Returning back to the Blogosphere

Well, I'm back at work, and just in time. Boy do I need the rest. This was the week of home owner initiation by fire.

As a wonderful gift from my parents departing their landlord responsibilities with the house we live in, they bought us carpet for our living/dining room area. We picked out the carpet and they bought it back in June, but the soonest it could be installed was this week. It was a week we've been looking forward to for some time. Good-bye high traffic dirt paths and mashed dead fibers and stains that defy every attempt to remove them from our lives. Hello new beautiful.

Since we would be charged extra to have the installers remove the carpet, we decided to do that ourselves. This prompted us to lump in a goal we've had since we moved in 7+ years ago---to rent one of those big industrial construction garbage bins and do a heavy duty clean out. Get rid of all the stuff that had been left behind when we moved in, all the stuff we've been carrying around our whole married life that we don't need, and all the stuff that's built up over our stay here.

And while we were at it, I thought we might as well get to replacing the kitchen sink whose enamal had gotten a little chipped and rusty over the years, not to mention that it had a faucet that no longer could turn off completely.

I started work on Saturday, and took off the following Monday and Tuesday to prep. The weather decided to make my project a little more challenging and cooked up 104 degree temps for me to bask in as I cleaned out the garage and attic which were holding in the heat to the tune of probably 110 degrees F or better.

But I did it. I faced the challenge and emerged victorious. And I learned a few things on the way.

1. When you work in that kind of heat you need to drink a lot of water. My smart wife stayed on top of this for me, checking frequently to be sure that I was staying well hydrated. But I will tell you this, taking a drink on a day of heat like that is like pouring liquid in the bottom of a salt shaker. You no more than pour it in you than it is seeping out of you again. I kept a towl hanging from a nail in a rafter that I was constantly using to wipe my profusely sweating face.

2. Sharing your work day with 8 hours of podcasts is sugar that helps the medicine go down. Who said home improvements couldn't be geeky!

3. When planning home improvements, budget $100.00 and 8 hours more than you think you'll need. This is to allow for the zillion trips back and forth to the hardware store you'll make to get all the extra stuff you didn't know you needed and only discover as you go.

4. Plumbing is NOT plug and play. It should be, but it's not.

5. The T.V. image of the man half under the sink trying to be the do-it-yourself guy, clanging and banging and grumbling pseudo-swear words---that's all true. Completely. The iPod helps here too, so you don't have to listen to yourself being unpleasant.

6. On the last day where you are supposed to be working inside in the air conditioning, that will be the day when the cool weather moves in that you could have used 72 hours earlier.

7. Living in a house for any length of time you save up a whole lot of crap. And even though you are trying to pitch out everything in sight, you'll inevitably remember something you forgot to pitch in the bin after it's gone.

8. Getting all that junk out of your life still feels really liberating.

9. Having the kids over at Grandma's and Grandpa's while you work with your wife on the house is really a cool thing to do together. When it's just the two of you, it's almost like a date.

10. My wife get's a burning school girl crush twinkle in her eyes whenever I do home improvement work. I wish she got as jazzed when I hooked up electronics.

We had a couple little side adventures while we were doing all this too. This weekend was a scout camp for Robo that he was going to have to miss because of this huge project. Step up Grandpa the hero. Off they went and had a great time making great memories. And Robo came home with a tent that Grandpa is letting him use for scout camp-outs in future---and maybe even a few nights out with just dad or the family. Maybe.

At any rate, since all the furniture had been moved out in preparation for the carpet removal, Robo asked if he could set up the tent in the dining room area and sleep out there that night.

I couldn't think of a reason why not.

My "go ahead" caused Leemur to burst into an unrestrainable happy dance right there, akin to the moves Grandpa Joe did when Charlie found the golden ticket in the new Wonka movie. And by the time the tent was set up, the little Bear had generated so much raging internal hyperactivity that I didn't think we'd be able get him to sleep for a week. He was in the tent, he was out of the tent, he was doing laps around the tent. All of which got some protest from the other boys as they tried to set up a sleeping area.

We did finally all get to sleep that night though. Even Lemur, who moved from the tent to his bed and back a couple of times during the night, trying to decided which was worse, giving up comfort or giving up a night in the tent.

Then the next day, with the kids tucked away at Grandma's house, I spent the day cleaning out the attic and got all sweaty and unpleasant for a second day. That evening I then thought I'd just change out that sink real fast before going to bed.

Yeah, change out the sinkbefore bed---real fast no less. Right.

Around midnight when I realized that I wasn't going to get this done before sleep, even after multiple trips to the hardware store trying all kinds of solutions, I also realized that in my current condition my wife wouldn't even be able to sleep in the same room with me. I also realized that we had no way of turning on the water for even a moment with the state the sink was in.

So I did what any loving husband would do. I put on some shorts, grabbed the shampoo bottle and went out to soap off in the only place with available water-----the kid's pool in the back yard. And let me tell you, after the rain had added 3 cold inches over the last 12 hours, that was one brisk experience.

But we've gotten all projects accomplished---the carpet is in and looks wonderful (thanks Mom and Dad), and thanks to wonderful help and some improvised on the spot creative thinking from my Dad we have a sink that works and doesn't leak. We even got it all done in time for the important furniture to be moved back into place on Wednesday night---the T.V. and couch--so we didn't miss our family T.V. night watching "Lost".

So now that I've got all this work behind me---it happens.

I think there is something in males after a project that is like the hormone that is released in women after the experience of pregnancy and childbirth so they can still think, "I wonder what the next one will look like?"

I sit in my living room now, looking at my wonderful new carpet and think, "You know what we could do with those walls. . ."

Heaven help me.

Why I’m glad to live in the new Millennium

In the 70s the freaks had their day. In the 80’s it was Hip to be Square (and rich). In the 90s the slacker grunge world blossomed and was cool.

Now it’s our turn. Geeks, Nerds, Dorks---It is our turn to RISE!

CNN even said so in an article titled “Dork Pride”.

It is our turn to be cool, and we don’t even have to do anything but be our obsessive selves, hiding out in our compulsions. People still won’t know what we are talking about when we're at a party and get carried away going on about our area of socially outcast expertise, but now they’ll think were pretty groovy for being able to elicit those blank stares.

In this CNN article one nerd who feels suddenly validated worries that there will be a time when we return to a life of ridicule. But that's based on the idea that this is simply a 'trend' and subject to the fickleness of fashion. I believe it's more than that. Trends seem to start because of a fascination with something that wasn't there before, like the hula-hoop and Star Wars. It's a new excitement based on novelty.

But Geeks and Nerds have always been there, and there have been lots of us. It's like the ants in Pixar's "A Bug's Life"; when they realized how many more of them there are than the bullies, they figure out how to band together for cumulative strength.

The Interenet has brought us together and now the genie is out of the bottle. This is not a trend, it's an emboldening. We will not go quietly into the night!

And it seems like everyone is realizing that there is a little geek in all of us. And Geek is Good. Sarah Vowel, a self proclaimed history geek, labels "geekiness" as "detail oriented zealotry". The term Geek seems to be taking the place of Fanatic as more and more people have begun using the term in proud reference to themselves.

If people have to explain why they know something because of a secret passion, I've begun hearing people say things like "I'm a baseball geek", "I'm a railroad geek", "I'm a knitting geek". A term that began it's assosiciation with just Star Trek, computers and comic books has now found identification in every form of minuta.

She goes on in her book, "A Partly Cloudy Patriot", to quote a posting from Slashdot on the subject:

"Geeks tend to be focused on very narrow fields of endevor. The modern Geek has been generally dismissed by society because their passions are viewed as trivial by those who see The Big Picture. But Geeks understand that the Big Picture is pixalated and that their high level of contribution in small areas grow the picture. They don't need to see what everyone else is doing to make their part better."

And besides, like the kids in the CNN article realized, being a geek is "where all our friends are and that's where we have the most fun."

If we ever do fall back out of interest to the mainstream media and entertainment gatekeepers, we will always have the Internet. As Ms. Vowell says, the Internet is the Geek Israel.

Another quote I read recently that I like stated this after a review of the content of Blogs, Podcasts, and Video Blogs:

"It seems that Mundane is the new Punk Rock."

Cool.

Rock on Geeks. Rock loud.

In Memory: James Doohan, 85

Scotty from Star Trek passes on. He was not only a pop culture icon but also a real life hero, participating and being wounded in the D-Day invasion.

Read about it here.

It's interesting, given his association, that this happens on the anniversary of the first moon landing.

Yet another testimony. . .

Mom,

Click here to read another example of why we went with a Mac for your new computer.

So, How’s it going then. . . ?

. . .well, my summer driving with the window down because I have no air conditioning, combined with constantly being inside during the daylight hours, has my own hands, when clenched, reminding me of a 70s era racial harmony poster. My left hand is becoming much more “melanin active” than my right from the two hours a day hanging out the open window in an attempt to cool myself from the summer heat baking inside my car as I drive.

…I am now, as of last Thursday, a home owner. This translates to me being taken a bit off guard on the morning of the 14th as I arrived home from the closing and every plaster crack and chip of paint in the abode where I have dwelt for the last 7 years was suddenly wringing it’s hands and fiendishly laughing at me like a James Bond villain in my over active mind. I just hope that their monologue about how they intend to do me in goes on as long as it did for Bond, so I can find a way to save myself from being undone by them. On the upside, in true 007 fashion, I do believe that I’ll need to acquire a few new gadgets to overcome these foes. Bonus.

…A good friend from college came out to visit her brother this weekend, and as she usually does when she is able to visit, she spent a night with us so we could catch up with each other. She is a single deputy D.A. for a county in California, but she is still down to earth enough to be able to hang out with the likes of us and have a good time. She has impressed me to no end with a role she adopted soon after college of being a surrogate aunt to our children. Over the past 14 years she has sent us unsolicited (and unfortunately unreciprocated) packages and cards for all the kid’s birthdays and some major holidays. All done faithfully even thought we, my wife and I, suffer from being correspondence challenged.

She always calls on the birthdays of my wife and I. Calls which are immensely enjoyed but also elicits no small degree of guilt.

You see, we struggle, for some unfathomable reason, to even remember what day her birthday is. If it was just me it would be understandable. I have decided I have some sort of mental cross wiring akin to dyslexia that has the effect of making it nearly impossible to remember a birthday in the “teens” of any month, especially if it’s in the summer. My daughter’s birthday, no problem in early October. My wife’s thankfully, or perhaps by benevolent design, falls in the good part of the month and year so I’ve never missed it. My middle boys suffer from both being in the summer and falling on a day numbered between 10 and 20. I have to check my income tax forms every year to be entirely sure when I need to play their parties. My parents, woefully, also suffer from the unfortunate birth date criteria.

But my wife is brilliant! She not only remembers all our kid’s and parent’s birthdays, a power she uses for the good of keeping me out of the dog house, but she remembers all her brother’s and sister’s birthdays, and my brother’s birthday, and all their spouse’s birthdays, and the birthdays of people we just know as friends and acquaintances. But still, amazingly, this college friend’s birthday is kryptonite to her other worldly ability.

We had a good time together with our out of town guest on Saturday night. We were in conversation in our living room until late in the night, and then the next morning, Sunday, we awoke and quietly slipped into our day. My wife was scheduled for duty in the nursery at church as was my daughter, so the boys (Robo and Lemur) and I would drive our friend to her brother’s place about an hour away.

When we arrived at her brother’s place and walked up the steps of her brother’s house, I was walking behind her porting her luggage as my good nature is want to do. Her sister-in-law answered the door and let us into their living room still filled with the hush of the morning. Her sister-in-law’s hair was still wet from her shower and this side of the house was still cool in the morning shade, and the family seemed to still be asleep so we helloed in hushed voices. Suddenly, her brother, his numerous children and our friend’s mother (in from Florida) leapt of from behind furniture and shouted a phrase that turned me to dismay-----surprise, happy birthday.

She was in our house, in our home, in our bosom, and still we failed. We were so happy to be in her presence, but it was not enough to jog our memory and finally recognize this most important individual commemoration on the very day it was occuring, and applaud the anniversary of this valued person’s inception into existence.

We are bad friends. I have no idea why she still likes us. I’m just glad she does.

. . .my mother replaced her computer a few weeks ago, as you might remember me mentioning. In accordance with this purchase offer, she received several pieces of accompanying hardware for “free” from the online store where we purchased the new addition. In this case, Free is a relative term with respect to the final purchase price after the mail in rebates for said items. Rebates. Rebate being the operative word which in secret handshake, pinky-swear marketing language translates to “being able to use the word FREE to lure the consumer, but then placing the burden of that promise on the said consumer who is commonly too stupid and/or lazy to fulfill their end of the bargain meaning that in the end, after their failure, we don’t have to give them anything and feel no obligation for remorse and there is nothing anyone can do about it”.

After the month of trying to get a house bought and a play produced, I realized Sunday night as I sat down to finally send in these rebates that I had become a statistic reinforcing that image.

. . .Last night was the first meeting of the group planning MY 20 year high school reunion. It’ll be next July. There were 7 people there, all of whom I knew but mostly hadn’t seen since high school. As we assembled in the back of a Mexican pizza place in town, I looked around and realized that in high school I don’t believe I ever served on an organizing body with anyone who showed up to help with the planning, but I did seem to remember that pretty much everyone there was fairly instrumental in heading up some school event or the other. This intimidated me a bit at first but by the end of the evening I really glad that I was participating in the planning of this.

I’m going to be the one heading up the organizational efforts on the web. Surprise,surprise.

5 on the 5th in '05 for July

I'm a little late this month for the 5 on the 5th but better late than not at all, I reckon.

This was the only picture of the play that I got because I was walking the Bear the whole time. If you've read the play, characters shown here are (starting in the back, right to left): Madeline in purple, the Widow in black (of course), Doris, Victoria in white, Lucy, and Cash on the end. Bonnie is in the yellow kneeling and Gabby is in the denim.

The rest of these photos are what I showed people at the reunion who wanted to see pics of the kids. The first one is of Kitten at her Aunt's wedding earlier this year, and the other's were taken after dinner when I realized on our way out the door that we didn't have any photos of the kids to take with us. We showed them to people using the display on the back of our digital camera. I felt kind of bad about that till we ended up looking at other people's kids on thier cell phone display. Welcome to the 21st century.

The Play is the Thing!

This past Saturday was blistering hot, which is typical for our little town's main summer festival. It's always either super hot or raining. Never seems to ever be in-between. But it's almost become a tradition to suffer for your fun during this event. If you had it easy, how would you know you were alive?

We did plan for the heat this year, though. That was half the reason for writing the play in a modern style in the first place. When you set these plays in the historical period in which they typically take place, that means wearing multiple layers of heavy wool clothing for a costume. I made that mistake about 10 years ago and my cast paid the price. One of the lead actors had it so bad that he got sick in a trash barrel between performances and my stage manager never said a word until she broke down in tears from heat exhaustion.

I'm honestly not a slave driver, but I just get so driven myself that I don't think about things like eating and rest when there's a show going before an audience in just hours! I've been working on that though.

This year the costumes were more appropriate for summer, although there were a couple of suit jackets and a black dress. I only said it was better, not perfect. We're still working towards that. Not that anything could have been entirely comfortable in that tent in the middle of a sweltering afternoon where the air was as still and heavy as it could possibly be.

We went up at 3 in the afternoon so I was in the park assembling the 'set' at about 1:30. It consisted of only a backdrop wall (8' tall by 12' wide) with an arch that would be covered by a makeshift curtain. The curtain was never used, and the whole thing was just meant to kind of set off the space rather than being functional. Four wooden benches that acted as makeshift pews in this chapel setting rounded out the picture.

The reason I had to assemble it was that we were re-using a set that I used on a touring summer show my wife and I did about 10 years ago. In fact, I wrote that show and we performed it when she was 8 months pregnant with Robo. I was pulling the set out of the garage a few months ago Robo asked me when the last time we used the set was. I was going to say something like 4 years ago because that's how it felt. When I thought for a second, though, I said, "Well, how old are you?"

Consequently, since the wife was acting in that last show, I wrote a pregnant character into the plot. It worked real well till we revived it 2 years later and had to come up with pregnant tummy padding and that meant more costume rental cost.

At any rate, when we were doing that show, I had to design this back wall set so that it could be torn down and transported in the back of at 1991 Chevy Cavalier mini-wagon. So the largest piece could only be 4'x4'. I ended up making an interesting puzzle piece design that went together quite well at the time, but it was a bit of a mystery putting it together for the first time in 10 years after dragging it out of the garage. I did finally figure it out, and so on Saturday construction was a smooth step by step process.

We had a good write up on the front page of our small town morning paper that morning, so the show was well attended. It was difficult performing in that space---outdoor theater is always a brutal endeavor. The more people that attend, and the hotter or more humid the air, the more sound gets sucked up. So it ended up being difficult to hear toward the back. Not to mention that keeping people's focus is a challenge while all around there are 4000 noisy distracting things going on.

Near the end of the performance the Civil War re-enactors felt the need to fire off their field cannon not even 100 feet from the tent. That of course scared the holy-hannas out of everyone in the audience AND the cast. After which, of course, the audience just started to buzz, talking to their neighbor about how much that freaked them out. This caused a whole scene to be pretty much lost. And just when things were calming down, they shot it off again!

That kind of took the wind right out of the sails, but the stalwart cast finished as a matter of principle, ending to enthusiastic, appreciative applause.

And just like that, it was history. One performance after 6 weeks of rehearsal and we're done. I would have liked to have seen the performance in a more controlled space so I could understand what parts of the show worked with an audience and seen how to tune the show a little to tighten it up. I couldn't gauged this audience reaction at all, not being able to hear if they were laughing and when. And to be honest, I didn't even get to really see the show except in pieces because I was doing laps with the little bear in the stroller to keep him from getting antsy and vocal.

I did have a couple of local people come up afterward to eagerly ask if I might be interested in writing something for little drama groups that they have, so they must have thought the quality of writing was passable. I'm considering their offers.

In the meantime we're figuring out how to spend all the free time we have together now. I'm back to putting in as much overtime as I can muster at work. But for tonight we'll be all together as a family watching "Lost" for the first time since last seasons finale.

And in 6 weeks school starts. Where has the summer gone?

Hi and Hello!

If you are visiting this site because you got the address from the Reunion, please send me an email with your email address. I'd like to keep in touch but wasn't together enough on that night to remember to ask.

Thanks.

Send it to cyberjazzdaddy {at} mac {dot} com

And if you have just run across this site from a link or by surfing--Welcome---I'd love to hear from you too!

Has all that time passed already?

We staged the play this weekend for it’s one performance grand finale opener. More on that later.

We finished it up just in time to shower and spruce up and get gone to my wife’s 20 year High School reunion.

20. Years. Are you kidding me.

Nope. Not kidding. Our kids looked at us during dinner when we told that what we were going to like we could quite possibly drop dead at any moment we were so old. Then the questions about our pet dinosaurs and the pyramids started.

The wife wasn’t even quite sure that she wanted to go at first. But we both graduated from the same high school and I wanted to see people from her class as much I would for my own reunion, so I made up her mind for her. We were going. She didn’t protest too much. At least she had me to blame me if it didn’t go well.

She was very pleasantly surprised though. I think perhaps that she didn't want to go because she thought of the reunion in terms of the people who represented the class in the larger sense. The figureheads of the class; popular people, class government, star athletes---all the people who were photographed and became the “public image” of the high school at that time in the papers and yearbook. We never really had much in common with those people and it didn't seem inviting if that's all it was going to be.

But when we got there and started seeing people, she came alive remembering all the people we had shared time with--people who we lost track of in our memory as our thoughts got caught up in the needs of the now. She seemed to be having the same reaction to people that I was, perhaps even more so. Like a little light going off that says, “Now I remember, I’m glad to have known you! How are you?”

And people were amazingly all over the map. Back in the day we tended to be collected together in the crowd of outsiders. Some might call them (us) the nerds, geeks and freaks at the time—but we liked us, and for the most part we were to busy being what we were and liked being to be intimidated by what others may have thought we weren’t.

Now all the years later we came together again. Some of the math guys got to cash in on the tech bubble, but were not so entangled that they went down with the burst. There was the debate queen who attended fine colleges, made her way through the D.C. culture, met her love at Mardi Gras, was married in Manhattan and now is a freelance writer. One of the guys who just seemed to be a normal middle class Midwestern student had to come back from England for the reunion where he was involved in insect research at Oxford! Another friend ended up a professional magician. Then other’s were in the midst of a career change---one into the ministry, another we found out decided to be an airline pilot.

All these people had credentials that would have given them the collateral to put on airs, but wonderfully they didn't. They were all so great to be with and talk to. In a moment that typified what went on all night long, I found my wife speaking to a very statuesque cosmopolitan looking woman, and the both of them fondly remembering how they used to re-enact the Wizard of Oz in her grandparent’s basement as little kids. No pretension there.

I was told that the majority of no-shows were from people who were very local and could have easily attended. I wondered how many of them feared the stigma of not having achieved enough, or even having gotten away from the little town they swore they would leave and never look back.

Even I had a little bit of self inflicted comparison when I thought that I wasn’t where I expected to be at this point in my life. Then I thought how curious it was that the life that I’m loving so much was suddenly potentially inadequate in my own mind when placed in the “so what’s been up with you over the last 20 years” gallery. It was a thought that was thankfully fleeting under the genuine camaraderie of the people around us who really never for a moment made me feel like we were being measured-up.

In the end I think that every one was a little sad that the six hour party would be such a short time before we were spread out again all over the country/world. See you again in 10 years (a time that seems so long but will, in truth, probably pass in a wink).

We got home late but still lay in bed with all the night’s events buzzing in our heads. Thinking about all the people we hadn’t thought about in years. Thinking that we should have gotten email addresses and didn’t. Thinking that maybe we drank too much (even though we didn’t drink hardly anything, but it’s more than we normally do) and stayed out too late and would regret it in the morning. Thinking that every one there was almost 40, but for a night it was like we were all 18 again.

In a week I get together I get together with people to begin planning my 20 year reunion---class of '86. This was a good dress rehearsal for me. I can honestly say I am much more excited at the prospect than I was a week ago.

The Twinge in my Heart

Yes, it's that time of year again. The time of year where I realize that I am very happy, but some how my eye turns to the horizion and I feel this ache deep down inside. Just a little.

My thoughts are constantly drifting to Bushnell Illinoise and the most kick the doors down music and more festival ever.

Yes, it's time again for Conerstone.

I went when it was only 3 years old in 1987 and have never been back, but would really like to. And each year when the gates open at the end of June, I realize that I'm not there again this year.

It is fantastic unbelieveable with all the stuff that goes on. Over 25,000 people converge on this country town to go to a fill a neaby pastureland and listen to 300 bands on 11 stages over 4 days. But it's not just music, there's an art festival, a film festival, a dance tent, extreme sports, a lake, horses, kids activites and over 200 seminars. All happening at the same time.

And the kicker for us is that it's a Christian event. Family friendly but with a twist. This won't look or sound like any church that I know of. It's a collection of the Jesus Underground. Every kind of music from Death Metal to Celtic style world music to Electronica. Every outcast subculture from Punk to Goth to Hippie to Homeboy. Tatoos, piercings, leather, spikey hair, colored hair, long hair, no hair (and then throw in some Grandmas)---it's all there. This is the original Jesus Freak Show.

Some of the bands you may have heard of like Switchfoot and Jars of Clay. Most you probably haven't. It's an indie fest like you've never seen from all kinds of generes. Some of the bands you may hear more from like Relient K, MxPx and Project 86.

The film festival has a strong attraction to me as well. The show things you may not think of as being typical from a festival like this. They are set up to show and discuss films like Dogville and The Motorcycle Diaries. They will also be showing documentaries, foriegn films and indie films.

A seperate part call the Imaginarium will be showing old classic flims like Casablanca and Frankenstein.

I follow the website to live the experience by proxy, and this year they've added video, and a podcast being hosted by the Zany Aquires. It helps.

It's over now and so I start thinking again---maybe next year I'll be there. My mother in law is going to buy us a tent for Christmas she told us this last week, so maybe that puts us one step closer.

Only 365 days to find out for sure.