A semi-daily chronicle of my life as a musician, a family man, and a citizen of Oregon.

Mar 27, 2008

James' Visit

A few weeks ago our friend James came over to hang out with us while his folks went to see a movie and get a little bit of a break from kid time.

At first, we were really sad because we missed our mom.

After we started playing guitar we felt a lot better though.  Brianna let James borrow her guitar, which he was really into.

James is a bit of a Renaissance man so in addition to guitar we played a bit of maraca, both with eyes-closed concentration:

and with eyes open:

Mar 26, 2008

someecards.com

I stumbled upon someecards.com a few days ago and it's been putting a smile on my face ever since.  Warning - it's pretty dark humor, if that's not your kind of thing.  It certainly is my kind of thing.

Mar 24, 2008

The Dave Laptop Table

I don't really see how you can know about the Dave laptop stand from Ikea without buying it for me.  It just doesn't make sense.

Brianna Gets Her Ears Pierced

For years now I've been saying that Brianna would need to wait until she was 12 years old to get her ears pierced.  My reasons for this mainly revolved around the values I would like to teach Brianna about being a smart, independent woman who isn't valued primarily for her looks.  This seemed like a pretty good line of thought to me and pretty reasonable, but over time I've come to recognize that like most things in our culture, what makes reasonable and logical sense to me just isn't how most people do things.  Of course, Brianna has been pleading to get the deed done for years now, and Jen has occasionally expressed her agreement that we should just go ahead with it.  Recently I was at Brianna's school and realized that literally every girl in her class had her ears pierced except for her.

So I finally gave in.  We took her down to Jori Zan's in Salem, which I would highly recommend (based on the reviews I'm not the only one).

 

I will say that one advantage of waiting until Brianna was older to have her ears pierced is that she is absolutely meticulous about making sure that they are taken care of just the way that Jori told her to.  She does the special soap, the soaking in salt water, all that without a lot of reminder from us.  As a result they've healed nicely and Brianna's looking forward to being able to wear different earrings soon - but no danglies... dad has to keep some rules going.

Mar 19, 2008

Jasmine's Birthday

Another cool thing that happened just recently was Jasmine's birthday party.  Jasmine is Jen's niece and just a totally awesome kid - she's been on the blog before.  Her birthday was at a place called Pump It Up in Wilsonville.  Have you ever seen one of those inflatable castle things where you can go inside and bounce around? Pump It Up is basically like if there was a whole gym of those, including a really big slide.  It is awesome.

Here's Jasmine on the slide:

Brianna in the bouncy tent:

Mar 18, 2008

A Day at the Park

Sorry I haven't written in so long... life's been going on and so forth, but the great news is I've got a whole lot to share over the next few days!  It's going back a couple of weeks but we had a great day at Laurelhurst Park a couple of weeks ago.  As usual, I didn't want to go (can't remember specifically but I probably wanted to work on something on the computer or play guitar or something), but I'm glad that Jen talked me into it because it was a ball.  We spent a surprising amount of time on the see-saw.

Was also played a lot of wall ball, which I hadn't played in YEARS.

Mar 7, 2008

Open Source Musician

Just want to give a plug to my brother's new podcast Open Source Musician.  It's pretty awesome and definitely informative.  He did a great job on the first episode.

Mar 6, 2008

Hands Are Shaking

I've posted a new song for your listening enjoyment - a dub throwdown called "Hands Are Shaking".

Click here to visit my last.fm page and give it a listen.

 

The lyrics are:

I can feel it now

My hands upon my face and I'm sorry

Living life on time

A modern world pushed off on the future

When will we own up to what we have done?

The stress of being right

And not fuck up as bad as it could be

Every eye I meet

Is filled with fear and the lies that are making

Bloodshed on the streets

I'm most scared of the hands that are shaking

When will we own up to what we have done?

The stress of being right

And not fuck up as bad as it could be

In the song that's me playing all of the instruments and singing - Piano, Organ, Bass, Rhythm and Lead Guitar.

Of course, I'm still using hydrogen for drum synths.

Mar 2, 2008

Victory!

On the tenth day, the machines are working!

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Day 7

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Day 8

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Day 9

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Day 10!

 

I don't think I'll be doing this experiment again, since I was getting a little bored with it myself.