What's Hopper Been Up To?

 

Also known as, Where in the World is Hopper?

Still living in an unnamed Dallas suburb, starting our fifth month here. Not much has changed since I last posted that enigmatic dog soup photoshop two weeks ago. Work is progressing as I’m learning the policies and procedures of my new multinational masters, becoming more efficient at my tasks and thus becoming less stressed out at the weekly and monthly deadlines that hurl themselves at me with abandon. The wife is excelling at her job as well, even more so than I, which is nice because it’s the major reason we moved down here from blue to red state. The girls are adjusting at their schools. All is on a fairly even keel.

We still manage to do some fun stuff every weekend. The girls enjoyed Halloween two weeks ago, dressing up as characters from this thing called Minecraft. They each scored a generous amount of candy in their rucksacks, and I was surprised that our own doorbell only rang about 10 times in the three hours I sat in my well-lit front office. We live on the corner of two streets across from a neighborhood park, so I was expecting more foot traffic. As a result, I will be forced to eat two large bags of candy leftover for the trick-or-treaters.

Broke out the telescope to view Jupiter and Saturn. Resolution was too low to see Jupiter’s bands, but I’m almost positive I saw Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Little One is sure, too. The rest of the evening we focused on the quarter moon, until she got bored of it.

I’ve been alternating periods of sluggishness with periods of brisk walking. I even broke out the weight bench and bars. I have a 15-pound bar for bench pressing, squats, etc., a triceps bar for that muscle, and a curl bar for that exercise. Also about three hundred pounds of metal weights. Patch says she’d like to start lifting with me, but she’s in between seasons right now (Volleyball in the Fall, Soccer in the Spring) so they have her lifting and running at school. Not having done any serious lifting in almost 15 years, I tested it out with her spotting me. I was able to bench press 105 pounds ten times. Don’t laugh; I could probably go heavier but I’m at an age where things will break easily if overdone.

My guitar playing has leapt a plateau. Not only have I written enough material for three albums, not only have I learned about twenty new songs to play on the electric, but I’ve seemed to have developed a nice, melodic vibrato, something that had eluded me and relegated me to songwriter / rhythm guitar status during my active days. I like playing the leads on “Beck’s Bolero,” “Blue Sky” by the Allman Brothers, the little solo in “White Wedding,” and the syrupy stylings of George Harrison’s “Something,” among others. Even trying my hand at Van Halen (“Jump,” “Running with the Devil,” “Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love”).

And I’m continuing to work on my shrouded-in-secrecy magnum opus. It’s like chipping away at a massive block of granite and hoping something like Rodin’s Thinker will somewhat appear before I exit stage left of this earthly existence.

Anyway, more to come. I’ve written a few blog posts to put up here every other day or so. These include a revisit to Middle-earth, a revisit to Napoleonic France, a revisit to Jimmy Page and John Lennon, and a review of my Halloween reading, Bram Stoker’s Alucard.

Hope to see you back …