Well done, sir

And I didn’t even vote for him!

Weirdest of Horrible Dreams

Last night I dreamt something I think you’d agree is truly weird.

… and horrible …

It started out innocently enough.

Let this song from your childhood run through your mind:

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale

A tale of a fateful trip …

That’s right: Gilligan’s Island.

I was on the island with Gilligan, Skipper, the Professor, Mary Anne, Ginger, and Mr. and Mrs. Howell.

But there was something else on the island …

Ready?

…

Drum roll

…

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

….

A Xenomorph.

Yep. A Xenomorph, or, as is known to the non-nerd populace, an alien. From Alien. Or Aliens. Or Alien3, Alien Resurrection, Alien vs. Predator, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, and/or Alien Covenant.

There’s an alien on Gilligan’s island, and it’s making its way one-by-one through those seven stranded castaways – eight, counting me.

Blood. Guts. Screams. Jump scares. Ineffective coconut guns. Bamboo barriers basically bad at blasting these baneful beasts at bay. A chestburster claims curious young Willy Gilligan. Skipper skewered by those second set of slimy jaws. Professor drowning in hubris to “communicate with these wondrous creatures” drowns in blood. The Howells attempting to escape in a raft – only to discover said raft harboring a maternity ward for those alien eggs o’trembling ….

So, that was my nightmare last night.

Good Lord, can’t my brain just disconnect for a couple of hours a year???

Jazz Odyssey

Trying to think of a new way to relax, I decided I should listen to music more. I always had, but since house and children in the early 2000s I haven’t really listened to much of anything. Yeah, some Hendrix now and then, some stuff from my youth, classical here and there, lately old Genesis, but nothing on a daily basis.

I have close to a hundred CDs at home. (Had a box of 200+ that was stolen during the move from apartment to house, but I forgive you thief.) And to be honest, I just don’t get the whole smartphone thing. I’d rather just listen to my CDs. So the girls bought me a Walkman CD player (and no doubt were embarrassed the entire duration of the selection and purchase) for Christmas. The first thing I listened to was a Charles Mingus CD of my father-in-law’s.

That was chased by Coltrane’s Giant Steps and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue.

That invisible bulb flared o’erhead. Why not explore jazz? I’m a curious fellow, and it’s one area of music I’m not too fluent with. Yeah, I did a cursory survey around 2000, 2001, but it’s still new turf to me.

Over the past three weeks, I borrowed the following CDs from my local library, three at a time:

Charlie Parker – The Legendary Charlie Parker

Django Reinhardt – The Essential Django Reinhardt

Charles Mingus – Mingus Ah Um

Herbie Hancock – Thrust

Wes Montgomery – The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery

Sun Ra and his Arkestra – The Definitive 45s Collection

Miles Davis – Birth of the Cool

Chick Correa, Stanley Clarke, Lenny White – Forever

Thelonious Monk – The Blue Note Years

To date I’ve listened to a third of the total music on these CDs.

I’ve also streamed in WBGO at work (I have the privacy of an office with a door that closes), just about every day since January 1.

Conclusions?

I not a fan of big band. I don’t like the Harry Connick horns-a-blarin’ sound. I don’t like poor recordings, say, pre-1950. Though I appreciate the musicianship, my body just doesn’t relish the mono, the prehistoric mic tech. On the other side of the time spectrum, anything after the 70s – especially “cool jazz” “lite jazz” or “jazz FM” – does nothing for me.

The trumpet doesn’t do much for my nerves; I much prefer the sax – warmer, fatter, more soothing in tone. And, of course, I prefer the guitar most of all, in all phases and sound, though I do dig keyboards, both natural and electronic.

So far I enjoy the guitars / keyboards / saxophones mashups of the 70s, “fusion,” meaning a fusion of rock with jazz, though I feel it leans more towards the latter than the former. Which is okay with me. Three chords over 4/4 can only go so far, and I passed that point sometime in the mid-80s. My focus going forward will probably be in that region, fusion, though I am enthusiastic for the “classics” of jazz – the revolutionary stuff of the 50s and 60s, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Mingus, Monk, and their contemporaries. Probably won’t be listening to earlier Duke Ellington or Jelly Roll Morton or Louis Armstrong, though on occasion I may dip my toes in those (hopefully remastered) waters.

Favorites so far? Recommendations, if you will?

Well …

“West Coast Blues” by Wes Montgomery (my unrelated-at-all-to-Disney Disney theme, cuz that’s where I first heard it)

The entire Thrust album by Herbie Hancock

Most of Davis’ Birth of the Cool (which I like better than “Kind of Blue,” a CD I’ve had for twenty years and listened to about a hundred times)

“Rocket Ship #9” by Sun Ra (not for the faint-hearted)

though I still have to dig deep into a lot more of those nine CDs, and dozens more as yet unsampled …

Quite the Stressful Month

Thirty days ago the family drove down to Hilton Head, South Carolina, to spend the holidays with my wife’s parents.

Thus began the Stressful Month.

I did enjoy the vacation, though it wasn’t as fun as the one we took down there back in August. For one, it was colder, colder than normal, hovering about 50 most of the time. But there was a whole host of little stress nests: forgot one of the five bags of Christmas presents, the rental place wasn’t as cool as the prior one, the girls were not exactly on their best behavior (especially when alone with their grandparents), I discovered I had to take some last-minute tax classes and tests, and money seemed to be hemorrhaging left and right from our bank account.

Returned home for a quiet New Year’s Eve, then had to go to work the next day at 11. Similarly, I had to work the MLK holiday, while everyone else at the office had off. I don’t get OT at the nonprofit, so the best I could wrangle for having to work these days is that I get the equivalent amount of hours in PTO to use at a later date.

On January 2 I began the night job doing tax prep. To date I’ve only done two returns (but had two reschedules for later in the season), but there was a lot of other work: emailing last year’s clients, studying and being tested on the new 2017 Tax and Jobs Act changes, focused workshops to engage the client better, etc., etc., etc. I’ll have Thursdays and Sundays off, at least until the end of March when tax season goes into overdrive.

Both girls are playing basketball, so there’s the challenge of getting them to games and practices now that I work nights and the wife commutes out of NYC and fights insane traffic on a daily basis. Patch also does off-season travel soccer practices Friday nights.

The Mrs. brought a long-fermenting plan to visit Disney World to fruition, beginning January 11. I flew down alone with the girls; she met us down there. I spent three days in the various parks (Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, and Epcot Center) then had to fly back home to work MLK on the 15th. I returned wearier than I left. The girls stayed a few more days and had a blast (as did the wife I suspect) but I found the whole thing off-putting, introvert and solitary soul that I am. Perhaps a post on that later. And if I thought the bank account was hemorrhaging before, well, I’m still too afraid to look at the balance.

Then this past Saturday we got a puppy. This guy:

Charlie

Again, one of the wife’s long-fermenting plans. His name’s Charlie, and now we’re undergoing various sorts of training at the house: poop and pee training, crate training, obedience training. The Hopper house has officially become an unmanageable menagerie: two adult humans, two young humans, a fish, a hamster, and now a dog. I’m the zookeeper that no one listens to.

My primary source of relaxation, reading, has, unfortunately, taken a back seat to all this. Only finished two books so far this year. Normally I’d have put away four or five. I come home at 8, wrestle with getting the girls to bed (and now the dog back in his crate) by 9, 9:30, then go to sleep by 10 or 11, to get up at 6:30, go for a walk, and start the whole thing over.

I’m completely exhausted, and though I’ve wanted to post here on the Hopper, posting is the last thing on my mind.

I think once I’m done traveling through 1945 Europe with General Eisenhower (Crusade in Europe, over there on the left in the “Current Reads” section), I’m gonna switch to some light adventure thrillers of the Clive Cussler variety. I have three or four on the bookshelf. Maybe chase them with some short fun-for-me reviews.

And maybe post some music, or something funny, should anything strike me so.

(I have been listening to nothing but Jazz as a sort of de facto New Year’s resolution and am starting to form opinions on that …)

Wanted: Chill or Cooling Time

Man, I’ve had an insanely busy year. If I’m going to post anything anytime soon, I need some serious chill time.

*******

Hmm. My daughter’s studying French in school. How would my excuse for lack of blogging sound in francais via google translate?

J'ai eu une année follement occupée. Si je vais poster n'importe quoi de sitôt, j'ai besoin de temps de refroidissement sérieux.

Interesting. I guess. I don’t parlez vous the language.

Wait – I’m Czech. Let’s run it through that vowel-challenged lingua:

Měl jsem bláznivý rušný rok. Pokud budu čekat co nejdříve, potřebuji nějaký vážný čas chlazení.

Whoa. One could easily sprain one’s tongue over those words.

Let’s translate it into, uh, how about Latin?

Ego habebat rabidus anno occupatus. Si opperiri quam primum fieri potest, opus est aliquo gravi frigefaciendo sentiunt tempus.

Welsh!

Roedd gen i flwyddyn brysur crazy. Os byddwch yn aros cyn gynted ag y bo modd, mae angen rhywfaint o amser oeri difrifol.

Basque!

Lanpetuta urtebete nuen. Ahalik eta azkarren itxaroten baduzu, hozte denbora larria behar da.

And now, drum roll ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Back to English!

I was busy for a year. As soon as you wait, cooling time is required.

Yes! Cooling time is required! Love the google translate 2018 version of Telephone.

Maybe something interesting later in the week ….

Snow Day!

Ah, a snow day!

Coming at the tail end of a very hectic beginning of 2018, it was greatly appreciated.

Though my lower back doesn’t seem to think so …

Why so hectic, you may be wondering, Joker-like?

Let me tell you: Drove 865 miles north on Saturday; up late Sunday for New Year’s Eve – though not drunk; in to work by 11 am on Monday when everyone else had off to process a week’s work of blah; a full day on Tuesday doing payroll for 650 individuals, followed by two hours in the evening starting up the tax preparer job; a slower day on Wednesday followed by two hours at the tax job; snow and its requisite clean-up yesterday on Thursday.

It was a fun snow day, I’ll grant you that. But it didn’t start out that way.

I woke up at 3:30 a.m. – that hamster got a corn a-rollin’ in its wheel again. Noise kept me up and I couldn’t re-enter Nod. So I did something new. I pulled out the laptop, wrapped myself in blankets on the couch, plugged in the headphones, and watched Mystery Science Theater 3000 on youtube. It was 1978’s Incredible Melting Man that was parodied. I was in chuckle heaven.

When I realized wearily I was up for the day, I glanced out the window. No snow. And it wasn’t snowing. By the time the Melting Man had completely melted incredibly, however, it was a swirling whiteout out there. The school robo-dialed us at 6:30 that it would be closed. My boss texted me not to come in at 7:45.

The girls were up and about, flitting here and there, chowing down cereal, excited to have the day off. The wife’s NYC meeting was canceled, but she had home-office work to do, so she shuffled down to the basement in her PJs. I went upstairs to take a cat nap, but sleep eluded me.

So I watched the guys from MST3K make fun of Laserblast.

Then I watched the guys make fun of The Mole People.

I shuffled downstairs around 1 to make myself some soup, but we had none. Thus I had a hearty meal of ziti with tomato sauce which my detoxifying body wasn’t used to. Believe me, I suffered for it.

The winds whipped the house so hard I thought we’d be sucked up into a giant ice tornado, kinda like the Wizard of Oz revisioned by Roland Emmerich. There’s a door on our second-floor master bedroom that leads out onto the flat roof of our garage. I think you know where I’m going with this. Torn off three of four hinges, slamming against the door frame. I braved the snowstorm to take out the two glass panes, which alleviated about 95 percent of the flailing wreckage. The rest’ll have to be looked at once normal above zero temps flow in.

The digital clocks struck three and I decided to watch a movie with the girls. Turns out we had DVR’d Nicole Kidman’s somewhat creepy 2001 flick The Others. We watched it, and the girls seemed to enjoy the twist ending. Afterwards I noted the storm had stopped; Patch and I went out to shovel and dust off the cars.

Back to work at both jobs today, and the only memory of the great Super Bomb Blizzard of ’18, aside from the five or six inches of icy snow laying all about, is the small ache laying about my lower back.

Did get some interesting reading done, and listening to some interesting jazz.

More on both, later …

The Dancer

Nice fun ditty by bassist Stanley Clarke to start off 2018 right, and also, coincidentally, my nickname in high school.

Nah, just kidding.

I actually really enjoy this type of stuff every now and then – Jeff Beck, Return to Forever, Al DiMeola, just to name a few of the numerous CDs I’ve bought over the years. Awesome music, this jazz-fusion-type thing. Gotta listen to it more.