M’s kickball career has gone like this over the past three years:
Fifth grade, advanced to the City semifinals and lost by 5 or 6 runs. They would not have beaten the team that was waiting in the City finals but it was still disappointing.
Fall of sixth grade, went undefeated in the regular season and lost in the City championship game 26–1 in four innings. Blech.
Spring of sixth grade, went undefeated in the regular season and lost in the City championship game by 9 runs after having a one-run lead going into the 7th.
Most of my kid posts are a little braggy. But this one is even more braggy than usual.
L wrapped up her soccer season over the weekend. They were playing a crappy team they had played earlier in the week, and this time the other team was missing so many kids that we had to loan them a couple of ours. L had a couple of really nice goals in the first half, both of which involved her beating a defender one-on-one and then ripping a shot from 10–15 feet away from the goal.
I have been struggling with insomnia lately. Several nights a week, despite often being absolutely, physically beat, I will go to bed, fall asleep for 30–45 minutes, and then wake up and be unable to go back to sleep for hours.
This is mostly because my brain has been working overtime of late. I’ve been teasing you with references to a big family project for a week or two. It is that project that has my brain unable to shut down at night.
It’s been a rough music week. As you can imagine, I have been listening to a lot of Frightened Rabbit’s music. Their songs always had a difficult quality to them. Those elements have been amplified since Scott Hutchison’s death.
But it is time to move on, so here are some new tunes for you. No video this week, as I’m waiting on our fourth visit from AT&T this week and videos aren’t loading right now.
It’s a wacky, wild time around here right now. I’ve been busy with a bunch of outside projects, we’re in the midst of a big family project I may be able to announce officially soon, and then the end of the school year has brought a bunch of during-the-day and after-school events that have filled up my calendar.
Oh, and our Internet has been bugging out all week and AT&T can’t seem to figure out the problem.
Normally on Friday mornings one of the first things I do is start combing through my playlist of newest music to put together the Friday playlist.
I can’t do that today.
News I had been fearing for several days was confirmed just moments ago: the body of Scott Hutchison, lead singer of Frightened Rabbit, was discovered in Edinburgh overnight. Hutchison sent out some cryptic Tweets Tuesday night (our time) and then disappeared.
We are in the midst of our two busiest weeks of the spring.
Last week the family had a combined eight kickball games in four nights. We swept all eight of them, the closest game being the first of the week. L’s team, which played without five players because of injury/illness/conflicts, came from 10 down to win by one. Most of the rest of the games were comfortable, with a couple run-ruled wins in there.
Today is the St. P’s annual day of service. I’m signed up to join C’s class at a local food bank and we were scheduled to leave very early, so this was actually posted Thursday night.
Last month was the 10th anniversary of my favorite album of this century, Frightened Rabbit’s The Midnight Organ Fight. I have not posted anything about that because I’m saving my recollections for the anniversary of when I first heard the band.
Chart Week: April 21, 1984 Song: “Time After Time” - Cyndi Lauper Chart Position: #36, 2nd week on the chart. Peaked at #1 for two weeks in June.
I recently read an article suggesting, based on an analysis of information from Spotify, that for the majority of us, the music we listen to between ages 11–16 form the basis for the music we listen to as adults.[1] I suppose this helps explain why I so love the music of 1984; that was the year I turned 13.
The City of Mirrors - Justin Cronin This was my spring break book, the final in Cronin’s super virus/vampire trilogy. In this book, thought it took him a long time to get going, offering a lot of background in the first half or so. Some of the background, that which centered on the life of Tim Fanning and how he came to be Patient Zero in the outbreak, was quite good.
open.spotify.com/user/224a…
“Breath In, Breath Out” - Melody’s Echo Chamber. Such good news that Melody Prochet is returning this summer after suffering serious injuries in an accident last year. Her new album was all recorded and set for release before her accident but was delayed pending her recovery. Glad that she is back.
“AZ” - Now, Now. Mother Nature keeps pushing spring back. It might, MIGHT, be up in the 80s here next week.
I suppose I’ll finally take my head out of the sand, hold my breath, and write about KU’s name coming up in the most recent FBI indictments related to shoe companies, college hoops, and recruiting.
Over spring break I was only mildly tuned in to news of any kind. At the end of the day, while the family was taking turns getting showered and ready for dinner, I would check Twitter and scroll back just an hour or so to make sure I didn’t miss anything big.
Lazy ass.
That’s what I’ve been.
Well, to be fair to myself, we do have a couple potentially large projects in the planning stages that have dominated my attention of late. Should they proceed, I shall share them here at a future date.
But I’ve also just been lazy. Freaking weak-ass weather isn’t helping either.
We got the boat in the water last weekend. All went well in every aspect of that process.
A week away means there’s a glut of music to share, so I’ll expand this a little bit this week. Oh, and there’s an absolute monster track that appeared last night that will wrap this up.
open.spotify.com/user/224a…
“Cali” - Ride. Ride’s comeback album, Weather Diaries, was released nearly a year ago now. At the time I was a little more enamored with Slowdive’s comeback disk. This song popped up in my Discover playlist recently and I’ve fallen in love with it.
It’s been a weird week, trying to get back in the swing of things after our vacation. The weather hasn’t helped, with the cold mornings robbing me of motivation to do much of anything. I have a couple posts mentally prepared but just can’t sit down long enough to bash them out.
So I guess I’ll share some links.
My main man John N. sent me this link, to an excerpt from Chris Nashawaty’s upcoming book about the making of Caddyshack.
I’ve finally made my way through my RSS reader, which collected over 1800 articles while we were gone. In that glut, I found a few items that can very loosely be connected, as all are about one kind of loss or another.
First, Lindsey Buckingham announced he was leaving Fleetwood Mac again. I had to wonder why this was such big news in the music press. Sure, Fleetwood Mac is one of the biggest bands of all time and a summer tour will probably draw way more people than my 10 favorite current bands combined.
We left cold, snowy Indiana for a week in the warmth and sun of Mexico. It was, almost completely, an excellent trip.
Our home for the week was the Paradisus La Esmerelda resort in Playa del Carmen, about 45 minutes south of Cancun. Our flight down was without incident, we navigated the hour-long line that was Mexican immigration, gathered our bags, and found our transport agent, a man holding a sign with our family’s name on it.
It’s been a busy week around these parts.
First, crazy ass weather. Sunday night/Monday morning we had our fourth snowstorm in the past two weeks. This time we got somewhere between 3–4” of snow. We received almost as much snow in those two weeks than we had gotten all of this winter before then and last winter combined. Weird.
We followed that up Tuesday with ridiculous rains. Some areas got 5” of rain.
open.spotify.com/user/224a…
“Twisted Highway” - Erika Wennerstrom. While her excellent band Heartless Bastards takes a break, Wennerstrom decided to record a solo album on a whim. If this, the first single, is any indication, there will be no loss of quality compared to her work with HB. “Gauntlet in the Sun” - Ricky Lewis. I feel like my general music tastes have not changed that much. I’ve been locked into alt/indie rock for over 20 years now.
Chart Week: March 26, 1983 Song: “Little Red Corvette” - Prince Chart Position: #27, 5th week on the chart. Peaked at #6 for two weeks in May.
A few weeks back I heard Prince’s first Top 40 hit, “I Wanna Be Your Lover” and wondered when the first time I ever heard a Prince song was. “Lover” reached #11 in 1979, and the radio stations my parents listened to at the time were likely to have had it in their rotations.