June 2003 Archives

Just got this in my inbox today...email addresses deleted to protect the not-so-innocent:

Date: Fri, 27 Jun 03 02:52:28 GMT
From: [vernon.chapman@...]
To: greenone@...
Subject: Dimensional warp generator Needed k vlorxce

Greetings,

We need a vendor who can offer immediate supply.
I'm offering $5,000 US dollars just for referring a vender which is
(Actually RELIABLE in providing the below equipment) Contact details
of vendor required, including name and phone #. If they turn out to be
reliable in supplying the below equipment I'll immediately pay you
$5,000. We prefer to work with vendor in the Boston/New York area.

1. The mind warper generation 4 Dimensional Warp Generator # 52 4350a
series wrist watch with z60 or better memory adapter. If in stock the
AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction
motor, two I80200 warp stabilizers, 256GB of SRAM, and two Analog
Devices isolinear modules, This unit also has a menu driven GUI
accessible on the front panel XID display. All in 1 units would be
great if reliable models are available

2. The special 23200 or Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor
with built in temporal displacement. Needed with complete
jumper/auxiliary system

3. A reliable crystal Ionizor with unlimited memory backup.

If your vendor turns out to be reliable, I owe you $5,000.

Email his details to me at: info@...

Please do not reply directly back to this email as it will
only be bounced back to you.

So of course, among the plethora of questions that this email induced in my mind, first and foremost was this:

Does anyone actually have one? Because I'm thinking we could split the 5 grand. Maybe we can make like Doc Brown in "Back To The Future" and give them an bomb casing filled with used pinball machine parts. I could sure use the money...

The road trip has always been an integral part of who I am. I'm sure everyone knows someone who will just take off at the drop of a hat and just drive hundreds of miles to go see something or someone. I suppose it's appropriate that I embark on a month or so of heavy road-tripping a couple of weeks after the passing of one of the people who's probably most responsible for my traveling ways.

My mother's parents are probably the most well-traveled people I know. My uncle Peter may be the one who moved to Australia after he graduated college, but my grandparents have gone to visit them several times. They've seen every state in the US, quite a few countries in Europe, and have even traveled to Asia and northern Africa (I think). And they've got the pictures and film to prove it. One of my favorite and most recent memories of my grandparents was going down to their house with the whole family last year and helping them drag out and set up the slide projector and movie screen. Their short-term memories may not have been good, but their recall of the details of a trip they took 30, 40 or 50 years ago was still fresh in their minds.

They passed the road-trip genes along to my mother, who took us around on many a trip while we were younger. "100 miles before breakfast!" was the oft-heard rallying cry, and we'd do 500 or 600 miles in a day without thinking twice. We drove to Florida and back a couple of times, to Illinois and back a few times, and one year they took five weeks off and drove cross-country, visiting national parks galore along the way. Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Zion, Bryce Canyon...I was a rather seasoned 11-year-old when we'd driven the last of the 8800+ miles.

It was only natural, of course, that I would want to put my own mark on the map, so once I got heavily into music, I started some trips of my own. The first one of any import was a Maine-Boston-Lake Placid-New York City run to catch three Blues Traveler shows at the end of 1996. After the Boston show we drove up to my friend's frat house at UVM and crashed on the floor of the common room. Before NYC we drove to his place in New Jersey and slept on the floor there as well. Sort of the "any port in a storm" mentality...the sleeping was secondary to just being on the road and seeing the show. Then my friend Steve conveniently had to return a car to a friend living in New Jersey in August of 1997, so we rode in style to see BT play with a symphonic orchestra in Holmdel, NJ. After I got my own car in the fall of that year, it was all over. Dozens of trips to Boston to visit my then-girlfriend, who was foolhardy enough to actually agree with me when I suggested we drive to Florida over Christmas break (I was teaching high school at the time) to see another Blues Traveler New Year's Eve extravaganza. Four of us crammed into a Celica - not small people, either - and I entrusted the last leg of the journey to a fellow fan who claimed he drove better while partaking of the sweet leaf. Hey, we were young and foolish then (we're old and foolish now, to quote They Might Be Giants). Since then, pretty much anything between Maine and Philadelphia has been fair game, and we've driven as far west as Binghamton, NY in search of another live show. And of course, we're not averse to boarding an airplane - off the eastern seaboard I've hit Michigan, Ohio, Colorado, California, Missouri, Kansas and probably some others I'm forgetting.

So this evening it's off to upstate New York. Next weekend it's off to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Then we fly out to Colorado to make my semi-annual pilgrimage to see Blues Traveler at Red Rocks. And finally, a mini-jaunt down to Maryland and Virginia to visit friends and see a couple more shows. And after that, who knows? Our road-tripping days are far from over...

Gerda Paula Holm Smith, my maternal grandmother, passed away on June 8th at the age of 90 years old. Gram, as we called her, was a wonderful, mischievous little woman who essentially did the best job anyone could do of being the ideal grandparent.

We went to her funeral last weekend, and it was really the first one of my adult life. I vaguely remember my paternal grandmother dying in 1986, but I was 11 at the time and we weren't as close to my father's side of the family as we were to my mother's side. I also had a classmate and neighbor who was killed in a boating accident a couple of months after we graduated from high school. It was a sad occasion, but not nearly as sad as I was expecting this funeral to be.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Visiting hours at the funeral home were on Sunday, and we arrived in time to be there for most of it. At the far end of the room was a bulletin board with all sorts of photos, old and recent, of Gram. Right in the middle was a big picture of her, dressed up and smiling. My mother pointed it out and asked me if I knew where it was. I shook my head, and she pointed out our old picnic table behind her - it was taken at my college graduation party.

In every single picture, she had just about the same smile on - a crinkly-eyed grin for the camera or a loving smile at her husband. They celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary not too long ago and were smiling the whole time. My favorite picture of her is actually from their 50th anniversary, in 1987. We had bought them a big bunch of silver and gold-colored balloons, and Grampa is off to one side, kind of looking around the side of them. Gram, on the other hand, has a fistful of them in her hand and is peeking between the strings with a big smile on her face. Other pictures of her had us sitting around a table playing pinochle - our game of choice at the Smith household - or sitting down at a big meal. There were very few pictures of her by herself, and I don't think there ARE all that many; she was always surrounded by family and friends.

The funeral itself was in the church that she had belonged to for 68 years. She and my grandfather had always been very involved in the church; he was actually the organist at not only his church but at several others in town (and as far afield as New York City, where he played for ten years) and she taught Sunday school for over 50 years. Truly a dedicated woman. But the most moving part of the entire service was the fact that my grandfather wanted no part of playing the grieving widow. He was amazingly serene the entire weekend, and it just seemed natural that he would continue his work at the church, and played all of the music during the 90-minute service, including duets with my mother and my uncle. Grampa never left his seat at the organ, and I don't remember seeing so much as a tear come to his eye. And the rest of us seemed to take a cue from him, instead remembering our grandmother happily and smiling quite often as we took comfort in the readings and the music.

I don't doubt for a minute that I'm going to miss Gram, but my memories of her - now even including the funeral - will be happy ones. Goodbye, Gram... here's two more kisses, one for each cheek.

"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."
--Al Pacino, as Michael Corleone, The Godfather, part III

Let's put aside the fact that my only exposure to any of the Godfather trilogy is reading Mario Puzo's book. The quote above is more in reference to the continuous spending spree that my latest hobby has put me on.

When I was in college and money was tight, I always prided myself on the fact that I didn't have an expensive hobby. While other people were off spending money on ski gear and lift tickets, or golf clubs and expensive greens fees, I was happy to pull out a glove and baseball, and flash some leather around for a while, or surf the web through my free college connection on my one big expense, the trusty old Macintosh Color Classic. After I graduated, I got a job teaching school for a year, which meant that I didn't have to pay any bills other than my phone bill - my room, heat, water, and food were free - which enabled me to save up and buy my first car (which finally went to the big Parking Lot In The Sky last November, about eight months after I'd sold it to my brother).

Once the car was out of the way, I decided I was sick of going to concerts of the bands I liked to see and coming home empty-handed, so I bought my first DAT from a place in Massachusetts, sight unseen via mail order. It's one of the few things I now own that pre-dates my wife (my relationship with her, that is...not her actual age) and was the beginning of the end as far as money is concerned. I actually carried the thing around in the box it came in for a few months, until I realized that the gigantic mass of cables I carried in my backpack just simply wouldn't do - it looked like Radio Shack had coughed up a huge hairball in there. So I bought a little L.L. Bean camera bag to hold the deck and a few accessories. That held me for quite a few years, actually - I had a friend build me a little D-cell power pack to run the deck more than 3 or 4 hours at a time in 1999, bought a digital cable later that year, but no big deal, right? I also picked up a mic stand the next year, in the eventuality that I would upgrade my rig, but I wasn't expecting it to happen anytime soon.

Then disaster struck.

For years, one of the two main bands I taped (Guster) had either allowed soundboard patches or run a matrix mix that anyone could plug into. Suddenly in early 2002, the policy changed and it was audience taping only, i.e. bring your own mics. I improvised one show with a pair of headphones (which are basically just microphones in reverse - instead of the headphone element vibrating to push the sound waves into your ear, the sound waves vibrate the headphone element and send the signal back up the cable...many thanks to MAO for that tip, wisdom imparted years ago) but within a week I had dropped almost $200 on a pair of mini-mics and a battery box. A friend found out that I was interested in mics and offered me his old ones, slightly better than the ones I'd just bought, for $150. I jumped on them, fully intending to sell the first pair...but that never happened.

Then fortune struck.

Thanks to a generous Christmas bonus from work, I had a small windfall with which to upgrade the rig. I managed to convince my wife that it could all be done for the "play money" portion set aside from the bonus. Which was sort of true. With that money, plus the $150 I got from reselling my friend's mics, I was now the proud owner of:
- Two Elation KM201 microphones with cardioid capsules
- Grace Designs Lunatec V2 microphone pre-amp
- Eco-Charge GP90 12-volt battery and recharger

But like dear Mr. Pacino, just when I thought I was out... Since then, I've also laid out, um, discretionary funds for:
- Sabra-Som T-bar
- Shure A27M vertical bar (because the Sabra-Som wasn't cutting it)
- Two Audio Technica AT8410 shockmounts
- Two 20-foot BLUE Kiwi XLR cables
- Powersonic 12-volt battery (just in case, you know)
- PhotoMaster camera bag (to hold all the new stuff)
- Two Shure A81WS heavy-duty wind screens

And it's not like I'm done, either. They may say necessity is the mother of invention...I say necessity is the mother of spending large sums of money...

I was sitting here on the couch while the wife dozed in the bedroom... or at least pretended to doze in the bedroom. I went in and checked on her and heard the radio on low. Yep, listening to the Red Sox game. In the meantime, I'm out here with the laptop, pretending to be on duty for the one girl left in our dorm (yes, graduation is tomorrow, and then we're free for the summer), watching the same game. The Sox are in Milwaukee, their first time playing the team since 1997, and their first time ever in Miller Park. I don't know what they did to Milwaukee, but they must have moved it a mile above sea level like Denver, because balls are flying out of there like [obscene joke deleted]. A stirring comeback to win 11-10. Good times.

Meanwhile, I wish to share with you the entirety of an email I sent to my friend Chris this afternoon. As you may know, Roger Clemens was going for his 300th win against the Chicago Cubs. He took a 1-0 lead into the 7th inning. And now, that email:

Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2003 14:39:06 -0500 (CDT)
From: greenone@bluestraveler.net
To: Chris Soule
Subject: Baaaaaaaaaaaahahahahaha...

Chi Cubs Inning Summary
-C. Patterson struck out swinging
-S. Sosa singled to left
-M. Alou walked, S. Sosa to second
-J. Acevedo relieved R. Clemens
-E. Karros homered to left, M. Alou and S. Sosa scored