All My Days

[Forgive my liberties]

"Many a night I found myself with no friends standing near
I cried aloud
I shook my hands
What am I doing here
All of these days
For I look around me
And my eyes confound me
And it's just too bright
As the days keep turning into night"

-Alexi Murdoch

Alabama

There's some property there I'm interested in. But mostly, being painfully, brutally honest, I miss:

1. My friends there
2. The mild winters there
3. Racism

Basically in that order.

It's an itch I may need to scratch, either to get it out of my system, or to see if I irritate it enough to let it get infected.

A road trip is being planned tentatively. Moonpie riding shotgun, Cat holding down the fort.

(Or, you know, maybe Vermont.)

Venting, A Wood Stove

So, yeah, the starter on the '90 plow truck went out after I got it stuck down the lane. But it's not the starter. But that's okay, because it could only be about 584 other things which I don't understand. No biggie, because it's not like there's another blizzard coming through tomorrow night and Wednesday.

Power steering gone in the '89.

I don't know why I whine. I have more than I need, really. Moonpie and I will go into town first thing tomorrow and supply up (dog food, cat food, chocolate covered sugar bombs, etc.). The rest of the day she and I will cut wood -- a huge, huge walnut tree that blew down year before last along the east creek. A good stove in here, a good stove out in the tool shed. What more could anyone want?

(2 hours of Amish shunning on PBS tomorrow night is what.)

She's getting old. She'll only stay out there with me for about an hour, then she'll wander back to the homestead. Hopefully she'll have the courtesy to die when the ground isn't frozen.

Snow Falling on Cedars

Here we go again already. -18's a killer, but at least the wind is remorseless. Cat seems to find herself operating as a hot water bottle, alternating betwixt me and Moonpie.

If I were a Norwegian Bachelor Farmer, I'd be half in the bag in my whiskey cups. But I'm not Norwegian.

"Enough tea and biscuits to sink a ship", Ian Holm? Really?

This could be an interesting next few days. The last time it was this cold in this part of our country was almost exactly 20 years ago. I was renting the farmhouse on Jess's property, but I was ferrying firewood from his place to mom and dad's house about 2 hours away.

I expect to lose running water. I don't have a lot of confidence in the wood supply -- some of it is near perfect, but there's just not a lot of it out by the tool shed to split, which I should be doing right now instead of watching football. But most of the stuff I cut yesterday is waterlogged and spongy, i.e., useless when it's this cold.

I'm hoping the batch I cut this morning is as good as it looks.

Cat has her 4 week follow up vet appointment tomorrow at 4pm. Not much snow yet. But if it starts to blow across the lane, I don't know that the plow truck will start, given it's leaking antifreeze.

However, Moonpie is excellent company, I have plenty of dog and cat food, so I may as well stage various scenes from The Day After Tomorrow to keep us busy.

And 4 hours of Downton tonight.

Oops. Forgot.

I moved up here exactly 3 years ago.

Cat's doing great. But Dog is slowing down. A little. I'll be honest: A slower Moonpie, even if it's just a step or two, makes me anxious and sad.

Of Mice And Men

So the guy I do tractor business with stopped by last night because someone had abandoned a days-old kitten at his shop. He thought for some reason that I needed/wanted a kitten/cat. I don't. I don't like cats. Moonpie doesn't like cats. I said, "Absolutely not."

So now I have a days-old kitten in a little crate just off the east door with a small cup of water and a small plate of tuna. God help me it's not a bad looking cat, and Moonpie could certainly use some help with the field mice. If it survives, it'll be treated like a barn cat, a really well-treated barn cat.

Oh, and I was sober for 2 years yesterday. Today I'm sober for 2 years and 1 day. I was working on the mini-truck yesterday morning and kind of forgot.

Vernal Cleaning

I'm still fighting depression and anxiety. Mostly anxiety. And sadness. The sadness seems healthier than it was 2 years ago, for obvious reasons. The anxiety is less severe, maybe even much much less severe. And the depression doesn't seem to be putting up much of a fight. I blame a lot of the angst on coffee.

Still, I do best when I focus on the small pictures -- shop floor, garage siding, glorious glorious mowing -- and try to... manage/turn down the volume on less small pictures -- what does it all mean?, death, etc.

In any case, Spring is a yearly miracle. Easily explained and accounted for by our planet earth's rotation around and its relative proximity to the sun. But miraculous nonetheless.

Hell's Kitchen 2013

It's interesting and fun to watch the teams panic about a slightly overcooked pancake ("Too brown on that side!!!"), and then quickly switch to the scene from New World when the colonists are boiling and eating their own belts.

Some songs

"Are You Gonna Waste My Time", Zeus
For fans of Zeppelin B-Sides.

"Hot Knife", Fiona Apple

"Again and Again and Again (and Again)", The Bird and The Bee

"The Times They Are A-Changing", Joshua Redman (guess who on piano)

"River Man", Nick Drake
Might be worthwhile to check out also the cover of this by, well, you know.

"A Lady Does Not Often Falter", Cahalen Morrison and Eli West
These 2 hippie kids aren't just the future of bluegrass music; they're the future of authentic music.

"Is Your Love Big Enough (for What's to Come)", Lianne LaHavas
The best version of this song for me is still the live performance on Letterman, conveniently located on YouTube for those connected to the intranet.

"Anthropology", Mehldau/Rossy Trio
For me, the best tune Charlie Parker ever wrote. This is a great study in solving the rhythm changes problem, by a young Mehldau. On iTunes, look for it under the record title, When I Fall In Love

"Queen of California", John Mayer
Sorry, guys. But I love his voice. Always have. Guess I'm all gay again.

Attack of the Log Cabin Republican

My brother, Jess, has it in his head that I need to build a log cabin. There's an awesome log cabin kit manufacturer over near Millersberg/burg, which means the manufacturer is Amish. Really well-made stuff.

I don't know that I want a log cabin, at least not in this context/execution. He and Jane, his wife, are stopping by tomorrow, so I'm jotting down some notes. Jane will understand, because she always does, mostly.

1. Just because it's not what you would do doesn't mean it's not right.
2. I don't want to have to heat even just 900 square feet.
3. When it's nice out, even in the winter, I won't be inside.
4. I don't need a kitchen.
5. I don't need a bedroom.
6. I don't need a "bathroom".
7. You won't have to live here.
8. You don't have to help build it.
9. Maybe I would like to build it myself.
10. Maybe building it myself is a large part of the point (to whatever it is I think I'm doing [still don't know]).
11. You're not always right.
12. Again, I don't live like you do.
13. I kind of hate kits, no matter how high-end.
14. Again, for the 397th time, I don't need/want a kitchen.
15. You're not listening. (Whole other post.)

Freaks and Geeks

If any of you out there are Freaks and Geeks freaks like yours truly, the latest issue of Vanity Fair has an interesting though brief piece on the evolution of the show with a fun "you knew them when" look at its creators and stars.

My Bham friend Paula gave me a prescription of VF for Christmas. Good mag, great gift, appropriate prescription.

It was one of those shows that was so good and ahead of its time that of course it was cancelled after one season. (Available at The Netflix.) But you knew these folks were neither defeated nor finished.

For those of you not familiar with the show, let me hit you with some knowledge!

Judd Apatow
Linda Cardellini
Seth Rogan
Something Kasdan?
James Franco
Paul Feig
Busy Phillips
Jason Segal
Martin Starr
&c.

For those of you who don't recognize any of those names, never mind.

"Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas"

The greatest Christmas song ever written. Just a few good versions. My favorite is Tony Bennett with strings. But it doesn't have the crucial original lyric: "Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow." That's the whole point of the song!

Anyways, I can't decide whether to watch It's A Wonderful Life, or Sense And Sensibility.

Big storm coming in tomorrow night. Might be another chance to give the easement a try with the plow.

Some kind of peace, any kind of contentment, to you guys and your families.

switters and Moonpie

Just Another Day

Yeah, yet another day that I'm almost grateful that death has spared my mom and my dad from having to see... the very worst of inexplicability and helplessness, and, well, hopelessness.

The Duke

"The Duke" is Dave Brubeck's greatest composition, and a great tune. Inspired by Ellington and Darius Milhaud, with whom Dave studied briefly, the best version is, as many songs are, by Gil Evans with Miles Davis on, I think, Miles Ahead. (I won't check my vinyl in the garage.)

1. Chord progressions that, on a cheat sheet look arbitrary, sound to the ear organic.
2. Not so much the birth of the cool as the puberty of the cool, "the cool" being more or less the west coast response to bebop.
3. Really fun to play if you can wrap your head and hands around the constantly morphing chord changes.
4. Played in the exact right tempo, it swings hard whether solo piano or quartet or big band.

Though more often than not, Dave's experimentation with polyrhythms and progressive harmonies feuded with both Paul Desmond and what ended up being the legacy of novelty in jazz, and most hardcore (and arrogant!) jazzers would find Dave's music ultimately gimmicky. Understandable, but not necessarily fair.

Album to own: Time out.

Definitely a worthy ambassador of jazz and a tremendous human being. Which is more important we'll still never know.

Whew.

Well, Dog and I made it through deer season again, without getting shot, or shot at this time.

Good job, Dog!

Ken Burns' "Dustbowl", A Review

Wow.

Company

Good Steve Sondy show. But enough about me.

My sister, Julie, and her husband, Steve, came up yesterday from Athens, Ohio, for a visit. Nice time.

Steve is a former SeaBee, and they weren't here 10 minutes before he fixed the light on the '90 Ford that goes above the plow. Later we put the plow back on.

What a day. The weather the last several days has been nothing short of cruel. Moonpie, even with visitors, has spent the majority of the last 24 hours camped beneath a tree in Tom's tree line to the northeast. Raccoon. Damn I love that dog.

Shelves and mom's books. I need to talk more about this because there's an earnestness and alleged annoyance about it that wasn't there mere weeks ago.

Today prettier than yesterday, but a turn for the cold next week.

Please note deafening reticence re: Alabama game yesterday.

Whew.

You're welcome.

Alabama versus LSU

Whew.