Choir Practice

Tonight one of the choir members smuggled me a bootlegged copy of the up and coming cd they made last year. I think they're pretty great for the choir at the old neighborhood parish. Here is one of the songs. (It's the non-mastered bootleg version, mind you).

One of those Tuesday nights.

A very happy birthday to my beautiful niece Autumn. I cannot believe how fast you've grown!

(Dear Anne, I totally stole this photo from your facebook page (yet another creepy thing about facebook-people can steal your photos!). I hope you don't mind. :))

A walk in the woods

Live in DC

This my dear friend Tom. We go back to kidhood. Or at least to the 8th grade dance at St. John's. He did his very first standup routine last night and I'm swollen with pride. Though I enjoyed his routine (here on youtube) purely for it's wit and hilarity, the favorite part of my experience was realizing that this isn't at all far off from what a regular conversation is like with Tom. Now you know why I love talking with Tom. He's on my speed dial.

If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will.
But it feels like a real fight. -William James

Bo-ring.

I just pushed "start" on the dishwasher. The dog is snoring. Eric is working on a presentation on giving presentations.  It seems the perfect time to go here or here.

Even though we had to trade Lake Michigan for them, a walk near these breezy grasses always makes my fall day.  It's the time of year when this cowgirl gets to missing the prairie.  

Orson's War

One of my writing students wrote a story about a time when he was a boy (in 1938) and a panicked neighbor knocked on his family's door announcing that something bad was happening, that they needed to turn (the radio) from NBC to CBS. They all stood there shocked as what they thought was a news broadcast told of an alien invasion from Mars. Well, you've probably already heard this story, and I had too, but there's something truly gripping about a first hand account of a solid 20 minutes of peering out a living room window with sheer dread while hearing news of Martians walking around the USA and while one's mother, with shaking hands, tries to preoccupy with piano lessons. It's also amazing how few years have really passed since then but quite enough that we would never mistake that kind of theater for news today.  This student, however, was an intelligent, upstanding future Naval midshipman. It just so happens that in 1938 we knew virtually nothing about Mars...except for one scientist who had recently brought the Martian canals into focus on his state-of-the-art telescope, which totally got the imaginations going. Between this and other feared (German) invasions, the stage was set.

I had to take a listen to the original radio show. The "this is only theater" part at the very beginning was easy to miss. (And 90% of radio listeners tuned into the comedy show on the other channel at the beginning of the hour anyhow.) If you have a little time I highly suggest this awesome piece of theatre. If you can imagine the context (1938) and listen as an eleven-year-old boy (or girl), you'll see that's it's pretty incredible. I actually found the first fifteen minutes to be the scariest (very left to your own imagination) though most people in 1938 didn't tune in until after this point. Here's the first 7:40. You can find the rest right here on youtube or on Internet Archives. (This one includes a 2 min intro by Orson Wells from a re-broadcast.)

Here is a new photo collection that I recently acquired. It's called "Variations on sharing recently purchased handmade skirts over e-mail." I think they will look stunning with thick black matting.

Today, for THIS, I slammed on my breaks, did a u-turn, put my shoes back on, and jumped out of my car to deeply admire. Yes, she is for sale. Yes, it would break the bank just to keep her gassed. Yes I have a birthday. I also have Christmas.

Ads

I must have a short attention span. (There's really no question about it.) But how often are the commercials more captivating than the actual programming? At least on the 14 channels at the gym. So often there is more creativity packed into 30-60 second spots than in anything else on the tube. I love this one:

I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.

Good boy.

Max is always willing to be my subject when I don't feel like blogging.

Today I heard "knock, knock, knock, knock" near my back door but not on my back door. I looked out the window. No one was there. Then, "knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock." Closer to the side window that time. "Knock, knock knock knock, knock knock, knock, knock." What the...? I went outside (this is always the part of the scary movie when you're yelling at the screen that the person is the biggest dip you've ever seen. WHY would they follow that noise?). But thankfully this was no scary movie. It was a woodpecker! I thought he was pretty neat and I wanted to be hospitable but, in fairness, he was eating my house. Or, rather, the bugs in the wood of my house (awesome). "Hey!" I said. And he flew away.

P.S. I didn't get a photo but this is what he looked like.

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

I highly recommend their album "Up from Below". I took a listen today and it made my Sunday.
Here they were on Letterman:

Adam at home with homesick huskers (sippin' on an elk creek).

Should be the name of an awesome rap.

Birth of Cool

Today I said "Pague (with an accent over the "e") los gatos." (Gatos=cats, gastos=bills/expenses). And just in time to save my Spanish teacher from smacking her forehead with her hand, I decided that I meant to say that. Yeah. You know, like jive talk.

If there's no Spanish jive, then I just don't want to learn.

"myface"

Well folks (and this is for those of you who are about ten steps behind the time, like me), I signed up on facespace (mybook? myface? whatevs) last week because all, count them ALL, of my family is on there and that is where they posted their photos from our Florida trip. I wanted to see! It was as innocent as that. I've always had a long list of reasons of why I didn't sign up for an account, one being that it's utterly distracting (and I am very distractable). Another being that even though it's so fun for me, this blog already makes me feel strangely overly cyber existent. And yet another reason being my (somewhat erroneous) belief that it's just a platform for people to post photos of themselves dancing at parties. Weirdness. Totally strange.

It turns out that one week later I am still on there and am convinced that the creators have figured out a way to send crack out through your computer and into the pads of your fingertips.

Oh and you should know, people can tag photos of you (from their collection) and they will show up on your account. This happened 9 times. And here are 5 of the 9 photos.







I'm in it for real.

Masterpiece Theater

Eric has never seen Jaws. (Well we are watching it right this very moment because I couldn't stand this thought). But seriously! Does everyone have these moments? Ones where you look at your spouse, dumbfounded, and ask, "Who are you?" and "Why have I not visited the rock you used to live under?"

Korean Karaoke

You haven't karaoked until you've karaoked at Lincoln Karaoke. It is serious fun. And even more serious when it's a girls only birthday party ringing in year 30. Good call LK. I now know what it's like to be Kenny Rogers, Michael Jackson, and Lulu...all in one night. It's a huge responsibility.

Eric and I shot over to Gethsemane Garden Center today. There was a big bald brown spot in our garden. We caught one of the nice people buzzing around with big floppy hats and elbow length gloves and told her, "Hey we have a spot in our yard that floods when it rains. It's pretty much a place for a mud wrestling tournament. And all the plants have drowned. And we're far too lazy to level the yard."

"Oh!" she exlaimed with a grin. "So you want to make a rain garden?"

"Why...yes! That's precicely what we want to do."

Who knew there were such things? But now we have one. At least in its phase one.

Found a Husker bar tonight. Met some nice Huskers. Talked about the new face of Nebraska Football. And how it's not hip to call us Corn Huskers. Huskers is more pc.

Blerg!

Pardon me.

Just a quick announcement. In the wee hours (you'll get the pun soon) of last night I beat Eric at Wii Bowling. Which is very exciting for two reasons 1. I never beat Eric at any kind of bowling (and thus he accused me of training behind his back) and 2. Um. We have a Wii! Sarah, Eric's sister, SENT us one! I KNOW, right? You're wondering where can YOU get a sister-in-law that cool? Well, she's mine. You'll have to find your own. :)

Plaza Sésamo

So my Spanish teacher mentioned that she has a student who watches the Mexican version of Sesame Street (Plaza Sésamo) and claims to learn a load of Spanish from it. Which really makes perfect sense if you think about it. All in all, Sesame Street is a show to teach language to newbies. So I come right home, go to youtube, type in Plaza Sésamo and click on the first video that comes up. I listen hard and move my face closer to the screen as if this will help me understand a few things, which I don't...until cookie monster comes on. Take a listen. You'll understand too. (I still have no idea of what this nice little sketch is about. And after gathering a few words from the comments left on youtube, I have to guess that it's not very nice. And that I probably wouldn't post this here if I had any clue about what's being said.) I just had to share my Spanish lesson gone weird.

I walked out my back gate tonight and joined the choir at St. Mary's just twenty steps away. Watch out 9am mass. You've got a soprano with rusty cords on your hands.

Part 3 on dear Allison (aka Noil).