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Pictures that move. (Grades are mine, then Josh's) [updated: 9.8.05] |
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Wednesday, July 31, 2002 Here are two very cool songs that everyone needs to listen to. I wish I could put the entire songs up here, but you'll have to settle for amazon's handy-dandy track samples. Then I know you will all be so intrigued you will find some way to hear the whole songs, and then you will love me forever and want to adopt me so I will always be around to introduce you to more fantabulous musical flavas. Please listen: Hmmm....do we see a pattern here? CCM Magazine: 5-02: Cover: Amy Grant. "Coming Next Month: Kirk Franklin on mentoring" 6-02: Cover: Kirk Franklin. "Coming Next Month: Salvador" 7-02: Cover: Salvador. "Coming Next Month: Get to know the real Bebo Norman" 8-02: Cover: Bebo Norman. "Coming Next Month: Sixpence None the Richer" 'Nuff said. Tuesday, July 30, 2002 Booger! Booger, booger, booger! Well, the good news is I'm not wrong. Not yet anyway. The stupid Mole folks decided to leave us cliffhanging for another week. So you will all just have to wait. I know you are on the edge of your seats. 11:26 PM || I want to be a comment. Post me! The final episode of "The Mole" is tonight. I know none of you probably care about that, but I would just like to state for the record that the mole is NOT Bill. I repeat: THE MOLE IS NOT BILL! It is, most likely, Dorothy. Small chance it is Heather. But I am officially going with Dorothy. We shall see later tonight that I was right. Ciao. 5:52 PM || I want to be a comment. Post me! Thursday, July 25, 2002 1. I hurt. Ow. 2. Yeah, comments are working again. So comment me, baby! 3. I am being very ambitious and starting a Steve Taylor song tourney over here. If it goes well (i.e. people actually participate), maybe we can come up with another artist enough of us know well enough to attempt another one. We shall see. 4. I wish much luck to my in-laws who are moving tomorrow. Even when it's only across town, moving sucks. A lot. 5. Someone needs to force me to work on our new website again. Much like other people need to be forced to work on poetry contests. Seriously. 6. I just discovered that David Bryson, probably the second-most-important member of Counting Crows (my favorite secular [*gasp*] band) not only mixed the Steve Taylor album Squint, but also both mixed and engineered Chagall Guevara. Isn't it fun finding connections between two of your favorite artists (who really should not be connected in any way)? And, this is all in addition to T-Bone Burnett (aka Sam Phillips' husband and legendary musician/producer of music, both "Christian" and non) having produced the Crows' debut album (August and Everything After, one of my top 5 albums of all time and genres). AND, Sam Phillips does all the music for the tv show Gilmore Girls, one of the two best (fiction) shows on television. Why do I feel like Kevin Bacon is going to pop up here any minute...? Wednesday, July 24, 2002 And I know my archives are messed up once again. They were actually fixed for maybe a day or so, but have reverted back to their old ways. We shall attempt another mending. In the meantime, I hope this page doesn't take too long to load for some people, as I am forced to keep every post I have ever written on the current page (as there would currently be no way to get to the earlier posts otherwise). Bear with me. 12:22 PM || I want to be a comment. Post me! As some of you may have noticed, comments can not currently be posted by anyone but the site owner (me in this case), as the system is apparently having some issues while they are in the process of upgrading. They hope to having working again within the next few days, and the good news is that it should also be much faster than it has been in the past. Now, I wouldn't want to miss any comments from you lovely people, so I will follow Matthew's lead and allow you to email anything you want posted to me and I will put it up. A special note for Patty should she ever find her way in here: Girl, just listening to you talk about running and cross country and... running... makes me tired. I will never be able to understand people who "run for fun." It is just sick and wrong, and I will have no part of it. Really, though, I wonder if you know how lucky you are that you can actually enjoy something like that, something that is so good for you and I'm sure can be a great release of energy or frustration or whatever. Nice. Now, I may be a lazy bum, but I assure you I am not a complete and total lazy bum. This weekend I actually started a bit of, er, weight training to try to tone my upper arms especially, and if I stick with it hopefully it will have a positive effect on my disc golf driving, too. So far I've made it a full three days and am feeling pretty proud of myself. Now all I need to do is figure out some kind of at least semi-aerobic exercise I can stand to do, and that I can do in our apartment and without any special equipment (or at least not expensive special equipment). I figure it wouldn't be a horrible idea to try to get at least a *teensy* bit closer to something resembling being in shape...especially since I haven't been all that active much of the summer with the heat and all. We also need to get Josh a tennis racket so that we can go to the park and play (see, that's the way to do it, a work-out disguised as fun...hmmm, I might be on to something here!). It's been way too long since I've played tennis; I'm probably horrible at it now. So it could be a good laugh, too. :) Tuesday, July 23, 2002 I've really been struggling to come up with anything interesting to say the past few days, so I sincerely apologize to all five people who read this. I know each and every one of you lives only to read my blog, and there is no excuse for how I have let you all down. I shall severely reprimand myself. Now. I love French. Anything French: food, countryside, wine, kissing -- er, strike that last one from the record for the benefit of my dear mum-in-law -- but especially the language. I took French for three years in high school (the last of which would be six years ago now...wow), and it is truly sad exactly how little I remember. I bet if I'd taken that fourth year it would have pushed me over the top and I would still remember every ounce of it....mmmm, maybe not. But every once in a while I see a French word or phrase that I know I *should* know because it is so awfully familiar, but I just can't quite pull the meaning out of the mess of my brain. (Example: perdants from George's blog.) So on occasion when I have come upon these words or phrases, or perhaps when I am leafing through a multi-languaged instruction booklet for some new-fangled thing we have bought, I begin to have an eerie desire to go out and buy a couple of books to reteach myself the language. Just as a hobby. Then, no matter where I live the rest of my life, I'll know I can always run to the local Bibliotheque Francais and read anything I want to. What fun. Seriously, though, I just might do it. If only so that my man George doesn't begin to surpass me in knowledge of the language. *Shudder* Friday, July 19, 2002 How scary that we have finally updated our film page. 11:00 PM || I want to be a comment. Post me! People, you are about to get a glimpse of precisely how pathetic I am. My birthday was June 18. A month ago. I have not yet received a birthday present from my husband. But, you ask, doesn't that make HIM the pathetic one? I wish. It is my own fault I have not received my gift, as I told him before my birthday, knowing that he had no gift ideas that really excited him all that much, that he should just let me decide exactly what I wanted and then he could get it for me. No surprises. Well, you can see how smashingly well that idea has worked. I haven't been able to come up with anything, really -- that he could actually get me, that is. There are things I'd like, such as REAL living room furniture (awfully expensive and not worth buying now if there's a possiblity we might move anytime soon), every episode of seaQuest in its entirety and of perfect quality, preferrably on DVD but at this point I'd settle for VHS (doesn't exist in the universe as far as I know), to go on vacation to some tropical paradise with white sandy beaches and palm trees (expensive and, um, we just went on vacation, so that ain't gonna happen anytime soon), to know what I want to be when I grow up (yeah, right), etc. You get the idea. So today he says to me, Beth, that's it, we're getting you a birthday present sometime this weekend and that's the end of it. Great. So now I actually have to decide. The only ideas I've been able to come up with at all are a cheap bed-in-a-bag or some items of clothing, both of which Josh says are really boring and he thinks we can do better. So I stand in front of you begging people who, needless to say, do not know me as well as I know myself (or as my husband knows me) for ideas. I am desperate (obviously, or I never would have exhibited such extreme, uh, patheticality -- hey! If it's not a word, it should be). Any crazy idea that's in your head. Really. Please. Help. Thank you. Tuesday, July 16, 2002 How weirdly weird... to think that we are going to bells tonight. It's just wrong. Wrong, I tell you! There are no bells in the summer season! What is this world coming to that our church wants the bell choir to play at some random summer service?? Did I mention it's summer? 'Cause it's summer! Don't they know that? Ahhhhhhh! I think my head is going to explode! Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4:40 PM || I want to be a comment. Post me! Monday, July 15, 2002 First off, I need to congratulate my mother-in-law for taking first place in her division of the disc golf competition at the Iowa Games. Now, as for why I haven't posted since Thursday, I was quite busy this weekend with Lifest (yet another Christian music festival) up in Oshkosh, WI. I meant to warn you all of my upcoming absence, but that obviously didn't happen. So. My Lifest Report. We drove up there Thursday night (~2 hours) to see Newsboys, who didn't start until 10pm. Then we drove back home at about 11:30 and proceeded to listen (via CD) to all the songs we wish we'd heard at the concert. They did NO songs from Not Ashamed, ONE song from Going Public (gee, I wonder what that one was...), ONE song from Take Me to Your Leader. Wow. Verdict: All the driving and the late night were not worth it. FRIDAY: Got there in the afternoon about five minutes before Burlap to Cashmere went on (whew!). Had a very close-up view for this one, and it was worth it. They only had 4 of their 6 members there, so two people were attempting to pull double duty (one person on both drums and misc. percussion and only one guitarist with really no backing vocals). This was actually very entertaining at times, as the group's recently promoted lead singer (whose voice thankfully sounds almost exactly like the old lead singer's -- probably because they're cousins) made fun of the band's lack of, well, people, and openly admitted before some of the songs that they really didn't know if they would be able to pull this one off. (If you don't know anything about their music, much of it moves quite fast with a lot of intricate guitar work, etc., so having only one guitarist to somehow take care of the all the interesting stuff, plus keep some kind of basic structure to the song in the process, plus sing the lead vocals at the same time...well, let's just say I was impressed.) Anyway, the atmosphere was light and fun, the performance was incredible (duh), and the few new songs they did sounded really cool. The rest of the day we saw Switchfoot (eh), Mitch McVicker (okay), about three songs by Mark Schultz (not so much my kind of music, but obviously good at what he does), Andrew Peterson (just him and a guitar -- I was pretty impressed that he held my attention completely for the full hour, despite the fact that I didn't know a single one of his songs and it was a very acoustic, stripped down kind of a performance, the combination of which could easily have either put me to sleep or bored me out of my mind (neither came even close to happening); I love how he tells stories about his life in between his songs...plus, he made me laugh, which will always put someone at the top of my list), and Steven Curtis Chapman (I recognized most of the songs he did, even if it's not my favorite kind of music...very happy he did "Lord of the Dance," probably my favorite of all his songs). We then drove about 15 min. to Appleton where we spent the night. SATURDAY: We palyed disc golf at the much-hyped course in Appleton, then drove up to Door County (site of our honeymoon) and gave Kaly the three hour tour of the area (which basically consisted of stopping at one county and two state parks and driving through all the quaint little towns and past all the quaint little orchards and pointing out the drive-in movie theater Josh and I had gone to, etc.). We got back to Lifest about 5 minutes into the Lost Dogs' set (I didn't really recognize any of the songs they did, but I think Josh did. Wait, I take that back, they did "Breathe Deep," which they said they didn't remember all the words to, so they had three guys from the audience come on stage and sing it with them. That was funny. And one of the guys had a "Liver" shirt on. Way cool.) Then we missed Daniel Amos, saw Lost and Found (in a way-too-small-but-very-intimate tent; they put on a very entertaining live show -- I think "loopy" is the best word I've come up with to describe the way they were behaving -- and even though I only recognized a few of their songs, it was highly enjoyable), and then Kaly and I saw Jars of Clay while Josh went to see The Swirling Eddies. Yes, The Swirling Eddies. Now, why did the folks at Lifest schedule those two concerts for the exact same time? Did they really think there would be no overlap in the fan bases? Okay, so maybe they did. And maybe they were mostly right. But I still would have liked to have been able to see them, since they only perform about once a millenium. And since the word from Josh is that they did "Arthur Fhardy's Yodeling Party." Big fat bummer. The Jar Boys' performance was good but typical, with no real surprises. I don't think I've ever been to a concert where the singer shamelessly name-dropped the concert's location to rile up the obviously easily-impressed crowd *quite* so many times. It was sickening. Even Kaly thought it was sickening. Why people go crazy over that stuff I'll never know... The fireworks afterward were probably better than the concert -- they aren't your regular, run-of-the-mill kind, but more of a fireworks/large-scale-pyrotechnics combo. Very impressive, just like last year. We got home at around 2am and decided it wasn't worth it to drive back up there on Sunday just for Delirious and half an hour of Terry Taylor. Good call, I'd say. And today I drove Kaly to the Greyhound station in Aurora to head back to Iowa. Me pooped. Bye bye. Thursday, July 11, 2002 I just saw a commercial perhaps more disturbing than the talking Snapple bottles with hair: It was for something called "Baby Bottle Pops" or some such thing. Some weirdo combination between baby bottles and lollipops, apparently. As if that weren't disconcerting enough...it had these three adolescent/teen-type kids sucking on their baby bottle pops or whatever, except they all had the bodies of adolescent/teen-types and the heads of babies! The "heads" proceeded to talk with adolescent/teen-type voices, and two of them then laughed at the third when he ran out of his baby bottle pop and his head all of a sudden changed from baby back to adolescent/teen-type. He then looked dejected. Oh my. Oh my, oh my, oh my... I think I am scarred for life. Okay, we lost 26-5. Josh went 1-2, though. That gives him a season batting average of .500! That's a bright note I guess. Anyway, I blame Kaly. We've lost 3 games this season, and 2 of those 3 Kaly's been present at. There can be no disputing it. 3:46 PM || I want to be a comment. Post me! Okay, does anyone care how Josh's Church League Softball Game went the other night? Unless someone does, I think we would rather leave that agony in the past. 11:35 AM || I want to be a comment. Post me! Wednesday, July 10, 2002 So I have a pot roast cooking right now. Aren't I spiffy? Yes, I actually do make something resembling effort when it comes to cooking sometimes. Especially when we have company. But that's all Kaly is, really -- a slave to help me cook and do dishes. :) No, but cooking is a strange thing for me in that sometimes I really like it and sometimes I really don't. I'll go through a period of a couple weeks where I want to try a new recipe every day, and then the next few weeks I won't feel like doing anything more than throwing frozen pizza or chicken pot pies in the oven. I must drive Josh crazy... 3:40 PM || I want to be a comment. Post me! Tuesday, July 09, 2002 Today is Happy Day because the new Counting Crows album is finally out! Next Happy Day: Spetmeber 24. I hope. Um, and I'm still waiting for new Tony Vincent (reportedly in the works but currently on hold) and, oooh, do I dare say it? I think I do. Maybe the whole reason it hasn't happened yet is because I've never posted anything about it on my blog. Yeah, that must be it. Dearest Roland Stephen, now that you know how awfully much I want new material from the likes of you (preferrably a full album, although a new song here and there -- or at least here (Shortstop) -- is at least something, and you did give us some lyrics on the new Newsboys album; I'd even settle for Steve-directed music videos, but just something, please!) What was I saying? Oh, yeah, so I want a new Steve Taylor album. Duh. And Matt: I promise I will write about Cornerstone tonight or tomorrow. One tidbit to chew on that you probably already know if you've read the bored at all lately: Mr. Australia himself was there. What a sneak. Monday, July 08, 2002 Yeah, and what's up with the comments system pooping out so much of the time lately? Like now. And wow, are my archives messed up in a major way.....we'll have to look into that. HA! I have successfully addicted Kaly to "Flake" and Safe and Sound." Who's next? 4:25 PM || I want to be a comment. Post me! Saturday, July 06, 2002 Another reminder: We will be at Cornerstone / Springfield, IL this weekend, with no internet access until latish Sunday night probably. A report from our Weeknd O' Fun will be forthcoming. [sidenote] Friday, July 05, 2002 I hate it when schedules lie. Okay, so maybe it wasn't technically a "schedule," but when you have a list of things going on at a certain stage on a certain day of Taste of Chicago, and it doesn't list specific times for each thing but it does say when the whole mess of things is starting, is it too much to expect that at least the things were listed in the order they were to occur (meaning, if everything was supposed to start at 3:00, the first thing on the list would start at 3:00)? Apparently so. So we took the train into the city yesterday, with the main purpose of seeing Indigo Girls perform for free at Taste of Chicago. We got there around 2pm, and the grass in front of the stage was already packed with people. We managed to find a pretty good spot and sat down (in the hot, hot, hot, beating sun, I might add -- 86 F with a dew point of a whopping 75, making for a 95 F heat index) for what we THOUGHT would be about an hour wait before the concert would start. WRRRONGGGG! First we sat through one concert. Then we sat through another. Finally, the Indigo Girls went on stage a little after 6pm. Now, we were not prepared for all this waiting in so many ways. We figured we'd be out of there no later than 4:30. We'd had a relatively early and somewhat light lunch, and weren't about to pay the exorbitant prices for all the food (and drink) at TofC. Plus, you can't just BUY food there, you have to first go to a ticket booth and buy tickets and then you buy stuff from the vendors with the tickets. They must do this in the hopes that people won't realize exactly how much they're spending on the food. We had brought a big insulated jug of ice water, but it was not quite enough for three of us sitting in the hot sun for four hours. We had not brought a blanket, so we were sitting directly on the grass, and the sweat on our legs was like adhesive for every little piece of dirt, cut grass, or dead bug on the ground. We had not brought anything to do to pass the time, and we were not really interested in any of the other artists performing, so we spent our time playing the dot game and hangman on whatever pieces of paper Kaly and I could find in our purses (and let me tell you, when you're that hot and miserable, you don't come up with very many original and challenging hangman puzzles). But mostly we were just bored. Bored and hot. Bored and hot and sweaty. And sunburned. By the end of the day, Josh and Kaly were both horribly sunburned on their arms and especially upper legs and knees. If everything had happened when it was supposed to, we only would have been sitting in the sun for an hour and then standing for another hour (where legs especially tend to be more shaded), rather than four hours sitting and one standing). I, however, am eternally paranoid and so had slathered sunscreen all over my whole body, not just my face, ears, and neck. They (Kaly and Josh) hurt now. The other problem with having to stay so late was that we didn't have time to get supper AT ALL even after the concert, becasue we had to catch the train to get to Evanston in time to walk to the lake and watch the fireworks. As it was we barely got there in time for that (I had forgotten exactly how long the el can take to get you from one place to another). Then afterwards everything was closed, since it was after 10pm AND a holiday. Basically we got home around midnight and hadn't had supper yet. Yeah. It was all fun, though. Really. Sort of. :P Wednesday, July 03, 2002 1. I have a theory... ...that George's posting to his blog and posting messages to the bannerbored are inversely proportional. I am right, no? 2. I must say Happy Birthday to Kaly: 3. Josh's Church League Softball Update. 4. Why do people not watch The Mole? 5. We finally bought the UHF DVD last night. 6. The forecast says it's supposed to be 78 tomorrow. Monday, July 01, 2002 This weekend I had my two best first-halves ever at disc golf and bowling. First, disc golf. On the front nine I was +5. A typical score for me for all 18 holes is about +16. Unfortunately, I choked a little on the back nine (on which I typically do a little better than the front, even) and ended up +13, still almost good enough to tie my record of +12. But the point is that I totally should have been able to hit +10, or maybe even break it. Bummer. Now bowling. Okay, I used to be pretty good at this, even though I never did it all that often. I don't know what-kind-of-score good, but I wasn't bad. I remember getting strikes and spares, anyway. Not "often," but at least enough that I remember them. So the last several times I've gone I've really stunk up the place. The first time this past Saturday night was no exception. I bowled a 62. Yes, 62. I was so disgusted in myself I insisted we bowl another game. Unfortunately, our balls kept getting stuck in the back somewhere and the, um, bowling alley guy had to keep running back there and un-sticking them. All this took so much extra time that we only had time to bowl half a game (5 frames) before the place closed. In that first half I managed a 53, almost as much as my entire first game. Again, bummer. Although it probably just saved me the humiliation of ending up with a 70 or something... |
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Disc-shaped music. [updated: 9.8.05] |