Guess who turned 5 today!

Guess who turned 5 today!
Originally uploaded by CyberJazzDaddy.

You know what's better. . .

You know what's better than finding $20.00 in a winter coat pocket the first time you put it on in the fall. . .coming home late at night and feeling hungry, and then just when you've given up hope that there is anything snacky to eat in the house, you find that stash of homemade chocolate chip cookies you'd forgotten about.

In our house, if dad is going to get any of the treats made earlier in the day, the momma has to stash some of them high and deep somewhere. And so she did several weeks ago. And last night, I was re-united! Sigh. Just another sign that the God of the Universe is big enough to even thow a perk when you least expect it.

Woah, look at that drop. . .

We're at the crest of the first hill of roller coaster 2007. Just a quick note to say that I'm here, and I'll be writing again soon, just don't be concerned if I don't get a chance to for a while. I'll try to stop in for some cheat posts here and there (Youtube and stuff) just for good measure.

In the meantime, here are some pictures to show you how I spent New Years.

Christmas week was spent with 2 days of celebration, then I had 2 days of sick. Kind of sums up the year. Serious ups, and serious downs. I can't say I was sad to see the year go. I'm ready for a clean slate. I seriously experienced some of the lowest emotional points I ever have in my life last year, and it's taken me all this time to dig out. I can't quite explain it, and can't point to something that even I understand as being significant enough on paper as to what would cause it. I'm still trying to figure out that part. But emotionally, I know that I am on the other side now, ready to pick up and plod forward.

At any rate, on New Years we went to my brother's house about 3 hours west. The drive was slushy and yuck most of the way but we were making good time. Then, about 15 miles away the ice got seriously bad. We slowed down more and more with each car off the road we passed. By the time we saw an over turned semi-truck we were down to about 10 mph. That last leg of the trip took over 45 min, and my wife did her best to hide wiping her eyes as she silently cried the whole rest of the way.

We were much happier when we were finally safe in my brother's house. We did a gift exchange with them that night (because they were with the other side of the family on Christmas day this year) and went snugly to bed. We woke up the next morning in time to be greeted by a power outage. It was crazy as the kids looked at all of their electric powered gifts they'd just received(movies, video games, music and other things you plug in the walls) and didn't know what to do. The outlook seemed grim. But slowly board games were discovered and we had a kind of old fashioned family gathering that in the end even the kids themselves appreciated, commenting that if the power hadn't gone out, we probably wouldn't be all together in the kitchen like this.

Then, almost like a prompt from a Hallmark script to prove this point, the power came back on and after much cheering, the group fragmented to all corners of the house to plug in the new gifts and play back in the 21 Century.

When I helped my brother clear the ice from his driveway the next morning, two hockey playing kids from down the block were able to ice skate down the middle of the street to see what we were doing. I have honestly never seen ice like this. On his lawn each individual blade of grass was encased in a little clear cocoon till it was about the size of an adult thumb. With their rounded tops it looked like the entire groomed lawn had been replaced by glass marbles.

I hear lots of other parts of the country are getting this kind of treatment too. Check out pictures from the weekend that people took from around the area here.

The Future. . .Again!

My kids love cool. Just like all kids do. But, they don’t generally pay close enough attention when the herald of the new cool thing is their dad. Sometimes they do, but not always.

Today, my red head came into me as I was moving the morning podcasts to my iPod and said, kind of excited and out of breath, “Dad, do you know the band Family Force 5?”

I stared back amazed and baffled for a second. Searching my brain for the missing part of what he was talking about, because his question couldn’t be that simple. I replied.

“Um, yeah----we’ve been listening to them in the car for the last 6 months taking you to school”

“Oh, yeah, right----but did you know that they were cool?”

“I’ve been telling you they were cool for the last 6 months.”

“Yeah, but no---now they’re really cool. Dustin (his best friend’s brother who is in High School) listens to them. He has all their albums.”

Sigh. I can even prove that I was into them for ages-----I posted their video off Youtube on my blog!

“All their album. They only have one. They’ve only been out since middle of last year. Their currently touring with TobyMac---we’ll be seeing them at the Fine Arts Festival (a youth event) we’re going to before the end of the school year.”

“Really? Awesome!”, and off he trundles to go tell the other guys in the living room the good news. We’re going to be seeing them in concert!

So many things go about the same way. I can’t just name drop. I have to really be surreptitiously aggressive with introducing my kids to things that are cool that they’ll totally love. Pulling up the movie trailer nonchalantly, leaving magazines open to ads and articles about events coming up, burning them CDs that I deliver to their rooms with little or no ceremony or sneaking songs onto their iPod when they aren’t looking. But mostly I bring things up and then wait for conversations like the above to point them back to the starting point of where I originally recognized that this was something that was going to be big.

I picked up on indi bands like Relient K, Switchfoot, Flyleaf, TFK, and the like before the cool kids did. I pointed out sites like Myspace, Youtube and Secondlife. I brought them the HomestarRunner Internet cartoon and Ask a Ninja. I showed them trailers for Napoleon Dynamite, for goodness sake. All these things went uber cool with their friends—or their friends older siblings, and I just want to say, "Listen to meeeee---I was there first!" I don't mean to sound whiney. I've just never been in this position before, and lately I've begun to feel like a 21 century version of the myth of Cassandra.

I'm the first to admit that I can’t predict the future and don’t claim to have my finger on the pulse of youth or cool culture. I just like the things I like and want someone to like them with me. And lately, these things have been catching on. It’s rather odd really, and frankly throws me a little off guard.

And Apple. Yes, even Apple after all these years. I was there at the beginning, man. From the moment the Apple IIe came in to the Jr. High math club room and I had to get one of my brainy friends who was smart enough to be in the math club sneak me in to see what all the excitement was about, I was in love. But for years after that I had to endure the scorn of not only the cool people, but even the geeks and nerds (they had all since de-evolved into a Microsoft world), for my Apple love.

Now as High School friends my kids know begin to graduate and get loaded up for college, they’re buying Macbooks. And my kids can say with a glint, “Yeah, we’ve had a Mac for ages.” And even better, they get to drop the fact that their Dad could probably answer any questions about the new laptop. He’s a Mac Guru, you know, they’ll say. I’m still a geek, but at least now I’m becoming useful. And it’s only getting better.

Did you hear about the latest shot hear round the world?

Of course you did. How could you not. It's every where. Even my Mom called me up Tues. evening to talk about it. It's all people are talking about, and with good reason.

Amazingly, this last Tuesday Apple single-handedly eclipsed the entire International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Seems like Apple was the only one not in Vegas---and turns out the didn't have to be. All the headlines from all the other new product announcements were swept away by the one being made miles to the west in California. And, of course, this is only appropriate, because Apple was not just announcing really cool new gadgets----it was throwing the switch on change to global first world culture.

I won’t go into details on the new iPhone or AppleTV---you’ve probably seen and heard about them to death already. If you haven’t, go to the Apple demo pages, or listen to the Keynote. These things are gorgeous. And the iPhone is going to change everything we thought we knew about communicating. Pundits are already saying that this thing took the stage and all the other phones and smartphones in the world got embarrassed.

But it’s just a phone, right? And we’ve seen touch screens before, and Internet phones. What’s the big deal. And to those questions I say, wait. . .this is Apple.

Do you remember back a little over 5 years now in October of 2001? A little white box that plays music stood on the stage with Steve Jobs. With his usual flourish and hyperbole, he knew. Like a combination of Edison, P.T. Barnum and the Beetles, he seemed to sense the importance of what was happening. Many, though, did not.

So many people said, “An MP3 player? Is that all? We’ve all ready got MP3 players. And that price---you’ve got to be kidding?”. At nearly a 100 million units later this little white box and it’s various incarnations has not only "changed the way we listen to music", not only the way we think about music, but it has forced changes into "the music industry itself ,” to quote Mr. Jobs from his keynote---and he’s right. But he stopped short. It also changed the way we think about T.V. and continues to change how the television industry thinks about itself, as well as radio broadcasting. It is currently changing movies and games in the same way, though most might not be able to see that quite yet.

Now Apple has gotten it’s hooks into the communications world. That’s significant. The cell phone world will never be the same. This change will hit deeper than anything Apple has ever done. They compared the level of sales of computers and MP3 Players to cell phones, and and cell phone use dwarfs anything else in it's path.

Watch the change. It’ll be gradual. But in 5 years or so, you’ll look at your current cell phone or PDA like an 8 track tape. I already do. Not to mention with the Apple TV, your living room will begin to become yours again---not subject to the dictates of the cable company, broadcast stations and movie rental companies. You won’t have to hide in the den to get to your digital stuff. It’ll come to where you are.

And the most underplayed announcement of yesterday. That Apple Computer changed their name and will now go by simply Apple, Inc. I don’t have any fear that they will abandon the computer part of the business, at least not as long as Jobs is there. That’s his baby. But now they have unfettered themselves from being limited to only being a computer hardware company. Forget competing with Dell and Microsoft. Now, if they can dream it and do it better, they’ll do it. And you know they will.

So I came home Tuesday evening and called through the house for the kids to come into the living room. I gathered them around the laptop and showed them. We went through all the Quicktime demos. I didn’t want them to miss this (even if I was competing with America's Funniest Home Videos over my shoulder). I wanted them to remember the night in January of 2007 when their dad came home and showed them what tomorrow was going to look like. To my mind, what we saw Tuesday is like the moon landing----only better. It won’t take over 40 years to think about going the next step.

It’ll be here before you know it.

Begin Again

Have you ever walked out onto an entirely empty stage in a theater where live performances take place? A stage swept clean with just a hint of never ending saw dust in the air. Typically, a lone bare light bulb on a stand, roughly eye level to an adult, allows you to barely see into the far corners. It always has a cathedral hush even when the ceilings aren’t that high.

No matter if I’ve never been involved with a particular stage or seen a show there, if I step out onto any theater’s uninterrupted stage, I can feel the history. The ghosts of shows past are there. You can feel them. It’s one of the things that I find exhilarating about being the Theater. I love walking across that empty space, exciting Christmas morning butterflies in my stomach every time. And the feeling never goes away. I could be involved with a stage for seasons on end and the feeling never goes away. A bare stage says memory.

A bare stage just after a show is taken down can also feel cathartic. No matter how the show went. If it went well it will be tinged with a bit of regret that something so wonderful is done. If it went not so well, either because the show didn’t turn out well or the cast and crew were hard to work with, it can be a relief at a commitment completed---new Freedom. Whatever the case may be, the stress dissipates with the final broom strokes.

Nervousness about remembering lines is gone, even though chances are you’ll remember them for months to come. That prop that was so essential for the second act ---the on that would cause the world to screech to a rotational halt if it wasn't where it was supposed to be----is placed back on the dusty shelf to be the little piece of bric-a-brac it really is. Everything that was so oppressively important, like an herd of self destructive children that couldn’t fend for themselves, becomes no more than torn ticket stubs in the bottom of your pocket.

New Years is kind of like that too.

Then, almost instantly, the bare stage becomes expectation. The Empty Space excites parts of me that yearn to fill it. I guess that's the disease; the addiction. When your nature abhors a vacuum.

That's where I get into trouble. Thinking that if I can think it, I can make it happen. And the complicating compliment to that--I seem to have the ability to make people believe in me. "Come on along on the Magic Bus--I can take you there." I can't tell you how many times I've been like Kermit in the Muppet Movie (the Jim Henson Kermit, not this travesty that lives on in his name---you can't take the soul from the puppet and expect people to just buy into the sugar coated zombie)---the scene I'm thinking of is the one where Kermit is in the desert talking to himself (literally) and wondering what he's gotten himself into, and all these people into in the bargain. Suddenly worried in mid-flight that you're may actually be piloting a Hindenburg of your own design. I have been in that situation more than a few times.

And I guess I'm launching to that destination in the sky--again. Still so sure I can build a castle up there. Looking out to 2007, right out of the gate, I'll be directing a show. I don't know what show yet. The one I had in mind fell through--they aren't giving license in the U.S. right now. They're trying to get something going in NYC. But it's the first time in a while. It'll be interesting.

Not to mention that I've got the Bear's Bday party at the end of this month, a Talent show that I'm helping Kitten prepare her song for, tickets for the family to the Lion King tour on Feb 3 (thanks Mom!), my wife's surprise Bday party that she found out about right after that, a coffee house performance of a night of Speech team scenes I'm producing end of Feb before they go off to Districts, coaching kids for a Fine Arts Festival, Easter Service, ----and then, oh yeah, this play.

Dang, this empty is getting kind of crowded.

In the meantime we know what everyone's real distraction is, don't we.

Yeah---the MacWorld Keynote on Tuesday.

You can almost feel the status quo shifting under you feet---can't cha?