Where I Am: The Living Room

What I’m Doing: Tucking Bowser in for the night

When we first got Bowser, he slept in the kitchen in a bed in a cage (with its door open). We didn’t want to give him free range in the house because of what he might do while we slept.

Like any parent, we eventually grew lazy and soft. We brought the bed out into the living room and let him roam as much as he wanted around that part of the house. We kept (and keep) the gate blocking off our hallway so he can’t come to our bedroom door to annoy us while we sleep.

As soon as he was strong enough to jump up on the couch on his own, he made it his new bed. The cage is gone now, donated to an animal shelter (or maybe we threw it out. I think we’ll stick with the nobler one) and so is the bed that was in it.

We’ve got two fuzzy red blankets and he makes a cocoon out of them for his bed.

I’m helping him along here.

permalink January 16, 2007 at 11:59 am · Filed under Failed 2007 365 Project

Where I Am: Twin Peaks (actually the parking lot of a Staples in Yonkers, NY)

What I’m Doing: Taking a crappy photograph and not noticing

Since this is the only picture I took yesterday, it is, by default, my picture for the day.

This is all the sun had to offer for 3:30 in the afternoon. It’s a beautiful day for an accidental murder in the Arctic Circle.

Well, it’s mostly official: my ring is gone. We took out the seats and tore apart the upholstery to no avail.

I’ve already been shot down on my suggestion of a Lord of the Rings replacement. Lisa’s only other requirement for the new ring is that it’s bought soon.

Time to go see if gold decoder rings are available for overnight shipping.

permalink January 15, 2007 at 8:50 am · Filed under Failed 2007 365 Project

Where I Am: On the couch

What I’m Doing: Shamefully staging a photo. Mission accomplished!

The dog actually fell asleep while I was pretending to be asleep. It makes the photo all the more adorable.

The calm in this picture says nothing of the whirlwind of activity in my house in the past few weeks. The whole damn thing is in upheaval.

The main bathroom has been entirely redone: new bathtub, new toilet, new sink, new tiling. Soon, there’ll be a new floor to go with it.

The kitchen has been repainted, the counters have been removed in preparation for new countertops. New cabinets have been installed, giving us something to do with the left side of the kitchen other than a repository for dog waste. We’ll have new appliances within the next few months.

The entire living room has been rearranged and rewired. All of the electronics have been moved to the other side of the room. The bedsheet formerly serving as the screen for my projector has been replaced by an actual screen.

There’s a giant tapestry of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle hanging over my bed now.

Little things have changed, too. All the doorknobs in the house have been changed, so now we can lock each other out of rooms temporarily during fights. The knobs and handles on every folding door and cabinet have been replaced. The decorations for both bathrooms have been put in place after months of storage.

The constant change has put us in a few awkward positions.

For one, when the tub was removed, xmas weekend hit before the new tub could be installed. This left us with a pipe sticking out of the wall at the level of the tub spout. We showered in the squatting position for the long weekend (and the two sick days the guys installing it took afterwards) which is every bit as pleasant as it sounds.

I’m not as comfortable with change as I thought I was. Well, to be fair, it’s more the prospect of change that has me constantly second-guessing the wisdom of what we’re doing. When actual change occurs I embrace it and welcome even more in its direction. I just hem and haw when it comes to getting a project like this started. I think the problem is that what “this” refers to is interchangeable with too many things in my life.

permalink January 14, 2007 at 3:48 am · Filed under Failed 2007 365 Project

Where I Am: In my semi-newly painted kitchen

What I’m Doing: Something previously thought impossible

This photo is not photoshopped in any way. I am actually working to improve my home.

This is above and beyond the standard cleaning and maintenance required of me. If you asked Lisa she would tell you that I do not clean around the house and in fact make it messier just by my mere presence. I am, in her eyes, some horrible progeny of Pigpen and the Tasmanian Devil, leaving destruction and a thin veneer of filth in my wake. While I do have a propensity to take a few shortcuts now and then, I do more than my fair share of cleaning around the house. Lisa is currently running a scam in which she asks me to cook/clean as a favor to her since her back/shoulder/neck/ass hurts or since she worked all day. This may seem perfectly harmless but the scam part is that she has rerouted her neural network so that any favor asked of me performed in her stead is actually a check in her column, not mine, and in arguments she can still claim that I don’t do anything around the house.

This, however, is an entirely different matter. We’re currently renovating the kitchen and just had the walls and the cabinets painted. I’m installing new handles on the cabinets, brushed metal affairs that, combined with the new cabinet colors, give the room a lot more light, unlike the old cabinets and handles which were composed mainly of dark matter.

The odd position I find myself in is that, while I wasn’t really behind this whole project at the start, now I’m invested in seeing it to completion. Details that before went unnoticed now stand out like a sore thumb. The old rangehood now looks like it travelled through time from the 50s in order to spy on our kitchen. The refrigerator and dishwasher, previously given a passing grade, could now be mistaken as items salvaged from a shipwreck. The oven, already slated for removal and replacement, lends the cheery air of a man marked for death. I’m honestly thinking thoughts like “Man, I can’t wait to see what the new countertops look like. I can feel my testicles straining to escape their confines to seek greener pastures.

I’m not as in love with the new wall color as I am with the cabinets. It’s not so much a dislike as a not-used-to-it-yet. It’s a striking change from the half-Lassie-era wallpaper, half-bare, crumbling wall motif we had going. The color’s been compared to a blue found mostly in aquariums and I couldn’t muster a compelling argument to the contrary. There’s nothing particularly wrong with aquariums. I just don’t cook a lot of fish.

My living room is painted a blood red so deep that I’m surprised some enterprising goth didn’t snatch the place up before we did. It somehow brings a warmth to the room as well as a “Hey, strangely that looks nice” reaction from everyone upon first seeing it. I’m sure the previous owners had the same reaction as we’re having to our kitchen when they changed their living room from some neutral, inoffensive color, to it looking as if the elevator doors from the Shining had opened in their living room.

permalink January 13, 2007 at 3:45 am · Filed under Failed 2007 365 Project

Where I Am: In my Car, in the Bronx

What I’m Doing: Fulfilling a request of my crazy wife

There’s going to be days where nothing interesting happens. I’m sure there will be a lot of those days.

My main concern when taking this picture was to fulfil a wish made by Lisa: that in one of my many boring car shots I highlight her first ever gift to me, the Love Monkeys.

Actually, I don’t think that it was the first gift she gave to me. That may have been the Donald Duck lunchbox filled with pictures of a fetal scrotum (which I cannot differentiate from all the other swiling gray masses but which she assures me is quite prominent. She’s an ultrasound technician, which makes the act of obtaining these pictures far less creepy but not the intent behind them).

While that lunchbox is tucked away in the closet of things-we’ll-eventually-unpack, the Love Monkeys have had a home in my car and the car I had before this one (both Ford Tauruses because I am, at heart, 90 years old) and will continue to make their lovenest in my vehicles until someone vomits on them.

They’ve got a card attached full of inside jokes we no longer have. It’s like our love had a yearbook and she signed it.

permalink January 12, 2007 at 11:40 pm · Filed under Failed 2007 365 Project

Where I Am: In my newly painted kitchen

What I’m Doing: Looking Short, Failing to set up a Good Eats-style shot

I spent a good 5 minutes trying to set up a Good Eats-esque "inside the cabinet" shot but gave up and settled on this. This is actually my first reshoot since the project started, since the photo I had settled on earlier in the day was kind of a letdown when uploaded to the computer. I still had some time left in the day, so I decided to snap some shots of myself in my newly painted kitchen.

It’s dramatically different. Everything’s much lighter and less ancient-looking. I don’t know the exact names of the colors Lisa picked, but the cabinets are essentially cream-colored and the walls are a blue/green type color that actually looks better than I thought it would. You can kinda see it in the picture.

All the cabinets and drawers are open in my kitchen and the light fixture is hanging down from the ceiling so all the paint can dry properly. I’m not sure if it’s going to be Lisa or I who incurs the first massive headwound.

permalink January 11, 2007 at 11:53 pm · Filed under Failed 2007 365 Project

Where I Am: Lisa’s Makeup Table

What I’m Doing: Wallowing in my Dumbassitude

Perhaps it would have been better to write it backwards, like the writing on the front of ambulances, so that the message scrawled on my forehead served not only to warn others of what I am but also to remind me that I am, indeed, a dumbass.

I’m pointing to that finger because that was the finger my wedding ring used to be on. I think. I’m such a dumbass that I’m unsure if I’m pointing to the correct finger or even the correct hand. There’s no convenient matted hair or skanky yet strangely enticing smell left marking the spot like when my watch comes off. My hand’s just a little bit lighter.

You see, I’ve lost my wedding ring.

My fingers have always been skeleton-like, with the bone wearing the flesh and muscle only out of a sense of duty and not because it feels like it’s fooling anyone. Somehow when I lost weight again after the wedding, my fingers got a bit thinner as well and my ring became loose. It wasn’t always loose, but when it was it would come flying off my hand with the slightest gesture. This was the case when I lost it.

I was shuffling around some banking as I waited in my car at the drive-up teller. My ring flew off and I didn’t see where. I got out of the car, carefully scanning the ground to make sure it hadn’t landed on me and subsequently fallen off me outside the car. I poured over the car’s interior and did once again when I got back to the office. I pulled up the driver’s side upholsetery to see if the ring had somehow magically seeped through the chair cover. It hadn’t.

So now I’m ringless. Lisa and I are both taking it in strides. It’s upsetting, but nothing too earthshattering. Hopefully, once I remove my car seats, I’ll find the damn thing.

I hope.

permalink January 10, 2007 at 11:34 pm · Filed under Failed 2007 365 Project

Where I Am: My house, in our dining room

What I’m Doing: Demonstrating what a normal head looks like when compared to my Easter Island-esque cranium

This marks the first appearance of my beautiful wife, Lisa, who complained of not being included in any of my photos despite the fact that there were only 8 taken. I’m honored that someone else besides me would show interest in this project, but mostly I’m relieved that at least there won’t be 365 poorly staged and photographed pictures centered on my big, fat, lonely head.

We are not dwarfs. Well, at least I’m not. I’m sitting on a chair in front of our kitchen counter and Lisa is hunched over beside me. When she stands upright she’s a little over 14 inches tall, so the angle is not as deceiving as one would think.

The reason we are sitting in front of our kitchen sink is, besides the fact that I needed a picture that wasn’t of me just standing around being uninteresting (which, it can be argued, I am doing here in a sitting position), that the template for the new counters are being done tomorrow and thus the old countertops have been relocated to a far less useful location.

The entire process of replacing the countertops seems designed to be inconvenient. The old countertops must be removed before the templating can be done (a process wherein cardboard is laid out on top of the cabinets and then cut to match its shape, which seems like a technique invented in Medieval monastery that remains unchanged to this day) and there’s a two week period during which the new counters are fabricated and you’re left counterless in the meantime. It’s like our kitchen appliances have been run out of town and set up a refugee camp on our dining room table.

We’re left without a kitchen sink (but still have a functioning dishwasher) as a result of this and thus will be doing the bulk of our dining for the next two weeks off of plastic. This is funny because Lisa has been trying to pawn off plastic dinnerware on me since New Year’s to get rid of the leftovers from the party and now, when we actually need and want to use it, we’ll have to buy more, which comes in party-sized quantities, so that the vicious cycle will continue long after the new cabinets are installed. I imagine I will be able to see through my cutlery well past Easter.

Today was my grandfather’s birthday, the first since he passed away last year. We headed down to my grandmother’s house to keep her company (and keep her mind off things) where we joined a crapload of people: my sisters Lizzie & Patti, my brother Mikey, as well as my Uncles Chris, Frankie, Eddie, Richie and John, my Aunts Carol, Patti, Danielle, Renee and Debbie and my cousins Frankie, Frankie (a third one), Danny, Kayla, Kelly, Angie, Tori, Chris and Skylar. That’s nowhere near close to a full house in my family, in fact it was a small gathering if anything.

Deja and Reg were nice enough to take care of Bowser when they got home and when we returned we went over to their house. They’re recently engaged and have just begun the wonderfully arduous and hate-inducing task of planning their wedding. There’s no visible bruising so unless they’ve gone at each other with wire hangers and phone books, they’ve managed to keep their fighting to a minimum, most likely because they’ve got a full two years to build up the kind of intense loathing for each other that only a wedding can inspire. They spent their night at an overly-crowded Bridal Convention and were seriously considering ditching the traditional church-and-banquet-hall stuffiness that we tried to avoid and taking their act on the road to Vegas. Lisa and I, being the loving supportive friends that we are, wholeheartedly encouraged them to pursue this. We were in no way motivated by the mind-boggling amount of booze, strippers and other debauchery that such a wedding would no doubt involve, but instead were looking out for the best interests of our dearest friends. It wasn’t huge gyrating Asian dirty pillows at all. Just love.

I am not, as is visible to any and all who view these pictures, a professional photographer. I’m not even an amateur photographer. I fiddle around with the exposure as if I know what I’m doing, try to keep my hand from shaking too much and keep my thumb extended; that’s the extent of my mastery of the craft. This project has forced me to confront the fact that I take really uninteresting photos as a general rule, the kind you use as a springboard for the memories and not something that really captures a moment in time all by itself. It’s also forced me to rethink something that I’ve otherwise been fine with: I’m a boring homebody. I’m sure I’ll get a few great shots on the various vacations I’ll be taking this year (Disney World, Vegas, Europe, Lake George) but if I don’t want 95% of my photos to be pictures of my head in one of the 7 rooms of my condo (eight if you count the hallway!) I’m going to have to get out more and learn to use my camera.

Let’s see how that goes. Don’t hold your breath.

permalink January 10, 2007 at 4:57 am · Filed under Failed 2007 365 Project

Where I Am: In my Living Room

What I’m Doing: Waiting on Hold with Nintendo, Bottling my Anger and Disappointment so That I’llBe Satiated by Well Wishes and Two Copies of Nintendo Power

A Wii has been returned to me. Not my Wii. But a Wii nonetheless.

All my save files, Virtual Console games and Miis are gone.

It won’t be very fun playing through those grueling first two hours of Twilight Princess again and all my Miis are a shadow of their former selves, as if I’m in a Twilight Zone episode where I wake up and everything is just different enough that I might be in an alien zoo.

I did learn that the Virtual Console is linked to your account (which they did transfer) and that all your games have permanent licenses associated with them. If, say, I delete a game to make room for whatever, I can redownload that title whenever I like.

That tidbit was not enough to make things right.

permalink January 9, 2007 at 3:28 am · Filed under Failed 2007 365 Project

Where I Am: Laying on my couch in my living room

What I’m Doing: Holding my beloved Gears of War, hiding both my double chin and the fact I’m wearing the same shirt as yesterday with varying degrees of success

This may be a bit premature. After all, our relationship just got started and we’ve only been together a few times. I can’t help it, it feels so right:

I love the Xbox 360.

It’s a beautiful machine that fulfills needs I didn’t know I had. The atrocious online offerings of the PS2, combined with the meager online setup on the DS, the virtually non-existent presence on the Gamecube and the fact that no one had the Xbox Live service on the original Xbox but me (and I didn’t care to get my ass kicked by strange 12 year olds) led me to believe that an online-integrated console was something I could easily do without. That’s still true, but now that I’ve seen what Xbox Live is capable of it makes other console’s online offerings ludicrous and arcane.

To whit: I was playing Gears of War and little icon popped on the bottom of the screen informing me that my brother had sent me a video message. I was able to, with the click of a single button, pause the game, go to a screen where the message (and others) was waiting for me. I played the video (my clearly annoyed mother not understanding what he was having her do), replied with audio using the supplied headset, then went back to my game. It was seamless.

Relating this kind of thing is what would get me called a “fag n00b” (I assume the 1337 speak is implied although it is spoken and not typed) by the aforementioned 12 year olds but it was truly a mind-altering experience. Wii’s messageboard seems quaint in comparison, the equivalent of having the walk out to my mailbox in the snow as opposed to opening an email.

The gamerscore is a very bad thing indeed. My penis is a many splendid thing but it is challenged against all reason by the fact that I haven’t unlocked as many achievements in Hexic as someone else. I spent a good 90 hours of my life completing Jiminy’s Journal in Kingdom Hearts 2, so the mindless and infuriating grinding required of me in order to unlock all the achievements in Pacman is something I can, sadly, see myself doing in the near future.

Enough of how wonderful the Xbox 360 is, as I’m sure I will return to it in the future. This should be about Gears of War and how much I love it.

As a general rule, I suck at First Person Shooters. There’s something about the wiring in my brain that craves the split-second jumping required in a platformer but can’t aim worth a damn when it comes to the FPS. My thumb does not want to comply even when the enemy is centered on the screen. In the Doom-like FPS where the confrontations are basically face-to-face stand-offs between you and the enemy, I lose. Gears of War emphasizes cover, something that vastly improves my chances. I have time to get my bearings, work out a strategy, and, thankfully, aim properly whenever I encounter an enemy. When I die, I usually deserve it. That’s something I can’t say about most other FPS games.

The game has an amazing momentum to it. There’s no break in the story, you just continue through the story. There’s no feedback as to how many headshots you’ve made, what you’re accuracy is, and a constant stream of C- level completion ratings. You survived, and that’s all that really matters. The game moves on.

The only snag was the vehicle level where I picked up the junker. The vehicle itself brought the game to a complete halt. Although the controls on the vehicle were tight, the entire ordeal was just annoying. It was night and you had to stop the vehicle every so often to shoot these tiny bat-like enemies that were as black as the sky and who would come at you from all directions. Your only clue as to where they were coming from would be a teammate shouting something like “6 o’clock!” a split second before they attacked. I got through the thing in one try and it still left a bad taste in my mouth.

The game demands my attention in an all-consuming way that won’t jibe with regular, nightly play. I do have a wife and, as he constantly reminded me by jumping into my face when I was playing, a new puppy to take care of. The weekends however…DIE LOCUST SCUM!

permalink January 8, 2007 at 11:49 pm · Filed under Failed 2007 365 Project