As things go, I simply haven’t had the time to sit and write anything.  Even writing this is requiring some rebudgeting of time.  Things have just gotten busy.  I have to say that when people said life with kids is time consuming, I didn’t understand that, at least not with only Amanda around.  I realize that when they said “kids,” they literally meant the plural of kids, because what free time we have is not used to sit and write on this site, obviously.  It’s also not used to pull weeds from the front yard, as the letter from our Home Owner’s Association can testify the presence of “weeds that have been allowed to grow to maturity.”  Nor is it used to finish up sprinkler systems that broke last fall.  Or get the dresser I wrote about weeks ago out of the garage so I can park there again.  Whatever.  I’d rather be in with the kids and Alissa, bouncing Danielle on my knees and making her giggle, watching Amanda draw and be a big sister.

I can do a lot of things – not bragging, I just mean I have enough skills to get things done, maybe not perfectly – I’ve kind of felt like one of those “jacks of all trades” for a long time, but I’ve realized recently that a lot of stress is involved in many of these projects I take on.  It hit me not too long ago that despite having the ability to do these things, the tools, etc., when that kind of stress builds up around anything you’re doing, it may just be because it’s just not what you’re suited to doing.  You know, when you have plenty of free time, it’s fine, but when your time is stretched thin, it’s hard to not get a bit stressed out doing to Home Depot three time and Lowe’s once in one weekend . . . and then find out you still have to go back for more stuff to finish off the job.  It’s times like those when I think, “This why people pay others to do this stuff.”  I never got it before – why pay someone to do something you so easily could do yoursef?  I get it now.  I have to finish now – everything’s half-finished and no one could pick up where I am, but in the future, I will seriously consider handing things off to others to do.  Everything else is far too precious to waste all this time doing on tasks I pretty much hate doing.  Am I the last to figure this out?

Let’s put that aside for a moment and look at something else: Bad Santa didn’t bother to show up with his drums, nor was he prepared to sing.  What, exactly, was he going there to do?  I believe he went into this interview/performance for the sole purpose of being a prick, wanting to make a scene.  If he had walked in there in a good mood, ready to rockabilly-out, he’d have had his drums, and a better attitude.  But he didn’t.  Maybe he wanted to stage a Joaquin Phoenix-on-Letterman type of “hilariously bad” interview, but this wasn’t it.  He was just an ass.  Where Joaquin’s bizarre behavior kind of made him an internet hero of weirdness, Billy Bob has shown him to be what I kind of assume he really is – a difficult, angry, unpleasant man.

It’s probably a good thing he cancelled his Canadian tour after calling them “mashed potatoes with no gravy.”  This will give him more time to write up a script for Armageddon II.

Even though I’m two full years into allergy treatments, this year’s crop o’ crap is wreaking havoc on my system.  I guess it’s not as bad as it could have been, but, man, this is pretty bad.  When you sit in a building all day and feel okay, then leave and are accosted by the wind, then feel horrible within 15 minutes – headache, achy teeth, sinus congestion, etc. – that’s really bad.  And, again, I’m being treated for this crap with shots designed to train my immune system to fight off the effects.  I can’t imagine how bad off I’d be without that, or my trusty “fexos” (Allegra generic.)

I spent Saturday watching the DVD that comes with Mastodon’s absolutely ruling album, Crack The Skye.  I declare it a MUST SEE for anyone interested in this album.  Do not be cheap and buy the regular edition.  I started watching it before we left for my mom’s birthday, thinking it must be 30 minutes long or so, then had to stop with what I assumed must be 10 minutes left.  Came home later that night and watched another 40 minutes . . . and that’s only the making-of portion, which is followed by a 30 minute track-by-track commentary by the band.  The whole thing is fascinating – humorous, interesting, intriguing, and informative.  Not only do you get to see the album come together, you see why, and with something as dense and weird as this album, it really helps.  What also helps is that, despite their heavy prog-rock leanings, especially here, these guys do not take themselves at all seriously.  They do, however, take their music very seriously, and the difference between a band that can’t separate themselves from their music and a band like this makes all the difference in the world when trying to swallow ridiculous concepts like those fueling this album.

Sunday night, another “nothing TV” night, was filled with Jeff Beck’s great new DVD Performing This Week Live At Ronnie Scott’s.  If you are at all a fan, this is also a must-see.  For a while, guitar-gods operated in dead-serious mode, where not a smile was to be cracked on stage because what they were doing was ART.  Well, not here.  The small stage was filled as much with equipment as it was with exuberant smiles, and it’s all the more fun to watch a great band because of it.  Also amazing was finally getting to see the amazingly young Tal Wilkenfeld, Beck’s 23 year old female bassist who can seriously rip it up.  I point out her gender for one reason: rarity.  Sorry ladies, but this is really unusual.  She’s a tiny, cute little thing, and it’s extremely unusual to find someone in this realm who can seriously hold court with guys like Jeff Beck and especially drummer Vinny Colaiuta.

As I mentioned about a year ago at the old site, Borders is doing away with CDs (and apparently DVDs, too,) and right now is “entertainment armageddon.”  The only upside to this is that good savings are to be had, but I’m sad because Borders had been one of my local stores in years with a reliably eclectic selection.  Not anymore.  (Sorry Chris.)

The music section was already obliterated.  Not much to be had. I found one CD, which was actually for Alissa, and decided to hold onto it for a small Easter gift, so no mentioning it here.  What was stunning was the number of absolutely brand new titles – I mean just-released titles, including the one I picked up.  Things that came out in the past couple of months or weeks when, surely, Borders main offices knew what was going on and knew the plan.  Why bother to stock new titles?  Why spend more money on new stock when you’re just going to fire-sale it shortly?  Or did they truly not know and this is indicative of the other rumors I’ve read about, that Borders itself is in deep, deep trouble and may be sold or file for bankruptcy?

Anyway, I finally picked up a replacement for my ridiculously “defective” Fargo which the equally ridiculously defective Circuit City wouldn’t do anything about last summer.  (Won’t miss you at all, Circuit City.  Good riddance.)  Also grabbed Pat Metheny’s The Way Up Live DVD, because that is just how I roll.  All for $22.

And finally, as a Pearl Jam fan, it’s hard not to feel slighted by the decision to include the famous Drop In The Park concert only in the super-expensive “super deluxe” package.  I understand including it on vinyl, but the included mp3 download . . . why couldn’t that have been included for everyone who bought at least the deluxe version?  Many of us didn’t want the box because we don’t have the means to spin vinyl and therefore 75% of the contents are pointless.  Luckily, others felt exactly the same way and “liberated” the mp3s that come with the vinyl for fans like me to hear.  And I thank them.  “Exclusivity” in 2009 is a concept for the birds, despite the many expensive sets that tout that word.  Hooray piracy!

I tried, I tried really hard.  We got this big dresser, with a nice tall hutch on top of it, for Amanda’s room that once belonged in Alissa’s room when she was a kid, so we could swap out the smaller dresser for Danielle’s room.  That dresser was mine as a kid.  I liked the parallel there.  Both of our children had something from our childhoods.  Only the dresser we brought back from Alissa’s parents house smelled . . . bad.  It had been kept with the cat litter and had absorbed, for many years, the various odors cat litter is known for.

I did everything I could think to remove the odor.  I sanded, I painted with a special odor-killing primer, painted, etc., but things went from bad to worse.  Not the odor, mind you – the primer finally took care of that.  But my painting skills leave much to be desired and there was a lot to be painted.  It ran, it rippled, it bumped.  It looked terrible.  I blamed it on bad brushes so I bought better brushes.  It still looked terrible.  I painted on the back porch and the wind came along, knocking the hutch onto the corner of the dresser, punching a hole in that damned backing material that I never remember the name of, but you know what that crap is.  It can’t easily be repaired, but probably could be replaced, but that’s just one MORE thing.  I freaked out.  I froke.  I threw up my hands and said that’s it, this is over, I can’t do this.  And it was over.

Except I felt guilty because I started thinking maybe Alissa had the same thing in mind that I did, that our kids could have something from each of us, and now one would have something of mine and the other would have some thing from some store delivered by some truck.  Or something.  So i gathered my whits again and tried to approach it anew.  We moved the dresser to the garage where I was sure all my problems would be solved – I was certain the paint was drying to fast in the sun on the back porch, and now our wind problems would be solved – and begain again.  And I bought some more brushes.  As I discovered, there is an amazing sense of progress and importance that rushes over you as you peruse brushes.  And brushes get very expensive, so I opted for a $7 four-inch brush to speed up the painting, just sure that this nicer brush would make for a nice smooth finish – because the three-inch one I had used prior to that was from a four-piece kit that cost about the same as this one brush alone.  Surely the low quality of that brush was responsible for the terrible paint job, right?

By mid-afternoon, I had Kenny Rogers in my head, telling me “Son, you got to know when to fold that shit.”  I looked at the dresser.  No matter how careful I was, it was still covered in drips and runs that had dried past the point of quickly painting them away.  It looked less like something of an heirloom and more like something I’d picked up outside of a high school woodshop, discarded after a failing grade in the finishing portion of the semester.  It was an embarrassing wreck.  It was time to fold and walk away.

When I told Alissa, I expected her to be upset.  She wasn’t.  She only expressed desire to not have to spend money.  Any emotional ties I’d attached to the project were purely mine, it turns out.  I can’t say I’ve put myself through all of this for nothing.  The past however many weekends have been painfully annoying, but yesterday was a bit of a realization.  I know now that I need to focus on what I really can do and find someone else better at what I can’t do alone.  Since I tend to do everything myself, this is hard, but I’m wasting precious time, going back to work exhausted after a weekend spent doing all kinds of things with very little to show for it.  So it’s not all a loss.  And now I can get Kenny Rogers out of my head again, because I had enough of his warbling when I was younger and had to endure whatever my parents played, and I’m as done with that as I am this dresser.

(Those of you with a good eye will notice on the large-size version that the single cover thumbnails appear to have been hastily tossed on there.  I don’t know why – it’s very easy to align boxes in any graphics program, but someone sure had a hard time keeping things lined up.)

The moment “Just You” springs to life on Dog Eared Moonlight, with its gentle guitar, piano and simple flutes, those are the images you get – clouds drifting by, laying on the grass on a cool spring day, etc.  Things I don’t recall ever doing myself, actually, now that I think about it.  Sounds nice, though, doesn’t it?

“Maryfaith Autumn” evokes a kind of “quintessentially English” notion that calls to mind what XTC might sound like if Richard Thompson joined the band instead of Andy Partridge.  You may be quick to pick up that XTC seems to be a big influence on this band – and that’s perfectly okay. The band happens to be signed to Partridge’s label, but don’t think that means he’s making them into XTC2 – he simply fell in love with their sound, too.

It’s not all “laying in fields watching the day go by” music, however – “Incredible Visions” recalls The La’s in their non-”There She Goes” material.  You know,  all those great songs 95% of the people sadly have no clue about.  The Milk & Honey boys clearly have studied Lee Mavers when it comes to the upbeat stuff, effectively evoking “greasy little British barroom.”

But it’s “Absolutely Wrong” that I keep returning to again and again, straddling a line between the two sides of the band, melding their late-model XTC influences with that swanky La’s swagger for something that clutches at me and won’t let go.  I suppose this one, more than any of the other more mid-tempo numbers, is the one that feels like it completely steals me away.  After a few upbeat songs, it appears almost out of the blue, completely unexpected . . . kind of the way that The La’s “The She Goes” does.  Simple, effective, just right.  It’s a perfect piece of pop.

I just hope the band feels better about Dog Eared Moonlight than Mavers reportedly does about The La’s (so far) one and only album. Music that conjures something in the listener is special, because that’s the music that immediately and forever digs in its hooks. Bands like The Milk & Honey Band, like XTC, or The La’s, do so by transporting the listener away from everything for even just a moment – to a grassy English countryside, or a grubby imaginary pub, somewhere, anywhere, not here.

What’s nice is they accompany the article with a photo of the family, so if we see them out and about, we can point and say, “Hey, there’s the family that eats with stuff out of the garbage!”