matthearn.com

Things with the high school show (“Thoroughly Modern Millie,” Mar 15-17, 7pm, Brandywine High, come check it as it will be RAD) are ramping up rapidly, so we’re heck of busy with that. Still, a few things worth sharing:

Our friends Brian and Karen got married over the weekend; check out a few choice photographz here. Everybody was HOT.

I also put up some new pictures over at CharlesHearn.com. They are so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend checking them out.

I’ve had my Sanyo Katana for almost four months now, so I figure it’s time a little review, so I can let you know whether or not it’s awesome or Teh Suczk.

You may recall my short post a few months ago when I bought it and alerted the world that you could actually call me (the previous phone had been broken for a while). At the time, I was totally enamored with my new little flip-phone, and now that the initial puppy love has dissipated, it’s time to take a hard look at the pros and cons, yo.

Pros:

• It’s super-slim. Seriously, it’s like a half-inch thick. It would fit comfortably in the rear pocket of my jeans, even with my gigundous black girl booty, if I wasn’t afraid of sitting on it and crushing it with Teh Fatne$$.
• I can hear people on it, and they can hear me. This may seem like a basic thing, but after the problems I had with the last phone, this is a major improvement.
• HUGE screen. For websurfing it’s still a tad small, but I was able to download Google Maps’ free mobile client for it, and now I never get lost! Which is teh sweet.

Cons:

• You can use it as a wireless broadband device, which is pretty cool, but Sprint wants you to pay $40 a month for the service. With Sarah’s phone, which is a bit older, you can do it for free. What a gyp. $40 a month, which is about what I pay for 3Mb/s cable modem access, for something no faster than about a 38400-baud modem. No thanks, losers.
• The ringtones are too soft. All the ringers are too soft, in my opinion. Most of the time, that’s good, since I don’t need the thing playing the theme from “The Greatest American Hero” (Sarah’s personal ringtone) at 110 decibels while I’m at, say, the proctologist, but when I’m driving in my car and singing along with “My Sweet Escape” by Gwen Stefani, I usually can’t hear it. Which of course is when wives, when they are pregnant, go into labor. (Note: HW is NOT currently pregnant, for which she thanks Baby Jesus.)
• This is a biggie: the stupid side button keyguard is set up in the most ridiculous possible way. The phone, like many others, has little buttons on the side that perform a variety of tasks, like controlling volume, scrolling through the phonebook, and, while the phone is closed, activating the speaker phone and dialing the most recent number. Since I keep my phone in my pocket, and since I wear very, very tight pants, this is bad, because if I don’t turn on the keyguard the phone continually dials people, the end result of which is my father-in-law saying “hello? hello?” over and over again to my junk.

  Not cool.

  You’d think you could just set the keyguard and not have a problem, but get this: you can disable the keyguard by just holding the button down long enough. Which happens at least twice a week because, as I mentioned, I WEAR TIGHT PANTS. (Everything’s tight when you are 45% ass.) This is the major flaw in the phone, in my opinion; I’m hoping they issue a firmware patch that allows you to completely disable the side buttons when the phone is closed.

Final verdict? A solid B+, which is far better than any other phone I’ve had. (The last phone probably started out a B and ended up as an F———— because by the end it didn’t actually function as a phone; it was more like a $30 a month pocket watch.)

Walking through my local Acme on Monday, I discovered that, of all things, they were selling Ducklings. 5 pounders. On sale for $1.99 a pound. I was like, whaaaaaaa?
I have a more or less permanent craving for duck, and have always wanted to make it myself, but never found a place that sold it (I guess I could check a local butcher, but there’s not one that’s at all convenient). I consider it rather a gourmet item, so finding it Acme seemed incongruous; I half expected to find, I dunno, bricks of foie gras or something nearby.

Anyway, I grabbed me one and brought it home. Sarah was out with Charles, having dinner with friends, so I had plenty of time; I made a nice brine, pulled all the giblets out of the bird, and threw that puppy in there for a good soak. Mmmm…sugar salt water. While that sat outside in the snow to keep things from getting too bacteria-y, I worked in the garage building a custom-sized baby gate for our main staircase, which is only 5 steps high but 48″ wide, and all the pre-made gates that fit that size and were hinged were going to run us $60 and I said HA HA to that. HA.

After a couple hours, I covered the bird in salt and pepper, sliced up the skin a bit to promote rendering and tasty browning, and threw it into a 400 degree oven to try and get me a nice crispy skin. After about 20 minutes, the skin was sort of bubbling, but not yet brown; I lowered the temperature a bit and put my probe thermometer in the thigh.

After an hour or so, it started beeping. I was like, wait what? I thought this thing would take 2, maybe three hours. Nay nay, apparently. The skin was still kinda squishy, but I’m not terribly picky, so I cut in, and was nearly bathed in dark red liquid. Ummm…yeah, done my fat pink booty. Back into the oven it went, and I upped the temperature to 500 to try and crispify things.

5 minutes later….beep beep beep! What the hell. I got out my instant-read thermometer, though, and everything said 165, which admittedly is lower than the 180 demanded by the government, but if I did everything the government said I’d have a lot fewer hobo bodies under my floorboards. There was still red liquid, but I said to myself, hey, this is duck. Not nasty salmonella-y chicken. I’m gonna eat it.

And I did. And I’m still alive! It was delicious, although the skin needed way more crispitude. Next time: I’m just gonna let that bastard broil.

Just a few short notes for today:

• They still haven’t plowed my neighborhood, and so now the ice has sublimated and refrozen and is perfectly slick. I basically sledded out to the main highway today. Note that the 1998 Mazda Protege is NOT equipped with runners. I’d make some calls, but you know me, I don’t like to create a fuss. Plus I have a sneaking suspicion the guy in our neighborhood who is in charge of such things has probably taken 37 calls on the subject and might strangle me through the phone if I call him up and employ Sarcasm. So I’m gonna let it slide. For now. Unless I’m driving home with my son and I slide into a parked car at 5mph.
• My homeskillets Ped and Andy have started themselves a blog in which they intend to ridicule all things artsy. I fully support this, and not just because I’ve known the two of them for like 8,000 years.

  In fact, it’s an odd story, woven through the millenia: I knew Ped when I was like 8 or something, in public school. I think we ran across each other in Math League every year all through middle school and high school. Andrew I knew because we were in band in high school, but he also may have done dorky science and math stuff with me before then. And then we were all in the Ychromes together in college. Delaware is a small place.

  Anyway, check out their site, it’s highly amusing.

• I’m setting myself up for a serious amount of abuse here, but on the advice of my attorney Josh, I have invested in a neti pot. The idea, and this is really gross, is that you make a saline solution, and then you pour it into one nostril while it drains out of the other one. Then you switch nostrils. It’s very new age. It cleans out your sinuses, and then you get to spend a few minutes spraying water out of your snozz and spitting out nasty wet loogies.

  It’s almost as fun as it sounds, but I can report that my sinuses are so clear it’s disturbing. I’ve used it twice a day for about 3 days (although not this morning, ’cause I was in a hurry, yo) and have achieved major awesome results. There are downsides, however:

  1. The sensation of water pouring into your sinuses and back out the other nostril is pretty disturbing. It goes against all my principles of “avoiding sinus burn in the pool.” Doesn’t burn a bit, though, unless you’re an idiot and double the amount of salt in the solution.
  2. Sometimes the saline gets sort of trapped in your sinuses, and you can’t really feel it in there, then later on, you bend over for some reason, such as to kiss your wife, and salt water pours out of your nose all over, say, your wife’s face. Her response to this may be unpleasant.

  Still, it’s given me a reasonably clear schnozz for the last few days, and I’m looking forward to finding out if it improves my singing noticeably.

I didn’t watch the Grammys (Grammies? I personally despise making it plural via adding an apostrophe (as in, “Grammy’s”) because that makes Baby Jesus cry) last night, so I don’t really have anything important to say. Apparently the Police got back together, which is pretty awesome, but I missed it because I was asleep, because I had a DEVASTATING WEEKEND OF FUN. More on that later. What’s important is that the Police played, but Juliet Huddy reported on FOX this morning that it seemed kinda boring, and we listen to everything she says because she is hot.

Re: weekend of fun: I was hella busy all weekend. I covered oncall Friday night, and then Saturday morning rode with Craig down to DC to meet Some Boyz for a Bachelor Fiesta! We started out at the ESPN Zone, or rather most of us did; Kyle and I trotted over to the Verizon nee MCI center to see about hockey tickets. They had none cheaper than $90, so we laughed heartily and said, dang. So much for hockey.

BUT! Kyle, being heck of inventive, called his wife, and got her out of the shower to get online and search for tickets for us. She found some via a place called StubHub, which turned out to have a location very near the arena, so she put the tickets on Kyle’s credit card and all was gravy. After Kyle got off the phone with her, he turned to me and said:

“I’m pretty sure she bought those tickets while naked.”

“I’m going to be thinking about that all game. Thanks!”

“Me too, man.”

I’m glad we were able to get seats, since our backup plan was to get tickets to the International Spy Museum, which was also nearby. Instead, we went back to the ESPN Zone and watched sports for roughly 4 hours while I drank martinis. THEN: To the arena!

I’ve been to many hockey arenas in my time (okay, 4) and I’ve never yet come across one that sells anything but overpriced beer, but let me tell you, The Verizon nee MCI Center has a bar. That sells gin. So I bought two. I’ve never been so happy at a sporting event since, and this is a hilarious story that I like to tell, I was at a Virginia Tech @ Rutgers football game with Kyle and Hiz Crew O’ Mizfitz, and I bought 4 large hot dogs. I got to my seat, ate two hot dogs, and then they played the national anthem so I stood up and removed my hat, then sat back down on the bleacher and watched the first few minutes of the game. After a little while, I said, “Man, those hot dogs were good. I wish I had more.” Only then did I remember that I had NOT eaten them all, and in fact had two more sitting immediately to my right. It was like Baby Jesus had shown a bright light of love down on me, in the middle of all that chaos.

Buying gin at a hockey game is very similar. Cost me $8 per drink, but that wasn’t much worse than the beers (I later paid $14 for two Michelob Ultras, which are notable for two things:

1. They are somewhat low carb (although not much lower than Miller Lite, to be honest), and
2. They have a taste that is surprisingly reminiscent of what the water from your well would taste like if your septic system started leaking into it.)

The game wasn’t memorable; there were a couple of fights, which is always fun, but it was hard to see what was happening since we were in the absolute last row of the place. Seriously. I’ve never been so far away from a sporting event and still had to pay $40 to see it. The Capitals lost.

Then we went back to Barrett’s (the emphasis is on the first syllable, which is much more manly than if he’d been named after a hair clip) for poker, at which I won everybody’s money. This was doubly frustrating for Kyle because

• I am not known for my poker-playing prowess, because I have all the patience of a fat kid in a chocolate factory, and
• I was WILDLY inebriated.

Then Craig drove me home, which was kind of him since I fell asleep once he was safely on the interstate.

The next day I got up, on about 4 hours of sleep, and had to go to church, then play in a piano recital for schoolchildren (it wasn’t a COMPLETE embarrassment), and then sing a short concert to benefit a Quaker school.

Then I came home and played with my son for a while because he was driving Sarah insane; he can now crawl rather expertly, and his desire to put the entire world in his mouth is unabated. This results in us having to grab him every 10 minutes and pull things out of his mouth, things like paper, foam torn from the upholstery of an old chair, cat fur, cat tails, wires (oh, how he loves electrical wires), cat food, carpet fibers, and Sarah’s toes. Sarah had been doing this, with small breaks for sleep, for 36 hours, and so I took over for a while so that she’d stop making her head spin around like she does. (She’s been fighting a flu/cold combination for about a week now and the pressure is starting to tell.)

And then I slept for about 11 straight hours, which might have been the highlight of the weekend if I hadn’t had to go to work in the morning.

Okay, so uh, what’s in the news? Apparently that girl Anna Nicole Smith died, but I joked about that yesterday. (Was it too soon? The response I got from the interwebs was cold, to say the least.) There’s some banshee crazy astronaut ho that drove from Texas to Florida in DIAPERS to kidnap and likely kill her romantic rival. Apparently she wore diapers so she wouldn’t have to make unnecessary stops, but here’s the thing:

Distance she drove: about 950 miles.

Distance most cars can go before they need to stop for refueling: 350 miles.

So she had to stop AT least twice to get gas; would it be that out of the question to maybe take 5 minutes to whiz while the gas is pumping? Here’s the lesson I have learned: women are crazy.

What else? The weather has been making up for lost time; it hasn’t been above freezing, as far as I can tell, in like 6 days. I can’t say I’m sad about it, since I enjoy me some cold weather, but I’d like to have a good dose of 8″ of snow to go along with it and make it impossible for me to drive to work. They say we’re supposed to get snow on Tuesday, we’ll see how it goes.

I’m low-carbing it again, but it doesn’t appear to be working as well this time, probably because I’m screwing it up. It’s not my fault! People keep making me pies! I need to get on my bike some more and see if that helps force the old belly into “ketosis,” which apparently is what they call it when your body starts burning your fat for energy. I fully support the burning of fat; I am, at last check, roughly 85% fat myself. Maybe self-immolation is the answer…I’ll look into it.

Speaking of death-wishes, Charles has been crawling for a few weeks now, and has developed quite an interest in flinging himself down the steps into the foyer. So far I’ve caught him before he does so, but we need gates; a friend of ours is going to lend us some, but I’ve yet to go pick them up, so I guess I’d better do that. You know, before my son lands nose-first on cold, unforgiving ceramic tile.

As you can probably tell, I really don’t have anything of any interest to share with you, so I’ll just point you to Vinegar Man-Douche and let you have your own fun.

I love cars. Also, I hate cars. Or rather, I love cars that work or can be easily diagnosed and fixed, and hate cars that defy all attempts to repair them. At the moment, my Bomb@ZZ whip, the venerable Izzy B, has but one functioning brake light. The one in the rear-view window. I guess that’s better than none, but try to tell that to the guys at the Motor Vehicle Inspection Lanes. I did. They weren’t terribly amused. I’m assuming all the carbon monoxide has destroyed their senses of humor.

Anyway, I went to Pep Boys to get new bulbs for the brake lights. But Pep Boys had none. So I went to ANOTHER Pep Boys, which had them. I installed them. No change. So I bought some new fuses and tried those. No change. So I kicked the car and threatened to bring wrath upon it. No change.

I gave up after that, but the long and short of it is that I have a car with fewer then the recommended number of brake lights and my registration expires in three weeks. CAN MATT GET THE CAR REPAIRED IN THREE WEEKS, GIVEN HIS BUSY SCHEDULE? STAY TUNED!

Oh, and go here and check out a bunch of crappy pictures I took of Ye Olde Newe Castlee last month.

Okay, we’re back to a more normal schedule, I think. There were much goings-on over the weekend, particularly a cold-weather golf tournament (our second year!) of which I have many pictures, some of Milo‘s backswing, some that Milo took of my butt. I’ll get all that stuff posted probably tomorrowish, or Wednesday, or probably some time before 2008.

In the meanwhile, I started a gallery where I can upload my various efforts at photography, which so far contains just the one album of recent shots. I plan to get most of the New Castle shots up ins if I can figure out a way to batch process them (they start out as 3MB photos and I need to chop them down to 1MB or so before uploading, or the gallery prog won’t be able to handle them, and also I’d wipe out my online webspace in a matter of days; the problem is that there are over 200 of them and I’d like to shrink them in one big process rather than loading each picture into photoshop, resizing and saving it, etc.).

I also uploaded some new stuff to Charles’s site last week, make sure you don’t miss that.

USELESS NOTE: I am aware that the general form of my page is still Christmasy. I shall endeavour to update it this evening.

Don’t worry, I’m alive. I got roped into a last minute business trip, one of those deals in which I work about 40 hours in 2 days. Which I did. Got home early Wednesday morning and crashed like Billy Joel’s car.

Woo. I need another nap. More later.

And…woot.

We had a nice loooong weekend. In honor of the commencement of my 30th year (for those of you who are math-dumb, this means that I have just turned 29 and am thusly awesome), I took Friday and Monday off, and we drove to Richmond to be one with our Virginian pepys.

‘Cause they smell rather iffy.

The drive down was a breeze, since I got paged for something and our 6pm ETD got pushed back to 8pm. By that time, of course, there was simply nobody on the road, aside from a bunch of trucks, and the usual idiots sitting in the left lane holding up the works. I guess that means there WERE people on the road. However, they were very few, and dammit I STAND BY MY HYPERBOLE.

We arrived late, which didn’t prevent us from shooting the shiz with Kyle and Kris, having a few drinks, making Charles stay up WAAAAAY past his bedtime, etc. In our defense, he was about as interested in sleeping as I was in getting up at the asscrack of dawn on Saturday for work (more on this later), but we finally got him down to sleep.

We awoke on Friday to the plaintive cries of our firstborn, softly murmuring for mother’s milk. Ha ha! Just kidding. He woke us up at 6:45am by sitting up in his crib and talking at us at the top of his lungs. Here is the gist of what he said:

Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba wa wa wa wooooooo ba ba ba bla bloo blaa wooo!

Translation:

What are you idiots still doing in bed? The sun’s almost up, and I’m famished! Additionally, I just dropped a deuce big enough to feed a family of five.

We gave him a bottle to gnaw on and attempted to sleep, but his constant yammering (I don’t know where he gets this from) caused me to bring him downstairs so he wouldn’t wake up everybody else. We watched Kyle’s enormous TV and chewed on various things.

That day, we mostly sat around and cogitated (and took roughly three million pictures with my new camera), but eventually we did go out that evening to celebrate my birthday, during which I drank many beers and ate a piece of prime rib the size of my head. It was excellent.

Saturday was spent preparing for the bridal shower, which mostly meant grabbing Charles and ducking for cover. In the afternoon approximately every woman in the Commonwealth of Virginia descended on the house, so the boys, sans Charles, hightailed it for lunch and bowling. We played three games; in order, my scores were: Not Good; Slightly Better; and Surprisingly Good, Considering I Had Switched To A 12 Pound Ball And Was Just Screwing Around Trying To Throw The Most Devastating Spin I Could Muster. I kinda “found the range” with my spin and was knocking down pins like cuh-RAZAY, and so have decided I need to buy an actual bowling ball and practice this further. I haven’t told Sarah of this decision yet, mostly because I just dropped nearly a grand on a camera and accessories, so any further purchases must be approved by She Who Would Clothespin My Dong To A Bicycle (As If It Were A Baseball Card) If I Didn’t Keep An Eye On It.

The gals planned to go out to dinner, so the guys had to come home and entertain Charles for a few hours, after which the girls returned and kicked us out again so they could have a Bachelorette party and watch Carmen Electra Strip Tease Workout videos. (Seriously. I couldn’t have been more thrilled when we came back and discovered them all practicing with chairs and poles and things. Most of us wept a little bit, and I took some pictures that will never see the light of Internets if I ever want to have more children.)

Sunday was my birthday, so I got up and hung out with Charles while Sarah slept in. This may not make sense to you, but it sums up our marriage dynamic rather tidily. (Just kidding, honey! Put down the pliers!) Around 11am, we were watching some NFL pre-game TV when Kyle noticed it was snowing. Neato!

Around noon, Mel and Craig (who were also down for the weekend) skedaddled north. Team Hearn needed to be in DC by around 3pm for the first birthday of another of our friends’ childrenz, so we had the car completely loaded up when Craig called to alert us that the roads north of town were icing up, full of traffic, and basically at a standstill. So, Sarah and I got into HearnHuddle^TM and decided that we would wait out the precipitation and traffic. This meant that we would have to miss the birthday party, but it also meant that I didn’t have to fight through heavy, sleety traffic on my birthday, which would have caused me great angst and possibly forced me to develop a small nuclear program.

It also meant that we were able to watch both Conference Championship football games, which was nice too. Yay for Peyton Manning finally coming up big.

We ended up getting on the road about 10:30pm, and sure enough, there wasn’t much traffic. The roads were still slick, though, particularly just north of DC where apparently no salting was being done and there was a good inch of slush on the road. This slowed all the cars down to 35mph, but seemed to have no effect on the heavy eighteen-wheelers, all of which were blowing by us at 50-plus. Coupled with the fact that you couldn’t see any lines on the road, I spent a fair amount of time praying to God to spare us and, if He had to, kill one of the other families in our stead.

I just made one stop to drain the main vein, and we made it home around 2:30am. Since I had yesterday off, I was then able to sleep until about 10am and it was SO AWESOME. Then I did some computery things and took my camera over to Old New Castle to take some pictures which I plan to edit a bit and post later this week. (Don’t worry, I don’t intend to turn this into a Photography blog, because photos aren’t especially funny (with obvious exceptions), and my purpose in life is to make you giggle until you pee and ruin your best work pants.)

AND THAT WAS MY LONG WEEKEND. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much I enjoyed doing it, except for the driving in the slush with maniacal 18-wheelers part, because I enjoyed that not at all.