The Dancing Sausage Web Journal: Personal Notes

Bicoastal Library Problems

So I've been packing. It looks like I have the job in San Francisco, and anyway I took an apartment out there not even knowing. It was just too great a deal to pass up -- Noe Valley, unexpectedly cheap, Victorian, has a garden, around the corner from good friends and my aunt, the roommate has his finger on the pulse of everything interesting in the city -- and I figured I needed a change after a gruelling year in school and eight years (!!!) in New York; all the better if that change had a garden and a roommate who was already cajoling me to join him for a bullfight the weekend after I arrived.

I've basically moved every year I've been in town, what with jobs in Pasadena and Charlottesville and my housesitting gigs in Manhattan, but this one is definitely taking more thought and work. I've got the happy circumstance of being allowed to leave most of my furniture behind for future tenants, and the cat is going to summer at the Apthorp with Jess, so that at least is easy. I've sold off or given away all of the bumper crop of cherry tomato plants I managed to grow from seed, netting me about $55 and apparently helping a neighbor, Dale, start her own business selling tomatoes to the too-pricey natural foods store on 181st. (I highly recommend the tomato variety, by the way. They are Sweet Pea "currant" heirloom tomatoes from Seed Savers Exchange, and I overplanted because I expected them to die under my dubious ministrations; despite the fact that I transplanted them when they were barely sprouted and mangled their roots, not a single plant died, and many of the plants I just gave away were already beginning to bear blossoms after an April planting!)

The real problem is the books. My collection has probably doubled since I started grad school, natch. I shipped about ninety pounds of books off to my future roommate today, stuff I thought I'd need for the job. I've got another thirty to ship, plenty more that is just going to *stay here* (good lord, getting them down from this fifth-floor apartment...), and one box which is going to a book donation drive.

MORE... Wed. May. 30, '07 1:27 AM | Re: 0

My Life, Through The Music of David Byrne

I've been back to making a lot of mix CDs lately. I keep going on about David Byrne, so he ends up in the mix a lot because people want to know what the hell it is I'm talking about. But when I try to figure which songs I would recommend, it's too hard, because I got to thinking, There is a song of him for every year of my life.

So I tried to write that out.
MORE... Mon. Mar. 05, '07 1:16 AM | Re: 0

Fries and Propaganda: Enter the vaGinger

Charlie's Kitchen, Cambridge, MA
Guest starring Shauna

g: I want a -- I was about to call it a vag!na, what's it called again? --

s: A vaGinger.

g: -- what she's having.

MORE... Tue. Dec. 19, '06 11:58 PM | Re: 1

Loud Party in the Endgame

The downstairs neighbors are having a loud party. I mean loud. Shake the apartment, spook the cats loud. Everything that's not heavy is rattling. Used to be that apartment would reglarly play music pretty loud, but it was never like this. I figured a bunch of latchkey kids lived there, since that was who I ever saw go in or out. This sounds like a grown-up party, and a bunch of people I haven't seen yet. Different mix of music. People have been ringing the buzzer all night, asking to be let in.

MORE... Sun. Dec. 17, '06 1:52 AM | Re: 0

Visions Productions Debuts Online

When we were in middle school, Robert Durff and I started a video production company called Visions Productions. (Well, actually, it was not so simple -- the ownership of the Visions name was in dispute among a number of kids in our class, as the company had started with Robert and Michael and a few other kids.) Between the rise of YouTube and my academic work among a number of people who focus on youth media production, I've been thinking about Visions lately... so I decided to digitize some of our old videos and get 'em up online.

MORE... Tue. Oct. 24, '06 1:25 PM | Re: 1