the singer’s fault if he or she can be overpowered by a single unamplified person.

My copilot tore up an Alanis Morisette track and I did a mediocre Mr. Brightside. I blame it on congestion and having yelled for most of the evening. I looked through the songbook again and settled on “Wonderwall” as being appropriately within my range. We waited through a few more songs and the rotation came out to 1/2 drunk singing, 1/4 J-pop, 1/8 just bad, 1/8 really good. Finally, Wonderwall came up and myself and tall cross-dressed black man both went for the mic at the same time. We had apparently both picked the same song and both sang. I was more familiar with the verses but he belted the refrain in a cloud of alcohol and rainbows. Every time he did so, I’d laugh and stop singing and he would sing louder to help which was even funnier creating this big gay feedback loop.

After the song we talked and I learned that his name was Geranimo and thought my singing fabulous.

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I took the Warminster line to work and back and so didn’t go home directly at the end of my day. I made dinner for my mother and I and then got word that the power was back. How?

Dad: Terry, the power’s back on but I don’t have internet on my iPad. How do I get it back?

I walked him through the steps of turning the UPS back on which consists of pressing a single button. He asked how long it’d take and I told him a few minutes. He asked if there was anything he could do to have the internet come back faster.

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The first day without power is an adventure, the second an annoyance, and the third a tragedy. Day three is where the ice has melted in the fridge and freezer and where one wants either something hot or cold. My suffering was slight. I had gone to camp for years and could go a long period without most amenities. On top of this, I had friends who had offered their spare and not spare space to me. I had cell access and with a 4G network and tetherable phone had faster web access than most people do at home.

After work I faced the grim task of throwing out a lot of food. Don’t buy fresh meats and vegetables before a storm. I also changed the kitty litter, used the remaining water pressure to get Max water, and packed what I could into a cooler to bring to my mother’s. I had brought my desktop and a 30″ panel and worked on photos until 1am or so. Even through storms my desktop + a card table is the pinnacle of on-the-go computing.

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Waking up with no power during the day when the weather is mild can be a gentle experience. Max walked in, licked my foot and rose. Most of the lights in my room are obscured by tape so the only indicator of something not being there was my un-illuminated alarm clock. Walking into my office was similar with no obvious tells except for the UPS lights being off and the Minecraft server being at rest.

The freezer was still holding ice, so I popped some in a travel cup and packed my desktop into my car to edit wedding photos at Sam Lodise’s apartment. I had taken 1872 photos and Sam picked some 620 that he liked. Erin later picked some 680 photos she liked with an overlap of about 380 photos. Of those, I wanted to trim down to some 120 or so. Each time I removed one from the set Erin would howl as if in pain at me erasing one of her memories. Sam had a backup of everything. Nothing would be lost but still this indignity was an interesting compliment. We talked and agreed that we only needed one good photo of each person and each key event. After that, we picked a few dozen shots to represent the wedding. As we did successive waves of editing, everyone was represented less and less except for Green twins. Somehow with each pass, photos containing them were skipped.

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SEPTA was shut down today and I needed to find a way to get to work to grab my laptop so after helping a friend food shop, I continued on to Market Street across from City Hall at around 8:30am. The roads were empty and I was able to park on the street by Samsom and 16th Street. On street parking on a week day during work hours. I went to my building, rode a dark elevator to my office floor, checked my voice mail, grabbed my laptop and returned to my car. The GPS told me that it’d be 30 minutes to make the 26 mile trip home and this may be the only time that estimation of getting from Philly to Feasterville would be accurate.

Heading north the roads had few cars on them which somehow made them feel more deserted than if I were alone. The other cars served as reminders of what there should have been more of. Southbound traffic was backed up for miles going into the city. It was like Philly had been featured in an episode of The Walking Dead.

At home, I got my laptop set up, connected to the company VPN and began work. I was working from home, an impossibility in my previous life doing lab work. I started a few items in the oven to try to have food to ride out the inevitable power outage and finished two cheesecakes. I put four pounds of chicken in the sous vide rig and set it to 140ºF. Even if power gave out on that, thermal inertia would take the poultry to completion.

The power went out around 5pm near the end of my remote work day and with no ability reasonably work, process photos, or run cleaning equipment I finally felt freed up to revisit something I used to do: sleep.

Thank you, Sandy.

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The washer is broken.

As a line, the above sentence could probably be spoken with truth in my house roughly 5% of the time over the past two decades. We’ve never had a washing machine that properly functioned for a stretch longer than six months and it’s come to symbolize “this is why we can’t have nice things”. Our current washing machine has gone through bearings, lost belts, had electrical issues, been eaten at by mice, and now was in need of some six hundred dollars in repairs. Before, we’d have tried to fix it ourselves and learned a bit about washing machine repair but that is no longer our lot. We swallowed hard and paid for a new washing machine befitting my father and mine station in life. The washer arrived in its pristine alabaster condition gleaming brilliantly in the sun of a crisp Autumn weekend that smelt of change. Leaves were turning, we were wearing flannel, and the washing machine in no way fit with the existing dryer.

The bases didn’t match, the sizes were different, the bracing was incompatible and my father and I exhaled deeply as the washing machine was taken back. My father, stared at his hands and said “I’m tired”. 30 years of frustration on being a home owner summed up in two words. I was tired too.

I started hitting Craigslist and my dad started making calls looking for a new set. Over dinner we compared notes and found that we had each found the same set of high efficiency LG units for about the same price in about the same condition. HIs were in New Jersey and mine were in Delaware. I will take this coincidence as Providence. To a bright future of functional laundry equipment.

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I did four things today.
1) Went to Kevin Ott’s birthday party
2) Purchased jeans
3) Went to a Shiny Toy Guns concert at the North Star Bar
4) Attended a Halloween Party at Kacey’s house

**Kevin’s Party**

Kevin was turning 25 and I gave him the ceremonial gifts of this age point; a copy of Jungle Speed, and an angel food cake. We talked about mostly non-Scout things and this was odd for us as we usually talk about Scout things. He offered me his slot in the Philadelphia Marathon which he wasn’t able to use because of a knee injury and then convinced me to do a Tough Mudder with him sometime in June. Apparently beating the shit out of myself is now one of my hobbies.

**Jeans**

I was attending the concert with Suzie and Jeff and after leaving Kevin’s, learned that they were going to try to skip the opening act and would arrive an hour into the show. Having some time to kill, I stopped at Kohl’s and decided to purchase a pair of jeans. I’ve never worn jeans before except as a small child and then again once for a musical. I am well versed in the periodic chart and 2006 Contingent LIfe Tables but found jean fittings to be utterly baffling. No combination of cut, leg, waist, and brand produced something that felt like it properly fit. To fit my massive calves required a pair of paints with a hula hoop size belt and somehow a 36×32 was shorter than a 36×30 of a different brand. I settled on a pair that compromised on these points that was slightly loose in some places and slightly tight in others. Compromise. I changed into them after purchase and I dare say I looked casual.

**Shiny Toy Guns Concert**

A number of my friends through high school were in bands and I got used to going to crappy shows at shitty venues. Shiny Toy Guns are much better than they ever managed and the North Star Bar is a standard deviation better. The opening act was dreadful, and the one following needed to be a bit tighter. The warm-up act usually doesn’t have the benefit of the crowd knowing the music so cues are important. For instance, if the performer wants the audience to clap, they need to allot a few bars to getting everyone going, and then a long time to justify that start-up. If you leave only enough time that’d be slightly shorter than a bridge, it’s almost rude to the audience and somewhat lame as everyone stops clapping just as everyone’s on board.

The headliners had no such issues and the drummer clearly led the crowd and the keyboardist did a good job of telling the audience how to move. The crowd was a bit static compared to what I think they wanted and the standard rule of “you can only be one standard deviation more excited than the person next to you” held perfectly.

I very much enjoyed the show and wished I had known the performer’s canon better to the point where I could sing along.

**Halloween Party**

Kacey’s family was having a halloween party and Suzie, Jeff, and I arrived right at the point that Mike had gone to bed. I popped up, wished him good night, and returned to the party. I got into an argument over me not finding Bruce Springstein convincing and talked to people. At some point I was holding a cup with a dark beverage in it wearing jeans and an untucked button down shirt. I looked normal.

**Reflection**

There was no activity listed above that was reasonably within my purview as recently as August of 2011. Kevin has made me determined, Mike has made me kind, Kacey has made me trusting, and Suzie has made me brave. Thanks for a good night.