News came over the night of the third that a punk rock acquaintance of my youth was killed in a fight at his band’s Orange County practice space. He’d literally flown in the day before, after a couple weeks where he grew up, and I spent those weeks facebookariously enjoying him touching base, including a visit to another punk rock pal’s grave.
So I’m a bit down.
Went to the Orioles at M’s last night with Ken and Mary.
It was former Rakuten Eagle pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma’s first start in the US majors.
There were several other folks wearing Eagles caps and or jerseys, which I was happy to see. Stupidly, I neglected to get any contact info to follow up on NPB stuff in the region.
M’s won, 6-3.
Kleptones looks at some of the tangled threads that led to Graceland.
Hit play on that embedded mix link, hells yeah.
first porch-settin’ day since we got back from California.
My hip started hurting like crazy after getting stuck in a non-moving line for Space Mountain at Disneyland. This morning was the first day in a couple of weeks there was no pain at rising.
Last night Viv and I had dinner with Manuel and his girlfriend at Bizarro; it has been too long since I ate at that place. Pleasant evening.
We got back from California last Friday. That trip disrupted my run schedule and that plus my hip pain had me wondering if I was going to be able to keep up with my plan. As it turned out, I was able to meet my weekly run budget with several days to spare.
This week the rough distance budget is 24 miles; I turned in six this morning and will shoot for seven tomorrow. I don’t think I will try to push the weekly mileage too much further; going over 30 starts requiring too much clock time over a week. I guess the next steps past that are shifting some amount of the miles to road runs and starting to pay more attention to diet.
I harvested the first of two artichokes yesterday; I would prefer to serve both together but the larger one was starting to open up a bit and the smaller looks to have about another three inches of growth potential left. So possibly we will be splitting the choke.
It’s not quite warm and sunny enough for hammocks in the yard, but that should be right around the corner.
About two years after getting it, I have finally started hacking my way through the relatively recent edition of the Twain autobio. He’s as charming and self-regarding a rogue as ever. Which makes him good company, especially as mediated by a century and print.
My buddy Manuel is in Philly for a wedding and in about 45 minutes of of Google and Skype we tracked down the memorial and likely burial marker for my earliest American ancestor, the Reverend Doctor Caspar Dietrich Weiberg.
Weiberg came to the colonies around 1760 and sometime not too long after came to lead what is now known as the Old First German Reformed Church of Philadelphia. During the Revolutionary War he was jailed by the British and the congregation’s newish church conscripted for functions variously recorded as a hospital or stables. The church building still stands and Manuel will be paying a call in the morning.
Go to look up prices on iPods for the first time in years, and naturally I pick the one annual 4 hour window in which Apple downs the store.
Just saw a parked Google Maps car from the freeway, camera mast wrapped for inaction.
Viv called before the bartender at Kells deigned to take notice of me, which proved one random conversation about contacts and glasses to my benefit.
The smells of a dense urban center make me sooo much happier than the smells of the bucolic countryside.
In the bathroom of the Westlake Plaza parking level, a music track played which sampled Denzel Washington as Malcolm X, telling me of the nature and form of revolution. Something seemed off.