Songwriters of the Future

Back when I was young, we had these online discussion forums called web boards - what? They still have those? I guess I just haven't used one in a while, since someone told me blogging was the cool thing to do. I'm sure in the near future, it will all be considered antiquated technology. I have no doubt that the very child now growing in my wife's womb will someday look at me in shocked hilarity and exclaim "You used to post on web boards?!? Wow, I didn't know my dad was such a fooblerond." (In the future, of course, they will have new words to describe someone who is hopelessly out of touch.) Then the child will take a 6D holo-video of their embarrassing dad with their Apple i-Robot and send it via telepathy-text to their best friend/virtual classmate in Tokyo. I will probably be put out by this disrespect, and become slightly defensive. "Is it really necessary to make fun of me to your friends?" I will say, "They'll see this all tonight on Reality World anyway." (By this time, you know, the entire world will be a reality tv show. There will be camera crews in every house 24/7, and thousands of channels for each geographical region. But being the self-absorbed people we are, everyone will only watch their own channel to see what happened to themselves and all their friends that day. There will also be, by necessity, a spin-off reality show called "Lives of Reality World Camerapersons" that targets the only demographic not receiving regular exposure on the rest of the Reality World Network.)

Ummm...sorry, I got sidetracked. I was talking about a web board - to be more specific the "Webb Board" located on the website of a wee bald musical genius named Derek Webb. There was a very friendly, intelligent, artistic community there that kept a lively discussion going on a smorgasboard buffet of topics. (Although I now believe that many of them were only covertly looking for spouses...*turns to his cousin and winks*...) Btw, I use past tense when describing this community only because I no longer frequent it - i don't know if it exists still or not. Maybe I should find out. Anyway, there was an ever-present thread going there for songwriters. People would post their latest pieces and get help and critique from the rest of the community - and I remember that it was really a great outlet and encouragement for my feeble attempts at the craft. I started thinking about that now, because I believe I'm finally coming out of a musical dry spell that I was beginning to fear might last forever. I haven't played guitar or written songs in so long...but now...well it seems like the creative juices are at least beginning to trickle. Perhaps if I come up with anything worthwhile in the future, I'll post it here... Writing a truly worthwhile song, however, is the hardest thing for me to do. That's actually what I was going to elaborate on in this post, but now I've already rambled too much. So sometime in the future (before blogs and the internet go out of style) I will post my thoughts on songwriting, and perhaps a few of my favorite lyrics of all time. Cheers.

Christmas @ Big Bear

I know this is a little after the fact, but I thought I would post a few pics from our weekend at Big Bear. There wasn't alot of snow on the ground, but It was still definitely good to get up in the mountains. And the lack of snow didn't seem to bother most of these snow-starved Californians... they still lined their cars up at every wide spot in the road and flocked by the dozens to frolick around in little patches of crusty, dirty snow leftovers. It was amusing. At any rate, we kept a roaring fire going and lazed around the cabin most of the weekend stuffing our faces and playing foosball. On Christmas Eve it was about 50 degrees and we went to a tubing run, and then on Christmas the temp dropped to freezing and stayed there all day. The big bummer for the weekend was that we had to take Grandpa to the hospital on Christmas. Their doctor had told them they didn't need to take oxygen up, but because of the altitude change he started having congestive heart failure again, and we had to have the paramedics come to get him down the killer set of stairs at the cabin. They got his oxygen levels up at the hospital and just kept him in over night and he's doing fine now. The big fun for the weekend of course was springing the news about our baby in the making...that was fun. I thought we did a good job keeping it a secret up until Christmas Day - even with Jess eating constantly and nonchalantly dashing to the bathroom to throw up. Most of all we just enjoyed at least feeling like we were out in the woods again, smelling the pine trees and wood smoke and watching the critters... Ah, the simple life.

The "Big" News

Well, here you have it. For those of you who haven't heard through the proverbial grape vine (which actually moves faster than high-speed internet in many parts of North Idaho)...we are officially prego. Well, Jess is at least - I haven't shown any symptoms yet. I would elaborate on this momentous occasion and all of it's grave and joyous trappings, but I'm afraid it really hasn't sunk in yet. And it probably won't for me until the baby comes - which is theoretically supposed to happen August 9th, meaning Jess is about 8 weeks along right now. We weren't planning this yet, but we are excited nonetheless. Excited, content, and quite overwhelmed with a vague air of confusion and paranoia thrown in for good measure. I guess that's nothing out of the usual for me. Jess, on the other hand, mostly just feels nausea right now. We're both hoping that passes soon. So Happy New Year to all! I know ours is sure to be filled with excitement, hard work, and lots of decisions.........
Holy crap. We're having a baby.

Happy Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all...There's a lot of people we wish we could see this Christmas, but we hope your holiday is full of joy, peace, and contentment. (Even if you don't get to be with US...I know that truly is a great loss for you.) To the left you can see how far our tree has come since my last post. Actually, it's pretty much dead now, but that's what you get when you cut a tree down and stick it in your house for a month. It looks pretty anyway. Jess and I have officially declared tonight (Saturday) to be our own Private Christmas Eve. Tomorrow we will have our own Private Christmas Morning, and then head up to Big Bear where Mom and Bill and Grandma and Grandpa are waiting for us at a cabin they rented for the week. It just dumped snow up there, so hopefully it sticks around. We'll do some sledding, relax with hot beverages by a real wood fire, and thus it will presumably feel like a "real" Christmas this year - something we are both looking forward to. Due to Christmas on a Tuesday and the generosity of my boss, I get a four day weekend (Sat - Tues) - and due forces unknown and unexpected, Jess actually gets four days off as well (Sun - Wed). So I'll probably actually just take an extra day off, and we'll stay up there until Wednesday. No need to rush into a 3 hr drive down a snowy mountain after eating a big Christmas dinner - that's what I always say at least. Well, as I said earlier, we hope you all have a wonderful holiday with your respective families and friends....And God bless us, every one.

And so it begins...

The holiday's are upon us. Resistance is futile, there is no escape... And surprisingly, (shocking in fact, even to myself) I find that as the mad holiday season prematurely descends upon us, I am almost...well...enjoying it? For one who is most often characterized as a humbug or a scrooge, this strange feeling of pleasure is quite different. Frankly, it's odd enough to internalize it, much less act upon it. But yet I already find myself willingly partaking in holiday activities. The day after Thanksgiving, my crazy wife went out shopping before the first of her two shifts at work. And in between her shifts, guess what? More shopping. And I offered to join her. The next day, she had a rare Saturday off, and I had the itinerary ready to make the most of it. My mom joined us, we had lunch, and then went shopping all afternoon - I even braved Michael's to help her pick up ornament-making supplies. Later at night we went and picked up a tree, then I sipped egg nog while we watched a movie and did some present wrapping. Now mind you, Jess would have done all that with or without me, but the point is I volunteered to join her. I planned half of the activities, for goodness sakes! And dang it, I had a good time!!! I remember being told that I would start to enjoy Christmas again when I had kids of my own to enjoy it with. Of course, kids are a little ways off yet, but apparently the same principle applies to my wife. As the complete opposite of me in almost every way, she doesn't have an ounce of scrooge in her. She loves every minute of the Christmas season, and I suspect she enjoys it even more than most children do. So since making her happy makes me happy, it would seem that I must come to terms with my new appreciative nature for the holidays.

Random Thoughts, Infinite Sadness, and Air Travel

Well, the fires here are dying out, and things are getting back to normal. We saw Air Force One fly by the office last Thursday when Bush was touring the area. That was pretty cool. Things are busy at work...we are still wrapping up a big remodel and getting ready for all sorts of year end rush projects. I have my own (smallwindowless) office now, so that's cool too. I was somewhat bummed to see the BoSox sweep the World Series...I was mildly hoping that the Rockies would take it. I would have at least liked to see a close series. Oh well, guess I'll just have to wait for the Mariners to make it next October. The real sadness that has befallen me lately however is due to my sister and bro in law. In what seemed like a hasty decision to outside eyes, they announced they were packing it up and moving back to Idaho in two weeks. Two weeks. Can you believe it? I was shocked and dismayed. That pretty much reduces my social circle by approximately 50%. (I suppose I should do something about that...) They knew they wanted to move back, and they just decided it would be better to do it now - before Brady invested alot of time and money into his photography business down here and then had to cut ties later. So they're going to stay in my Grandparent's house for a few months (Gma and Gpa are down here for the winter) and then I'm sure they will find a nice, newer house that's five times the size of our apartment for about half as much...*sigh*...nothing like that North Idaho Cost of Living. The only upside of the situation for me is that Jess and I are going to help drive them up there (gotta love roadtrips) and I should have at least one day in CDA to see some friends before I fly back. We're leaving on the 10th and should get up there late on the 11th. Jess is staying through the end of that week with her parents, so she's happy about that. I think we snagged the last of the cheap flights before the holiday weekend. I'm telling you, ExpressJet is the bomb diggity. Non-stop Spokane to San Diego - flight time under 2.5 hours - with taxes and fees...$80. Freaking crazy. Everyone in the Pacific NW needs to come visit me. Everybody.

California Is Burning

Unless you live in a cave with Osama, I'm sure you've heard about the So Cal wildfires going on. We got home from Israel safe and sound Saturday night (It was an incredible trip - I'll post more on that with pics later) and Sunday morning we noticed the smoke. Then things got pretty crazy down here. The San Diego fires have already collectively burned over 300,000 acres. Somewhere around 1,200 homes have been destroyed, along with hundreds of commercial buildings. Hundreds more have been damaged. At one point they had evacuated around 500,000 people. Jess and I are quite safe where we are in La Jolla, but my Mom and Bill, and Lani and Brady and the fam all had to temporarily evacuate on Monday afternoon. Fortunately they were able to go home Tuesday afternoon though, and all is well. We had our friends Johnny and Brooke in town for a couple of days, and Lani and Brady ended up having to stay Monday night with us as well. So we had 6 adults and 3 kids in a small 1 bedroom apartment for a while...that was interesting. :) That incredible NASA photo above shows you what the 50+ mph Santa Ana winds were doing to fuel the flames. They have finally died down, so I think the worst may be over. They have lifted quite a few mandatory evacuations, so a lot of people have been allowed to return home. I think quite a bit of progress was made today, though I think it will still be a while before everything is out. They now estimate that the largest fire, the Witch fire, is 10% contained (this is better than the 0% containment estimate made yesterday.) That one fire is responsible for 200,000 acres and 800 homes. President Bush is supposed to tour the area tomorrow...it's just crazy how much damage has been done so quickly. This is one of the many maps that gives you an idea of just how big the burn areas are. So far the city has taken it very well. Most of the area business and restaurants are donating tons of free food and services. There's nothing but good reports from Qualcomm Stadium, where they housed about 10,000 evacuees. Our church opened as an evacuation center as well and was able to provide shelter, food, clothing, medical care, child care, etc. Like I said, I think Jess and I are safe here by the coast...and it's also comforting to know that in a worst case scenario we could easily fit everything valuable and important to us in our car. :)