Geek Chic Update

I'm very happy with myself that I've managed to keep up with the pictures so far.  I know it's less than two weeks into the New Year, but still.  My attention span seems to be at an all time low right now.  But here we go with batch two of my geeky shirts.

January 4

This is one of my Aquaman shirts.  I love that Aquaman has finally become "cool."  He's been the biggest joke in comics for the longest time.  It's one of the few success stories (for me, at least) to come out of DC Comics New 52 revamp.  Most of the rest of the line, not so much, but the Aquaman book is incredible.  Hopefully that will continue with Geoff Johns leaving and Jeff Parker coming in to write the book.

January 5

Batgirl.  My favorite super-heroine.  I was just about to jump in the shower and asked Ken to go in and pick out any shirt he wanted and to lay it face down on the bed.  This is the one he chose.  I don't know if he looked through the closet and found this or if it was a random grab, but he done good.

January 6

This one was a random grab.  It was Monday morning, I wasn't feeling it and I just walked into the closet and grabbed the first shirt I could.  This was it.  It's one of my absolute favorite shirts EVER.  It was the first shirt I bought when I finally reached my goal weight and knew I could fit back into human sized clothes again.  I bought this and a Supergirl shirt, which will be worn sooner or later.  It's an homage to the cover of the first appearance of Batgirl, recreated here by Brian Bolland. 

January 7

Almost all of my Doctor Who shirts are from the various shirt-of-the-day sites.  This is no exception.  It's a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots homage featuring a Cyberman and a Dalek, two of the Doctor's longest running enemies.  For some reason, I got a lot of comments at work on this one.  It's not a new shirt, so I'm not sure why people kept asking about it.

January 9

I took a day off of geek shirts and only wore a purple ringer tee on the 8th.  But on the 9th I wore one of my Arrested Development shirts.  This is my only mass market AD shirt.  The rest are from the shirt-of-the-day sites.  Arrested Development was one of my all-time favorite tv shows.  I still have high hopes that it'll be back again.

January 10

Another shirt-of-the-day site picks.  This time it's the Batman TV show logo done up Doctor Who style.  I love that I was at my friend Chris' t-shirt site and he's got a very similar new shirt.  It made me chuckle.  I have one other shirt that's similar to this and you'll just have to wait to see it.

January 11

Yesterday's selection was the Metal Men.  The shirt rocks and that's all I need to say about it.  Other than the fact that there are symbol shirts for each member of the Metal Men and I do not have them.  Yet.

1985

It's been October since I did one of these.  My bad.  I'm currently listening to my playlist for the year 2000, so time really did get away from me.  Let's see if I remember what I was doing...

I was out of high school and didn't pursue higher education.  My folks couldn't afford it and they tried to get me some financial aid, but it wasn't to be.  And I wasn't working much.  I believe I was only working at the comic book shop at the time and I had a seasonal job in the mall for Christmas.  I wasn't the most motivated of people when it came for looking for a job.  I earned just enough money to buy comics and an occasional record and at the time, that was good enough. I look back at the me of 1985 and just want to kick the shit out of him.  But the past is the past.

I wasn't looking forward to the post-1984 playlists.  The music of high school was pretty terrific, especially in retrospect.  And that sound had been slowing morphing through the early 80s.  My initial thoughts as I got to this playlist was it was going to be a lot of really cheesy canned synths and cheap production.  And while there may have been some of that, there were some pretty great things.

That's the year Be Yourself Tonight by Eurythmics came out.  That album was a complete game changer for me.  I loved the stuff Eurythmics had put out prior to this, but there was something about this record that absolutely hooked me.  I really liked them before, I became a fanatic at this point.

It was also the year that Control by Janet Jackson came out.  I loved that album.  So much.

I loved Howard Jones' first album, but it was his second album, Dream Into Action, that, like Be Yourself Tonight, totally sold me.  Took away any doubts about which direction my adoration for Howard was going to go.

Falco 3 also made a huge impression on me.  I was still all about anything German and his German/English lyrics tickled me so.  He was a great big giant cheeseball, but he didn't give a fuck and made fun records.

It was right around this time, I believe, that I discovered the radio station out of Woodstock WDST.  They played all the coolest music.  None of that pop shit that I loved, but alternative stuff no one else was playing.  I found out about Midge Ure's solo record The Gift by listening to that station.  "If I Was" remains one of my go to songs to this day.  It was a thrill to finally see him live in concert last year and to hear this live.

Hounds Of Love is another album that pulled me in and hasn't let me go to this day.  I'm embarrassed to say that I'd never heard of Kate Bush until I heard "Running Up That Hill" on the (pop) radio station.  It was everything a pop single could be without being a pop single.  My friend Tom had all her albums and lent them to me to copy.

I was (and still am) obsessed with Tina Turner.  I flipped when I found out there was a new, unreleased song on the USA For Africa album.  I was there the day it went on sale to get it.  I don't know why I have such a strong memory of it, but I bought it at Cam-Bo-Rec in uptown Kingston. 

Another album I have a very distinct memory of purchasing was Youthquake by Dead Or Alive.  I only knew "You Spin Me Round" but it was enough.  It was snowing, I got off work at my mall job and I was waiting for my Dad to come pick me up.  I don't recall why I didn't have my Mom's car that day, but I had some time to kill, so I was poking around the record store.  And I saw the album and had to have it.

It was really fucking cool going through this playlist.  There was a lot of great music that I just didn't realize came out in 1985.  It really surprised me in a good way at how good it was.

Here's what I bought in 1985 as new releases.

New Year, New Project

Something I've been meaning to do for the last couple of months is to weed out my closet.  I think I'm to the point where I have too many clothes.  But the thought of going through and getting rid of stuff is kind of overwhelming to me.  So I decided to make it a game.  A game, partially inspired by my friend Chris and his blog 365 T-Shirts: a sense of doubt blog. On his blog, he's going through his t-shirt collection and doing up full blog posts for each.  I'm hoping to do something similar.  I plan on wearing each of my t-shirts just once until I've gone through my entire collection.  I figure that by the time I'm through them all, I'll have a good sense on what I'm keeping and what I'm not.  Do not expect the awesomeness of Chris' blog on these posts.  I won't be doing one for each shirt and there won't be very much interesting commentary on the posts either.  But I plan on posting pictures of them all and maybe a few words to go with them.

Today is the 3rd of January and I've worn one every day so far.  There are days when I won't be wearing a t-shirt, though they should be pretty infrequent as I live in t-shirts.  I'm excluding from this challenge my gym shirts as they are dirty and gross and I wear them over and over.  But everything else is fair game.

January 1

This is one of my absolute favorite t-shirts.  I only wear it this time of the year because of the (implied) Christmas theme.  It's a Doctor Who/Doctor Seuss mash up with all the Doctors done up in a Grinch style.  This shirt just makes me smile ear to ear.  At least, it did until a few weeks ago.  An updated version of this shirt was offered on one of the t-shirt of the day sites I love.  The updated version includes the War Doctor on it.  He's the Doctor who we recently found out comes between the Paul McGann version and the Christopher Eccleston version.  But I didn't order it, as tempted as I was.

January 2

A generic Green Lantern symbol shirt.  I have another one similar to this, so I'm not sure what compelled me to buy this one other than loving Green Lantern.  I think I may have had a little store credit somewhere and didn't want to keep carrying it around with me, so I got this.  I think.

January 3

This is my newest shirt.  I mentioned on the January 1st shirt that I look at the different t-shirt of the day sites and shop them frequently. Actually, I go to teemagnet.com and they show the offerings from a half dozen or so sites each day.  I got this one from RIPT Apparel, I believe.  It's a Doctor Who/Power Puff Girls mash up.  I think it's so fucking cute.  I've got a thing for Doctor Who shirts, as you'll soon discover.

I do love my t-shirts.  For the longest time I was too fat to buy any since they don't make anything interesting in circus tent sizes.  Once I lost all that weight, I was going to buy myself anything that made me happy.  And my shirts make me happy as shit.  On the off chance I don't wear one to work, people always comment.  I wore a button up shirt one day last week and half the office made comments about it.  It was a little weird.

But there we are.  Three days in and three shirts worn.  I'll probably just end up doing a few shirts per post since it's been hard enough for me to post more than two or three times a month lately. 

Fake Jan Day

By the way, today is Fake Jan Day, the day we honor Geri Reischl.  She played Jan Brady on the short lived but amazingly awesome Brady Bunch Variety Hour.  It's today, January 2nd (or Jan 2 -- get it?  She was the second Jan...)  The official food of Fake Jan Day is the cheese ball, naturally.  I hope you all have a fantastic Fake Jan Day!

January 2014 Pot Luck

I'm not quite sure what my aversion to writing in this thing has been lately.  I have things to write about, but when it comes time to do it, I find a thousand other things to do instead, 99% of which are huge wastes of time.  Tonight I'm channeling some of the excess energy I have that I'm not using to put down something.  Anything.

I've got the extra energy because I'm blowing off the gym tonight.  I was hoping to go, but the weather sucks balls.  It's been snowing since late last night/early this morning.  We don't have much accumulation yet, but the roads are really messy.  That, and it's two degrees outside.  After weighing my options, I decided to blow it off tonight and go tomorrow instead.  I'll still be keeping on track as I usually don't go Fridays, but I do go Thursdays.

And speaking of which, even though it's Thursday, it really, really, really, really feels like Monday today.  This whole week has been messed up.  Having a holiday right in the middle of the week screws around with everything.  Yesterday felt like Sunday all day.  We went out to breakfast like a normal Sunday, I did chores like a normal Sunday, I cooked dinner like a normal Sunday.  But it wasn't.  Tomorrow is going to mess with my head even more because I put a slip in a work to take tomorrow off.  By the time I'm all shoveled out, I'm not going to want to have anything to do with work.  But it should be easier than usual.  On Tuesday our new snow blower was delivered.  There's no way I can do another winter with just a shovel.  I'm too old for this shit.  Ken cleared off the driveway just before I got home from work.  He said it was a little tougher to maneuver than he thought it would be.  I'll be the judge of that tomorrow when it's my turn.

I usually don't make New Year's Resolutions, mostly because they're stupid.  If I want to make a change, I usually don't wait for a special occasion to do it.  I just do it.  But since it's the new year, I thought I would put it out there in the universe that I'm done with stupid people and stupid people games.  I'm really sick and tired of people purposely being vague or evasive.  I'm really tired of the lack of common courtesy.  I know I space it from time to time, but that's not what I'm talking about.  I'm over people who never, ever seem to have it or use it.  I'm done with them.  The older I get, the shorter my attention span for bullshit gets.  

I'm not a huge fan of sideburns.  On some guys they look great, but on most, not so much.  That being said, I've decided to see if I can grow my own.  My facial hair is a fucking train wreck and I've got some big patchy areas, but the sideburns portion of my face seems to not have this problem.  So I'm working on them right now.  They don't look so great yet, but I'm hoping that in a week or two more they'll look like real sideburns and not the joke they look like now.  We'll see.

Like every day of my life, I'm still struggling with my weight.  I know most of the struggle is only visible to me, but it's very real.  I still compulsively record my weight every single day.  I still weigh myself twice a day, though the times have changed.  I used to weigh myself first thing in the morning and last thing at night.  I don't do it at bedtime anymore, instead doing it just before going to the gym so I'll have an accurate number to enter into whatever machine I'm doing that particular day.  The struggle has been tougher the last month or so, but it's that time of year.  There's food everywhere from the middle of November until now.  Add to that the cruise I was on two weeks before Thanksgiving and it's been a bumpy road full of temptations.  I know I failed more times than I would have liked to, but for the most part, I haven't let my weight get too far out of control.  Ultimately, I'd like to be below 195 pounds, so any day I can be beneath that number is a good day.  If I can get below 190, it's a fantastic day.  If you look at my weigh ins for 2013, it doesn't look like there's any struggle at all.  It's all mostly good news.  But I have to work hard to keep it looking like that.  There was a spell when I felt like just throwing in the towel recently.  I think lack of sleep contributed to that, but I was just so fucking sick of having to push myself as hard as I do to maintain my weight.  I'm mostly over that (for now) and it's a good thing.  I still hate that I have to work this hard, but I abused myself for so long that this is a small price to pay.

That's enough random rantings for one night.

Mortality

I've been accused of being a "Debbie Downer" many times in my life, but for the most part, I don't think I am.  I do think I'm a realist and try to look at things the way they are and not the way people fantasize them to be, so maybe that's where I get that bum wrap from.  I don't sit around thinking about death and dying and all that crap all the time.  Sure, I've spent a lot of time in the last two years thinking about death after my Mother passed away, but I think that's natural.  But I don't think about me dying or even contemplate it.

Today was a little different, though.  Not in that I sat at work all day thinking about what will happen when I die or how I'll die, but more about the fact that I'm getting older and I'm sitting comfortably in middle age.  I'm not a kid anymore, no matter how youthful (immature) I may feel or act.  My youth is long behind me, but I don't think I've ever really tried letting it go.  I'm forty-seven years old and maybe it's time I should own up to it.

The mother of one of my childhood best friends passed away early this morning.  I don't really have all the details, but I know she and her daughter were in a car accident back in October.  My friend went through the windshield, but remarkably made it through the accident without any major issues.  Her mother wasn't so lucky.  She's been in the hospital ever since, surgery after surgery, procedure after procedure.  It was all in vain as she passed away today.  It got me to thinking about back when I was a small boy.  We lived in Kinderhook, NY.  The family next door had a son my age and a daughter my brother's age.  The house next to them had a son my age and another my brother's.  We were all very good friends.  We lived there for maybe seven or eight years before my nomadic family packed up and started moving all over the northeast.  So Kinderhook is the place that I consider my hometown even though I wasn't born there.  That house is the first place I remember.  I spent most of my formative years there.  Whenever I'm in that part of the area, I always drive up my old street and just look at the houses and reminisce. Of the three families on that street (mine and the two families next to us), my Dad is the only parent still alive.  Of my immediate peer group, I'm the only one still alive.  The oldest sons of both the other families are long dead.  The youngest kids are all still alive and kicking though.  When I think about the parents, it makes me realize that I'm getting older.  When I think about my peers, it scares me because this is too young to be passed away.  It's a little hard for me to wrap my head around sometimes.

Last year, Mr. Kelly, the parent from two doors down passed away.  He was still living in the same house.  His son Eddie sold the house and was going to pack it up before it changed ownership.  Unfortunately this happened the same week I was away on vacation.  I was really anxious to try to get one last look at the house before it was too late.  I even told him that if I wasn't going to be away, I'd be more than happy to lend a hand with whatever needed to be done, just to get one final glimpse of my childhood.  At the very least, pictures were available on the real estate website and it made me smile to see how very little the house had changed in thirty-five years.

It's guess I'm just feeling a little sad today and a lot nostalgic.  I think I had just about the best childhood I could hope for before we started moving around.  I miss it.  But I'll always have memories and photographs.

Austin

Let's hope this comes out even slightly coherent. I'm still wiped out from my long weekend away and all I want to do is pass out, but I'm also afraid that the longer I wait to write so ethi g about the weekend, the better the chance that I'll write nothing. So here goes. Good luck trying to make heads or tails of this. 

I've been taking a lot of time off from work lately. I don't think I've worked a full five day week since sometime in October. It's been nice. Really nice. Between vacations and long weekends, I've been getting spoiled. This past weekend, for all intents and purposes, was the end of my vacationing. On Friday morning, I hopped a plane to Austin, Texas to celebrate the recent marriage of two of the best friends anyone could have the fortune to have. Back in October, my friends Freddy and Jed got married on a trip to New York. Since they were away from home, not many of their friends could join them. But they could for the reception and that's what the trip was all about. 

The reception was going to be held out at a far outside of town. Tents and tables and bonfires and all that jazz. The previous weekend, the temperatures were in the mid 80s. That's a foreign concept for me living in the northeast.  This time of year the temps are somewhere between 30 and 40. As the weekend approached, the forecast got less and less pleasant. Ultimately, Austin's weather became Albany's. Mid 30s with a chance for ice. Freddy did some scrambling and found a new indoor venue at the last minute. Thank baby Jesus!

The plan was for Ken and I to go. He's never been to Austin and this was finally his chance.  At e last minute he had to cancel because of his new job. He was crushed (and he still is). So I traveled alone.  What was different this time was (a) I wasn't staying with Freddy and Jed and I'd be driving in Austin, both new to me. I'm a fine driver and I've been to Austin enough to fake my way around, but I really learned that my sense of direction just isn't as strong as I think it is. The drive from the airport is about a half hour. Mine was an hour.  Yeah, I got lost.  I was relying on google maps to get me where I was going, but I lost my connection and for about 10-15 minutes had to rely on my instincts. I overshot my exit by about 12 minutes (which is when I got my connection reestablished.) but no big whoop. I planned on dropping my stuff and getting to Freddy's house by five.  I wasn't too far behind that schedule. 

Friday night was fun. Seeing Freddy and Jed and their kids, as well as my good friend Eric from NYC and Texas friends Heather and Amy Carr (my nemesis!).  I got to meet Freddy's brother-in-law, who also flew in from out of town that night. We hung out, had some awesome Mexican food and played Cards Against Humanity (on one of my turns to read, I ended up crying because the cards were too funny and I could barely read them.)  It was a fantastic night. Eric was staying about a mile or so from me and I brought him back to his place before heading back to mine. Freddy hooked me up with an airbnb owned by friends of his. I knew of them from his Facebook page, but I didn't know them. About five minutes after I got to my place, there was a knock on my door from Andy. He invited me over to the main house to hange out and to meet him and Ellen. I'm such and awkward person when I don't know someone (less  awkward than my usual awkward) and I hope I didn't come off too badly to them. I'm guessing I didn't because we hung out for nearly two hours getting to know each other. They're really great people. I didn't get to bed until a little after 1am, which i realized wasn't exactly true as I laid down to go to sleep. Because of the time zone change, my body thought it was 2am.  Considering I got up at 5:30 that morning, it was a long ass day. 

Saturday Eric and I were on our own for most of it. We slept in a bit and hooked up around 10 o'clock. I brought him to a restaurant near my place that is been to on a previous trip to town. The food was as good as I recalled. Because I'm a pig, I ordered the rocky road pancakes. Chocolate pancakes with mocha chips, nuts and topped with marshmallow fluff. Eric went healthy. What a putz! Just as we were leaving, I got a call from Freddy asking if we could help him bring some supplies down to the venue later that afternoon. In between, Eric and I did what any two nerds would do. We hit up a comic book store. Austin has some great shops. We planned on hitting two of them, but ran out of time. But the one store we hit was spectacular. Afterwards, we stopped for coffee (or hot chocolate for me) and a snack (this pig got a chocolate/peanut butter cupcake) and then to help out Freddy. We loaded my car with boxes and brought them down. We also helped out getting the place set up for the party before we were dismissed. Driving back to where we were staying, we tried to figure out if there was going to be enough time to hit another comic shop, but there really wasn't. Instead, we swung by Eric's for him to pick up clothes and then back to my place to get ready. Eric needed an iron. His place didn't have one, but mine did. We got ready and then got a lift down to the venue with Ellen. I mentioned to her that I was going to catch a cab so I could drink and she offered the ride instead. 

Man, that party was fun. Fun fun fun. I started drinking early.  I don't really think I had all that much to drink, but I felt it. I have a rather low tolerance for booze and I didn't eat anything all day after that cupcake, so I had nothing to soak up he alcohol. I wish I could learn to loosen up in sober life like I do when I have a little bit of booze in me.  From what I'm told and what I remember, I was really outgoing all night long. Really outgoing. I got to see a bunch of people I know already, like my friend Gregg, who I've know since waaaaaaaay before Freddy.  I got to see a bunch of people I know through Freddy like Kay and Darla and Leslie and Kevin and TJ. I got to meet in person a lot of new people who I feel like I already sort of know from Freddy's Facebook feed.  People like his co-worker Christy, who always cracks me up, and Elizabeth and Karissa and Julie and Shelli. And if that's not enough, there were people I wasn't all that familiar with from Facebook or previous trips who were just spectacular. One in particular was Stephen the bartender. I saw him when we went down to help set up the place earlier in the afternoon and thought he was fucking hot. But I'm not the type of person to say anything (because I'm awkward and repressed and uptight).  We'll, I'm not the type until you put some liquor in me and then I've got all the courage in the world to tell him to his face he makes me hard. Only, it's kind of embarrassing when his husband is standing there next to him when you spill the beans. Actually, it's only embarrassing the following day when you sober up. 

It kind of freaked me out at the party for people to come up to me and ask if I was Walt. It happened quite a few times and I felt like I was famous or something. It started with my new friend Karissa and kept on happening all night long. My favorite time was when Freddy's neighbor asked, "Are you THE Walt?"  That's not just any old Walt. I'm THE Walt!

I know I'm leaving out people, but it's not on purpose. There were so many people there and I don't feel like I got to spend enough time with any of them. I'm also pretty sure I was like a little boy constantly distracted by a shiny object, going person to person randomly. 

Sunday was both fun and sad.  Norman had to leave shortly before breakfast. Eric had to leave shortly after breakfast.  So did Amy Carr. There's something about saying goodbye in Texas that makes me emotional. The rest of Sunday was spent with the family. We hit up a big annual art fair.  I was really hoping to find something cool, but nothing really caught my eye. Dinner is something I still haven't lived down. Ken has been trying g to get me to go for Indian for dinner for years. We went once and it was not a good experience for me. Recently I told him I'm willing to try again, but not just yet. Sunday night, we all went out for Indian. It was posted online when we got to the restaurant and within minutes, I got an angry text message from Ken. I am now at his beck and call for when his next craving for Indian hits and I can't say no. 

Sunday was an early night. Everyone was exhausted and I had to be up at 4:30 on Monday to get showered and back to the airport in time. I'm happy I headed out as early as I did because it took forever to get through security. There was no traffic on the road that morning because I think everyone in Austin was in the security line. It didn't really occur to me that Monday morning would be a heavy travel time, but of course it is. It's a hell of a lot of business travel. 

But it's Wednesday now, I'm still exhausted and I've been nursing a sore throat since I got back. And I've been basking in the afterglow of this weekend, spending time with family and expanding my circle of amazing friends 

December

I can't believe it's December already.  I seriously don't know how 2013 flew by as quickly as it did.  It feels like it should only be about half over, not almost completely over.  It feels like I barely got much of anything done this year.  Hell, I was off from work all last week and I got next to nothing accomplished.  I thought about that on the drive in to work this morning.  I decided I was finally ready to get to that list of things I was going to do.  

I guess I got a little bit done, though.  I pulled out the Christmas trees and set them up.  Last year I never got around to doing that at all.  I cleaned the house, though to be honest, I didn't do that until this past weekend.  I got my teeth cleaned.  Whoopie.  And I have to go back in two weeks because I have a chipped filling with a little decay behind it.  I'm not looking forward to that.  When my teeth are good, they're really good.  When there's a problem, it always seems like it's a bigger problem than anticipated.  I'm going into the new filling with that in mind so that if something bigger is wrong, it won't come as a shock.  I intended on writing here more, but that didn't come to be.

On Thanksgiving Day, Ken and I traveled to Connecticut to have dinner with my Aunt and her wife.  I've been reconnecting with her lately and it's nice.  She's only about five years older than I am, so growing up she was more like my cousin and not my aunt.  She's the black sheep of the family, too.  Lives within a few miles of everyone else, yet has no contact with anyone.  So this visit was nice.  Seeing the area of Connecticut where she lives was nice, too.  We would travel there usually twice a year when I was growing up.  I don't know the area well, but I have some very strong and very fond memories of it.

My aunt lives about 40 minutes from a casino, so Ken, still feeling lucky from the cruise we were on a few weeks ago, wanted to swing by there on the way home.  He had a game plan, too.  We'd get there, walk around to see what was what, then set our timers for one hour.  We'd each play $100 and whoever had the most money at the end of the hour won.  I played for a little bit, but didn't win anything.  While searching for a machine about ten minutes in, I passed Ken who had already turned his $100 into $200.  Naturally.  I didn't see him again until time was up and we met at the pre-arranged spot.  He managed to get as high as about $225, he said, but ended up with $0.  He lost it all.  Me, on the other hand, didn't.  I turned my $100 into $100.09!  That's right.  I took nine cents from the Native Americans.  So I was the winner, but my prize sucked.

The drive home from Connecticut was kind of fun.  There was no traffic on the drive to my aunt's, but there was quite a bit on the drive home.  Every time we'd pass an exit with shopping visible from the highway, the traffic would automatically thin out.  Looking at the different shopping plazas we could see from the road was kind of sickening to me.  Lines and lines of people waiting for the stores to open.  Seriously, it's worth all that to save $5 on a piece of shit that you don't need anyway?  I did go out on Friday afternoon, but to the grocery store.  I didn't know before this year, but Black Friday is the ultimate day to buy groceries.  There was almost no one in the store.  It was glorious.  On Sunday afternoon, Ken needed to hit the grocery store because he wanted to try to make chicken noodle soup from scratch, so we ventured out to get his ingredients.  On the way home we stopped at Toys R Us to pick up a couple presents for these little bastards I love more than life itself.  The store wasn't busy at all.  I was a little freaked by the thought of shopping in a toy store on Black Friday weekend, but it felt like everyone had shopped themselves out by Sunday afternoon.

I need to find just a little time to get back to my year by year playlists.  The posts aren't quite coming out the way I'd hoped, but I'm still having fun writing them.  I just started 1998 at work today.  I should really be done with the 90s, but I took a little extra time off in between years.  My goal is to find do at least one this week, though I've got a lot going on again.  ::fingers crossed::

Frank Turner Part Two

I couldn't figure how to embed these videos from the iPad last night, so here I am on the desktop to do what I promised last night.

Alive

I'm kind of shocked and surprised it's been as long as it has since I last posted anything here. To say I've been busy is an understatement. I've been keeping myself fully booked these last few weeks.

This is going to be brief because I'm tired and need to get to bed shortly. It's another busy day tomorrow, starting with the dentist and errands, chores around the house and then catching up with Ken, who has been away all week. It doesn't sound like it's all that much, but there won't be time to goof off, something I'm in dire need of.

So, last night I took myself out on a nice date. I'd have taken Ken, but as I said, he's away right now and he would have been miserable.  Last night I took myself out to see Frank Turner in concert.  I've missed him the last two times I was aware he was in the area. Coincidentally, both times I missed him, I found out the night he was playing that he was in town.  This time I was more proactive. 

The show was fucking amazing. AMAZING. I really didn't know what to expect since I'd never seen him before. Whatever I might have expected was probably far less than what he actually delivered. From the first note of "Photosynthesis" to the last note of "These Four Words" he had the entire crowd hooked. I can't remember the last show I was at where the electricity in the air was so heavy. 

The crowd also surprised me.  I was expecting a smaller crowd and a much older crowd. But the place was sold out and the majority of the crowd was young enough to be my children. I didn't know he had such a young following in a market this small. But after watching the show, I completely understand. Frank is a former punk rock singer reinvented into a folk singer. He channels so much of his punk roots in his performance while never letting you forget these are modern day folk songs. Folk and punk aren't really all that dissimilar styles of music when you boil them down to their basics. 

I love what he does during his encores. He starts them all off with an area song, meaning he picks an artist from the general area and covers one of their songs. At my show, I got a cover of "Career Moves" by Loudon Wainwright. I spent a bunch of time today on YouTube checking out other shows. He did REM when he was in Georgia and Bob Seger in Detroit. I love that idea. 

If you don't know Frank Turner, you're missing out. I'll post a couple videos after this. I'm typing on the iPad and haven't figured out how to add the video directly into the post yet. Because I'm pretty, dammit!

All in all, it was one of the best, if not THE best concert I've ever been to. He best come back soon.