but what the hell, here’s a weekend wrap up.

The weekend didn’t go as I expected, and things I though would be short and sweet ended up lengthy and expensive, and some stuff didn’t get done at all. However, I mostly can’t complain.

Among other things, I ended up lining up a great deal on a necessary home improvement project that I hope I’ll be happy with, even if the lining up thereof took up my entire Saturday morning. I expect I’ll have more to say on this at a later date.

A trip to check out a local bike shop I heard about ended up with me coming home with a new bike. Yeah, I already have a serviceable (or at least serviceable after several tune-ups) bike, but it really wasn’t meeting my needs anymore after several hundred trail miles; this hobby took in a way a lot of others haven’t, which meant that it was time to replace the battle-scarred “best bike you can buy at Wal-Mart” with something of higher quality that’ll serve me for many years to come*.

I ended up with a Giant Revel 1 mountain bike, which is all kinds of nice, and several steps in quality above my old one. It also, probably most importantly, is actually the right size for someone of my height, which makes a tremendous difference in ride comfort and control. I put almost twenty road miles on it this weekend to get a feel for it, though I’m really very anxious to get it a little dirty out on the trail in a couple of days.

A nice highlight for Sunday was the Richmond Family Peace Festival, full of the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of numerous cultural and spiritual traditions present in the area. It was a neat experience, and a source of excellent carribean food.

In amongst all this, I also got at least some of the usual housework, bill paying, and shopping done, and watched a handful of movies, mostly music documentaries, including It Might Get Loud, covering a multi-generational guitar summit between Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White; Anvil: The Story of Anvil, chronicling the efforts of the influential but not particularly successful Canadian metal band to remain relevant and release their thirteenth record, and I Think We’re Alone Now, which documents the stories of two stalkers obsessed with 80s pop star Tiffany, that starts of a little disturbing and then gets even more so.

I have no clever way to close this out, so I’m just going to let it fizzle out, kind of like Friday night.

_________________________

* – The old bike won’t necessarily fall by the wayside; my eldest child has already claimed it to replace her bike, which, while purchased at Walmart, was far from the best example of their product line. I’m going to go ahead and recommend you don’t buy a budget bike at the big box stores.

Because honestly, I’ve got nothing.

1. “Explain It To Me” – Liz Phair
2. “Butterflies and Airplanes” – The Clarks
3. “Knife Going In” – Tegan and Sara
4. “Johnny” – Innocent Nixon
5. “Our American Cousin” – Molly Lewis
6. “Can’t Get There From Here” – REM
7. “These Days” – The Rentals
8. “Hands In The Air” – Girl Talk
9. “Bring It (Snakes on A Plane)” – Cobra Starship
10. “Follow Your Bliss” – The B-52s

Sage wisdom about my favorite public transit system courtesy of “master thief” in this fark thread:

Ladies and Gentlemen: Welcome to Fight Club Metro.

The first rule of Metro is: you do not talk to anyone on Metro.
The second rule of Metro is: YOU DO NOT TALK TO ANYONE ON METRO.
The third rule of Metro: If the chimes sound and the voice says “Step Back,” the doors will close.
The fourth rule of Metro: Only two people to a seat.
The fifth rule of Metro: One stop at a time.
The sixth rule of Metro: Walk left, stand right.
The seventh rule of Metro: Rides will go on for as long as they have to.
And the eighth rule of Metro: If this is your first time riding Metro, you WILL be delayed.

Other than “Thou shalt take ‘please move to the center of the car’ seriously,” this is all you need to know.

With a few exceptions, I guess. That Katy Perry song sticks out, but damn if I don’t really like vast swaths of the Teenage Dream record; unsubtle penis metaphors, cotton candy-scented packaging, and my own anti-commercial sensibilities aside.

She’s got a great rock voice when she lets it loose, like she does on selection #8 below, along with a couple of well-placed lyrical F-bombs. It’s almost like she’s one more heartbreak away from her own personal Jagged Little Pill, and this song’s a little preview. Not that I wish her ill, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to hear that record.

Anyway, I wish you all a happy weekend, as long as you don’t say anything about my forgetting to pick up my mobile phone before I left the house. Again.

1. “Carry Me” – Patty Griffin
2. “Sixteen Military Wives” – The Decembrists
3. “Soil, Soil” – Tegan and Sara
4. “How To Skin A Cat” – Hüsker Dü
5. “Finest Worksong” – REM
6. “My Body Is A Cage” – Arcade Fire
7. “Sing” – She & Him
8. “Common People” – William Shatner
9. “Circle the Drain” – Katy Perry
10. “Flower” – Liz Phair

As of this afternoon’s eight miler around the neighborhood, I’ve passed five hundred(!) bicycling miles this summer (which I’m measuring from roughly Memorial Day), just in time for “summer” to come to an end for Labor Day.

To celebrate, please have Zooey bathed and brought to my tent. <smirk>

Really, though, to celebrate, I’m going to rest for the remainder of the day, and see if I can shake this edge of a headache I’ve been having for the last day or two (which I’ve been trying to treat with bike riding so I could get past my arbitrary round number goal for the last couple of days), then keep riding some more each day as I can, because honestly, it’s become a habit now.

So, once again yay for me, who’s managed to meet an arbitrary goal, and hopefully improve my cardiovascular health a bit.

Just sitting here 110 miles from the beach, hoping the hurricane turns east so I don’t have to deal with it, because we all know how much fun that was last time.

1. “In Step” – Girl Talk
2. “Any Way You Want It” – Glee cast
3. “Heavy Metal” – Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
4. “Crossfire” – Kasey Chambers
5. “Anwsering Machine” – The Replacements
6. “Dragonforce” – Body Breakdown
7. “Rocket Queen” – Guns ‘N Roses
8. “Shoot Me Like A Prayer” – Rock Sugar
9. “Please Let That Be You” – The Rentals
10. “Hawthorne” – that dog.
11. “Chasin’ Girls” – The Clarks

…Because the most horrific consequence imaginable of underfunded public education would be that kids start reading comic books.

I’m really tired of people perpetuating insulting myths about my hobbies, especially when those people are Democratic political candidates like Nancy King (running for the MD state senate), whose positions I tend to agree with, especially on education funding (there’s no better investment in the future of a nation than making sure that the population is educated and informed).

I honestly thought that the “comics = degenerate” meme went out with the Comics Code Authority. Apparently not.

I’ll be curious to see how this particular race plays out; Diamond, the huge comics distributor, is based on MD, and King’s primary opponent has already responded to the ad, on the Bendis boards, a forum frequented by numerous comics professionals.

Back to the original idea though – how can kids reading be construed as a bad thing? Candidate King clearly hasn’t thought her cunning plan all the way through.

Not the greatest week for me, even if it was a short one. Lots of work-related frustrations, which, to be fair, are totally expected in the early weeks of a project’s testing phase, but are, nonetheless frustrating.

Otherwise, the weather was a bit cooler, and it made my bike rides very pleasant.

Family camping this weekend…hope it doesn’t rain.

1. “You Never Give Me Your Money” – The Beatles
2. “Pressure” – Paramore
3. “True Romantic (acoustic)” – Indigo Girls
4. “Moondance” – Nightwish
5. “Accelerate” – REM
6. “He Wasn’t” – Avril Lavigne
7. “Space Doggity” – Jonathan Coulton
8. “The Sun and the Rain” – Madness
9. “Pardon Me” – Weezer
10. “I’m A Fool” – The Clarks

It’s kind of funny how synergy works. Just the other week I was musing about “princesses” and the problems they can present, and now, the always reliable JoCo releases a new song addressing the same general topic.

The words of Coulton himself:

I wrote a song called “The Princess Who Saved Herself” because my daughter is obsessed with princesses, so I am forced to think and talk about them a lot. None of them really kick ass as much as I hope my daughter kicks ass when she’s all grown up, so I made up one that does…

It also happens that this song was inadvertently written directly to another specific demographic: my eldest daughter, who has pretty much decided that this is her new favorite tune (at least until something else comes along).

Yeah, we need more of this kind of thing.

Incidentally, the song was released on Many Hands, a charity compilation CD benefiting Haitian earthquake relief, with a bunch of other kids’ tunes. And even if the other tracks are (in my kids’ humble opinion) not necessarily as strong as this one, the project supports a worthy cause, and if nothing else, served as the basis for some “teaching moment” conversations ’round here when we popped the disc in.

disempowered and ill-applied.
skills lie fallow, time
and effort squandered.

quests charged already entrusted
elsewhere.

initiative quashed, despondence formented.

what is worst is that
no one notices.