Category: Daily Life

This is my 523rd post (I wasn’t paying enough attention to mention my 500th post a while back) and today is the two-year anniversary of this blog.

I thought about doing a heavily linked retrospective of the topics that have had the most Google-juice over the last two years, but that’s what the archives are for.  If you’re new to this blog, I invite you to dive in and experience the dizzying combination of Sea-Monkeys, recipes, personal anecdotes, good-natured rants and self-absorption that make up the Average Jane oeuvre to date.

Aside from the writing, my favorite thing about being a blogger is belonging to such a great community of other bloggers.  Between the enormous list of BlogHers to the left and the always-expanding list of "Blogs I Like" on the right, I have so much reading material every day that I can hardly tear myself away from the computer to sleep at night. 

I look forward to continuing this blog as long as I can still think of things to write about.  I may never make it past the "D list," but that’s okay – I’m having fun.

Since it’s Valentine’s Day, I figured this was as good a time as any to tell the story of how I met my husband and how we started dating.

It all started about 14 years ago or so when I was singing in a hard rock band and dating a guitarist I now refer to as my "psycho ex."  We needed a drummer for our band, so he and I ended up going to a drummer’s house for an audition/jam.  While we were there, another drummer showed up.  He had long, curly blond hair like Robert Plant and was wearing an awesome black leather trench coat.  I thought he was mighty fine, but oddly enough the psycho didn’t seem to react with his usual jealousy.  We all stood around outside and chatted for quite a while after we finished playing.

Fast forward seven or eight months:  I’d kicked the psycho to the curb a while back and had recently broken up with a guy with whom I could never have had a future because he was allergic to my cats.  In the meantime, I’d put ads up on music store bulletin boards looking for a new band to join.  I wasn’t having much luck finding a band or a date.

Then one day I got an answering machine message from a guy who had seen my ad and wanted to talk about starting a band.  The message was garbled and I couldn’t make out the phone number.   However, I heard enough to know that it was the hot drummer I’d met before.  Damned Radio Shack answering machine!

Fortunately, he called back when I was home.  We made plans to meet and talk about music.  When he arrived, I discovered that he wasn’t blond anymore, but then again neither was I.  That didn’t make any difference once we got to talking.  The "meeting" rapidly turned into a date.  We went out for Chinese food, had McDonald’s vanilla cones for dessert, and rented "Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey" and watched it on my horrible, old console TV that needed to be pounded on periodically when the screen turned green.

We’ve never been apart since.  He moved in indecently soon after we began dating (not that it was a huge deal – he really didn’t have anything except clothes and drums) and we got married about two years later.  We’ve now been married for more than eleven years.

You may be wondering if we ever got a band together.  Well, not so much.  Actually, we played together briefly in 2004, but that was the first (and so far the last) time.  Clearly, the band thing was just a pretext.

My husband has always told me that he knew I was "the one" from the moment he met me at the other drummer’s house.  I don’t know if I was quite that certain about the whole thing, but I have to admit that when we finally met again, the old cliche of "feeling like you’ve known someone forever" definitely came into play.

So Happy Valentine’s Day, honey!  I look forward to being your Valentine for many more years to come.

I had exactly one goal this weekend:  record vocals over three or four of my band’s songs.  My husband recorded some instrumental tracks at my band practice last weekend, and since I really need a quickie demo CD, I wanted to get some vocal tracks down in a hurry.

The band’s been having a lot of trouble getting the sound we want.  When I brought the guys into our home studio, they weren’t very comfortable playing in that environment.  The guitarist was particularly unsatisfied with the sound he was getting plugged into the digital mixer.  He ordinarily plays at full, bone-crunching volume through a Marshall stack, and the digital emulators we tried just weren’t producing the same sound and feel.

Thus, we went with the live sound just to get something to work with for now.  I’m sure we’ll go back into the "real" studio again eventually, but not in the next few weeks.

So anyway, it turned out that the audio files on the laptop just did not want to be transferred to CD and taken upstairs to the studio.  It took forever for my husband to coax them all out, one by one, so they could be set up for my vocal tracks.  Grrr.

After an abortive recording attempt on Friday evening, we tried again on Saturday evening.  I warmed up, tackled the first song and managed to get a pretty decent take on about the third or fourth try.  Then we moved on to one of the songs that I kick myself for writing to be so difficult to sing.  I did about five bad takes in a row and then gave up.

On Sunday, we managed to squeeze in one more song between lunch and my husband’s band practice.  It’s another one that’s kind of challenging to sing, so I have a feeling that my husband/producer will end up putting together the vocal track from the "good pieces" of all five takes.  Sorry, honey.

I need a minimum of three songs for the demo I have to provide to enter a Battle of the Bands next week.  I’ll probably revisit the song we gave up on Saturday evening and hope things go better this time.

My husband and I had a long talk over the weekend about the weaknesses we perceive in our own musical performances these days.  He feels that his timing isn’t as good as it used to be.  I find that there are some flaws in my vocals that I can’t seem to fix, even though I’m aware of them.  He thinks his solution is to practice more often (and hope that the problem doesn’t stem from one or more of his medications).  I think it may be time for me to find a new vocal coach.  It’s probably been 15 years or more since I last took lessons.

I’m certainly no perfectionist, but it frustrates me to be kind of good at something that I’d like to be really good at.  I hope that with more practice, a little training and persistence, I can get to where I can effortlessly sing any vocal line I write for myself.  In the meantime, I guess I’ll keep plugging away at take, after take, after take…

Update:  I got in touch with a local voice teacher and I’m scheduled to start lessons on Thursday. If I keep this kind of thing up, I won’t be able to call myself a procrastinator anymore!

My sleep schedule this week is all screwy and doesn’t appear to be getting any better.  I keep staying up far later than I ought to and then getting up at the crack of dawn anyway. 

Every morning I wake up with the most recent songs I wrote running through my head, which tells me that I’m not quite finished working out the melodies.  Ever heard of a recording session as an insomnia cure?  Me neither, but that might be what it takes.

I should really use some of this extra awake time at the gym.  It’s open 24/7, so I could go either in the early morning or late evening.  Instead, I plant myself on the couch in front of the TV with the laptop on my legs until the battery gets uncomfortably hot and I have to take a break.  Man, I’m lazy.

I feel as though I have a pretty good handle on all of the things I’m supposed to be doing these days…except exercise.  Do you have any advice for a chronic gym procrastinator?  Is there some cool, new class that I might like?  Is there a secret to establishing and keeping up a workout schedule that I don’t know about?  I’ll never flatten my abs and tighten my triceps at this rate, so I’ll take all the help I can get!

I really did intend to eventually post something on Monday, but then I figured that the weekend bonus post kind of let me off the hook.  I’m probably wrong, but that’s how it goes.

So…the Super Bowl.  Game:  So thoroughly rigged that you could almost see the ropes and pulleys.  Seriously, playing "Bittersweet Symphony" as the Seahawks came out?!?  Gee, who do you think is going to win?

Halftime show:  I liked the choice of the Rolling Stones, and I’m not that big of a Stones fan.  I hope I end up running back and forth across a huge stage and singing rock songs at the top of my lungs when I’m 63.

Commercials:  eh.  Our vote for best tagline was "Let your man out" from the Full Throttle commercial near the beginning of the game.  We all repeated it merrily every time the announcer mentioned someone needing to have a groin injury taped up.  It reminded me of a bass player in an old band of mine whose favorite quip was, "It’s so nice out, I think I’ll leave it out."  Ah, male humor.

I liked the two Ameriquest commercials, but not quite as much as last year’s one with the cat, the butcher knife and the spaghetti sauce.  The Budweiser one with the Clydesdale foal was cute, but it was emotionally manipulative enough to make me a tad resentful.

The earlier part of my weekend was fairly productive.  I wrote the lyrics for two songs and we did some recordings at practice that I will sing over in our home studio later this week.  I’m planning to enter us in a battle of the bands, so I need a three- or four-song demo by next week. 

Now you’re caught up on my life, dull as it is.  What kinds of fun things do you have planned for this week?

When I got to work today, there was a fortune cookie slip on my desk that said, "Wake up.  You are under the lucky star now."  Well, isn’t that a relief!

Aside from dragging two cats to the vet and dragging two enormous new PA speakers to band practice, the only thing I have planned this weekend is to attend a Super Bowl party. 

I’m going to make and bring benne wafers.  After a discussion yesterday with my friend, The Cowboy, I have a notion that I might be able to keep them from sticking to the pan this time if I use a silicone liner sheet.  I’ll submit my report on that Monday.

As someone who’s more interested in advertising than football, it’s likely I’ll continue my tradition of paying more attention to the commercials than to the game itself.  I need to be able to hold my own during Monday’s water cooler discussions.

So what are your weekend plans?  Anything interesting and fun going on?

I think they forgot to tell me about one side effect of the anaesthetic:  ridiculously unfounded optimism.  Yes, after I wrote yesterday’s post and had a sandwich, I went to lie down and ended up taking a nap that lasted…all day.

There was no writing, reading or even TV watching until "Veronica Mars" came on at 8:00 p.m.

Since I have nothing new to say, I’ll leave you with an interesting article I found via Slashdot the other day:  Putting Star Wars to the MythBusters Test.  Enjoy!

Well, I’m back from having my endoscopy with strict instructions not to go back to work, drive, or otherwise exert myself.  Sure, twist my arm!

I don’t really feel like taking a nap right now, but the demerol has left me feeling a little woozy.  On the other hand, it took away the headache, backache and cramps I had when I woke up this morning, so I’m not complaining.

The only part of the procedure I remember is getting bitter, banana-flavored numbing spray shot into the back of my throat twice.  After that, they zonked me out and I woke up in a different room about 45 minutes later with my husband standing next to me. 

The doctor showed me a sheet of six beautiful, full color photos of various parts of my insides.  She explained what each thing was, where and why she took certain biopsies, yadda, yadda, yadda.  (The yadda, yadda, yadda part is why I’m glad my husband was there to hear what she had to say.)  The lab results won’t come back for another 7-10 days, so I really don’t know much more now than I did before.

Before I underwent the endoscopy, I told the doctor to take it easy on my vocal cords on the way down because I’d be needing them for singing.  She made me promise to give her an autographed CD when we get one finished, which I thought was rather charming of her.

So that’s that story.  I’ll probably spend the rest of the day napping, surfing the ‘net and maybe trying to work on song lyrics.  I’d say that’s not a bad way to spend a Wednesday.

This week is already headed down a path that promises minimal excitement.  Here are a few things I have planned (aside from work, of course):

• Songwriting – I’ve promised to have two more songs finished by Saturday’s band practice and now my husband and a couple of his friends have asked me to write lyrics to a song they recorded over the weekend.
• Reading – I’m about 2/3 of the way through "Assassination Vacation" and I think I’ll read "The Kite Runner" next.
• Endoscopy – Tomorrow morning they’re going to have a peek at my innards to try to figure out why my heartburn persists despite daily medication.  Extra bonus:  I get to go home and sleep off the anaesthetic all day!
• Errands – I’m also getting my car repaired, taking two cats to the vet, trying to remember to schedule a haircut and color appointment, trying to remember to buy salt for the water softener, etc.

I suppose I’ve done quite enough for one day to drag you down to my level of ennui.  I’ll try to write something more interesting tomorrow.  Should I post first thing in the morning or wait to report on the endoscopy and hope that I can be coherent?

Is it just me, or did this seem like the longest work week on record?  Maybe it’s because Tuesday was the most depressing day of the year, although it didn’t seem worse than any other day to me.

I don’t have a lot planned for the weekend.  I’m about halfway through Oryx and Crake, which was recommended by a couple of people after I asked for book suggestions a week or so ago.

On Sunday, I’ve offered to go see King Kong with my stepmother, who rarely gets a break from caring for her 96-year-old mother.

So basically, things aren’t too exciting in the Average Jane household at present.  Let’s hope next week is a little livelier.