DanRochman.com

(The title is a quote from a movie released in 1986 - bonus points if you can name it, provided you aren’t Agent Dan.)

The. Screen. Is. Installed. Actually, it was installed over a week ago. It took a bit of effort, but was worth it. Of course, there are other windows in this place, and they’re not screened, never mind the fact that we leave the door(s) open sometimes. But I like that the screen is installed. There’s some feeling of accomplishment, particularly since there haven’t been any mosquitoes in the bedroom since I screened the window. Plus, I fixed the back door, which had been sticking. Three new hinges, with a shim behind the bottom hinge, did the trick. So now I am domestically sated for a while.

LOTS of stuff going on - that’s what I get for taking two weeks off from blogging. Again. Sorry.

In the past tense:

October 14th was Em’s (30th!) birthday - Em didn’t want a big party, so there wasn’t one. The raclette grill experiment (buying one, not using one) was a miserable failure, although I still think it might happen someday. Em made me take it back, which is just as well since we later found out that I’d been brutally ripped off (ie, we saw the exact same item being sold for literally half as much). We did go out to the Waterfront Restaurant, which was nice enough - the food was very good, the ambiance was a little lacking (for a romantic birthday dinner), but the view was really outstanding, and I chose it mainly for the view.

The following night we went to TNDC’s (where Em works) 11th Annual Celebrity Pool Toss. It’s fun enough, although a little strange to watch absurdly wealthy people bid large sums of money to push pseudo-celebs into a swimming pool at a hipster hotel. At least it’s all for a really good cause. And the hotel *is* very hip - you should stay there if you’re staying in San Francisco. Of course, if you’re reading this, you either *live* in the Bay Area already, or else you’d probably be staying with us if you came out to visit. Whatever - we can go to their bar for drinks and check the place out.

The night after that we had a potluck dinner to go to with some of my current and former co-workers (something like a reunion), and the night after that [Still with me? I'm up to Friday the 15th.] we saw From Tel-Aviv to Ramallah, a one-man show starring Yuri Lane, Human Beatbox at Spanganga with Donovan and Karie. I’m not sure what I expected, but it was actually a pretty amazing show - check out the guy’s web site for clips (just of him, none of the show that I know of), and see him live if you can.

In the present tense:

Let’s see, aside from tonight being Halloween, and AGENT DAN BEING HERE (he’s actually been here for a week!), there’s a whole lot going on! Well, not really. My OpenBSD 3.4 CDs arrived, but I haven’t had time to upgrade yet. Oh, and nobody reading this cares. In cooler news, I got a sweet new jacket at REI (thanks, Em!), as well as a sweet little handheld GPS! Expect to see more GPS-related stuff here soon, like GeoURL meta tags, embedded location information for entries and photos, GeoCaching exploits, and other dorky stuff related to GPS technology.

These days, I’m:
PLAYING (with Agent Dan) The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers on PS2 (got Aragorn to Level 10, and we’re stuck on the Tower of Orthanc secret level - great geeky fun)
WATCHING (with Em, and now with Agent Dan) Sports Night, which gets delivered on DVD thanks to Netflix, which we recently joined, and which is pretty sweet
READING (all by my lonesome) Absolute OpenBSD, and you can probably guess that no one here has been trying to steal it away from me

In the future tense:

I’m still not sure what’s happening after work tonight. I expect we’ll head over to the Castro - we’ve been there before, but Agent Dan must not miss the spectacle that is Halloween in the Castro, even if it *is* slated to be tamer than last year’s near-riot. We may go elsewhere before and/or after… We all just suck at making Halloween plans. And it goes without saying that we still don’t even have *ideas* for costumes, much less actual costumes. Sigh.

This weekend, we’re gonna celebrate the Dia de los Muertos (Agent Dan is REALLY lucky to be here for this - it’s hella cool), and we’re planning on hopping down to Monterey to visit the awesome Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’m planning on having lots of cool photos to post soon.

Okay, that’s it for now. Lunch is over, and I gotta get back to work. And if you’re reading this at work, then so do you!

Yes, screens are good. Did I mention that I often curse the people who built (and build) the homes in California? As a Canadian, I’m used to homes built to standards like R-2000. Moreover, I was spoiled by growing up in a family where the family business went from aluminum windows and doors to steel doors, and despite being the usual dysfunctional family, I *can* proudly state that we always built really high-quality products. [Note: I am a computer weenie, almost useless with my hands, but I can recognize and appreciate these gifts in others.] So even growing up, I had a keener-than-average sensitivity to shoddy construction - standards, materials, practices, the works. Even moving from Montreal to Toronto seemed a huge step down the ladder. People’s homes don’t have WALKWAYS in Toronto! To get from the sidewalk to the front door, you’re (usually) expected to use the driveway, squeezing by any cars that happen to be in it at the time. And floors CREAK in Toronto - even in the newer, spendier suburban homes! At firsts, I asked some people in Toronto why they didn’t get that fixed, and they looked puzzled - don’t all floors creak? (Answer: NO, dammit! Not if you use the right methods and materials!) So, I’m an admitted snob when it comes to home quality.

But I had no idea how much further down the rabbit-hole went. [Sorry. I just saw the latest trailer on the big screen.] California just keeps on blowing my mind. Even the worst places in Canada are built better than most of the places here, if only because “drafty” in this climate equates to “lethal” in Canada - at least for a few months out of each year. Very few people here have ever HEARD of “dual-paned glass”, much less “argon-filled” or “low-e” windows. Seeing an inch of daylight come under your closed front door is an everyday thing here. Granted, the weather in San Francisco is such that we can sleep with our bedroom window open year-round, and (like many people in this part of the world) we get by with neither heating nor air conditioning. [I do love our electric blanket very, very much - Em resisted at first, but finally realized that sliding into a pre-heated bed on a chilly night just ROCKS. We *could* live without it, but would prefer *not* to.] But even if the weather isn’t harsh, building homes like dollhouses has some nasty corollaries - homes here are FAR noisier and dirtier than I’m used to. Dual-paned windows and insulated walls and ceilings don’t just conserve energy and increase comfort, they also kill sound. And drafts can carry in a lot of dust and pollen and such (oddly enough, drafts never seem to carry that stuff OUT, just in).

Generally, because we’re renters, I just grimace and bear it. Em will maintain that 100-year-old victorians like this one “have character” that modern, yuppie-scum lofts don’t. On the other hand, the plumbing in this place is ancient, weak, and probably not up to code. (We *do* have a new hot water tank, but only because the old one burst one day, and - in clear violation of building codes and common sense - flooded our kitchen instead of draining safely to the outside.) The electrical wiring is barely newer - 20 amps on two breakers for the whole flat, a single outlet in most of the rooms, and most of those not grounded properly if at all. The electrical wires run OUTSIDE the walls, in conduits, which is interesting because it usually means, as in this case, that the construction of the building pre-dated the common use of household electricity. And (best part), when we moved in (how did I not check for this before we did?), I realized that there were NO PHONE JACKS ANYWHERE IN THE APARTMENT. The people who lived here just before us had run an extension cord (?!) from the TEST JACK on the outside wall (aka, the demarcation point) THROUGH A CRACK IN THE FRAME OF THE LIVING ROOM WINDOW, and then (presumably) into the back of a handset. When we were moving in, I realized that the only “phone jack” in the place was a male RJ45 plug on the living room floor, at the end of a cord that I could (at first) trace back as far as the window sill. So in (at least?) THIRTY YEARS of widespread household telephony, NO ONE ever ran wiring?? I ran some proper wiring myself, if only for the sake of DSL, and otherwise get by on the newfangled “one base station, multiple cordless handsets with their own chargers” technology. Oh yeah, this place has character. Mmmmm, character.

Anyhow, I bought a screen kit for the window, so now I have to hacksaw the pieces to the right lengths, assemble the frame, remove the splines, lay the screen on the frame, re-insert the splines with the pizza-wheel thingy, trim off the excess screen, and then hopefully squeeze it into place outside our bedroom window, where there is (of course) no channel for mounting a screen. This is gonna be fun, I just know it. At least I’ll have learned a new trade. In the meantime, I simply TAPED the screen (it’s fiberglass, so very flexible and lightweight) to the inside wall AROUND the bedroom window, which is impossibly stupid-looking, but which still managed to keep us bite-free last night.

I’m still scratching - Em and I each had more bites than we first thought. Multiple attackers? More bites the second nite, even though we slept (relatively) soundly? I dunno. But I am determined to have a mosquito-free home, if it means moving to Antarctica (factoid: Earth’s only mosquito-free continent).

Oops. I *thought* I owned a hacksaw. Time for another quick trip to the hardware store. Good thing it’s (pretty much) across the street.

Comment (from Agent Dan) on my last entry:

Ahem. Every day I think *what will Dan have on his blog now? Maybe today will be the day I finally don’t have to read about poor old Karl again.* But no, not today either. Not even a little note to say *I love Em* or something like that. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Like the ringing of Art Garfunkle’s phone.

Obviously, this was meant to shame me into posting, and just as obviously it has succeeded. For the record, I *do* love Em. On the other hand, she’s about to turn 30 (on Tuesday!), and you can’t trust anyone over 30, and you can’t have love without trust, so… Just kidding. But I’ll check back in on Wednesday in case anyone’s worried.
Also for the record, Art Garfunkle has been brought back to life by a team of cryonicists, and not only does he have a web site, rumour has it that he’s been making and taking calls of late. It was one month ago today that he and Paul Simon performed “America” and “The Boxer” on Letterman, and the two of them “will embark this fall on their first concert tour in 20 years“. I’d even be tempted to see it, if tickets weren’t running into the hundreds of dollars.

In other news, since my last post, our friend Judy went out and built a blog/site of her own - you GO, girl! [I really can't believe I just typed "you go, girl" - the sight of it is almost as silly as the sound of me saying it would be. Almost, but not quite. The sentiment is legit, but the silliness rating is still off the charts.] Anyhow, she’s also helped to shame me into posting, if only by posting almost daily since putting her site up, and thus making me look even more like the lame-blog loser that I am. And she has a daughter! How does she do it?

In recent torments, it’s amazing how a single mosquito can ruin a night of your life. What does it weigh? How can something the size of an eyelash cause so much grief?? Em and I both woke up (MANY times) last night to that unbelievably nasty, unmistakable buzzing that starts out faint, then rapidly gets louder until it sounds (and FEELS!) like it’s coming from right inside your ear - which it sometimes is! Of course you wake up, and flail an arm by your ear in a fairly pathetic way that mostly involves slapping yourself in the head, only to hear the sound come back a few minutes later. You also start to realize (in my case) that you’ve got at least a couple of bites already, and that they’re already beginning to swell and itch, and will be absolutely lovely by morning. And that you’ll be tired all day from not being able to sleep - even when the buzzing stops for a bit, you’re restless, knowing that you’re being stalked (and nibbled on!) all night by a relentless, tiny predator. Plus you start wondering WHERE the stagnant water is that would account for the presence of such a beast (we’ve never had one in our apartment before - although we’ve only been sleeping with the bedroom window open for a couple of months), and making plans to root out the source once day breaks. Oh, and did I mention that there’s some peculiarity in my biology that makes the little bastards love me like no one else I’ve ever known? For years as a kid, I had to endure this nightly torment at summer camp. Six long, long WEEKS in the woods a couple of hours north of Montreal, and I have never really gotten over the experience of being left out every night as a big plate of food for another species to feast on. At first, I’d wake up with 20-30 new bites (only ten times as many as any of the other kids), until I learned to start sleeping with bug spray slathered on me (oh, the sweet smell - and taste - of DEET), and how to make a tent out of my blanket, and tuck the edges under my mattress into the springs of my cot, and sleep curled up in the center of the “tent”. I didn’t get much oxygen that way, but I’d definitely rather run the risk of anoxia than spend the nights being eaten by bugs, and the days scratching myself raw.

The amazing part is that at some point in the wee hours, some time after Em got fed up and went to sleep on the couch in the living room, I made a fast pass with my right hand by my right ear, and ACTUALLY CAUGHT AND KILLED THE DAMN THING. [I assume there was just one, since after I killed it I wasn't bothered again.] I can’t explain how good it feels to kill a mosquito. Particularly since there was a nice patch of blood in my palm (presumably my own), confirming that the little beast had already nicked me at least once already, and was coming back for more. I understand that she only wants a little, and even that just so that she can have children, but oddly enough that doesn’t stoke my sympathies. While I was cursing all the world’s mosquitoes (they “cause more human suffering than any other organism — over one million people die from mosquito-borne diseases every year”), I also took time out to curse the people who built this place almost a hundred years ago. The ancient, wood-framed, bedroom window took me almost an hour of brutal effort to get open a few weeks back, and now it can’t be closed. And of course there are no screens on any of our windows. If there’s another mosquito attack, I’m going to have to nail a screen into place myself. Actually, I may just go get a screen at the hardware store tomorrow - why wait for another bloodsucker to show up?

Sigh. I’m bitter. I didn’t get enough sleep last night, and I’m stopping every few seconds as I type this to scratch at one of the four new bites I’ve got - two on my left hand, one on my right, and one on my back. DAMNED creatures!

In somewhat mixed news, Arnon has graciously extended some hospitality our way, in light of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recently becoming the Governor of California. I’m grateful for the offer, but we’re gonna tough it out for now. If the radical right sends shock troops in, we may have to circle the wagons and make a last stand in Berkeley - if so, remember us fondly.

Okay, that’s enough to get me back on the blog-updating wagon. More tomorrow. This time I mean it.