Return Your Carts

I made a quick trip to Menard’s yesterday morning. I was inside for maybe 10 minutes, and in that time the car I parked nose-to-nose to did not move. However, while I was inside, someone did decided to jam a shopping cart between my vehicle and the one opposite mine. They didn’t do any damage to either car. But I did get super annoyed. The cart corral was about 15 feet away, and some person not only couldn’t be bothered to walk that far on a beautiful spring morning, but they also decided to put their cart where it was touching two other vehicles.

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Friday Playlist

A couple kind of heavy songs in this week’s list along with a healthy dose of Ryan Adams. open.spotify.com/user/224a…  “Headless Pin Up Girl” - Chemtrails. Written just as lead singer Mia Lust was coming out as Transgendered, this is all about the meaning of identity. “Burn Blue” - Flasher. Hazy but not quite shoegazey. “I’m Not” - Daddy Issues. A driving, moody track about sexual abuse. Just the thing to give you a lift on a Friday, huh?

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Reader's Notebook, 5/4/17

A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles As I point often, I amuse myself with my To Read list. I’ll read a blurb about a book somewhere, or see it on a Best Of list, or get a recommendation from a friend, and just throw it on my list and then forget why the book received acclaim. Which is kind of fun, because that makes each book a mystery when I finally get to them.

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Testing Day

So yesterday was a fun day: I got to experience the joys of having my first colonoscopy. Yep, big time fun it was. A few of you have already been through this rite of passage. For those who haven’t, fear not; this is not going to be a highly detailed account of what went down at the endoscopy center. The reason I was going in a little early (white folks don’t generally need to get scoped before 50 if they don’t have a family history) is that I’ve been having some weird stomach issues for the past year and a half.

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Third First Communion

Saturday was an official Big Day for the family. It was L’s First Communion day, a day we’ve all been looking forward to for two years, since C’s First Communion. Do we just love First Communions so much that we couldn’t wait for the next one? Nope, that’s not it. Rather, we’ve been laughing for two years over the prospect of L wearing a formal dress for the first time in her life.

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Friday Playlist

Some really good, brand new music to share this week. open.spotify.com/user/224a… “Shine On Me” - Dan Auerbach. The lead single off the Black Keys’ vocalist’s second solo album sounds like Beck channeling George Harrison. Which means it’s fabulous as hell, and perfect for spring and early summer. “Silver” - Waxahatchee. Katie Crutchfield has written some great songs over the years, but this might be her best yet. “Bleeding Blue” - Woods.

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What If The Beatles Had Said Yes?

Last week was a guest editor week at Kottke. Tim Carmody took over and devoted the week to looking back at where and how the web has evolved over the past decade-plus, and revisiting some of the site’s readers’ favorite parts of the classic web. On Thursday Carmody posted a piece called The Web is a portal to other words, and included links to all kinds of great What If posts from over the years.

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Weekend Wrap

I remember when Mondays used to be my blog catch up day. That’s when I’d drop a buncha words on ya’ll about what had gone down in our house, and with our family, over the previous 72 hours. But Mondays have, strangely, become my busiest day of the week. Time just seems to fly by and suddenly it’s school pickup time, we have a practice and/or game to get to, and I still haven’t had a chance to sit down and do a weekend summary.

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Bonus Video

youtu.be/GDWfT10RF… “Starfish and Coffee” - Prince A year ago I was watching this video - one of the few Prince videos available on YouTube at the time - in tears. Still can’t believe he’s gone, especially as we learned about how troubled his final days/years were. I’ve read a couple retrospective pieces about Prince today, and one of them included this video. Which was ironic because, in prep for my nephew’s morning nap, we listened to the song together three times: two times through the Prince version, and once through Renee Stahl and Maya Rudolph’s version.

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Friday Playlist

It’s a throwback day around our house today. I’m watching one of my 11-month old nephews for the day. It feels like 2005, 2007, or 2009. So I thought for the Spotify portion of the Friday tunes, I’d pull three songs from those years when I was spending each day with my 11-month-olds. There’s some humorous subtext to at least the title of each song. open.spotify.com/user/224a… youtu.be/DTjcRHfR5…  “Celebrate” - Little Dragon featuring Agge.

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Words With Kids

We’ve reached the point in our parenting lives where the annoying moments begin to pretty closely balance the delightful moments. Our girls are all good, but they’re also getting older and hitting natural stages where they become more challenging, whether they’re good kids or not. We had a couple truly delightful moments over the past few days, though. Saturday night we were watching the Royals-Angels game and Albert Pujols came to bat at an important moment in the game.

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Friday Playlist

open.spotify.com/user/224a… “Dull” - Microwave. Thus crunchy, grungy track sounds a lot like something Manchester Orchestra might have done when they were sussing out their more dramatic sound. “New” - Family Friends. A strong, mid-90s vibe alt-rock radio vibe here. “Stars” - Hum. If I’m sharing songs with one-syllable titles and Clinton-era overtones, I might as well go back to the actual age and pull a classic. “Fix “ - Hazel English.

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Reader's Notebook, 4/13/17

Book catch-up time. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini. As I mentioned in my last Reader’s Notebook post, somehow I never read this book. I know my wife read it. In fact, I bet there’s a copy tucked away somewhere around our house. Several friends read it and raved. I know it was on my list of books to read for ages, but for some reason I dropped it a few years back.

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Breaking It

We stuck close to home over our spring break last week. Doesn’t mean we didn’t do fun stuff. As is tradition, a quick recounting of the past 10-ish days. The girls’ final day of school, March 30, was an all-school day of service, a first-time attempt at St. P’s. There were some minor hiccups but, all-in-all, it was a good day. I was supposed to help out with C’s class, but they got rerouted and I ended up at the same place as both C and L, the Down Syndrome Society.

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Friday Playlist

A different sort of playlist this week. On our lazy spring break, I roared through the Pearl Jam Twenty book that was released as a companion to the documentary of the same name a few years back. When I picked it up at the library, I expected it to be just a collection of photos and other memories of the band’s career, layered with little anecdotes from the band the the people around them.

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Baseball 2017, Ya'll!

Yes! Baseball is here! As I type this, I’m sitting in front of the TV watching the Royals take on the Twins. There’s humidity in the air, we mowed the grass for the first time yesterday, there are mulch piles all around the neighborhood. Spring is here! Wait, what’s that in the forecast for Thursday? Snow with wind chills in the 20s? Yikes. Anyway, I’m happy baseball season has arrived. I might be a total fool, but I don’t believe the pessimistic forecasts so many experts have predicted for the Royals of Kansas City.

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Friday Playlist

Busy week so low on posts. Still time to share some music, though. open.spotify.com/user/224a… “Please, Let’s Go Away” - Trementina. Today is the first day of our spring break. As we’ve already taken a trip this year, we’ll be staying close to home for the next week. Doesn’t mean we can’t wish we were going somewhere warm, especially since the forecast is cool and rainy for most of the next 10 days.

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The End

Saturday I had a feeling I can’t ever remember having during a KU loss, especially a season-ending loss. Peace. Oh, I had my moments of yelling, cursing the TV, and throwing things, no doubt about that. But as Oregon’s cold-blooded assassins dropped in ridiculous shot after ridiculous shot, as Jordan Bell kept rejecting every shot KU took near the rim, and as KU could never find anything on offense beyond BIFM, it was obvious this was not KU’s night.

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Friday Playlist

A quick playlist since I’m well behind schedule today. open.spotify.com/user/224a… “Dundee Man” - Spiral Stairs. I was sure this band was Scottish. Turns out it is actually Pavement co-founder Scott Kannberg. I still like the song. “Hope The High Road” - Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. Drifting more toward the rock side of his alt-country sound, I really like this song. “Living In The City” - Hurray for the Riff Raff.

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Destruction, Terror, and Mayhem

Holy shit! What a goddamn game. It’s taken me until noon Friday to calm down a little bit after a thoroughly satisfying Thursday night of hoops. I went to bed after 1:00, and slept only fitfully between the lingering adrenaline and the trips to the bathroom caused by that last beer at 12:30. This morning my pulse was still a wee bit fast, so I threw my camera over my shoulder, drove to a couple nearby nature parks, and spent two hours walking and snapping pics.

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