two fell swoops

So, our garage sale on Saturday wasn’t as good as we hoped. While we did end up offloading some stuff, and making a bit of money to offset wedding expense, Tim accidentally sold something that he’s going to regret for a long time. It was this thing called a “Walkboard,” which is difficult to explain (so bear with me) - basically a red wooden board that you stand on and walk (like a skateboarder would?), tottering from one side to another (if you can explain it better, Tim, jump in.) After a few scary incidents where garage-salers tried to use it and nearly knocked into some of the piles of crystal we had for sale, a woman took real interest in it, and bought it for her cousin. As our friend Ted keenly pointed out, apparently, another person at our garage sale took interest in HER: http://annarbor.craigslist.org/mis/1210047109.html.

amazing garage sale on Saturday - m4w - 99 (white st. at Stadium)

I was talking to you at the garage sale on saturday as you were making off with the Walkboard. We both liked the idea of your cousin (?) working it on his hands! You were really cute, especially as we discussed the Peanuts comic poster about loving it when friends sleep over… anyway, I’d love to run into you again sometime, perhaps over a beer? Drop a line…

We were quite pleased to read the missed connection, and hope that these people get together, because anyone who responded to our garage sale signs is a person worth dating. And, if you are reading this, Walkboard lady, Tim kinda wants it back.

we’re having a garage sale this weekend to make space in our storage garage, and to raise some money to for our wedding. stop by and sit for a while, or browse and buy something.

lots of weird stuff to sell! come and get it!

here’s the craigslist post: http://annarbor.craigslist.org/gms/1204216383.html

map: http://bit.ly/jb9WO

It was going to be our first dinner in our newly renovated kitchen.  In the days leading up, I pushed to make a big deal out of it and suggested a nice romantic dinner. That day, I spent most of the time finishing renovations and cleaning up and making sure everything was in place.

On the way home from work, we stopped at the co-op to pick up some fixings.  While we were there, Andrea realized  she’d forgotten her new kombucha mushroom at work.  Kombucha is a slimy pancake-looking thing made up of a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast that you use to ferment tea.  (Read all about it here.)  There is a window when you have to start the kombucha fermenting before the thing dies, so now added to the mix of our romantic evening was the project of brewing a batch of fermented tea (and researching how).

So we picked up the shroom, and when we got home Andrea started making dinner and I nervously worked on the kombucha project.  I had just moved all of our food prep tools and supplies into their new cupboard locations earlier that day, so Andrea had to keep asking me where things were.  And she was trying desperately to get things right using a brand new oven and cooktop for the first time, while I kept getting in her way trying to make a drink I don’t even like with what looked like a slimy live pancake in a jar of formaldehyde. Things got a little tense.

When dinner preparations were almost done, I set myself up at the sink and called over to Andrea, “Hey, could you come over here and stick your hand down the garbage disposal?  I think something’s stuck.”  She replied with a disgusted tone - “Um, no.”  “Come on,” I implored, “your hands fit easier than mine.”  Eventually she acquiesced.  “It’s not on, is it?” she asked.  “No, I answered, kneeling down to unplug it from underneath the sink.  She stuck her hand down and felt what I’d put in a few minutes earlier when she wasn’t looking.  “Um, yeah, there’s something in here,” she said.  Her hand emerged clutching a fancy little felt ring box.  She turned it over in her hands and asked, “What is this?”   I said nothing and just looked up, waiting for her to notice that I was still down on one knee.  When it finally registered, she started crying.  She opened the box and I read her a poem I’d written for the occasion.  To sweeten the deal, I brought out from the cupboard a chocolate cake (her favorite) that I’d bought earlier that day. With all the crying and hugging and my whole speech, the whole thing lasted about fifteen minutes. By that time, dinner had gotten cold and needed reheating.

But she said yes.

i’m kind of awkward, but you get the point.

skating-the-drainage-ditch.mov

Happily, the people who renovated our house before us carried on the tradition of stuffing current newspapers into walls they closed up.  I thought I’d share this clipping from the October 25, 1967 edition of the Ann Arbor News, in which Secretary of State Dean Rusk compares antiwar protesters to Nazi appeasers.  Timeless.

I wanted to write a quick note about an awesome Scrabble Competition Tim and I are competing in next month, and encourage you to support team Swoops!

826 Michigan, an “nonprofit writing and tutoring center offering free literacy programs to over 1500 kids each year,” is hosting a scrabble contest at Conor O’Neils on September 28th [UPDATE: Possible reschedule to Nov. 23rd!] from noon-8pm. Team raise money to “unlock” cheats that they can use to beat other teams.

You can donate to the Two Fell Swoops to help us triumph by clicking here Then, you can come see us & cheer for us, dressed like a team, on Sept 28th!

We know times are tough, but if you have some pennies to spare to help the Swoops prevail and help kids write, please chip in! We promise we will represent our readers well. See all the cheats below:

$25: Trade out a letter
$50: Wheel of Fortune: buy a vowel
$100: Flip a letter over and make it blank
$150: Add 10 points to any letter to increase its value
$200: Add Q, Z, or X to any word
$250: Passport:play a word in any non-English language
$300: Consult the dictionary for one turn
$400: Reject an opponent’s word for no reason
$500: Invent a word (must have definition)
*****A secret $5 cheat will be announced on tournament day.*****

Or, if you are feeling competitive, you should enter, so we can laugh at you (as per the rules of the event), and beat you. Don’t test us. We’re good at scrabble, and we’re also good at cheating at scrabble (seriously, ask our friends.)

This message was brought to you by Tim leaving the house with the words “I can’t believe I’m responding to the last 20 minutes by going to get you ice cream.”

On the wall at my polling place today:

Sorry for the blurriness of my phone’s camera with the low light.  If you can’t read it, I’ll tell you it’s one of a few mock advertisements that some kids were allowed to put on the wall behind the voting kiosks at the Ann Arbor Community Center.  The kid who is imploring us to vote for him in this ad is named Darius.  Here are some highlights:

• he (Darius) will build security robots and hi-tech security lasers
• his two vice presidents well (sic) help you with the law
• we will help bring alien civilization to earth
• he will lower everything that is expensive
• good stuff well (sic) be
• if you vote for Darius all your dream will come true

On the left is something about school being fun, but I can’t make it out, and I left without reading everything, trusting that my phone had captured it.  Did anyone else see the poster?  Or can anyone figure it out from the picture?

Notice also the boringly familiar campaign promises about global warming and gas prices mixed in with Darius’s promises about alien civilization.  Interesting too that some of his more outlandish promises map pretty neatly onto the promises of the more well-known Presidential candidates.  I leave you to figure out what it all means.

And special thanks to the guy in front of me in line for noticing the poster.  We joked that Darius might just receive three write-in votes from he, his companion, and I.  And by “joked” I mean - seriously considered….

A few months ago, we noticed a new restaurant going in where a short-lived Indian restaurant was on North Main.  I can’t remember what it was before then, but it’s one of those locations where nothing seems to stick.

The first thing we noticed was the name on the signage out front: “Seajoy’s”.  We thought maybe it was going to be a seafood restaurant.  But from what we could see, they hadn’t yet changed any of the interior sub-continental décor.

A week later, Andrea report seeing the following four items listed under the name on the signage, each with a corresponding sign-size picture, in this order:

1. Coffee
2. Fudge
3. Tasty Dosas
4. Juicy Burgers

Now we were puzzled.  I wondered if Andrea had seen the sign right.  What kind of restaurant offers those four things?  And what kind of Indian restaurant, if that’s what it was to remain, offers – or advertises that they offer – “juicy burgers”?!  Despite our puzzlement, we resolved to go there once they opened and order exactly those four items.

But when we finally got around to going, the sign out front had the following four items listed and pictured in the same prominent place out front:

1. Wraps
2. Lassi
3. Tasty Dosas
4. Biryani

It was an Indian restaurant after all.  (The name comes from owner Shijoy’s name.) They did indeed serve dosas; my “Seajoy’s Special” dosa was excellent.  But juicy burgers and fudge were nowhere to be found on the menu.  So before we left, I asked our waitress.

It turns out Seajoy’s was originally planned as a different kind of restaurant, one that served Indian as well as American and other dishes.  Hence the confusing signage, which actually did exist for a few days before they decided to go all-Indian and changed it.  And go all-Indian they did; Seajoy’s has a good variety of Indian dishes - North, South, Indo-Chinese, you name it.  Everything we’ve tried the handful of times we’ve gone has been good, and our friend visiting from India (who got to fulfill his lifelong dream of eating a cheese dosa) was impressed by the variety.

What I like best is the mom-and-pop feel of the place.  Shijoy and his crew can be seen bustling around the restaurant trying to keep people happy and get the business to stick where none do.  One time I overheard one of them say to another as they hurried off in opposite directions: “”Focus.”  That makes me want the place to succeed.  That and the really good food.

But I’m sad we didn’t get to order coffee, fudge, tasty dosas, and juicy burgers.  And I’m sorry for doubting you, Andrea.

A year ago right now (during our Alkalai School project, I should mention) Andrea and I were lying on the side of the highway leading to Mt. Rushmore, where all the locals who don’t want to pay admission fees go to watch the fireworks display. Radios blared the standard fireworks “Proud-To-Be-An-American” mix and cars whizzed right by our heads.

Later that night, carried away with patriotic fervor and truly American doses of alcohol, we made the following recording, which we post here tonight as our way of saying Happy Independence Day to you and yours.

spangled

Andrea and I had gotten used to seeing this cute old man shuffle by our house at a snail’s pace pretty regularly. You know, one of those people who’s lived in their old house for years and has probably taken the same walk thousands of times. There’s a cute old woman down by Packard and Stadium who does the same thing, walking I think from from a house just west of the intersection to one of the gas stations. She walks so slowly that you’ll see her as you pass on some errand and then see her on your way back - walking in the same direction. You have to kind of admire people like this for still making the walk despite what age has done to their bodies.

Anyway, in this case, the man walked from a house further north on our street to the liquor store across from our house. Every time we saw him shuffle by at his snail’s pace, Andrea and I both wanted to talk to him, though Andrea was a little bit creeped out by the way he seemed sometimes to stare at our house as if scrutinizing each little change we’ve made. Then one day as I was out on the front porch, the man stopped and barked across the front yard, “Who did those windows?” (He was referring to some glass block windows we’d just had installed on a small outbuilding on our property.) I answered cordially enough, and he told me that the person who did it knew what they were doing. Before I had a chance to ask him how we knew that, he dropped the bombshell that would instantly change our relationship:

“You know, I built that building.”

Which explained the staring. The cute old man introduced himself as “Frank” and went on to explain how he knew the original owners of our 1900-built house. He lived down the street as successive generations of the family lived here, and at some point, in the 70s I think, he was asked to do the masonry work on the little outbuilding.

From that point on, every time Frank would walk by and see us outside he’d say hi. Sometimes, I confess, we’d see him coming and go out just to be able to chat. We’re new to the neighborhood, and making friends and hearing all the history from someone who’s lived here his entire life gave us a nice feeling of some kind of torch being passed or something, some kind of approval of our presence here. What further endeared us to Frank was the fact that his old house down the street is situated just like ours, in a place where developers are extremely hungry to tear down and build more yuppie condos or parking lots. (”Bulldozer bacon” was the term reportedly used by one local developer to describe the place we call home.) As we’ve been fixing up our house, we’ve been inspired by our relationship with someone who’s stubbornly stayed here and grown old before us. And one time, literally as we were fixing up our house, re-roofing the building he built, sweat and roofing tar pouring off our bodies, we were reassured by Frank’s approving smile and the words he shouted up to us, which have been with us for every project since then: “Little by little, one step at a time.”

And just the other week, we finally stopped by his house as we walked by. We were invited in and treated to an earful of stories about the neighborhood with Frank’s nephew Vince and his neighbor Kathy. Frank was ill and mostly listened from under the blanket draped across his recliner. As we left that day, we resolved to return again soon with a freshly baked pie or something.

But a few weeks later, before we had a chance to visit him again, Frank P. Defelippi died. Neighbor Kathy told us that the illness he’d been suffering from led to surgery with some unforseeable complications. The Ann Arbor News obituary is here.

The service at St. Thomas this morning was nice, though I felt like everyone there was wondering who the young guy in the back getting all misty was. It’s stupid, I didn’t really know the guy, but he meant a lot. So I thought I’d write this post in memory of Frank - the cute old man who walked by our house, or stopped and said hello; the mason who built our outbuilding; a link to the past of our home and our neighborhood; and Ann Arbor’s ultimate townie, who lived here his entire life and as everything around him changed still mustered the will to take his walk to the corner store, right up until the end. Rest in peace, Frank. We’ll make our walk just the way you did, “little by little, one step at a time.”