As I said in my last blog post, I’ve been reading a lot lately, at almost a dangerous pace. So much so fast that it seems I could have a reading crash and injure my dictionary. But I still am not as bad as my wife, who I caught reading while she was walking down the stairs two nights ago. In a house with kids, not watching where you are going is really not a great idea.
So what’s been on my reading list?
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. This is a pretty famous book about a computer science professor from Carnegie Mellon University who is diagnosed with cancer, and the inspirational last lecture he gave to his students and the faculty there. It’s a quick read, but it isn’t always easy, and if you’re not careful, it may just change your life. You should also watch the video of his last lecture (either before or after is fine)
I got a lot lighter in reading after that.
The Spellman Files, Curse of the Spellmans and Revenge of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz (Yes I read all three of these in the past month). A series of novels about a private investigating family in San Francisco. The books are good, pretty funny and a quick read, but they have one really annoying flaw that drove me nuts. Footnotes. Not footnotes as in references to other books, but parentheticals that constantly distract from the flow of the story. As a writer, I’ve learned to never distract the reader and disturb the flow. A couple of times, this might be fine, but, to do it so constantly is just annoying, and were it not for my OCD and the fact that my wife recommended the books, I would have stopped after book one. My hope is that Lutz stops this practice going forward, or at least minimizes this device. I’d like to read more about the Spellmans, but I’m on the edge about actually doing it if I have to fight through the distractions.
Life As We Knew It – Susan Beth Pfeffer – A great Young Adult Apocalyptic fiction book that will have you restocking your pantry by the last chapter. We bought this book at John Scalzi’s recommendation. Lisa loved this book and so did I.
The Inside Ring – Mike Lawson – A disclaimer here, I’ve met Mike a couple of times at PNWA functions and got him to autograph this book. This is a political thriller revolving around the attempted assassination of the President of the US. It’s a good book, but I can tell that it is a writer’s first book, and it has a couple of flaws that I noticed as a writer, that the average reader my not. I’ll read more of Mike’s work, and from what I hear, the writing gets better in the next book.
As for Movies, with the death of the 2009-2010 TV season, I’ve had more time to watch movies. So here are the recent ones.
Seven Pounds – Will Smith – 3/4 Stars. If you don’t tear up at the end of this one… then you weren’t sitting where I was last night. This was a much better movie than I expected, and I really liked it.
The Enforcer/The Dead Pool – Clint Eastwood. Two movies in the Dirty Harry series. I’ve been watching these to say that I have, but I was really glad they were only about 90 minutes of my time and that I watched them when I couldn’t really do anything else. 0/4 stars. Keep those three hours of your life and use them to take a bath or something.
The Blind Side – Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw – A true story about a white family in Tennessee who takes in a disadvantaged black kid from the projects who goes on to play in the NFL. Not a bad movie, and worth a watch, especially since I’m a big NFL fan and watched the draft where Michael Oher was drafted. Bullock was good, but McGraw stole scenes with some great lines. 2.5/4 stars
The Hurt Locker – Oscar winning film about bomb disposal techs in Iraq. Great movie, with really well done visuals and movie effects. It is about the Iraq war, and there are a number of scenes that might be hard to watch. It doesn’t drown you in them, but it doesn’t let you into a false sense of safety either. 3/4 stars
Crazy Heart – Jeff Bridges in another Oscar winning role. Don’t expect to be uplifted by this, but the story isn’t bad, if not a little cliché at times. 2/4 stars
Notorious – An Alfred Hitchcock classic with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Good flick which seems a little cliché now… but it’s cliché now because everyone copied them. Every time I watch a Hitchcock movie, I gain appreciation for what he did. 3/4 stars
Surrogates – Bruce Willis – A pretty good, pure science fiction movie that I really enjoyed, but I like both SciFi and Bruce Willis, so this one may have been ideally tailored to me. 3/4 stars
The Lovely Bones – A slightly disturbing but good movie about a serial killer in the early 1970s, told through the eyes of one of his victims. Based on a highly acclaimed book by the same name. I haven’t read the book, but I still might, if I have time. 3/4 stars
The Commitments – A young man from Dublin forms a soul band to try to find a way out of poverty. A great movie, but you’d better be able to understand the Irish accent to watch it, and you’d better like music. 3/4 stars
I think that’s pretty much it, for now. It’s Saturday morning and it’s time to get some stuff done around here, so I can read more or write more or watch more this afternoon.
It’s been almost a month since my last post, and I’m on the train, so his may be a bit jumbled.
The biggest news is that Reece has finally come to terms with potty training. We spent a weekend really close to the bathroom, took away his diaper, and set a timer to go off every half hour. We gave him a warning five minutes before the timer was going to go off. We had a few accidents the first couple of days, but Lisa was quick on the draw when it came to recognizing the early signs of the type of accident that would have forced us to abandon our house and look for a new home to live in. After a couple of days of hard effort, the general idea seemed to have sunk in. The days have been getting easier and there have been fewer accidents, so it looks like we’re soon going to be on the hook for all the things we promised him a few months ago. You know, the bike, the scooter, the baseball glove, the fire engine, the moon.
Lorelai has been really supportive of Reece getting potty trained because when he is going potty, and she goes potty, they both get mints as a reward. That reward had been phased out for her a few months ago, but it came back when he started going. And they also believe that mint rewards carry over from day to day, so if you went potty 4 times yesterday and only got 2 mints, you have two coming to you right after breakfast.
The kids have really gotten into doing jigsaw puzzles of up to 100 pieces, though they’re a little better off doing 75 pieces and smaller. They’ll do the same ones over and over again, and love it. More importantly, we love it as it keeps them busy for hours.
Reece has become a computer geek, and somehow he learned how to type the 3 letter password I put on his login account on the computer, and he’ll sneak into the office and play pretty much any time of the day or night. I blame Lisa’s brother, Eric for that. Because I can.
The rainy weather in the PNW the last few weeks has put a damper on the outdoor fun with the neighborhood kids, so last Sunday we bought the board game ‘Candyland’ to try with them. I knew I was in trouble when the board came out and Lisa disappeared upstairs to ‘do laundry’, leaving me with two of the cheatenist kids you ever did see. It was like they didn’t even care about the rules. All they wanted to do was to get to the ice cream cone. And if their card said to go past it, they stopped on it and refused to move. Daddy almost won the game and put an end to the madness, but I pulled the Gingerbread Man card on what should have been the last play, and I ended up back at the start. The game went on until I helped Reece to win.
Lisa and I took a night to celebrate our 5th Anniversary in Seattle recently. We went to a movie (Ironman 2… better than I expected), and were supposed to eat at a restaurant called ‘The Flying Fish’ but they decided to relocate, and failed to tell us that when we booked the reservation. Since we had already paid for parking, we went across the street to ‘The Queen Street Diner’. The food was pretty good, but not the best I’d ever had. I wouldn’t be opposed to going there again, but it’s not at the top of my list.
The next morning we ate at Lola’s in Seattle for breakfast. If you get a chance to go there, do it. The donuts are amazing, and the potatoes incredible.
I’m back to normal hours at work after a couple of months of long hours trying to get some projects going. We still have a lot going on, but I just couldn’t sustain those hours forever, and the switch back to normal hours is already having positive effects on my writing. The words are coming easier, and my current book is coming along nicely. I’m at about the 1/4 pole, and the plot line is holding to what I had planned out. At this pace, the first draft should be done by the end of the summer. I do have to go back and do some editing on ‘The Forgotten Road’ in preparation for the PNWA Writer’s conference in July, but that should only take me a couple of weeks, and depends on the availability of my ‘Book Doctor’.
One of the side effects of spring is that my TV watching drops down to almost nothing, and my book reading and movie watching (not the same as TV watching, even if it is watching a DVD) goes up. I’ll cover the books and movies in another post, but I’ve been reading at almost a dangerous level, and it feels good.
The garden is just barely starting to produce a few leaves of spinach. The weather has been down right cruel, and things are way behind. We need some warm weather and some sun. I had the sprinklers set up a few weeks ago, and I had to turn them back off as the gardens are just big mud pits.
Lisa is getting ready for a dance competition in Denver later this month, so I’ll have a weekend by myself with the kids, which should be… interesting. I hope the weather is nice, but even if it isn’t, we’re getting out of the house at least one day, and doing something outside.
Anyway, I’ll recap books and movies later tonight, because, as always, my OCD requires I document my reading.
So besides the reading and the movie watching, what’s been going on?
I’ve been working a lot the last few weeks, getting a few projects ready to go. Things should start slowing down in mid-July, if we can get a few things out the door. The company is growing, and that’s a good thing. It also seems like the economy is coming back around, and that’s good as well.
I have started working on a new series of books, while taking a break from the Jake Clarke Series. I’m waiting for a book doctor I know (a freelance editor) to free up later this spring to take a look at ‘The Forgotten Road’ so we can polish ‘one-last’ version. Then it’s back to looking for an agent. But until book one in the series has stabilized, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to work on book 3+4. So I jumped into another series that I’ve been working on in my head since before I’ started telling Jake’s story. This one is epic fantasy with a Twist. Every author has to write fantasy at some point in their lives. I like this story, and I’ve got it well plotted out, and I think it’s sellable, though I have broken the cardinal rule and not spent a lot of time reading fantasy. Maybe someone else has already done this story, but I’m not going to worry about that until the first book is done and I try to market it. This isn’t fluffy fantasy with elves and magicians and dragons, so no use in polluting my mind with that.
The kids are doing great. We’re still potty training Reece, or rather he’s training us to accept that he will potty train himself at his own pace, not ours. We’ve corrected some of the bed time behavior (thank you Super Nanny!), so we are all getting more sleep now, and we actually slept in till 8:00 AM this morning. Of course we didn’t get home until 11:30 PM last night, but at 8:00 I was actually ready to get up.
The two of them love playing with other kids now, and we can turn them loose out in the cul-de-sac with the rest of the neighborhood kids and no one is coming in bleeding or crying with any regularity.
My sister was out for a few days last weekend, and the kids had a great time with her. They don’t often get that kind of dedicated attention, and it was good for all of us.
We took a long road trip this weekend to Ephrata, WA to see Lisa’s Mom on Friday night, then from there to Richland, WA to see Lisa’s brother Eric and his family. A lot of driving, but well worth it. Eric bought a house a month or so ago down there, and it’s a really nice place to raise a family.
Lisa is doing well, and getting ready for the dance competition season to start up. She’s been practicing a lot, and I’m hoping she brings home wads of cash so she can be my sugar momma while I retire and write for a living.
We’ve had a little problem in the garage the last few nights with stuff getting knocked over. We knew something had snuck in. We hoped it was a neighborhood cat, but after 4 night’s I finally discovered it was a possum (a big one), and it was hiding between the wall and the furnace. We left the garage door open a crack last night, and it was gone this morning. Hopefully it stays gone. Kind of a freaky thing to see staring back at you.
The garden is planted, and things are coming up, though the cold start to the spring has severely affected the tomatoes and the squash. I may have to replant some plants. The garden is a lot easier this year, since I did all the hard construction last year. This year it’s plant, water and watch grow.
Okay, time to make dinner! Gotta go!
I’ll start with books today, because the OCD in me says I must cover it.
I haven’t been reading a lot for fun lately, mainly because I am working on a novel of my own, am reading more for work, and am working a lot. So this list is relatively brief:
Thursday Next: First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde. Fforde’s series is unique. I guarantee you have read nothing like it. This one is good, though not as good as the other Thursday Next books, but the man has a great concept and if I had it, I’d be cranking out the books too.
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank: Written in the late 1950’s during the height of the Cold War, it’s one of the early ‘end of the world’ novels, better be prepared for a big change to civilization. Not a bad read, but some of the dialogue didn’t age well, and some of the story seems a bit quaint these days. I’m sure it was pretty edgy fifty years ago, but only worth a ready if you are a die hard apocalypse fan these days.
Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. I started following John Scalzi’s blog Whatever last winter when the big confrontation was going on between Amazon and MacMillan Publishing. Old Man’s War is a GREAT science-fiction book, and a must read for anyone who is interested in the genre. It’s a quick and easy read, but a great concept book, likeable characters and inspiring for writers like me.
I’m currently reading Vacuum Diagrams by Steven Baxter, another sci-fi book. I’m struggling to finish it. It wanders through 5 million years of the history and future of the universe, with a series of vignettes that are tied together by very thin plot line. It’s an admirable undertaking. Pure sci-fi aficionados probably loved this book. I’m more in the camp of “I can’t wait to be done it, and I wish I had never bought it.” It’s not that it’s that bad, it’s just that it kills my desire to read anything else. Kind of like having a bad sandwich at the only deli near your office. You know you will eventually go back there, but it might be a while before you get the bad taste out of your mouth. I’ve read Baxter’s stuff before, and it’s generally pretty good, but if I were his agent, I would have held this one back. But what do I know?
Movie wise, if had a few clunkers too.
Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey, Jr. Did not meet my expectations, which were probably too high. It was okay. 2/4 stars.
Robinson Crusoe – The Pierce Brosnan version. I’ve been watching this 20 minutes at a time for the past two weeks. Really bad. Epically bad. 1/4 stars – just because I refuse to give 0 stars to any movie I didn’t just delete from my queue after the first 20 horrible minutes.
To Catch a Thief: Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. Wonderful classic movie. And now I understand why people loved Grace Kelly. 3/4 stars
The Informant!: Matt Damon. Interesting, but not great. Felt kind of uncomfortable during the whole thing. Kind of Fargo meets Catch Me If You Can. 2/4 Stars
Up In the AIr with George Clooney: Good movie with good dialog. But we have seen so many ‘talkie’ movies lately that we weren’t in the right mood for this one, and it was just not that enjoyable. 2/4 stars
Zombieland: I loved this movie. It’s right up there with Shawn of the Dead in the Zombie genre (did you know there was a Zombie genre?”). 3/4 stars. Brace yourself for the gore of the first 5 minutes. After that it’s not so bad.
I bought my first CD player back in the summer of 1992 while living in Toronto. And then I did what everyone else did who was getting those new-fangled audio devices, I joined a CD Club. BMG I think it was.
At some point during that membership, I bought Dire Straits’ ‘Money For Nothing’ CD. All I knew about Dire Straits were the songs ‘Money For Nothing’ and ‘Sultans of Swing’. I had no idea that ‘Money for Nothing’ was the song I’d like least on that album, and no idea that that album would change my life. I didn’t know who Mark Knopfler was either.
I listened to that album a lot over the next few years. I fell in love with the song ‘Telegraph Road’ because of the story it told. I wrote my stories, and listened to the stories in that song, and on that album, and I truly appreciated the affect that a song or a story could have on someone. I’m sure that that album had a lot to do with me writing my very first novel, and seeing it through to the end.
A few years ago I bought another Dire Straits CD – ‘On Every Street’. When I found out that Mark Knopfler, the lead singer, had gone out on his own, I started buying his CD’s. I went through a phase where I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, and I listened to the way he played, and the way guys like Lindsey Buckingham played, and I though I knew I’d never play like that, I at least grew in my appreciation for the skill involved to not only write those story songs, but to play with such feeling, and such heart.
Last night, for the first time, I got to see Mark Knopfler Live on Stage at the Moore Theater in Seattle. I paid an exorbitant sum for the best seat I could find – Row A Seat 5 on the left aisle. I was a little disappointed in the the seat… I couldn’t see part of the band because a speaker blocked my view, and I had to sit a little sideways in my seat to see the whole stage.
But the performance did not disappoint. It amazed. I was 30 feet from Knopfler, and I could watch his fingers move on the strings like I had always imagined they would. And the songs they played! Oh the songs! They started with ‘Border Reiver’, then ‘What it Is’, and covered a bunch of crowd favorites from some albums over the past few years. But then he broke out some old stuff, and the crowd went nuts. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ got the first standing ovation of the night. There was an air of anticipation after that. Woukd they playy any other oldies? When the band started into ‘Sultans of Swing’, pure pandemonium. I got the feeling that they don’t play those songs very often on tour anymore, but I could be wrong. Who knew that was just the beginning?
First though, I’m a crowd watcher at these things, and I watch the band as well. The crowd was in a state of euphoria like I have never seen before, The people at the front are not those who are out for a casual concert. These are devoted fans, who know their stuff. And every one of them had a giant grin on their face. Feet were tapping (I couldn’t stop mine for 2 hours). Hands were clapping, people were singing along and just mesmerized by the talent on stage. And not just Knopfler. Everyone in the band was an amazing musician. Some played 5 or 6 different instruments during the concert, some instruments I can’t even name.
He wrapped up the concert with ‘Telegraph Road’. ‘Telegraph Road’ is eight minutes long on the album, and it was at least that on stage. The crowd went insane. The band took their bows, and the crowd demanded an encore. We got 4 absolutely amazing songs. ‘Brothers in Arms’, an instrumental, ‘My Shangri La’ and ‘Piper to the End’ to wrap it up. There may have been a fifth, but I lost track.
I never thought I would see ‘Sultans of Swing’ live. I hoped for ‘Romeo and Juliet’, but seeing Knopfler play ‘Brothers in Arms’, and ‘Telegraph Road’, all in one night, is something that I think few fans ever get to see. I am so glad I went, and I wish I could go again tonight. But I’m not driving to Portland tonight, not on 4 hours of sleep.
Last night was one of those moments in time that I will remember for the rest of my life. I might not remember ever song, but I will remember just how joyous it was, and what it was like to get sucked up in the excitement, and to put your hands in the air and clap and cheer for someone until your hands hurt and your voice was gone, because they have just put it all out there and you never dreamed your get that when you plunked down your money for a ticket.
The greatest thing was watching how much Knopfler still loves to play. The guy in the seat next to me leaned over and said, “He’s not doing it for the money.” and I agreed. There was heart in the music. Knopfler would close his eyes and scrunch up his face when the guitar solos got difficult, and he put it all into it. The man can play.
I bought a ticket to a concert. I received a memory to last a lifetime.
I’ll start off with a very funny exchange between my wife and Reece, as mommy was changing a very poopy diaper last Friday.
“That’s a big poop, Reecie.”
“No mommy, it’s not. It’s a Good Lord.”
“What?”
“It’s a Good Lord, Mommy. That’s what Daddy always says.” He sits up just a bit, looks at the poop, shakes his head a bit, and says in a near perfect imitation of my inflection. “Good Lord!”
Who knew that potty training would become such a religious experience for him?
Moving on.
I finished the novella I was working on last week called “Izzy’s Story”, and merged it into ‘The Forgotten Road’. It turned out to be about 9000 words long. I then cut about 2000 back out of TFR, which is sitting right around 90000 now. That’s a little higher than I want it to be. There are probably some more places I can chop, but I still have to make sure I’ve wedged the scenes from the novella into the right places in the rest of the story, and then make sure it actually works done like this. I’m still waiting on replies from two agents who have some parts of my books. If I don’t hear from them by tax time, I’m thinking of trying out a book doctor (a freelance editor) to do a structural edit to see how far I am off target. I think it will be a good investment, and I hope to learn a lot from it.
For now though, I’m probably not going to work on that book or that series for a bit. Until all the aspects of that first book are nailed, I can’t really say book 2 is ready to be called done, and starting on book 3 seems a little premature. Instead, I’ll explore a few other ideas I’ve been playing around with and see if any of them work out.
Work just got a whole lot busier this week as well, as we’re ramping up on a couple of big projects that will keep me busy through the end of the year. I’m back to taking the first train in each day, which means waking up at 4:25 each morning. Tonight I’ve got a 4:00 meeting on site with a client, which means I wont get home until 6:30. Makes for a very long day. But with this new project, we’ll be able to do some hiring to fill some open spots, and hopefully that will make my life easier in the long run.
Last weekend we had Lisa’s mom, dad and grandmother over for a day, and went out to a park in Tacoma with two of Lisa’s brothers and their families. With that many kids running around, there wasn’t much time to sit down and talk to adults. I don’t know why people say life isn’t always a picnic. Sure seems that life is always like a picnic: don’t touch that, don’t eat that, you have to share with your sister, stay away from the water, get out of the mud, don’t you dare throw that stick at her, stay where I can see you, that’s not a pine cone, damn it, does anyone have any antibacterial hand wipes?
Movie wise, we watched a great little movie on Sunday called ‘Saint Ralph’, a story about a 14 year old boy in 1957 at a Catholic school in Hamilton, Ontario who wants a miracle to save his mother who is in a coma and gets it into his head that winning the Boston Marathon is what God wants him to do. Definitely worth the watch.
Reading wise, I’m slowly working my way out of my reading funk, and in the middle of Orson Scott Card’s ‘Shadow of the Hegemon’, a continuation of the “Ender’s Shadow’” series.
There’s a bunch of new technology being released by Microsoft in April, and that means I’ll have a whole new slew of tech books to read. I probably won’t get to read much for fun in the next few months, but maybe all this new stuff will be easy, and the books will be shorter than the last time. Yeah, right.
I hit the wall last weekend. I’d read myself into a stupor. I tried to pick up a new book after finishing ‘The Motion of the Ocean’, but my give a damn index for reading had suddenly hit zero. This happens to me every once in a while. Sometimes it’s after a really good book that I don’t think any other can measure up to. Sometimes I’ve just read so much in a short time that I’m just tired. I believe this was a case of the latter.
In fact, I even had trouble reading a magazine for work this week, something I have to do for my job. I just didn’t want to read. I couldn’t concentrate. My mind was blasé about reading, but it was spinning with something else.
Instead, I wrote. New stuff. We’ll, not exactly new. It’s still in the Jake Clarke world, but it’s a short novella currently called Izzy’s Story. One of the criticisms I’ve had with ‘The Forgotten Road’, is that not enough happens in the first 50 pages, and another is that the antagonist isn’t introduced until the third act. I’ve resisted making changes to the story to fix this because there’s no easy way to do it. I can’t just go and add two hundred words somewhere and call it good.
In order to do what needed to be done, I would have to shunt in a complete second story line into ‘The Forgotten Road’ without spoiling one of the plot points of the first story line.
What I decided to do was to write the second story as a novella unto itself. I figure it’ll run somewhere between 8000-10000 words. When it’s complete, I’m going to inject it into the appropriate places into the original story. Of course I’ll have to chop out a few thousand words from the original story, and edit this one down a bit as well, but that’s pretty doable. I know where I have to cut.
I do have a fear that the story will end up being too choppy and the dual story line will feel too separate. But if I’m going to fix the issue, I need to start somewhere.
My worst fear is that people will like the second story better than the first. That will completely screw up my vision for where the story is going. I’ll try not to make the second story too good.
Anyway, progress on the second story is going well. I should wrap it up in the next few days. Then I’ll edit it down, figure out where to make the breaks, and insert them into TFR. Then I’ll edit for length and flow. I figure I should be done this revision by the end of March.
That’s the plan anyway.
Bedtimes for 3 year olds are a bit of a challenge. Tonight was extraordinary.
- # of Bathroom trips: 2
- # of Poopy Diapers after bathroom trips: 1
- # of shredded books: 1
- # of broken closet shelves: 2
- # of times door opened with one kid crying because he pushed me or she hit me: 2
- # of times Daddy walked into bedroom to find kids hanging off the headboards of their cribs: 2
- # of times Daddy went upstairs to tuck in / change diapers / pickup shredded books: 6+?
- # of times Daddy yelled up the stairs to go to bed: 8+
- Time between bedtime and last trip up: 1 hour 35 minutes, and they’re still jibber jabbering.
Aaaaak!
I’m sure I’m not the only one who ties certain songs to phases, days or people of my life. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what songs have are part of my personal history. In some cases, it’s more than a song, its a whole album. The albums tend to remind me of years. Singles remind me of people, or emotions.
The emergence of digital downloads will undoubtedly have a huge impact on this and the next generation’s view of the world. My generation will probably be the last one to identify a summer with an album. They might identify with a single song, or a one hit wonder, but how many will know about the conversation that the Eagles had with their fans on the Hell Freezes over album, or Eric Clapton saying ‘See if you can spot this one’ on the intro to Layla on his unplugged album, or the way the songs on U2’s Joshua Tree just flowed. You don’t get that effect listening to the album on shuffle on your IPod.
So here are some of the songs / albums that just mean something to me. Not that they are / are not my favorite songs, but I just tie them to a certain something (In no particular order)
U2 – Joshua Tree – High School Bus rides. I listened to that over and over again on the commute from hell.
Mickey Mouse Disco – Our first Halloween Party as kids, and Paul Jensen splitting his pants on a dance move.
I’m Moving On – Rascal Flatts – Reminds me of my move to Seattle, even though I moved before this song was released. It pretty much summed up what was going on in my life at that time
Old LA Tonight – Ozzie Osborne – My days working on the ASPEN project in Oshawa, Ontario for EDS in 1995. Played that song over and over again.
Bon Jovi – Slippery When Wet – Ninth Grade, riding the school bus, again, and having the bus driver pull over to tell someone to turn off the music, since we were having battle of the ghetto blasters in the back.
Fire Woman – The Cult – Playing pool at The Walrus, a bar near Pearl St in Boulder, Colorado
500 Miles – The Proclaimers – Dancing with a bunch of friends from college on a road trip north of Toronto either on a long weekend or the beginning of summer. We were all doing this goofy dance, and it was pretty freaking hilarious.
Highway Junkie – Gary Allen – Dancing with my friend Brandy at McCabes in Tacoma. We always lit it up with this song; that was until she caught me with an elbow to the chin on one of the spins and nearly knocked me out.
Zombie – The Cranberries – Living in a basement apartment in Oshawa, Ontario below a family where the husband and wife were always having screaming matches over money. I always heard more than what I wanted to, and I felt really bad for their kids.
Van Halen’s Balance Album – Living in Detroit in the fall of 1995, cruising through town with the stereo on my black Pontiac Sunfire just screaming out Sammie Hagar
When You Need My Love – Darryl Worley – Reminds me of the last girl I dated before I met my wife. That wasn’t such a healthy relationship. I actually told her at one point that this song made me think of her, and she was upset. She probably should have been, but it was accurate.
Half Way Up – Clint Black – This song stuck in my head when I used to ride my bike a lot. Easy to sing, and a good cadence on big climbs
Take Me away From Here – Tim McGraw – The early days of dating my wife
Fortunate Son – CCR – My First Novel. Listened to this one a lot while writing it.
Jack and Diane – John Mellencamp – We had a foster kid for a while named Walter, and he played this, and Journey’s “Who’s Crying Now” a lot. I don’t remember liking Walter a lot, but I remember the music he got me into
Gordon – Barenaked Ladies – My third year of university.
The Best Day of My Life – George Strait – Standing up with my friend Brandon at his wedding, and trying not to cry.
McClaren Furnace Room – The Watchmen – A guy named Randy Irwin who I knew only for a year or two back in 1994-96, who had a tremendous influence on my life. I wish I hadn’t lost touch with him.
Everywhere – Tim McGraw – The first house I ever bought in Broomfield, Colorado
My Little Girl – Tim McGraw – Driving back and forth from home to the hospital after the twins were born and Reecie was in the NICU. I remember rounding the curve on River Road in Puyallup with tears running down my face and worrying that I was going to have an accident. It’s not like there is a place to pull over there.
Workin For a Living – Huey Lewis – Working the midnight shift at the Forest Golf and Country Club and getting in trouble for having the music too loud.
Fred Bear – Ted Nugent – See previous entry
Anyway, that’s all I have today. I’m sure I’ll think of more later. It’s probably easier to list the songs that don’t mean anything to me.
We did not ride. The weather failed to cooperate, and the couch and the kids did. So instead of trying to ride two days in a row, I napped, and drank hot apple cider.
Not a bad way to spend a Sunday.
Joe Beernink 