A cloud of illness

Sickness has settled down on our house for Christmas and maybe New Year's -- we'll see. One family member has croup which caused us to go to the ER on Christmas Eve. All is better now, but it was scary there for a while because she was working so hard to breath. Now another member has come down with some sort of stomach bug and so we'll have to work through that. Not much fun, but I am feeling like the walls are closing in on me!

Facebook = massive time suck

It's not like I update this blog very often to begin with, but now I am more active on Facebook, and it's seriously distracting me from all sorts of things including updating this blog. It wasn't really until my wife joined that I really paid much attention to my FB profile, but now...!

Monkeyin' around

Here are some recent pictures of Jane, including some of her dressed up for Halloween as a monkey. We actually could not convince her to get in her costume on Halloween night (she put up a convincing counter argument: hysterics), so these pics were taken on Saturday when she was much more agreeable.

Jane runs the Army 10-miler!

OK, not really, but she is now officially a walking toddler! We're all very excited, but maybe a tad unready for the whole transition to walking. But so far, so good. No black eyes or scary falls -- yet. Just kidding. It's pretty amazing to watch her go, and improve her balance, too. They grow up fast, as they say.

Here's a short video of an early walk. A warning about the video: you may want to turn your sound down before viewing because there is loud yelling from excited parents. :-)

And here are some more recent pictures.

Go 'Skins!

I don't think I've had this much to cheer about in a looong time. It feels good. Four and one -- who woulda thunk it at the beginning of the season??

One week, three shows

Three shows in one week is too many, at least for an oldster like myself. I feel like I'm still catching up on sleep.

Last week started out with the Kooks show at the 9:30 club on Monday night. It was a sold out show. Overall it was a good show, but I had some problems with Kooks. They have good songs, and they're energetic, but they just seemed to be trying too hard: singer's got overly dramatic stage moves and singing, guitarist changing guitars too much. I don't want to make it sound like I don't like 'em because I do, but I found those things to be distracting.

At the last minute, we decided to go to the Gray Matter reunion show on Friday at the Black Cat. This was a fun show. GM played for a little over an hour, playing stuff from Take it Back and the first album. They were rockin'. The crowd's age was mixed, old and young. I did manage to get most of a pint spilled all over me. Some girl was standing in front of me, at the back edge of the pit, with a full pint glass full of what later smelled like Sierra Nevada. Of course, she got knocked, and then the beer went flying all over me. Not the best move standing at the edge of the pit with a glass of beer. Interesting thing at this show was that there were no people taller than me standing in front of me! Are punk fans shorter than average? At almost every other show I go to, there is at least one person taller than me who stands directly in my line of sight. But, that always happens at 9:30... maybe people who go to the Black Cat are shorter than average. Hmmm...

The next night (Saturday) was the Paul Weller show at 9:30 club. This was a show that was lukewarm on, but I went because it's Paul Weller. I'm not into his solo stuff, in fact, I don't own any of it. But I was a big fan of the Jam, so he'll always have a certain stature in my mind. I was mixed about this show. On one hand, it was cool to see Paul Weller energetic and playing a guitar and performing like he means it. On the other hand, he played a bunch of mellow stuff. I had to duck out while that was going on. The crowd loved all of it though, and then went nuts when he finally played a Jam song, Town Called Malice (which was great). Fun fact learned at this show: mods are rebellious! This was demonstrated by the fact that Weller himself lit up while on stage (DC smoking ban be damned!). This by itself is not the only indication that mods are rebellious since other performers at 9:30 have lit up while on stage. The real indication came when a mod standing next to me by the bar said to his friend "man, I really wanna cigarette. and not outside either, I want one right here like him [pointing to Weller]!" He then proceeded to light up right next to the bar and smoke, albeit *very* discreetly. It didn't last long either since I'm sure he was worried he'd be tossed out, plus it's probably not that enjoyable to smoke so sneakily.

And that was the end of a long but fun week. Now comes rest for a while.

Clean up your web presence if you're searching for a job

This article references a study showing that about 20% of all employers are doing web research on job applicants. So, in other words, they're looking at blogs (ahem), Facebook and MySpace profiles, etc, for a look at applicants' "character".

Dark Chrome Strummer

(I'm writing this in the new Google Chrome browser... just downloaded it and started using it today so it's too early to know what to make of it.)

This past weekend was fun but a bit active. We did the usual weekend stuff: errands, cleaning, etc., but we also got to mix in a few trips w/ Jane to eat out. We also visited my new twin nieces now that they're home from the hospital. Very cute!

We also made it to the movies... we haven't done that in probably two years. I *think* the last movie we saw in the theater was The Lady in the Water which I didn't like too much. This time we did it right. This time we saw Dark Knight and we saw the IMAX version. We saw it at the National Museum of Natural History at a 5:30pm show, and it was sold out. The movie was pretty much everything I had hoped it would be and more (ie, IMAX). Liz and I both really liked it. It was awesome. Did I say we liked it?

So that is the "dark" and "chrome" part of the title. The "strummer" refers to Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, which I also watched this weekend. (Yes, a bit of movie watching this weekend. It was a long weekend.) I thought this was great, too, but of course in a different way. Being a big Clash fan, and to a lesser degree a fan of Joe Strummer's solo stuff, I was very eager to see this documentary. It certainly didn't disappoint, but it did depict him as a human, faults and all. But I appreciated seeing that aspect of him. I've read books on the Clash and they have implied that he was maybe a hypocrite or maybe even a phony because of the way treated people. But I think we all have our contradictions, and we all have our demons and episodes of bad judgment or maybe you can call it immaturity. But I think the movie showed how he got past that stuff, went through a period of "darkness" as they put it, and then came back. It was a very interesting, funny, and also sad movie about a great musician. I would've liked to have met him.