Horsing around

We got up at the crack of dawn this morning to go out to the equestrian portion of the Iowa Games in which Anna was competing. The Iowa Games is, as the web site proclaims, the largest amateur sports festival in Iowa and for some reason, it is always in Ames. I always figured that having an athletic child would be the universe's revenge on me, but despite having more athletic ability in her little finger than I have in my whole body, she seems dedicated only to horses, eschewing most other sports. She has been taking riding lessons since she was in kindergarten. We've been through several different teachers - not because they were bad, but because of the transience that living in a college town will bring to your life. Her teacher over the last year has been Sara Edwards, who has just been fantastic for Anna. She took teaching Anna very seriously, teaching her tack and the essentials of horse maintenance as well as riding techniques. She didn't view this as just indulging a young girl's love of a horse. Sadly, she's leaving as well at the end of July.

She has accompanied Anna to three horse shows this year, all of which were in Ames and the last of which was today. Not only did the show land on the Saturday following a seemingly interminable 8-day-in-a-row stretch at work, but it was also the hottest, most humid day of the year. Even though we arrived at 7:15 AM today, it was already hot, headed for a high of 95 with heat indexes well into the 100s. Nevertheless, we persevered.



She competed at 8:00AM and 8:50AM and we endured the heat, humidity and blazing sun until around 10AM waiting for scores. When they hadn't resulted yet, we decided to blow the popsicle stand and go eat something. We were all hot, tired and crabby. So we hit Subway and with our blood glucose levels restored, we went back out and got her scores. While she did not place (they only award the top three finalists) I could not be prouder of her. It is no small feat to know how to control an animal like that, and she has about 1/3rd the mass I do. To me, she is amazing. I'm here to tell you I couldn't do that. Heidi and I were talking this morning about how she has this amazing amount of knowledge about horses of which we have virtually no concept. I imagine it isn't all that different from when I was taking piano as a kid and my parents were not able to help me at all - it was my thing, I had the knowledge and they didn't.

So once that was done, I headed into work for an hour to tie up some loose ends from the week and Heidi crashed on the couch. Not long after I returned home, I did the same thing. Anna heard that I was going to go sleep on the couch so she got it ready for me. Here's what I saw when I came in to sleep.

And yeah, I slept on the Princess blanket with the stuffed horse and unicorn surrounding me. How could I not?

Let's get soaking wet!

We have spent a large amount of time at the pool this summer. It doesn't hurt that Ames just opened its Furman Aquatic Center this year, after promising to be open mid-summer last year, only to not open at all. Those who argued that Ames didn't need an aquatic center need only drive by the frequently filled parking lot and crowded pool complex to see that they were sorely mistaken. When we went on Memorial Day this year, there were lines for inner tubes, for the lazy river and all the slides. The initial fervor has died down some, but it's still well attended and a nice addition to Ames. Really, a city our size should have something like this.

Anna is at a perfect age for swimming. And unlike me at that age, she's actually pretty good at it and unafraid of the water for the most part. My mom frequently tells the stories of how, when I was a kid, they signed me up for swimming lessons and I would barely even get in the water. The beginning level of swimming lessons was called "Dunkers" and all you had to do to pass Dunkers was dunk your head under the water. No can do. So I flunked Dunkers. I think my folks grew so weary of my resistance that I don't really recall having swimming lessons much more after that. This is not so for Anna. She is forever saying "Dad, count how long I can stay underwater" or "Dad, count how many underwater somersaults I can do." She is like a little fish. She's not ready for the deep end by any stretch, but she's getting there.

The Furman Aquatic Center has something for everyone - a "pond" for the little kids which contains a play structure with slides and what not, topped by a big bucket that showers the kids with water at regular intervals. There's a 50 meter "lake" in which most of the action takes place. Lap lanes for swimming and basketball hoops for playing, it's where we end up spending most of our time. There's also a lazy river and several slides, as well as platform and springboard diving. They really did it right when they planned this. The only problem with it is that there's not enough parking by half on busy days, leaving those unlucky enough to get there when the lot's full to park at the high school and make a 10 minute walk to the pool.

Without fail, there is always drama at the pool of some sort. One day, we arrived just as the ambulance was pulling up to whisk someone away on the gurney after they had a seizure or something. Another night, Heidi and Anna went and two sisters were fighting so badly the pool staff had to break it up. Then there was the infamous night that they had to clear the pool because someone pooped in the pool. True to form, tonight someone barfed in the pond section, leading to its closure for 30 minutes. Fortunately, the chlorine level has been cranked up to "phosgene" so we're all good.

As you can probably guess, I've gotten over my fear of the water, although I never really learned to swim properly. My daughter can swim circles around me. It was just she and me tonight, and is is frequently the case when we do things just the two of us, it was tinged with just a titch of bittersweet. As she dove and did handstands and somersaults, I remembered how she used to wear her goggles, snorkel and fins in the tub. I should have known she'd take to water. I am also, as many of you know, acutely aware of the passage of time with this, my only child. Sometimes, the fact that I only get to do this once gets me down, but it makes me slow down and when I would otherwise dismiss her because I'm tired or busy or distracted, I stop and take the time. I enjoy the time with her that is going faster than I would like, but I know that the next phase will be something new and different. Someday the "Hey Dad, guess what?"s will stop and lead to inevitable moody adolescence. But my goal is to lay the groundwork now so that she trusts me enough to come to me when things get angsty later on. But she sang Kylie's "Get Outta My Way" at the top of her lungs on the way home tonight, so we'll just savor this moment.

In the meantime, we'll be in the pool, getting soaking wet.

Hauntingly familiar

I'll admit to not being much of a Sarah McLachlan fan - I like some of her songs enough, but just have never really gotten into her albums. So it's not surprising that, while I knew she had a new album out, I hadn't paid much attention to it. But it appeared on the MP3 download page on Amazon as a recommendation for me today (apparently based upon my purchases of Mary Chapin Carpenter's The Age of Miracles and John Mayer's Battle Studies.) It was the first time I'd ever seen the album cover.


It's a nice looking album cover, but it was like I'd seen it somewhere before. I just couldn't figure out where. And then it dawned on me.


OK, Donna Summer is wearing markedly less than Sarah McLachlan, but the influence is there.

Year of 25 Books: #11 - The Seventies

We're officially halfway through the year, which means I'm officially behind on my quest to read and blog about 25 books this year. For those who may have forgotten, it was my resolution back in January to spend more time reading (and writing) and less time mindlessly surfing the net. So far, I've been pretty successful despite my being behind. I have read a lot of proofs for Dreamspinner that I haven't blogged about so in truth, I'm actually ahead. But what I blog about is where the rubber meets the road, so I have work to do.

I actually read The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics a while back, but just haven't blogged about it. I've read countless books about the 1970s - specifically the 1970s in America. It's one of the most fascinating periods of history to me. It was a time period during which I was alive, but not really aware. I remember some of these events like you would remember a conversation that was going on in the background of your life. You would think that after reading so many books on the 70s, it'd just be the same thing over and over again. While there's an element of truth to that, I am never bored by books on this topic (unless the writing is awful) because even though the events stay the same, each book has a slightly different take on it, each focusing on something different.

This book took an interesting approach to examining the 70s and in many ways, showed the parallels between that time and the time in which we are living now. Schulman's argument is that the main outcome of the 70s was to serve as a counterpoint to the 60s liberalism and the Great Society. With the economy tanking, the oil embargo and general dissatisfaction with what was perceived to be liberal elitism, the 70s actually represented a reversal in the misfortune of the Republican Party, despite some very visible failures in the early part of the decade. Even though 1976 brought about the election of a Democratic president, the seeds of a conservative revolution were sown in the discontent of the early-to-mid 70s, most surprisingly in a rather savvy way by Richard Nixon. It wasn't until the late 70s that the seeds bloomed under the leadership of Ronald Reagan and formed what seemed like a conservative majority in America.

It was during the chapter on tax revolts and railing against "big government" that I felt like I could have been reading a history of the last two years. So many of the things described in the book felt like they were lifted from a Tea Party rally. It made me think of that oft-repeated phrase "those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Hopefully we will learn from that history but I don't hold out much hope.

But as everyone knows, the 70s were not all about the rise of conservatism. There was hedonism aplenty - a hedonism that may have been directly related to the economic struggles that also define the period. There were chapters that focused on the rise of women's movement, especially how it related to readily available oral contraceptives which allowed women to take control of their reproductive cycle for the first time. The gay rights movement is also examined and surprisingly, the changing roles of men and the definition of masculinity were addressed in the chapter on the "battle of the sexes." Other touchstone events were also mentioned, but despite its title, I felt this was much more a political book than a comprehensive cultural history of the decade.

I enjoyed this book, but my favorite book on this subject is still It Seemed Like Nothing Happened which is probably due for a reread (but not now.)

It's called the Disco Maureen

I have been listening to WAY too much Maureen McGovern this morning. For most, any Maureen McGovern would be too much. I have only 3 songs of hers in my iTunes library and all of them are from either a movie or a TV show. Was she the precursor to Kenny Loggins? The world may never know. Anyway, my favorite of the songs I have is "Different Worlds" which served as the theme song to the 70s TV show Angie. I remember virtually nothing about the show, but I always loved the theme song. Here's the opening credits, just for shits and giggles. I especially love the "Love Boat"-ish way that the stars of the show are introduced, something that was ditched by the beginning of the abbreviated second season.



This song was actually a hit for McGovern in 1979, in a discofied version. I remember it being on a K-Tel 8-track that my folks had and I was forever trying to get to the spot on another program such that I could bump back to program 1 and listen to it. I don't remember how I came to have the mp3 (probably Napster, sorry folks), but you can now legally purchase it on iTunes. At 2:18, it always seemed too short to me, but then I came across the extended version on YouTube this morning. I'm not sure if it's legit as it sounds a bit amateurish, but still, it doubled the song's play time.



I'm always bugging Casey Stratton to record the theme from Maude for me (he just has to keep the funky 70s organ in there), but now I think I've found another for the 70s TV theme song covers project. Between these two and the theme from Alice, I think we're on to something.

Wrong number/right lover

True to form, all it took was for me to post my phone songs post and another one that would have rocketed into that top 8 suddenly appeared on my radar. My friend Jason read the post and it immediately reminded him of an obscure phone song from 1990 - Alisha's "Wrong Number." You can't find it anywhere for sale (digitally) on the entire internet. No iTunes, no AmazonMP3, no nothing. The only way you can purchase it is to go to Amazon and pay through the nose for the vinyl maxi-single (or, alternately, pay slightly less for the cassingle.) But for that price, you could hear all about how Alisha thinks she's calling her friend but somehow or another has dialed the wrong number and gets connected to a sexy sounding guy's answering machine. She's overcome with lust which leads her to sing "I've got the wrong number but my heart keeps telling me/I've got the right lover now."

I have to admit that I had never heard of this song before - I wonder how it charted or if it even charted? Well, all I know is that if I had known this song existed in 1990, I would have been all over it, played on continual repeat on my Walkman while I roamed the Iowa State campus. Sounding a lot like another one-named artist of the same time period that's been mentioned on these pages a couple of times, it would have been impossible for me to ignore it. AND it's a phone song so by default, it's worth at least one listen. What's even better is that it's full of phone sounds, be it phones ringing, dial tones, the "hang-up-now-or-else" sound that will more than likely be a thing of the past before too much longer.

It would be easy to dismiss "Wrong Number" as pop fluff, and well, it IS pop fluff, but it's not like that's a bad thing. As was posted by MrDiscoPop this morning, writing an effective pop song is not nearly as easy as some people think. There are so many that don't work, that when one does (and I would argue that "Wrong Number" works), it hits that spot that causes you to just keep repeating the song over and over again. Don't punish a song because it has slick production and no weighty social issue as its topic. Sometimes, we just need to let go, and for most, that needs to happen more often than it does.

I've gone on record as saying that this has been the best summer for music in so long. Songs like this, while not current, add to the fabric of the summer and fit in just as well as Kylie and Scissor Sisters and Goldfrapp. I only wish I could find a YouTube clip of "Wrong Number" - it's so worthy and no one has done it! I would post a link to the mp3 but I'm so not interested in getting my almost 7 year old blog shut down over it!

The (non)appendicitis was (not) rumbling

You might have seen me tweet on Sunday that I had been suffering from abdominal pain of unknown origin for 3 or 4 days. It was a most bizarre type for I could never pin it down to one place. Sometimes it was my right lower quadrant, sometimes it was my left flank. The one constant about it was that it was a dull ache that I just couldn't characterize as anything I'd ever felt before. My general rule of thumb is that if pain stays in one place, worry about it. If not, it's not likely to be serious.

Despite this rule of thumb, those of you that know me well know what happened next. In my grand tradition, I diagnosed myself with everything from appendicitis to ulcerative colitis to colon cancer. I swear, I am worse than the internet when it comes to turning relatively benign symptoms into something that could potentially be fatal. I don't consciously try to do it - it just happens. It comes from years of programming and my hard-wired anxious brain and my vast amount of medical knowledge that I have by virtue of my profession. The key to that last part is that, while I may have a lot of specific medical knowledge, I'm not a doctor so diagnosing is NOT my forte.

So here I was, a highly trained medical professional self-diagnosing on Wikipedia the other night. The pain was so highly localized to my right lower quadrant on Sunday night that I was certain I would be having an emergency appendectomy on Monday. For the record, my appendix is still in there and still vestigial. Even though my pain was never really acute enough for appendicitis and I had no other symptoms of it (no fever, no gastritis, no vomiting) I was convinced of it. When I stumbled across "rumbling appendicitis" - a chronic inflammation of the appendix that has milder symptoms - I figured that was my diagnosis, because, yeah, 4 days is chronic. Ish.

Clearly, I need to get a grip, and in the time that has passed I've found that grip. My pain has subsided a lot and I think it has a lot to do with the amount of pop I drink. So, much like Mary, my pop drinking days may be coming to an end.

After I work through the initial freak out, I can laugh at all this for the ridiculousness that it is - hence this post. There's a lady I work with who I have a long-standing joke with regarding my "latest diagnosis." I find that saying it out loud really helps me to realize how amazingly whacked and not based in reality those kinds of emotions and thoughts are. Inside my head, they are perfectly rational. But once you tell someone you have "rumbling appendicits" and you laugh uproariously over it, it's hard to take it, or yourself, too seriously.

Parallels along the spectrum

I came across this article buried at the bottom of the Google News home page (which, incidentally, am I the only one that really dislikes the new layout?) Given Heidi's and my interest in gay issues, it caught my attention.

The Last Person Out of the Closet: The Bisexual Male

The article made think of two things - one addressed and one, oddly, not.

1) If the struggle for gay rights really is the civil rights issue of our time, the parallels between being bisexual and multiracial really are appropriate and one I had not thought of before. While I feel that the stigma of being multiracial has lessened since the early to mid 20th century if not evaporated altogether, I think it will be a while before those people who identify as bisexual are not perceived by society at large as being on a train - next stop, Gayville. I think human sexuality is so much more complicated and bigger than our paltry labels.

2) I maintain that the biggest objections to homosexuality in our society stem from how it has turned the traditional concept of masculinity on its ear. How a guy like me that is not interested in sports or cars or many of the "traditional" guy things can be straight yet a big burly trucker interested in those things can be gay messes with our collective heads. This is ultimately a good thing as it causes us to see things through a different lens. The fact that the article does not mention bisexual women only solidifies this in my head. That is not to say that bisexual women don't face similar hardships, but rather that the underlying masculinity issue as it pertains to gay rights is the rather large elephant in the room.

Dividing line

There are SO MANY good songs out this year. Seriously, I have 29 songs on my "best of 2010" list so far this year and the year's only half over. I think I struggled to put together a list half that long in 2009. There are also so many good "summer songs" - the new Kylie album is full of them, but there are others as well. I don't want to give away the goods too soon as I may actually do a summer songs post in late August after just skipping the whole thing last year, but The Bird & The Bee kicked it off with "Heard It On The Radio." Since then, there's been a seemingly never ending flow of good music.

I don't know what makes a summer song, but I know it when I hear it in much the same way I know a good autumn song when I hear one. It's not often that a song is both, but when one manages that feat, it's sweet, sweet bliss. Such a song is "Lakes Can Be Lethal" by the British indie-pop band Delays.

I really need to have heard this song in about two months because it somehow seems to capture the "feeling" of late August/early September while still managing to be a summer song as well. I'm not totally sold on the album yet which I've been buying piecemeal on eMusic. The falsetto, not surprisingly, gets me every time.


Instead, I blew the last $4.45 of my iTunes credit from my birthday (thanks Mary!) on this wonder that I didn't even know existed until this morning!



Anne Murray ditching country/pop for a synth-laden album in 1986? Who knew? Clearly not me or I would have snatched this puppy up years ago!

(thanks to Steve for putting "Lakes Can Be Lethal" on my radar and to Jason & Lucas for the Anne Murray insanity)

Ring ring ring goes the telephone

I heard it said once that it's impossible for a song about phones to be bad. I don't remember where I read this, but I do remember thinking that seemed like quite a blanket statement. Surely this can't be true. Well, as it turns out, if it's not always true, it certainly is 99% of the time. So I went through my iTunes library using the search terms "phone" and "call" just to see what I had. From those results and from some songs I already knew would make the cut, I've culled my top 8.

1) Hung Up / Madonna
The most obvious choice for this list is probably my favorite telephone song. I think my favorite part about it is the play on words that is the phrase "hung up" in that she is hung up on the guy and also "hangin' up" on him. Some of the remixes went a step further, incorporating ringing phones, dial tones and "please hang up and try again" into the song. It's classic Madonna and a song that deserves its place amongst her best-known 80s hits.

2) Telephone / Lady Gaga & Beyonce
This was the song on The Fame Monster that I never really got into. Not even its cinematic video really sold me on it. It wasn't until the folks over at NPR did their spoof of it that I really began to appreciate it. Now, one of our favorite things to do is to say "stop calling, stop calling, I don't wanna talk anymore/I left my head and my heart on the dance floor" in our best Robert Siegel.



3) Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair) / Sheena Easton
In the running for the cheesiest song on this list, it certainly has the cheesiest video. I mean, seriously? Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula? This is a quintessential "80s song" for me - right up there with early 80s classics like "Total Eclipse of the Heart," "Down Under," and "True." Say what you will about the production values on those cheesy old 80s songs - they don't make them like this any longer. I can't even imagine someone like Sheena Easton getting a chance these days.



4) I Wish The Phone Would Ring / Expose
Expose were heading toward the end of their hit-making days in 1993 (although the gag-inducing "I'll Never Get Over You (Getting Over Me)" was just around the corner), but for my money, this song tops all the hits from their brief 80s heyday. Barbra Streisand would probably put this in her "dependent victim songs" category. The song is about nothing more than waiting for that special someone to call, hatching the phone as one of my friends used to call it. Sure it's co-dependent and playing the victim, but never has it sounded like quite so much fun.



5) Callin' Baton Rouge / Garth Brooks
"Callin' Baton Rouge" also belongs on the "country songs I like so much more than I should list." As a rule, I don't like Garth Brooks much (too many college nights in bars with drunk frat guys singing along to "Friends In Low Places") but this song is a major exception. I think it's the fact that, at 2 minutes 38 seconds, it doesn't overstay its welcome and the rather awkward prepositional phrase "But until then I'll spend my money up right down to my last dime" that seal the deal. A great 90s country song.

6) Hanging On The Telephone / Blondie
I deliberately didn't pick "Call Me" which is arguably more well known but I do like this one better. While not a Blondie original, they did make it famous. My sister Wendy and I have always been fond of the line "Did she go to work or just go to the store?"

7) Ring Ring / ABBA
When word leaked that Madonna might be sampling ABBA for the kick-off single from Confessions on a Dance Floor, "Ring Ring" was high atop everyone's list of possibilities - well, everyone's list but mine since I didn't even know this song until I sought it out around that time. And forget what I said about Sheena having the cheesiest song and video on this list. I should have known that ABBA would win that, hands down.



8) He's On The Phone / Saint Etienne
"He's On The Phone" was the very first Saint Etienne song I heard, thanks to a friend via last.fm. It's not surprising that I took to Saint Etienne as Sarah Cracknell is, in many ways, very Debbie Harry. Cool and detached but decidedly more pop and less punk, she fits the band like a glove.



Of course, this list is not all inclusive - which of your favorites did I miss?

Year of 25 Books: #10 - The Bell Jar

I first read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar when I was 15. I don't recall why I picked it up - probably because I was "supposed to." I wrote a book report on it for my 10th grade English class. Up until a few years ago, I still had it. When I was getting ready to type this post, I looked for it (a bit half-heartedly, I'll admit) but couldn't find it. I presume it's lost to the ages, but that's not altogether a bad thing. It is probably, if you'll pardon the pun, rather sophomoric. I thought I knew everything then and that everything I put on paper was perfection. Oh, how little I knew.

Anyway, I was talking to my friend Mary over Memorial Day and was saying how I'd really like to reread The Bell Jar. I remembered precious little from it apart from the fact that it involved a 20 something woman who was slowly but surely descending into mental illness. I also remember it being a rather thinly veiled autobiographical account of the author's own struggle with mental illness. Not the most uplifting of subject material, but as I so frequently say, "a little advice about feelings, don't always expect them to tickle." (credit where credit is due.)

The novel's main character, Esther Greenwood, is in New York City as the the story opens, participating in an internship for a women's magazine. But it's not until the internship ends and she arrives back home in Massachussetts that the trouble really starts. Having anticipated being accepted to another internship under the tutelage of a famous writer, she starts to lose her grip upon learning that she was rejected. This is compounded by troubles in her love life and the antagonistic relationship she has with her mother. She can't sleep and flits from one project to the next without finishing anything. Soon, her situation becomes dire, with her thoughts consumed by the idea of suicide. After a nearly successful attempt, she lands in the hospital - referred to in the book by the slightly un-PC and definitely out of date word "asylum."

The story is told from Esther's perspective, so the reader gets a good glimpse as to what depression might feel like. And that's just the thing. Esther really doesn't seem crazy or insane to me. Rather, she appears to suffer from severe clinical depression. She compares her mindset to living inside of a bell jar - a piece of lab equipment in which vacuums can be created. One of her most telling quotes comes during toward the end of the book, one I distinctly remember pulling out as the "required quote" for my 10th grade book report. In it, Esther is confronted with by the kindess of Mrs. Philomena Guinea - a successful author who was her benefactor during the summer internship and who also ends up footing the bill for her hospitalization.

I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

We all know how Sylvia Plath's battle with the noonday demon ended - with her head in an oven while her children slept in the next room. The Bell Jar is a cautionary tale - one that was well worth the reread even though its approach to mental illness is quite dated.

Now to try to find that 10th grade book report!

An early secret

The secrets went up last night on PostSecret - a welcome surprise since they usually aren't up until Sunday morning. I really like the once weekly posting that PostSecret does. During the week, I tend to forget about it, but it's always nice to see the bolded little (1) next to PostSecret in my Google Reader feed.

This one was probably my favorite of this week's offerings.


I think pretty much everyone can relate to this secret. Don't we all know someone who by something they do or a habit they have that, while maybe not the best part of our day, is something that we simply look forward to and makes life just a little bit more tolerable? This secret reminds me not to underestimate any of my actions, no matter how trivial they may appear to me, for they may be very important to someone else. I may never know it and perhaps it's better that way. I know there are people in my life that do that to me.

And what's more, I can't imagine being on a treadmill at 5:30 AM.

Put your hands up...

...if you downloaded the leak of Kylie's Aphrodite. Like I was going to do it any other way. Don't worry, I'm still planning on buying it.

Others on the web have said it much better than I ever could, so I'll just leave it at this. This is what pop perfection looks like. There isn't a single misstep to be found. Part of the perfection is the illusion of effortlessness. You get the impression that she just farted this out and it was perfect as it was. There's little doubt in my mind that there was a whole lot more to it than that. Kylie's best music, like Madonna's best music, has always been that which appeared to require little or no effort on her part. As XO said in his review of Hard Candy, part of the problem with Madonna is that you can frequently see the gears turning. Not so with Kylie on Aphrodite. It just magically appears.

The early stand-out for me is "Put Your Hands Up (If You Feel Love)." I can't figure out exactly what it is about that song, but it just gets me at the base of my spine and makes everything okay. Sure the world seems to be coming apart at the seams these days. But in spite of that (or perhaps because of it), music like this is just the kind of tonic we need, because if you don't look away from reality every now and again, all you end up with is exhaustion.

Thanks to Heidi, I can't think of Kylie without thinking of Sam Keller and right now, my inner Sam Keller is in dancing himself up into a frenzy.

Alas poor Lunar Golf, we hardly knew ye!

We took Anna into the doctor on Wednesday more just because it felt like Something We Should Do as she hadn't been to the doctor in a couple years. There were a couple of questions we wanted to ask a pediatrician and I wanted to make sure that she was growing appropriately (she is: at 4 feet, 8 and 3/4ths inches and 68 pounds, she's above the 99th percentile in height and at the 50th percentile for weight.) Before the doctor came in, Anna asked me if she had to get any shots, which I swore up and down she didn't.

Well, as it turns out, I was wrong. Hepatitis A has been added to the raft of vaccines recommended before the age of 2, and it must have been added recently because she didn't have it. Upon hearing this, she looked at me anxiously and gripped her arms, proclaiming that she didn't want it. No amount of rationalization was going to work. Eventually, Heidi promised Anna that I would take her to Lunar Golf (black-light miniature golf) at the mall if she would just relax and get the shot. She relented, but only until the nurse came in with the needle, at which point full-on freak out ensued. I really have to be patient with it though, because she comes by it naturally. When I was slightly younger than her and had cut my eye all to hell, they had to wrap me up in the paper on the exam table in order to stitch me up.

So she got the shot (but "didn't like it" as she said) and after I got off work, we headed out to the mall to Lunar Golf. It's 18 holes, 8 bucks a person, but you get to play three times. They play really fun classic rock and we always have a good time. I looked on the web site to make sure they were open and they were open till 9, so off we went. She sang "Telephone" the whole way out there, but when we got to the mall, well, "devastation" only partially describes it.

Lunar Golf was no more - completely defunct and out of business. The gates pulled down with black plastic blocking our view of the inside. Anna broke down in tears right there in the mall. I held my daughter who is 8-going-on-25 like a 4-year-old and let her sob into my shirt. I understood her pain. It was kind of "our place." We scrambled to think of something else we could do - there used to be another mini-golf place here in town, but I knew that was long since closed as well. We went back home and Heidi suggested we go to the Story City Carousel which turned out to be a good idea because it was something we hadn't done in a long time and was also pretty cheap. The whole way up to Story City, Anna wanted to take turns remembering the fun times we'd had at Lunar Golf.

I'll admit that a part of me is sad that Lunar Golf has gone the way of the dodo bird here in Ames. It was pretty fun although I never understood the people who took it seriously enough to keep score. Honestly though, it was never very busy, and I kind of thought in the back of mind that it wouldn't be long before it would be gone. We should have gone more often, but that'll probably be something that Anna tells her therapist when she's 38.

She's over it - she just told me on the phone last night that she's either giving me a scorpion or a bomb in a box for Father's Day. My incessant teasing has created a monster! I always say that I won the kid lottery and for all the times when she makes me crazy, she's better than I ever thought I'd get and likely better than I deserve.

Either sadness or euphoria

Was it EVER cool to like Billy Joel? There was a guy I went to school with who was a massive Billy Joel fan in the 8th grade. He went ON AND ON about the An Innocent Man album - kind of like I would go on about a Madonna album (equally uncool at that point probably.)

I have always had a love/hate relationship with Joel - I appreciate his music probably more than I really enjoy a lot of it. I have the Greatest Hits Vol. 1 & 2 (who doesn't?) and the previously mentioned An Innocent Man, which is probably one of two Billy Joel studio albums that I think are good start to finish (the other is Glass Houses.) I know all the hits, but have a tendency to look down my nose at them a bit, as if they are too plebian for my tastes - I know, that's horrible and it's not like my musical tastes are anything to write home about. I also feel like the quality of his work suffered toward the end of his pop career - if I never hear "The River of Dreams" again, I'll be okay with that.

But Billy Joel has always been a bit of a round peg in a square hole for me. I just never quite knew what to do with him. It wasn't until a couple summers ago when I was listening to a guilty pleasures podcast of Wings for Wheels (featuring Popdose's Dave Lifton, Jason Hare and Jeff Giles) that I discovered what is probably now my favorite Billy Joel song - "Summer, Highland Falls." I had never even heard of it till that podcast, but I bought it immediately after hearing it on that podcast. The lyrics are bittersweet - something that always seems to hook me - and so wise. "We are always what our situations hand us/it's either sadness or euphoria."



So you can keep your "Piano Man" and "We Didn't Start The Fire." I'll keep this one.

H2Whoa

Over the last week, I've noticed a small patch of water on the carpet at the foot of the basement stairs. As I have frequently said, you really shouldn't ignore water. You can hope that it'll go away, but when water goes away, it usually takes things with it. I watched it for awhile, not really sure what to make of it. The water heater (not the one we just had replaced) is there, as is the furnace for the back of the house. I talked to my dad and the plan was for him to look at it on Monday when he came over to do some more work on the deck. Well, the weather didn't cooperate so that didn't happen. It seemed to be getting mildly worse - or at least no better - so I put in a service call to American Home Shield to have someone come look at it.

I had done a little bit of research and thought that maybe the drip pan in the bottom of the furnace was cracked or overflowing, but this morning, when the furnace guys came, they confirmed it was NOT that. It's also not the water heater, as it would have probably been leaking a lot more and all the time. Honestly, I was hoping for something a little more definitive for my 60 bucks, but hey, you take what you get.

So plan B - I ripped up the admittedly crappy carpet in the area to see if there was a crack in the concrete through which water might be coming up. It's been a rainy spring - we're basically caught in the same wet pattern we were all winter only it's rain now instead of the mountains of snow and ice. After moderate amounts of cussing and having to find a sharper knife, I got it pulled up and while there's no crack, drying it off with a towel seemed to do the trick. I set up a fan down there to dry out some carpet that I can't get to with my knife and so far so good. I just checked it and it seems to be doing the trick. Here's hoping for the best.

It's times like these that I would trade the character of an old house in for the predictability of newer construction. People say, "oh, your house is so nice! It has so much character" which is true - I love our house, even though it's probably too big for us (when we moved to Ames, we were still thinking we might have more kids.) I've never been a huge fan of the sterility that seems to dominate so much new construction, instead preferring old houses with their all their idiosyncrasies. But whenever people admire the character of our house, I always want to say "yeah, and it's so much work!" The garage needs a new roof next summer (as well as a new paint job) and as I have detailed many a time, the yard is just beyond my ability.

But it's all worth it to live on a tree-lined street, even though I'll be complaining (mildly) about the leaf raking come October.

(the title of the post comes from a great Simpsons episode that we were just talking about last week thanks to the drop slide at the new Ames pool.)

A mere heart attack

I'm 80% through my run of night shifts and hopefully I won't jinx tonight by saying that they really haven't been all that awful. As predicted, I hit my nadir on the third night (I was SO tired on Monday morning) and am actually feeling pretty good headed into the last one. I've slept pretty well for the most part as well - something that is not always easy to do. Thanks to Ativan, I slept blissfully for 6 hours today which is more sleep than I get on some nights.

But working the night shift has caused me to neglect my life. Dirty clothes are strewn all over my office, clean clothes need to be put away. I haven't read a word of the book I'm reading and have only blogged once. I did manage to get the tonnage of pop bottles and cans back to the store which netted me a massive $3.75. When that's your biggest accomplishment, you know you're in trouble.

And how all this ties into "Heart Attack" I have no idea, but I listened to that song randomly this afternoon and just knew that I had to blog about it. I think it might have something to do with the fact that we sang a Cliff Richard song at UU on Sunday (I forced myself to stay awake so I could go to our minister's second-to-last service.) The more I thought about it, the more I wished that if we were going to sing a Cliff Richard song, I wish it would have been his duet with ONJ, "Suddenly", but hey, I'm not on the program committee.

I remember getting the single for "Heart Attack" without having even heard it - that's how sold on Olivia I was as a kid. If it had her name attached to it, I was sure to like it. Well, I got the single home from the store and I have to admit, I didn't really like it all that much. In fact, I liked the B-side, an album track from Physical called "Stranger's Touch" (video here, amazingly cheeseball) much better, even though the bridge-ish section in "Stranger's Touch" where sing sings "he's overpowering me/what'll I do-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo." always made me feel kind of bad for Olivia.

But I eventually warmed to "Heart Attack" playing it no less than 12 million times as a kid which is something my folks can verify. It's still only an "ok" ONJ song, but it does contain one of my favorite misheard lyrics. I always thought that in the chorus she sang, "You get a mere heart attack" instead of "You're giving me a heart attack." I remember asking my dad what "mere" meant and even though it didn't make sense in the context, I went with it because it was all I could do. At least it's no "I got debated by your heartache" in that this one at least makes some kind of sense.

The video, as was the standard for almost all of ONJ's videos, was bizarre - a combination of 80s cliches and serious WTF moments. Plus, the mullet was SUCH a bad idea.



But, much like the other artists in my core, I'm a fan for life.

Aphrodite? All right!

I have managed to resist the temptation to blog the album announcement, the release of the kick-off single and the video premiere. But with the leak of a 9 minute, 6 song megamix from Kylie's forthcoming album Aphrodite arriving on the internet last night, I could no longer be silenced. I first heard of it when I saw XO tweeting about it. His reply on Twitter?

xolondon @dancpharmd The Kylie mix will tip you into Gayville Dan. It is that good.

While I have to say that it didn't accomplish that (still just an honorary member of that tribe, I guess), it is beyond my wildest expectations for Kylie's album. Kylie's last album, X, was such a grower for me, but from the sounds of the songs on this album, Kylie hit this one out of the park. Listen for yourself - but be prepared for the trip to Gayville that XO warned about.



Is "Hands Up" not the most infectious thing you've heard all year?

What kills me about Kylie is how that paper thin voice of hers can elicit such strong reactions in me. Perhaps it's the production, perhaps it's the unbridled joy in the songs. Whatever it is, she's doing it right.

July 5th cannot come quickly enough.

Year of 25 Books: #9 - Something Wicked This Way Comes

Lest you think I'm behind on my reading goal for the year - never fear, for I am right on target. The end of the 5th month saw me finishing my 9th and 10th books for the book challenge. What I'm really behind on is blogging the books and here's my attempt to remedy that.

I picked up a lost book of my childhood in May - Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. I remember being a kid of maybe 11 or 12 and checking it out from the public library. I read the first couple chapters and then abandoned it. The prose was too thick, the story to moribund. It just seemed like nothing was happening. As a horror novel, it failed for me, which is no surprise since I probably had just finished reading The Exorcist. I was expecting something a lot, well, scarier. So it's a book that I'd been meaning to revisit for a long time, but as these things tend to go, I just hadn't gotten around to it.

A book with a serious autumnal feel, Something Wicked This Way Comes is a classic in its genre, but what exactly that genre is is hard to pin down. It has elements of a horror novel, but also of fantasy and science fiction. A carnival, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show arrives unseasonably late in the small town where Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway live next door to each other. Jim & Will are the best of friends, born minutes apart on each side of midnight. They are quintessential boys, especially of the time period in which the book takes place (1940s or 50s by my estimation.) They are thrilled that a carnival has come to town in late October. Naturally, there is much more to this carnival than meets the eye. Jim's father is absent, while Will's is an 50-something man with whom he has only a passing relationship.

Their boyish curiosity leads them to the carnival after hours where they witness a carousel that, while purportedly broken, actually can age the rider one year for each revolution it makes. Conversely, it will shave a year off their age for every revolution backward. There is a circus full of freaks and Mr. Dark himself is "The Illustrated Man" (a direct reference to one of Bradbury's earlier works) covered in tattoos - tattoos which have a darker, more sinister meaning that unfolds slowly as the book progresses. With each passing page, another evil aspect of the carnival is revealed, but even at the end of the book, much remains shrouded in mystery.

I had very mixed feelings on this book. As a horror novel, I felt it failed miserably. It was never scary. I chalk that up to the time period in which it was written. It had a VERY "literary" feel to it - as if to say, look-at-me-I'm-an-important-book. I can see why I was never able to read it as a kid. Even at nearly 38, there were times I considered bailing and I even started another book before I was finished with it, which is usually the death knell to the temporarily abandoned book. But I persevered and ultimately I appreciated the novel more than I enjoyed it. I feel like the writing was just far too turgid for me to really get into it.

Having said that, Bradbury is a master at setting the scene. Although the weather was warming up and we were headed into summer as I started reading the book, I felt like it should be fall. His descriptions are good without being overdone and I liked how not every little tiny detail about the carnival was revealed all at once. The slow reveal helped make the pay off worth it, even though I felt like the end was a bit of an anticlimax.

But what I loved most about this book was its commentary on accepting one's place in their life. Jim wants nothing more than to ride the carousel so that he can hasten his growing up, while Will's father pines for his younger days. It's only Will that sees the folly in this and serves as the conscience of the story. When both Jim and Mr. Halloway inevitably accepted that life progresses as it does, relationships all around were strengthened and became more authentic. As someone who is only a few years from the end of his 30s, this spoke loud and clear.

I would overall recommend Something Wicked This Way Comes, but I think I would have enjoyed it more as a 16-year-old, even though I have no doubt I would have still had trouble with the writing style. And I know that had I read it then, I would have identified much more with the boys rather than seeing myself in Will's father, despite the fact that I am smack dab in between them in age.

1st of June

Well, here we are folks. It's June 1st. Where in the world did the first 41.7% of the year go? It seems like just yesterday I was snow-blowing the driveway for the 400th time, and now I have a jungle growing up in my backyard that I can't seem to be home long enough to tame. Getting the yard to the point where I'm not embarrassed by it is the goal for Wednesday afternoon, but now it looks like it's supposed to rain, so who knows if that'll even happen now.

I'm getting ready to work another set of 5 overnight shifts starting the end of the week. I'm weary of working that shift, but in the final analysis it's not all that bad. It's actually harder on my family than it is on me. I'll work the last one on June 8th which means I'll be working for the first 8 hours of my birthday and will miss the season finale of Glee. Because I have awesome family and friends, a whole group of them are going to forgo watching on Tuesday night so that we can all watch together on the night of the 9th. Another unintended benefit of the night shift is that it works out that I have a four day weekend for Capital City Pride in Des Moines, where Heidi and I (along with other friends and family) will have a booth selling her books and promoting Dreamspinner. It'll be a busy weekend but it should be great fun. Anyone who is local (and hey, even those that aren't!) are more than welcome to stop by and say hi. Pride in Des Moines is pretty family friendly and there's a such an amazing mix of people there.

We hit the Furman Aquatic Center here in Ames yesterday for Memorial Day which was beyond fun. It was supposed to open mid-summer of last year, but it was behind schedule and didn't and frankly, I'm glad that they didn't rush it but instead took the time to get it right. It has a little something for everyone and it was just a blast - even though I did sunburn the tops of my feet (they feel better today.)

My goal for the remaining 58.3% of the year is, as trite as it sounds, to live now. I will admit to spending a lot of the first part of the year living in an alternate future with horrific imagined outcomes. That's under better control than it's been in a while, but still, I am me and that is just a part of me. I have learned to respect it and not talk badly to it, but I still fail daily so who knows.

That's it for my inaugural June post. It's not much, but it's what I have.