Nothing quite takes you out of the Winter Olympic mood than the mini heat wave in which Southern California currently finds itself. We've had a second daffodil make an appearance in the front lawn flower bed, for God's sake! Completely insane ( Read more... )

Small Boy Holding Toy to Dashing Pater Familias: "Daddy, children need practice chainsaws."

There's something extremely disquieting about that statement.

Encounter!The family visited the nearby mountain community of Ojai for the first time yesterday. Ojai has a reputation as being both a spa destination and an art commune, but the latter is ( Read more... )

Some photos from our Sunday at Faria Beach, as well as a few from the Christmas Break.

Brady looking at a starfish clinging to a rock. The tide pool was full of starfish and teeny little crabs, but Christine also found a sea urchin and a sand dollar.

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I was tagged by the lovely carmine_rose for the 5 Weird Things Meme, and how could one resist the charms of the UK's most alluring TA?!?

( Onward to the idiosyncrasies! )

My LJ pathology goes a little something like this: I'm inspired to write an entry, but I haven't responded to comments from my previous one and consider it rude to begin writing something new until I do. (At this point, the valid question would be why I didn't simply respond in a prompt manner, thus avoiding any breach of etiquette. I really, ( Read more... )

Merry Christmas and/or Happy Hanukkah!

My parents are in town, which is the inspiration for the Ref-copped post title. After a nice day sight-seeing in Santa Barbara (it was 75 degrees - 24 C - and glorious today), my parents and I had our annual blow-up over, as best as I can recall, the fact that I don't like ham and me being pissed at my dad ( Read more... )

This was apparently my week of making up for lost time in concert-going during which I saw cashing in reunion tours by two post-punk heroes of my youth - Echo & the Bunnymen and Bauhaus ( Read more... )

I'm not sure what's worse - the fact that I'm missing a show tonight because my stubbornness about paying 50% of a ticket price in service charges or that I actually went the extra mile and pre-purchased tickets for a band of questionable quality. The former involves the awesome band, The Wrens; the latter, goth heroes, Bauhaus ( Read more... )

The Friday after Thanksgiving, the family went to the beach with the intended goal of taking a picture we'd be able to send out with our Christmas cards. The lighting was atrocious, the beachcombers omnipresent, and the children... impatient, but we still managed to get a few fun shots.


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Volume 2 isn't nearly as "edgy" as I'd remembered it, consisting as it does primarily of NME's heroes of the neo-post-punk movement. My biggest regret is including the overplayed (and from the wrong year) "Galang" instead of something by Okkervil River or Four Tet.

Available for download at You Send It or Megaupload. (112 MB .zip file)

1. Neko Case ( Read more... )