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Kybecca wine bar update

Amazing progress since the last shoot, just one month ago…

Kybecca Wine Bar Pano (shift to zoom in, ctrl to zoom out, mouse to move around).

Weird stuff for my friends


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Surfers or deadheads

Wandered down to the Eastern Surfing Association championships today, they moved down to Hatteras from Buxton and Frisco earlier in the week.  Had a great time watching surfers, but it was just as interesting to watch the sunbleached crowd.  It reminded me much of summer tour deadheads, back in the day.  My last Dead show was probably ‘92 or ‘93, a couple of years before Jerry passed.  Sometimes I can’t believe how long ago that really was.  I thought it was a chapter in my life that had passed.  But an opportunity arose last week to purchase tickets to see the remainder of the Dead, with the Allman Brothers Band, up in State College, PA for an Obama benefit next month.  At this point it looks as if I’m going with a coworker.  Perhaps tomorrow I’ll post some surfer pictures.

Something other than insomnia

I’m up, but I don’t feel like I’m suffering from insomnia or anything else.  I’m just up.  I could have rolled over and fallen asleep quickly, but I wanted to finish Spook Country, and do this.  So I’m up.

I was reminded, when I got up, of how much I generally dislike air conditioning.  So many implementations involve rudely blowing cold air on a person.  Here in this house, this is definitely the case.  Case in point.  Standing in the bathroom and emptying my bladder at 3AM, it is morally WRONG to have cold air blasting onto the top of my head.  Just plain wrong.  In my mind, air conditioning should be about subtly changing the ambient temperature of a room, not about directly attacking you with bursts of cold air.  I don’t like in houses, and I don’t like it in cars.  I certainly understand the need for it, to prevent us from being cooked in our shells on hot days.  I just think the implementation is all wrong in most cases.

Getting away from it all

It’s the middle of the night.  Everyone’s in bed but me.  I’m reading a William Gibson book and listening to the waves crash on the shore and the wind flex the windows.  The forecasts predict 50mph+ winds here over the next couple of days.  They may close the ferry if it gets too powerful.  There may be ocean overwash and coastal flooding.  My face and chest are burned from the sun.  We visited Blackbeard’s Ghost yesterday.  The pirate theme is recurring, even in the Gibson book.  We’re burning through a significant amount of wine.  The pool is nice, it’s a dark one that retains heat a bit better than the light-colored pools.  THe hot tub is quirky and sometimes doesn’t want to run.  In the basement is a small pool table that has been placed into a room which is smaller than that which will support even the small table, so for shots from the sides, you find yourself using the micro-cue, which is suboptimal.  The house has several large TVs, none of which we generally use, except when all of the children decide to watch something downstairs.  We have a Wii with us, but nobody has played it yet.

The house has wireless ‘net that actually works.  This causes a comfort level with the occasional looking up of words, concepts and locations which come up in conversation or in reading materials, and a more frequent checking of email than is generally practices in situations such as this.

On my Finnegans Wake site, I had one response to my query that went out, requesting user to fill me in on the background of their usage of the site.  This one user is in the midst of a truly ambitious project: translating the Wake to Spanish.

It’s interesting to try and pigeonhole the owner of a vacation rental home based on the contents of the home.  With books and videos, it can sometimes be easier.  One house, remote and off the gulf coast of Florida, had several books about serial killers, though the home was owned by the parents of former Olympian Rowdy Gaines.  Often there are telltale clues, such as a religious book or two, an abundance of a certain genre.  This house has one spy book — usually beach houses have more — but this particular spy book was almost an insider’s book, leading me to wonder if the owner is retired from FBI or another agency.  It’s the book by Lawrence Schiller and Norman Mailer about the life of Robert Hanssen, the man who worked his way pretty far up the FBI totem poll while selling secrets to the Russians.

Another interesting facet of their media collection is that everything has a number on it, and laminated lists of the books and their corresponding numbers are on the shelf.  One wonders if this is an eccentricity of the owner or of the management company.

The children gasped in excitement when they opened the cabinet which contained the games, twenty or more of them.  They’ve been keeping themselves busy and behaving wonderfully so far, with very little conflict.

As for me, I’m having a good time, but I’m looking forward to getting back to work.  I left just when things got a bit more exciting.

ummmm

Kim Petras, the German boy who at the age of 12 became the world’s youngest person to start hormone treatments for a sex change operation, has been signed up by a German record label

Another Kybecca pano

This pano was taken on 9/11/2008.  I think they’re still hopeful to get the space finished by the end of this month.  I hope to have another update sometime near the end of the month.



Home sick

One of the children, who apparently can’t walk through a room without absorbing some illness germs, brought home a cold and now 3/4 of the household has it.  Typical thing to happen after the first few days of school, I guess, but I’m home sick as a result.  I have things to keep me busy, though.  Watching pink panther cartoons, maintaining my vast web empire, and pining for simpler and wealthier times.

Wine Bar Pano, getting closer to complete…

I took a new panoramic image of the Kybecca wine bar space this weekend.  Maybe it still doesn’t look quite like a wine bar, but progress is definitely being made, and I hear it’s on target to open in another month or so.

Kybecca Wine Bar Pano

Since I couldn’t…

Since I couldn’t get the authentic polygraph instrument I wanted, I settled for this one:

Vintage Mattel, circa 1960.