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.

Hill Killerz/GF tiramisu

Portland Bike Summer has begun. I will admit that it is tough to look at all the fun listings and shake my middle-aged fist at the reality of having job/kid/home in the hinterlands. Though of course it's also nice to have a job that isn't terrible, a kid that is awesome, and a house with an affordable mortgage. 

REGARDLESS: I saw that near my house on Tuesdays there is a "hill killerz lunch hillz" ride - ride from the bottom to the top of SE 52nd Ave. five times in a half hour. Seems like my kind of ridiculous, I thought, even as someone who doesn't particularly love hillz. But doing ridiculous thingz together with other nerdz? And using lots of Zs to pluralize nouns? Sign me up! 

I bike the ten minutes from my house to the bottom of the hill and will my cranky gears into their lowest granny settings, and off I go. I get there and it's a very positive scene. Bells are rung, thumbs-ups exchanged. People cool off in the shade at the top of the hill. There's lycra, athleisure, me in the same schlubby work tee and shorts combo I wore yesterday. No one is judging anyone. Within 20 minutes I've done my requisite five rounds and I head off into a perfect Clackamas afternoon.

Gluten-free treats update: Today my dear wife randomly brought home gluten-free tiramisu from the coffeeshop near her downtown job. I would never have thought to buy this or consume this, but I have to admit it was a good idea.