Things we can and can't have

Every year, the manufactured housing community down the hill from my house has a community yard sale. The sales tend to be highly underwhelming, but they're a good bike ride, and ever so often there's a gem, such as the quad receiver I bought a few years back.

This year's prize was an Atari 5200 game console, complete with some games and a couple of the 5200's infamous joysticks. Ooh, I wanted one of those back in the day (I can clearly picture the display in Pamida), and the price was totally reasonable (30 bucks). But I knew, based on my 1990s swap-meet days, that it would almost certainly not work, and it would definitely not fit in my bike bags (the console itself was comically huge). And so I went home without it. I hope some other nerd snapped it up.

I did, however, buy a Matchbox version of the Citroen Ami - the adorably funky small electric car/"quadricycle" that we can't have in the US, sigh - and brought it home for boyo.

Independence Day 2025 / Sea Dragon

I biked to feed my brother's cats and stopped by a yard sale on the way home. An old printing business is selling off their old tractor-feed stickers for like 25 cents a case, very very tempting, but being on the bike saved me from myself again.

To get out of the blast zone in our neighborhood we went for a hike. My wife looked at her Gwoogwoo Photos and noted that we usually go hiking on the 4th... well, why not? It was nice to hike even if my kid made me run to the restroom from the top of the hill. No matter. We climbed it again.

We were hungry afterwards and looked for restaurants to eat at. Everyone was closed except for our beloved nearby Chinese cart. Eating their reliably tasty food inevitably makes me think of my formative Chinese food experiences at the Sea Dragon restaurant in Fort Dodge, IA. I did the inevitable search and found that (1) the restaurant closed in 1997, and (2) one of the owners died late last year after being hit by an SUV. I like this line from her obituary:

Even in retirement, she taught herself audio and video editing, amassing hundreds of YouTube followers, and an impressive number of copyright strikes for her homemade music videos.

In sadly unsurprising news, there was at least one article blaming the person walking: something like "There are NO marked crosswalks at this location." Unbelievable. Not only should it be OK to, you know, cross the road, it doesn't look like there are any marked crosswalks anywhere remotely near that location.

It also may not surprise you to know that after the boy went to sleep, I rode around my neighborhood silently on the bicycle, taking in the scene. There were moments where I came across a firework going off in the middle of the street, and I paused to look at it and not spoil their moment. Then I rode off into the hazy night.

Editing / Lake O / Comedy dorks

Man, it has been really satisfying to do digital editing on the new album. Taking out the bad parts, swapping in new drum parts, FIUMing* things as needed. Realizing that I have the power to polish these things that I put together super quickly in time for songwriter's group after letting them ferment for a little while. So gratifying.

Our wealthy neighbors across the river (L*k* Osw*g*) are being forced to open up their fake lake to the riff-raff. It's been a long, comical saga, but what I didn't realize was that, in a maximum Lake O move, they blocked off the entrance to the park for kayakers using the "public art" piece "Spirit of the Marsh." The combination of snobbiness and pettiness is quintessential Lake O and I have to begrudgingly admire it. Anyway, this bespoke obstruction is apparently on its way out. And I will still order the excellent fiction that Lake O's library stocks via inter-library loan.

I had never watched M*nty Pyth*n before after being confronted with a million quotes from it from insufferable dorks, Objectivists, etc. in my college years and thereafter. But I picked up the complete DVD set for a few bucks from a neighbor of mine at a yard sale last summer and I've been cracking it while riding the exercise bike. Pretty good so far. Better first-hand than second-hand, as many things are.

(*Effing it up more, a technique that I frequently recommend in said songwriting group) 

New album forthcoming / Waffelos

I'm in the listen-to-rough-mixes-at-work phase of my recording life. I have to say that it is nice to be able to do things like update bass lines on the fly on my laptop rather than "punching in" on a four-track. The future is convenient, even if I haven't really changed all that much now that I'm sequencing stuff like a robot.

This evening while brushing the boy's teeth, somehow I flashed back to the time when I woke up early on some Iowa Saturday and consumed an entire box of Waffelos cereal while watching cartoons before the folks woke up. Peak Gen X memory, right?! I was trying to explain the existence of this short-lived cereal, and of Saturday morning cartoons, to my kid, to whom this is all very foreign. Of course I ended up on MrBreakfast.com, where Waffelos are currently #31 in the top 100. We watched the deeply 1980 commercial embedded therein and my kid started cracking up at the talking horse. 

I set a timer on my phone with the alarm tone "By the Seaside" and sang something like this when it went off:

Waffelos
Your daddy ate the whole box
The commercial
It's got a guitar-playin' horse
Waffelos, fellows, fellows 

Grape soda: Status update 2025

My wife and I were discussing matching sparkling beverages to shirt colors (don't ask) and I mentioned that I'd need to find some grape soda* ** to match my Purple Stride t-shirt.

"Where would you find grape soda?" she asked. My quick dad joke: Oh, at a vending machine near a junior high school.

Of COURSE I needed to check and see what today's grape soda landscape (landsgrape) looks like. I check walmmmart dot com and - wait, seriously? They have no grape soda available at my local affiliate?! Shipping only?!?! What sort of maniac ships grape soda?!!!!! Making things worse, my local Walm would be glad to sell me strawberry soda, always the worst possible fruit-flavored pop?***

Fredd Meyyer, too: No grape soda except some sort of foo-foo prebiotic stuff that's three bucks a can.

At last: Saifwhey has twelvers of either Crusssh or Sunnnnkystttt brand grape soda. I don't need it, but it is reassuring. The world can go on spinning.

*I'm totally on team "pop" rather than team "soda," but "grape pop" is too monstrous a phrase for me to even consider

**I have not consumed grape pop, or for that matter any pop, in probably a decade? Maybe longer? 

***Though the phrase and concept is dignified by its awesome appearance in "Burn Rubber on Me"

Esperanto rabbit hole

Got a text from a college friend this morning mentioning that he had found a copy of Why Learn to Speak Esperanto in 2025? in a Little Free Library. I love that Esperantists are still at it even if my own skills - hard acquired on the interminable bus voyage from Tualatin to Lake O to PCC-Sylvania to a terrible summer job in Beaverton in summer 1992 - are super rusty. 

Of course this sent me down an Esperanto-in-2025 rabbit hole. I ended up at the delightful Esperanto World webstore, where one can buy pronoun pins, including ri, a gender-neutral pronoun that has emerged in the ensuing 33 years! Esperantists against Fascism pins, pins declaiming one's love of a certain controversial consonant (ĥ). Love it.

It gives me joy to see that the community aspect of Esperanto is still a thing. Back in those days I loved learning the language but was terrified to actually potentially speak it to anyone. The years have softened me. There was a Cosmonox show a while back where I did a bunch of banter in extremely broken Esperanto. I was still a little scared that someone might actually heckle back in Esperanto, but the odds of that happening at a dive bar on SE Foster are pretty low, I guess, and anyway, high concept jokes sometimes don't land like you think they will. I went back to my usual incomprehensible speech in my native language after the first couple songs.

Salad spinner

Boyo and I were riding back from after school care when I saw some stuff laid out in a free pile at the side of the bike path. Wait, was that?!?! I turn our big cargo bike around.

Yes! It's a salad spinner!!! We currently own a semi-broken cheapo Ikea model that is partially functional, but with one plunge on this one's handle, it is clear that our salad spinner game has been substantially upgraded. The boy contentedly cranks it as we ride back home.

So I guess this is a free plug for OXO brand salad spinners. Plunging on this thing's handle makes me feel like I'm starting up a helicopter. It hums like a spaceship. Using a manual kitchen gadget should not be this fun. And does it spin the absolute bejeezus out of our salads? It does.