Today was pretty darned cool. It’s been a while since Fed and I last did anything, but since it was my last day home until August, I decided it was time to give him a call again. Fed, my friend-brother (he’s so much a friend, he’s like a brother), and I were at his house for a while in the morning trying to fix his printer. It keeps saying: “Cartridge jammed” and to solve that, Fed actually reached into the printer and pulled the cartridge over to the other side (”see, it’s not jammed anymore”). I almost fell over. It was probably because of what he did that the printer started making weird grinding sounds like a machine gun. I figured out how to unjam the cartridge by pressing enter on the array of buttons and taking out and putting back in the ink cartridges, but the printer refused to align the print heads properly and wouldn’t print anything from an outside source (computer). It could copy though, but still wouldn’t print. Very elusive. Since his black ink cartridge was empty, I thought perhaps that was why the alignment failed, but the printer should still accept incoming print data. In any case, I didn’t feel like resorting to drastic measures (ie. kicking it, breaking it open, giving it a cookie) so I suggested that perhaps he would buy a new printer. To put it inperspective, the price of a black and color ink cartridge costs around $55-65 while a cheap new printer with both ink cartridges included costs only around $60-80. I saw a really cheap lexmark printer at Circuit City weeks ago for only $60. To get maximum return on your investment, sell the printer on ebay. At least you can garner $15 for it, which makes the price of the printer and ink cartridges around $55 which is cheaper than buying ink cartridges for an existing old printer.
Anyway, we decided to scrap the printer and go play some pool at the Drexeline pool hall. Since Fed could drive, we took his dad’s car down and entered through the backdoor. That place is awesome. If this were prohibition, that would be the place where moonshine would be sold. That would be the speakeasy. It’s the perfect place! So we went in, got a table, and played four games which took about an hour. The only gripe I have about that place is the smoke content in the air. Since everyone in there smokes and there is no ventilation in the place, you end up as a secondhand smoker and leave smelling like a smoker. Everyone in there was all gangster :). You have bikers, guys with tons of tatoos, professionals, etc.
We played four games. I won two of them by a close margin. Fed won the other two. He readily trounced me during one game which was pretty amazing. I had stripes and still had 5 more to go when Fed hit the 8 ball in. At certain times though, we both looked like idiots since we haven’t played in a long while. The last time we played was during spring break, I think, at Dave T.’s house. I won all 3 (or was it 4) games :). His table has good karma or something.
After the pool hall, we went back to his house to practice some guitar playing. Fed and I were trying to write a good acoustic guitar duo song and we were trying out various chords and such. We figured out some pretty cool stuff and tabbed it down. Taking a break, we strolled down to Jano’s pizza and got a large. We had to wait 15 minutes so we went down to Rite Aid to grab drinks. Tom, Justin, Brian M., and someone else zoomed by in a car and were screaming out the window at us. They’re pretty cool :). I didn’t know Brian M. was there until I talked to him later at CVS where he works. Brian is the most homosexually straight guy I know. Well, at least, I hope he’s just pretending to be homosexual. If he actually were, that’d be kind of scary.
Grabbing the pizza and bringing it back to Fed’s lair, we watched some Mad TV and continued some song composition. I had to get home to pack so I unfortunately had to leave. Hopefully, we’ll be able to work on more songs later in the summer when I get back from CMU.