Rants, Raves, and Randoms

This song made me cry the other day.  Promise me that you’ll listen to the entire thing…

“The Ballad of Love and Hate” from Emotionalism by The Avett Brothers:

Sometimes I wonder if the very premise of blogging is an encouragement of self-absorption.  I have had a tendency to be rather self-absorbed in the past (and present) and it hasn’t done me well.  I tend to not think very positively about myself, and so dwelling upon “me” can be kind of dangerous.

Anyway, I’ve been wondering about why I have a blog.  I actually have a few, so that makes the question even more poignant.  As I have access to the statistics for this site, I know that even on the most active days, this site sees about 5 viewers.  So, is blogging merely self-absorption directed at the abyss?

I have contemplated shutting this blog down.  It is more-or-less meaningless, and it doesn’t seem to be drawing much of an audience.  Because I am the way I am, I agonize over most of my posts.  I think about them all day, trying to work out the best approach, the right verbage…yet, in the end what is all of that stress doing for me?  For anyone else?

I have recently been trying to “unclutter” various aspects of my life, and I am wondering if blogging is more clutter than it is useful…Still, the thought of abandoning it feels kind of scary.  I have, essentially, zero friends, so what else would I really do to “socialize?”

This is not a plea for more readers.  This is not a plea for more active participation from whoever reads this.  I am simply thinking out loud here.  The title of this blog is “Randoms…” after all.

You may recall that I used to walk/skateboard/bike to work.  This semester, though, I have been driving.  We moved quite a bit farther away from the college during the Christmas Break.  We used to be a little over a mile from the college; now we are a little over seven.  But, the distance isn’t as much the problem as is the topography.  Pretty much nothing in San Diego is flat.  In fact, there are several places along the coast where the elevation rises to a few hundred feet above sea level only blocks from the water.

So, I haven’t gotten up the guts to try riding my bike to work.  I know that I could do it, but I am worried about the practicality.  Given the hills between me and the college, I’d likely arrive at work quite unpresentable: sweaty, disheveled, tired.  Of course there is always the option of bringing clothes, even showering once I get there, but that extends the time commitment quite a bit.  I know, you can’t “have your cake and eat it too,” and I shouldn’t complain about having a 7-mile commute.  I do miss the time I spent on foot/skateboard/bike; it was kind of meditative and invigorating (though sometimes, after a long day, it was annoying and exhausting).

Here is what my old “commute” looked like:

And here is the new one:

Granted, the ride on the way to work would end with a pretty good downhill stint, but only after a 7%+ grade in the miles before…

My four-year-old daughter was telling about something earlier today.  After she was done, she said, “Do you know how I know that?  Facebook.”

Of course, I started laughing.  Then she said, “What’s Facebook?”

“It’s a, um, a website.”

“Oh.”

After a few minutes, she continued, “What is Craigslist?”

“That’s a website too.”

“That’s funny, Daddy!”

Okay, here are those promised photos:

First, though, I have to begin by promising that I’ll post some more.  What I have isn’t terribly comprehensive, and I don’t feel like they totally do the place justice.  Still, I wanted to post at least something to give you an idea of what’s been goin’ on.

So, here are two good “before” shots of the kitchen:

Notice the garbage disposal and mop in the sink…those were still there when we moved in.  Most of the junk was gone by the time we moved in, but all of the “ickiness” was still there.  Here is what the kitchen looks like form those same spots now:

Here is a before shot of my son’s room:

And here is what it looks like now:

My daughter’s room, before:

After:

Here is a shot of the master bedroom the day after closing escrow:

Note the greasy-looking dude.  At the point when this picture was taken he was technically trespassing on our property, as he and all of that stuff should have been gone 24 hours earlier.

And here is the same corner a few hours ago:

This is the master bath vanity, before:

Master bath vanity, after:

This is a look down the hallway into the master bedroom:

Same spot, after:

The fireplace was about the most hideous-looking fireplace I’ve ever seen.  It’s hard to tell in the photo, but the beige-colored hearth-sort-of-thing is made of stucco, and not nice, smooth stucco, but really rough, exterior stucco.  Here it is, before:

After:

Here’s a before shot from the bottom of the stairs, looking toward said hideous fireplace:

After:

We replaced all of the flooring in the house.  Downstairs was carpeting in the living room, dining room, and bathroom (!), and tile in the kitchen and entry way.  Now, the entire bottom floor is laminate flooring.  Here is a shot of the tile coming up:

And here is a shot from the same place (try to ignore the baby toy right in the middle of the floor…why my wife didn’t move that before taking the picture, I don’t know…):

In a lot of ways these before/after shots don’t really do the transformation much justice.  It’s hard to really understand the level of filth that the house was under when we acquired it.  In order to be consistent, I tried to take photos that were of the, more-or-less, exact things in both the before and after shots, perhaps leaving you with the false impression that our the house is still a mess…I promise that it’s not…at least not at this exact moment.

Come and visit me and you’ll see! :)

So, I promised that more posts were coming soon, that I’d post pictures of the new house, and all that stuff.  And here it is two weeks since my last post, having written no such posts, having posted no such pictures…

I promise that I have been really busy.  We’ve had almost non-stop visitors at our house–more are on the way tomorrow and Saturday.  It’s nice having visitors, but they make me feel obligated to put off work stuff, so I have all sorts of catching up to do when they leave.

Anyway, I am doing all I can to get back to this blog.  Who am I kidding though, really, I’ve seen the stats for this blog…I get like 4 visits a week.  Pictures within a week!

I’ve been meaning to write about this, and Sarah’s latest blog reminded me that I haven’t yet.

Our new house is bigger than our old apartment.  That was part of the motivation to buy the place (to buy almost anything).  The floor plan is, of course, different than any other place we’ve lived.  In trying to figure out how to arrange all of our stuff (with so much space!), we decided to do something kind of drastic.  The details will follow soon, but the end result is that we sold our TV!

Basically, as we were trying to decide on what and where we realized that it seemed silly to organize all 1400 square feet around a tiny box with a screen on it.  Is the TV really the point of the house?  So, we kept putting off the “Where’s the TV going to go?” question.  By the time we were ready to answer it, the only place that made any sense was right in front of the fireplace…but of course that doesn’t really make sense.  We liked how and where everything was situated, so, instead of re-thinking everything to make room for the idiot-box, we decided to just sell the thing.

It wasn’t that great of a TV anyway, and all we used it for (most of the time) was to watch DVDs.  In fact, our 24” iMac has a bigger screen than the TV did, so it’s better to watch them on that thing…

So, the story more or less ends with us selling a 19” TV, a digital converter box, and a TV stand for $50 on Craigslist.  Maybe now I’ll get around to reading those bookshelves filled with I-thought-I’d-have-more-time-to-read books.

While we were sitting at dinner our almost-ten-month-old son was in his room, acting a little anxious.  This instigated a really funny conversation between my four-year-old daughter and me.

“What’s wrong with him?  Is he scared?”

“Maybe.”  I said.

“What is he afraid of?”

“I don’t know.”

“But what is is scared of?”

“Scary monsters.”

“Scary monsters?”

“Yeah.  Scary monsters and super creeps.”

“What are super creeps?”

“I don’t know…”

I even got her to sing this song:

Everything has felt so disorganized lately, it’s about all I can do to keep my head above water.  If you haven’t noticed, I am like that…ridiculously obsessed with things being organized.  Sometimes I describe the way things have been feeling as a “whirlwind,” and if any of you have been hip to Southern California weather over the last week, you know how accurate that description is as of late.

Toward the end of last week, the house actually started to feel like a “home,” a place where we can feel comfortable and relaxed.  There are still a few little things that need doing scattered about, but mostly, we’re talking living in the “final product.”

Last weekend we took my in-laws out to Coronado to see if we could catch a quick glimpse of the sunset.  Here is what we saw:

It’s funny how something like that kind of forces you to contemplate.  When we moved down here I told myself (and my wife) that I was really going to take advantage of living in such a beautiful place.  I was going to go to the beach at least once a week (which, until Thanksgiving, I was pretty faithful about doing), make at least bi-monthly visits to Balboa Park, frequent visits to the mission, Old Town, Coronado, La Jolla, etc.  Of course, though, I get too caught up in trying to pay for living here, and I forget about all of those things.

I really want to spend more time contemplating, meditating, simply absorbing things.  I picked up John Cage’s Silence the other day, and was reading his “Lecture on Nothing.”  I need more nothing in my daily routine…

You’re all quite a bit hipper than me, I imagine, so you may have heard this already.  But, I just got this the other day, and I am finding this to be more and more interesting with each listen.

Amazon was having a “Buy an mp3 album @ $7.99 and get a $5 album free” sale a few weeks ago.  I bought Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years (which is amazing, and probably deserves its own blog post as well…and Paul Simon deserves some of your support…), and forgot that that meant I got a free album until the last day of the promotion.  I looked through the $5 offerings and nothing really hit me (leave it to me to be ridiculously picky, even when it’s free) as something I wanted.  Then I saw The Bird and the Bee’s first album (called the bird and the bee).  I’d heard a few of their songs through KCRW and iTunes freebies, and I liked what I’d heard.  I think that their version of “Carol of the Bells” is one of the most innovative arrangements I’ve heard in a long time.

Anyway, I got it and I’m really excited about it.  Here is a sample track…great stuff!

“Again & Again” (from the bird and the bee) by The Bird and the Bee: