Blog About my Home Renovation Project

Victoria and I now have a blog detailing our home renovation project this summer. We thought it might be a fun way to keep a journal detailing what we're doing, as well as keep our friends and families up to date with the project. We are closing on the home around July ish, and super excited about the project. The new blog is at: http://tudorks.wordpress.com

I've also added a Twitter widget to the side bar of this blog, so that I can at least keep some micro-blogs going here.

I Made It!

I just came out of the most nasty, gray winter ever. We're starting to ease into our spring pattern of weather- rainy mornings and sunny afternoons. Wildflowers are sprouting and the moss is greening up. My attitude and my feelings about music, and everything else, have changed so dramatically in one year.
I feel like I shook off the 7 years of poverty and anxiety pretty quickly. It's been a huge positive change for me to move from some place that didn't like me, that took active measures to keep me out, into a place where I'm wanted. I spent 7 years begging bumbling PhDs to permit me to sacrifice more money on their altar. Begging $9/hr jobs to allow me to leave my trailer for an extra water break. I did all that only to find that teaching was the most abusive profession on earth. Abuse from administrators, abuse from students, politicians, parents... Faculty who refused to recommend me because I'm not religious, administrators who sent mispelled emails in all caps- it was a nightmare. Now when I go to a meeting at work, I'm among friends. I work with people who keep me on my toes, and to whom my skeptical and critical nature is an enormous asset.
I'm still getting my head around just how different my life got in 1 year.
Before 2007 I had never even been West of the Mississippi, I made one trip to PDX. I had never seen mountains in North America, let alone all of the things I saw in a one week trip across the country: prairie dogs, antelope, sagebrush, nazi biker gangs, the rainforest, coyotes, seals, bald eagles, gigantic water beetles, salmon(they actually jump), himalayan blackberry brambles the line my roads now like strip malls used to. All the modern furniture and electronics I could never find in Nashville is popping up left and right around me. In short, Seattle is exactly what my adolescent fantasy of Seattle hoped for. I had almost convinced myself that every place was as miserable for me as Nashville.
My situation now is far from perfect, but when I look back at the dystopia I left, this is heaven. If I could, I would take a gigantic skil saw and cut the southeast off of the US and let it sink into the ocean. I can't even stand to hear the accent on TV sometimes. The only thing I miss is the immigrant population that I enjoyed the benefit of, and the sunshine. It's impossible to find anything in the way of a Seattle equivalent of Nolensville Road here. I miss my international markets.
I was in the wrong place. Sometimes I meet some poor lost southerner wandering around the northwest, and most of them are so unhappy here.
So now that the dust has settled, I need to keep an eye on craigslist for some of the great 60s japanese guitars that go for peanuts out here, and decide what kind of music I'll make when I live in a place where I can breathe, and where there's no pressure, and maybe even an audience.

Stupid song I made to test out the totally amazing acoustic guitar that my Dad was nice enough to lend me.

I Missed Nashville for a Minute There

And then this happened:


Oh wait, no, that was what I liked about Nashville. That and the fact that everything is really cheap. This was what slapped me in the face and reminded me why I ran from the south screaming and vowing never to return:
The English Only Resolution.

That's right, Nashville just ran a special election to consider whether or not they should stop translating government documents or providing services to people who don't speak English. They went out of their way, $280,000 out of their way, just to hold an election to decide how many people are ignorant jerks. And guess what? That number looks to be around 40%.

I'm happy to have a new president and a new congress. I hope that the era of hateful politics toward gays, atheists, and immigrants is over. I hope that America has learned its lesson after letting those people sit in power. I hope that this means that the rational, logical side of America has finally edged out the Nashvillians of our country. I hope now those Nashvillians get a taste of the persecution they've been spewing forth for decades.
Now that I've been out of the Southeast for over 6 months I'm realizing that the various instances of hate and persecution that were perpetrated by the south- from the civil war to their persecution of immigrants, is all part of one large, long pattern. It's a pattern of campaigns to limit the freedoms of any and all citizens. And it's a pattern of hateful behavior that so much of the country deserves punishment for- and yet shows no remorse, rather pride.
I'm proud of the Northwest for not wasting their lives on campaigning to persecute a particular group. It's amazing what you could do with all that time, Southeast.

Awesome Tapes From Africa Mix

Download

I've been taking some of my christmas break from work(s) to dig around mp3 blogs. One of my favorite, recent finds has been "Awesome Tapes From Africa" a blog of found cassettes audio from, you guessed it, Africa. I am pretty sure that the writer doesn't live in Africa, since I've seen a ton of these kinds of tapes at my Afro-Caribbean markets in Nashville over the years.
I've really been missing the immigrant culture I used to experience in Nashville. The Kitsap Peninsula is absolutely one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen, but it's a bit of a monoculture. Ok, it's a complete monoculture. What's really killing me is the lack of good food. There's some great food across the water in Pike Place, but you can be almost sure you'll receive the worst service in the universe. I think what I miss the most of about the immigrant restaurants and markets I went to in the Nashville area was how nice everybody was- they appreciated my business, they remembered me when I came back, they asked me what I was going to do with a food I bought, or I asked them what they recommended. Sometimes when I do business in Seattle I get the impression that the server or seller thinks that I should feel honored to get to do business with them.

Since my wife and I have all summer off, and our lease is up in June, we're thinking about spending the summer renting something cheap in downtown Portland and just putting our stuff in storage for the summer. Everything in the Kitsap area is for rent, so finding a space when we get back is not a worry. Our current property managers are absolutely negligent and ineffective, so our lease won't be renewed anyways. We're hoping maybe we can grab some kind of summer work or volunteer work in town and meet a few people who might help us land jobs in Portland sooner than just throwing applications around.

I have high hopes for 2009.

Stop the Christmas Insanity.

Download.

The AP reports a 34 year old man, a temporary worker for Wal-Mart during the holidays, was trampled to death by an anxious herd of retail zombie moms attempting to get $30 off of a camcorder and $4 sweatpants. I was thinking about this when I mixed this little 30 minute set.
I don't even know what to say. This man's death is the perfect example of the abuse and suffering caused by modern life. I hope before he died he was able to ask someone if they wanted a store credit card- or his managers might not put up a $3 plaque in his honor. The rich oppress the poor, and wealth as identity devalues the lives of the poor. The police who attempted to provide CPR to this man were also trampled and shoved. Shoppers were forced to evacuate the store, and were reportedly very angry that they had to leave.

If there wasn't a "War on Christmas" before, there should be now. Christmas deserves to be a ritual observed by the devoutly religious Christians among us, at church. The very day after our nation observes a sweet holiday about being thankful for what you've got, we go out and get in line at stores to wait all night in the freezing cold for the chance to buy Chinese junk that's only being marked up 500% instead of 800% FOR ONE DAY ONLY. Ask around, most people's favorite holiday is Thanksgiving.
The communities my wife and I work in are absolutely flooded with "Giving Tree" type operations. Apparently, lots of kids might not get a good Christmas this year. You're going to call me a curmudgeon, but I learned the most from the disappointing Christmases when my family didn't have much money. I'm happy that my parents didn't go into massive personal debt just to shut me up about wanting this or that. Take a look at the chart I've stolen and tell me if you think we've let this get out of hand enough.
So I'm now joining the leagues of people who wish they could cancel Christmas. As a nation, we ought to be adults, and get every little child nothing for Christmas. I'm starting to view Christmas culture as another extension of the "permanent adolescence" mental illness that pervades American society. Instead, we should have a nice meal, play a board game, and have a long serious talk about how we got here as a culture. This is sick. Don't donate to charity in my name, either. Keep your money. Tell your children that the generations of entitlement mentality have completely destroyed your ability to get anything but high interest credit to buy them things with. Tell them that poor children shouldn't get piles of stuff for Christmas like rich children. Because being poor sucks, and maybe they'll be motivated to do better for themselves as adults. Instead of buying a television so big it tips the trailer over on store credit and then not paying the water bill for six months.
It's the hard lessons that stick. Just ask anybody who lived through the last depression.

Everything about this is perfect

The mix, the tone on the piano, the great taste in combining high and low fidelity sounds, up front and blurriness... it's just RIGHT.

I love the references to both surf and blues- it just needs over saturated film to be sensory overload.


Can you smell the lurching tapeloop drums?

Living the Good Life.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28121631@N02/sets/72157608791427603/
Spent this Saturday on a day trip up and around the Olympic Peninsula and to the Pacific Coast. US101 is a beautiful drive through almost all of trip, except Forks, which was a nasty, muddy dump of a town. Ruby Beach is unbelievable-check the pictures. Ate at a nice, nice restaurant in Port Angeles with the generic name of Bella Italia. Port Angeles is full of weird, anti-social people with less social skills than people in Wyoming, if you can imagine. Great service at the restaurant, though. I had bleu cheese and fig ravioli with roasted chicken, chanterelles, and corn.
Politics has kept me interested a little bit lately. I'm so so happy to be out of the south, because now I don't have to hear the racist, social conservative banter at work about how much the world is doomed because of Obama. I still get to see it occasionally on Facebook, where someone on my wife's list recently posted: 'I took my last vacation today before Obama takes everything away.' But the distance makes it funny. I think what this election has said is that the "real america" that Palin talks about is still there. But the unpatriotic america that they heap scorn upon, the liberal, rational, progressive, America, has finally edged them out. Maybe now we get to be the real America for a change. I would love to see an election in my lifetime that looked like Libertarians vs. Democrats vs. Green Party, where the Democrats are the centrists, and the spectre of social conservatism can stop embarrassing us on the international scale that it does now.
I never realized what a societal parasite the belief that "the world is nearing the end times" could be. When you don't believe that one simple idea, you can get so much done. Suddenly, problems are there to be solved, not observed as signs that the end times were nearing. Eliminating that one concept from public discourse makes ecologically sound policies possible. It makes long term planning in government possible- and popular. I saw a sign up yesterday announcing an event planned for 2036- that would have been seen as an assault on religion in a lot of the country. It's so refreshing to meet so many people that don't reach for that stale idea just the instant they see something bad in their city.
My "new" life is keeping me busy. There's a new fruit to try at the roadside stand every other day- persimmons and apples and grapes so big my hands feel small just eating them, so much to learn about IT and teaching, etc. Although the learning has really slowed down lately in tech.
I'm continuing my hiatus from music for a while longer while I save for an MPC. I'm just not feeling the drive now that there is so little struggle in my life. Life is so easy when you have enough money to stop worrying, and you don't have that "surrounded by maniacs" feeling.