Jag Är På Väg Till Sverige

So I'm on my way to Sweden. Not sure what to expect. I hear the group is small, and the show is somewhat complete, so I'm going over to put a few finishing touches, learn some Swedish and maybe play some dölja och söka. All I really know is that the guy in charge is named Lars and that is already pretty awesome.

This is where I'll be teaching. Strängnäs. Read up on it.



You can see Strängnäs right in the middle there. Let's close-up shall we?



Hopefully I'll get a free day or afternoon and make my way over to Stockholm which looks like this...



I don't know what kind of access I'll have to the interweb over there so, you may or may not hear from me til next week. I plan on seeing lots of windmills, milkmaids & maybe a meatball or two. How ignorant is that!? Ha! See ya soon. Til then ... Så länge, adjö och ta hand om dina anhöriga!

...and there's always the off chance Laura may post on here, but let's not get too agog now.

Green Tongue/Blue Tongue

Banana Tree

Just trying something different

Again It's Green

Seemingly overnite, everything turned a bright shade of green. The Delaware Water Gap was covered this morning, and I swear it wasn't like that when I drove thru Monday.



Gotta pack now, do some laundry first. Maybe pick up a few things around the house.... I think I should leave early to pick up a guide book. I do have that birthday coupon from Borders. Borders is going out of business you know.



Quick rehearsal with Rxby, home for my favorite meal of late (tandoori chicken over basmati & naan & Sam Adams white ale) and I'm off tomorrow. For a week. Then things get crazy.

Cakes Of Funnel & Cup

Had an impromptu gathering in Jackson Sunday to celebrate mine & my father's birthday. I turned 31 on Saturday. He turns 59 today actually. 21,551 days to be exact. My mother grilled shish kabob style and then made two desserts. Cupcakes and funnel cakes. I think one was a backup for the other, but both made it into my belly.




Here is birthday boy #1 eating his favorite snack



And birthday boy #2 eating his favorite anything



Happy birthday Pops!

Hot Camp

Quick camp. It has never been so hot. Maybe because we were forced outside. Our kids were dropping on the precious gym floor. But it was a good time. I think partially because Laura came. She now understands my pain. Good stuff tho. Good kids. Some photos...







Ouch!



Highlight of the weekend. I got a birthday kiss from the toothless woman at the bar Saturday.



Don't be jealous.

11,324 Days

Birthday for me! I don't look happy up there, but I am. This is 31. I'm spending it at camp. Seems I'm there every year on my birthday. Most people's birthday moves around the week each year, Monday to Tuesday to Wednesday, etc you get the idea. But not mine. It's always on Saturday & I'm always here. How does that work? Don't matter. I think we should be more interested in celebrating milestones like 1,000 days or 10,000 days. That sounds huge. I missed both of those, but you better believe I got my 15,000 marked on the calendar. May 19th in the year 2019, clear you datebooks cuz the party's at my place!

Find out how many days you've been alive.

Some birthday wisdom? Let's see....

• never have better things to do
• don't listen to the radio
• take time to watch more birds
• invent new words
• get lost
  
• always make the brownies
• slow down

That's all I got. See ya later.

Laura Shows A Bell

Have a nice night.

This Is Sand

New website for wasting time! Check it out. I did one.


Not bad. You can see I really hit my stride at the end there.

Christmas Burns

Man those puppies burn right up. I tried to plant it but it died.



We waited too long. Try again next year.

A Childhood Hero Dies Today

Yes, that's Billy Corgan, mastermind behind such albums as Adore, Gish, Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness and personal top 5 album of all time, Siamese Dream, promoting what seems to be, well, a professional wrestling competition. Not only is he speaking the lyrics from Bullet With Butterfly Wings, the song previously known for Jimmy Chamberlains sick drum fills & its post-apocalyptic video, but he's using them to promote what I consider to be one of the largest gathering of idiots this world has ever seen, all the while pretending to be Eminem.

Oh Billy. When a star falls, it falls hard.

Memorial Or Graffiti?

Dwight Gooden attended a game at Citi Field last week and was urged by an employee within the Ebbets Club to sign a large grey blank wall. He did. What a great idea, to start a makeshift memorial that could be added to as Mets players of old can come back to visit the park and make their way up to the Ebbets Club to add their signature to the soon to be infamous wall. What a way to honor your teams history.

Apparently not.

"It's a brand new building, whether it's Doc or any other player, it wasn't meant to write all over the walls. We are going to do things to celebrate our history, but this wasn't the right way to get that started. If we allow this precedent, people will be writing all over the stadium. It's going to be erased." - Jay Horwitz (Mets VP of Media Relations)

Riiiiiiiight. Gosh, if we let Doc Gooden write on the walls then it will just be mayhem won't it. Everyone will come into Citi Field just high on sharpie fumes ready to do some real damage. In fact, we better not let Mookie Wilson on the field anymore because, well then everyone will just wanna get out there won't they. It'll be Armageddon. Also, please wipe your feet before entering CitiField. And for God's sake, haven't you ever heard of a coaster?

"One of the guys that worked there asked me to sign one of the walls, so I did it. It wasn't like I was walking around with a sharpie in my pocket. They asked me to sign the wall as a favor, as something for the fans to see. I was in there watching batting practice and they had fans taking pictures with me by my signature and I thought it was a fun idea." - Doc Gooden

After much hoopla and backlash from the fans that hit a high on sports radio, Horwitz caved and announced that the wall will still be removed, but placed behind plexiglass and relocated within the stadium where at least all fans can see it. Way to fold. You're a real Met now.

But the damage has been done.

"...when things like this happen, it makes me feel like maybe the Mets don't want me around. Maybe I shouldn't be, I don't know." - Gooden

Nice.

Oh and PS, Mets just got swept by the Cardinals in the most embarrassing series that I've seen since I started watching them again back in 2007. I probably won't feel the need to tune in much for this next homestand, even if it is against the Nationals. What's the point?

Proud Tent Owners

We are planning on hiking the Appalachian trail this summer. The whole thing!!

Building & Breaking

It's foggy today. Like eerie fog. I like it.



Got an interesting couple of weeks coming up. Cadets camp this weekend. Laura is coming down with me on Friday night and staying til Saturday morning. Always fun when she gets to come around and see everyone, meet some new people, put faces with names. That sorta thing. Plus at least we'll be able to have breakfast together on my birthday before she has to head off to work.



We finally used our Lowes & Home Depot gift cards yesterday. Mainly, we bought wood & chicken wire. Now we have to build that vegetable garden. Hopefully it doesn't come out too awful. As long as she's able to grow some stuff in there this summer, I'm sure we'll figure it out as we go. Plus Laura bought a lot of seeds.




Unfortunately we won't be able to get that going til I 2nd week of May or so. I will be teaching Strängnäs, a drum corp in Sweden. I am excited about going over, but it's bitter-sweet, cuz it's just me, and that's a place I'm sure we'd have a great time exploring. Maybe someday.



Laura broke her phone when she dropped it in the pool the other day. Ha. She was upset, but luckily Christina has like 17 extra Verizon phones and she's gonna send 'em up sooooo, Thanks Christina.

Riding With Cat Killers

I had heard rumblings from the Braddocks at WGI, something about this girl Allison I used to teach back in 2001 & 2002 and worked with more recently down in Boca. Apparently there was a rumor going around that she was in jail. Allison was always a sweet, well-mannered girl, so I thought it was some kind of inside joke or they were speaking in codes as they're known to do. But just the other day I received this article in my inbox, and I was stunned.



Apparently Allison had fled her apartment and left her two cats behind. Long story short, two long and foodless months later the police break in a find a grim scene... in their words...

"...her cats clawed up the apartment in a frantic search for food as they starved for up to a month before they died. The corpses then rotted in the filthy apartment about a month before an apartment manager found them."

Allison. Really?

I read on to find that each count of felony cruelty to animals carries up to five years in prison.

Here's the last time I saw Allison back in January 2008. She drove me from Boca to Braddock.



Looks like we were having fun. This is just further proof that everyone in Florida is bonkers. Everyone.

Reggie & Flynn

We have ducks. This here lady is Reggie & Flynn is the drake. We named 'em, yeah. What else we got to do out here in the woods?



Sorry about the sketchy photo. We couldn't get too close or they'd fly away (which they did) and it was dusk. Deal. We could have kept it a secret altogether but that wouldn't be very nice now would it?

Detailed Planning

The Vegetable Garden


The Front Yard


I defy you to find any landscaper who could draw up more detailed and thorough sketches. And to scale!

These rule!

Moving Mountains

...one rock at a time.

With the nice weather upon us and in hopes to jump start some more conversations as to our redesign of the yard this summer, we got out there yesterday morning and started some actual work. First we mapped out where we're thinking of putting an enclosed vegetable garden and Laura actually broke ground.



I brought in the backhoe to clear some land.



Ha! I kid. That's not my backhoe. But we do want to blaze a new path from the driveway to the house so that we can have a bigger, less interrupted front lawn, so I decided that I should at least clear the area in question as to possibly give us a clearer understanding of just what we're dealing with. So I spent most of the day moving giant boulders from here...



...to here...



[sigh]

This blog has officially hit an all time low.

Gary's OK With Me

I spent like 15 years hating Gary Sheffield, thinking he was just another bitter player who could never keep his mouth shut and never put up when it counted. But then tonight happened, and it wasn't so much that he finally hit his 500th homerun (I think only 25 other players have reached 500, it's a pretty big deal) after being dropped by the Tigers and going like 0 for 10 already this season, but it's the way the his usual head-down jog was replaced by a genuinely brisk jaunt of elation. The cherry on the top was how he was greeted by the team after rounding the bases. It seems the Mets have really accepted this "bad apple" vet and it, again, was a moment of genuine happiness as each player exchanged what seemed like pretty meaningful hugs and high fives for a minute or two before Sheff, who oddly enough is usually fairly humble about his on field play, took a curtain call and thanked the NY crowd.


Wow.

So now I like Gary. I just hope that's not the only reason he took the bench position to begin with and is planning on checking out for the remainder of the season. Then I'll just go back to hating the dude.

Well Hey Willie

Awww. Letting bygones.

Ninja Cat

Sneaky bugger

Where's Inbetween?

It's been quite cold here, sleeping with layered blankets, considering running the fire at night, that kinda chilly still. Now I'm sweating. Sweating all day yesterday, sweating while I try to sleep. Where's the inbetween? It better not be summer already here. We better get a spring!

And because I have nothing more to say this morning, here's some photos we've taken lately. Another photo round-up folks. Woo-hoo!

Thing Sniffing


Do You Know There's A Skeleton Behind You?


Nobody Move....


The Possibilities Are Ending


Mountain Joy


Purposes Unintended


Haunting In 5th Avenue


We Didn't Feel Anything


Swamp Leap


Sun (At The Tip Of My Nose)


Eyeing Tendrils


Why Do These Things Happen?


A Lovely Lake, An Evil Tree


Beard Details


Pennsylvanian Gothic


Find Five Cats