Merry Christmas

Just wanted to wish everyone Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. It's been a crazy year to say the least, but with my family and friends by my side I've managed to survive.

The holiday's will be as nutty as ever with the my side of the family being tomorrow (Christmas Eve), our family and M's family on christmas day and then my dad's side on sunday. Doubtful we'll make it to have Christmas with my parent's neighbors (which my parent and until recently I have done since something like 1967 or something). And i have no idea if my mom's side is even entertaining the idea of getting together cause in the past few years we haven't been able to make the trek and it kinda interrupts when they head down to their condo in florida n stuff. or something like that. but anyways... it'll be busy enough for me.

So... I say to you 'Yay Baby Jesus!' and happy holidays. May your travels be safe and your food be good and plenty. Peace!

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

I need to find this on DVD somewhere. I checked redbox, but sadly they aren't stocking it. Looks like I might be able to get it from the Marysville library. I've placed my reserve on Anvil! The Story of Anvil!

The funniest (and saddest) part about all this, is that some of the older CDs are not going for good money (like $35). For example, their first major label release 'Strength of Steel' is going for that. I can officially say that I had this on CD (which in itself was rare). I believe I picked it up out of a bargin bin from Camelot Music in Piqua, OH. I have to say that I disliked it, so I remember trading it at a flea market in Columbus for a bootleg of Skid Row's 'Slave to the Grind' which had the now deleted track of 'Get the fu&# out' on it. I still have that cassette somewhere. But I have it on CD now as well. Which makes me wish that I still had that Anvil CD, which I am fairly certain is the only CD I've ever traded away. (I take that back, recently I've been selling off CDs, but at the time, 15 years ago, I really didn't get rid of anything.

I'm not sure what brought that on. I think it went something like this... was listening to some Iron Maiden, the Piece of Mind album... I was looking at the wiki for Iron Maiden... then looked at the wiki for McBrain which described his single pedal footwork... which noted a very specific song on the Flight 666 movie... which lead to youtube... which reminded me that the Anvil movie was also out there.

We said if you don't got Mojo Nixon then your store could use some fixin

One my my wife's friend told her 'bout this. Yeah... that's right. Amazon has nearly all of Mojo Nixon (and by nearly all, I mean 152 our of 155 songs) up for free for download. Rock on. Amazon got Mojo Nixon.

Dead Milkmen rule.



... We got into her car away we started rollin
I said how much you pay for this
Said nothin man it's stolen!

Punk rock girl
You look so wild
Punk rock girl
Let's have a child
We'll name her Minnie Pearl
Just you and me
Eat fudge banana swirl
Just you and me
We'll travel round the world
Just you and me
Punk rock girl

Chalk white apartment walls surfaces my every flaw...

What to say.... ?

I've been a bit grumpy, annoyed, etc lately. My wife can vouch for that. I'm sorry I've been such a pain in the ass lately.

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I've been listening to cassettes in the car since, well, the car only has a cassette player. Some of the more interesting side 1 / side 2 combinations have occurred this week:

Side 1: Kiss - Kiss
Side 2: Starship - No Protection

Side 1: Iron Maiden - Somewhere in Time
Side 2: Kool and the Gang - Forever

Side 1: Kiss - Dynasty
Side 2: Stand By Me OST

I can't make that kind of shit up.

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I went through Burger King for lunch today... a Whopper Jr w/ everything and a medium onion thing. They quickly hand me my order and I pull off slowly... checking the bag... and them fuckers forgot the zesty sauce. That's the whole point of getting the O-things... that zesty sauce is so damn tasty. So I had to park my car and walk in to get my damn sauce. The whole point of the drive through is that I can DRIVE AWAY. Not park and walk. Grrrrrr

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It's all okay now, though. I ate my damn sandwich and my onion things with zesty sauce and it was tasty. My demeanor was also help by the fact that the next album on the ol' MP3 CD was red house painters - ocean beach. Nice and slow and mopey music. Helped bring me down of my frantic, pissed off mood. Plus helped smooth out the aggitated parts so that I just got kinda mopey... which is way better than the complete bastard I've been for the past 2 months or so. Cabezon is a great instrumental and Shadows I swear I've heard somewhere else before...either on a soundtrack or covered by Suddenly Tammy (which I checked, and it's not on either of the albums they released... so who knows.) I dunno. It's what I needed though. Something that has the same mood as my inner demeanor. Just mopey. Not Kool and the Gang, not Kiss, not Iron Maiden, not Testament, not certainly f'ing Starship.

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Heading off this weekend to two different events. The wife is having her ... 20 year reunion ( I had to think about it for a second there). It should be fun. It'll be nice to spend time with the wife without the kids. We desperately need some time like that. I'm sure that's part of my problem... not getting to spend much time with the wife that doesn't involve the kids playing / crying / whining / screaming / laughing in the background. On occasion, we get to catch an episode of thritysomething (which FINALLY came out on DVD to my wife's delight)... but sometimes even that is interrupted by one of the kids waking up, causing us to pause the show and sometimes even having to halt the episode altogether.

Anyway...

Number two on the agenda is my dad has a ceremony that we have to attend to. No bother mentioning what it is cause I barely understand what it is either. It involves being at the Dayton convention center and instructions like 'you'll just have to find us cause we're not sure where we'll be or how we'll be dressed or what time things will start'. Gee. Thanks. I just love going into things where nothing is set in concrete. Especially when I don't know where I'm going or what I'm looking for. NOT! If I'm lucky, my wife won't kill me by the end of the day. And after we pick up the kids, I'm sure I'll pass out in the van on the way back home... possibly with a migraine (though I have every intention of bringing along at least enough for two headaches).

Soon, we'll have the grandparents come up and we can spend an afternoon together and just do whatever or, maybe even better yet, nothing. Everything seems to cost money. Everything seems to come back to the kids. And sometimes that's fine. I love my kids to death and it's amazing to watch them grow and get personalities and all that. But I guess lately I sometimes just want to be able to spend time with my friend alone, without any of the other cares in our lives being in fore- or even background.

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Here's a Red House Painter song that that's called "Song for a Blue Guitar". It's not "Shadows" but similar in tone, in my opinion.

home.

well... we're finally settled into the house (read: the sofa does not have plastic on it, the computer network is set up, one room is painted, the swing set is up, the cats are alive... but there are still 150 boxes that need unpacking)

i don't remember much from the past 4 days. here's what I remember.

Thursday - The wife took the kids down the Cinci to stay the night. This left me to pack the rest of the house which I thought would be easy peasy. Dad came into town to finish cleaning up the back lot. Finished packing the garage around 5:30pm. Dad and I ordered 'The Meats' pizza from Papa John's and watched a couple of episode of MASH. It's still a good show. I started packing the rest of the house. Again, I thought it would be easy peasy. I called no friends in for support for this reason. About 10:30pm I realized my mistake. I had to call it an evening at 2:30am. I still was not done packing.

Friday - Woke up around 7am or so. Continued packing crap. Tom showed up at noon as requested by me the night before (in a panic of course) Originally he was going to show up at 2:15ish to pick up the cats and take them back to his house until we were done with closing. Anyways, Tom showed up at noon to start tearing down the computers and get them packed into my car. Maryann showed up around 12:30pm-ish after leaving the kids with a set of grandparents. We packed up her van as fast as we could. The movers were showing up at 1pm. However, by 1:30, we STILL didn't have my car packed _and_ the movers weren't at the house yet. Closing for the soon-to-be-old house was at 3pm; new owners to take possession IMMEDIATELY after closing. Oh, and btw, I still didn't have my final 'numbers' for the closing of the new house (in other words, I still didn't know how much to make the check for, so obv I still needed to go to the bank). Maryann called the movers. They'd be there in 10 minutes which was accurate. At 2pm I FINALLY got my final number. By the time Tom and I finished loading the car, it was 2:15 and I was sweaty and prolly smelled like a homeless person. However, there was going to be no time to take a shower as I still had to make my way to the bank and then to the office up on 23 by 2:45.

(I'm gonna start chopping this story down from here on out as this post was left unedited for the past 3 days)
So I hopped in the car, drove to the bank. They handed me the check. It had my name misspelled. They give me another check. It's correct. Thanks. I then hope into the car, still gross and sweaty, and drive to the realty office. My agent is already there in the parking lot. I say 'Hi' and then whip off my t-shirt in front of her. She's like 70. I say 'Sorry, but I'm really sweaty and gross, and I'm pretty sure you've seen all this before.' I put on some deoderant and wait for my wife to arrive, which she did about 5 minutes later. We hope into the agent's car and drive to the title agency to get down with some paperwork. We meet the early-20-something girlfriend of the guy who is buying the house. Up to this point, we thought that the people who were buying the house were in their thirties and had two kids and the wife worked at OSU. We're still not sure where that information came from. Anyhoo... we get through both closings in about an hour and a half.

Back in the parking lot, I call Tom to tell him that we're done and ask if he needs any help getting the cats back in the carrier. There is a pause and he tells me to 'come on home' cause the movers are still packing. We get back to the house and sure enough they are still packing. Luckily, the new owners were planning on catching some dinner and then painting later that night. Anyways, the truck is pretty much full when we get there. I'm glad we didn't get the U Haul. Those guys packed that 26 ft truck (which is about 2 feet taller than a U Haul 26 footer), top to bottom, front to back. There is no way me and my peeps would have made it fit. No way, no how. It was funny to watch them pack the last 5 or 6 things. They would pick up the item, look at the truck, look at the item, look at the truck... repeat until someone points to a crevice of space in the truck. The only thing that I had to leave behind was the snow blower, and that fucker hasn't worked right for the past three years, so fuck it. I left it on the curb. Good luck to whoever picked it up.

So, at 5:15 the posse of 3 cars and 1 truck started rolling. I knew we were in trouble the minute we got to the 270 exit. You could see that it was backed up. Long story made short, it took about 45 minutes to get from the Sawmill exit to the 33/161 exit. All the while, I was praying that movers would cut me some slack seeing as how they are getting paid hourly. After finally getting to the exit ramp for 33 (which leads to Marysville), we see the problem and the cause for the back up. A school bus had broken down and all the kiddie-football-jocks were sitting in the grass. Everyone was rubbernecking to see what was going on. Once you got past the school bus, it was 55 miles and hour. I hate gawkers. Stupid people.

So, we finally get to Marysville around 6:30. The truck shows up about 15 - 30 minutes later. I think they may have had to stop for gas and maybe a bite to eat. Anyways, the clouds started looming overhead. And at 8pm, it started raining. But the movers kept moving, just like should. Just like the load in, the load out had them moving the big furniture wherever it needed to go and the boxes were placed in the garage. While they were doing that, Tom, Maryann and I were moving boxes out of the garage to wherever we thought they should go. Tom's wife, Amy, was also at the house and was watching her kiddos play in the kitchen (as everywhere else was sea of movement). The movers finished up around 9:30. I paid them and they (and Tom) went on their way. The plan was to start painting lil N's room, but we were both tired, so we opted for sleep. It was a bit odd sleeping in the new house and not having the kids around.

Saturday - My wife's family, my wife's family friends, and cousins of my wife's family friends showed up to help us get moved in. And they all did a great job. There was the debacle of painting N's room. They started putting the primer on but it kept pulling off the walls. We ended up having to switch the primer. So a job that probably should have taken only 6 - 8 hours, ended up taking 2 days.

I don't remember much of Saturday. It was all a big blur. I can recall doing the following: installing the washer and dryer, helping the cable guy get the cable hooked up, putting together the swingset, putting together the swingset, getting my computer and the wireless network hooked up, and putting together the trampoline. About 4 or so, I got a migraine and took a 'nap' for 3 hours which didn't get rid of all the headache, but after a second dose of Imitrex, it finally went away. We had White Castles for dinner in honor of her family friend's dad who loved White Castles (it was the anniversary of his passing).

Sunday - Well, it was a blur as well. I had poop issues all day. It sucked. Too much stress from the past week, I'm guessing. The friends finished up painting N's room. I think it was mostly a day of unpacking and whatnot.

And that's pretty much where we are at. Still unpacking boxes. I've gotten a couple of gates installed. I need to redo the one upstairs. It's fine closing, but when opening it back up, it's sticking. I just need to move the wall mounts up just a smidge and it'll all be okay. Maybe back a little too. Who knows. It'll be the one that gets used the most so I want to make sure it's done right.

Anyhoooooooooo.... we're moved in and we're happy. Yay!