August 29th, 2008 by Laura
Johnathan and I have been terribly lax with writing lately, and my only excuse is really that life has been happening. We realized that in less than a month, we’re getting married. The last few weeks has been a mass of calling family and arranging for hotels and figuring out when people will arrive and what they’ll do and where they’ll stay, and… a lot of things. My family is all coming in from out of town, so that’s been a minor headache. Honestly, though, in comparison to what a large wedding bash would have been, this is still low-key. Figuring out who is getting here on what day is incredibly minor, and I’m not stressing about it anymore since it’s pretty well all sorted. The low-stress wedding is going to go as planned, I feel very confident.
At 11AM on the 23rd of September, we’re going down to the local courthouse and getting married in a succinct civil ceremony while all of our parents and my best friend look on. We’re going to go to lunch at a nifty Italian restaurant afterward, then out to a bed and breakfast in the boonies (incidentally, it’s the one we got engaged at over a year ago). We’ll be at the bed and breakfast for two nights, which will be very lovely, and I’m looking forward to it a lot. Then it’s back home for some packing.
Why packing? Because as of October 1, our lease at our brand new apartment begins! We’ll be painting soon, which I’m very excited about, and then we’ll start officially moving in about mid-September. This place is a little bit smaller than where we’re at now, but in a good way, as far as I’m concerned. There will be less dead space in the room and since there will be less space overall, we’ll have to keep things a little bit neater. We’re both notorious clutterbugs, though I’d wager I’m a little bit worse than Johnathan is.
Fall is just around the corner, and I couldn’t be more excited about the prospect of things. Life is pretty good! I love this time of year so much, and a lot is happening for us. Hopefully 2008 will continue and finish out on a high note where it came in on a low one.
August 7th, 2008 by Laura
I remember discovering Josh Groban in 2003. I bought the CD (when I probably shouldn’t have) out of the meager funds in my bank account during my last year of high school. I listened to the CD, enraptured by the lovely sounds that the boom box circa probably 1994 was playing out to me on the windowseat. I remember the day was very sunny and that I was supposed to be doing homework but was reading an L.M. Montgomery book on the windowseat that my dad had built for me, listening to this new CD which was at best contraband in my house. (Any new purchases were scrutinized for appropriateness, and while I had no doubt this would have been approved - after all, I had been given Cecelia Bartoli just a few months earlier with not a single qualm - my bank account would then have been scrutinized and found wanting.) I remember very little about the book I was reading, but I remember clearly my awe at this young man’s voice. In 2003, he would have been twenty-two years old, and at seventeen, I was still aware that meant he wasn’t very old. The album was released in 2001 when he was just nineteen years old. (Don’t you just love birthdays?) I remember that day so clearly, and I remember how my affection for the music, less than half of which was actually in English, grew and grew through the coming months.
It was the start of a fandom for me that I thought would last forever. My mom was a fan of George Michael and Billy Joel even still. She had liked them for upwards of twenty years at that point, and I thought that would be me. My mom became a fan of Josh Groban as well and we anxiously awaited the release of his next album, Closer, which we ordered so that it would arrive on release day. We joined his fan club and were lucky enough to receive a signed calendar (one of only 250!) for being quick to register for it. We got excellent seats for the third concert in his very first tour and loved every second of it. I remembered being enraptured for two hours while his lovely voice floated through the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, that January in 2004. It was heaven, to be honest, at that point.
Then things started going downhill. It is inevitable on the internet that when there is a large group of people, even if they are united by a similar interest, there will be conflict. My mom and I became the brunt of some of this conflict for daring to have a separate website for planning get-togethers for the Portland-area fans. How dare we subvert all that the fanclub and official sites are for! We were supposed to dig through hundreds (sometimes thousands) of threads to find the one that we had started for the purpose of our planning rather than having an easy place to locate the ones we wanted. That was where it started to go downhill when it came to participating with other fans.
My own enjoyment of Josh Groban’s music started to fail around the time that he came to Portland again. Instead of performing in a beatuiful, semi-intimate concert hall, he was in an amphitheater. It was large and noisy, which was uncomfortable to start with. Then it was compounded for me when he began singing. The lovely, beautiful tones that I’d fallen in love with were replaced by a strained, sick sounding voice which was coming straight through his slightly-stuffed nose. It wasn’t an enjoyable aural experience for me, and as subsequent albums came out, particularly the live ones, I found that it simply didn’t get any better. Josh Groban’s lovely technique and sound are gone. I couldn’t say why, but it makes me incredibly sad to behold.
I haven’t pursued any of his newer music. After hearing some of the music on his followup to Closer in 2006 (called Awake), I was unimpressed. It sounded like the same thing that he had done on his first album, but with less quality and soul involved. Having recently picked up Pandora’s radio for enjoyment, I decided to put him on my list of preferred artists, just to see if perhaps hearing the newer music would renew an interest in his singing once again. Sadly, I’ve found that isn’t the case. His voice sounds worse, and his technique is flawed at best. I don’t profess to be the be-all-end-all of classical singing, but as far as I am concerned, if one is going to sing classical (or even classical sounding) music, one should at least attempt to employ a technique that sounds vaguely like the real thing.
What was once beautiful to me is now forced and dishonest. Josh Groban continues to be a cash cow for David Foster, racking up money for charity after charity from “Grobanites” who are willing to go deep into debt to follow him around the country and see him as closely as possible. For me, I think this fandom is officially dead, without any hope of renewal, and it’s time to say farewell to something that I once enjoyed so intensely. It’s sad to see a fandom officially die, but it seems like it’s just that time.
Goodbye, fandom. It was nice while it lasted.
July 12th, 2008 by Laura
Last night, Johnathan and I went to the Beachland Ballroom to see Jonathan Coulton live. We got there early enough to see the “opening” act, which I can say now is more like a co-headliner who I hadn’t actually given a listen yet. I’d heard that Paul and Storm were enjoyable for those who’ve heard Jonathan Coulton’s music and liked it.
I have to say, it’s hard not to like a couple of guys who start their set with a song called “Opening Band.” There’s a particular line in the song that goes And sad to say, as of today, no panties have been thrown. Well, it’s clear this is a recurring event because when someone threw something just as that line finished, they stopped in perfect unison and looked at the item. I was expecting it to be panties, because that would be appropriate to the lyric, and I’m pretty sure they were, too. They (and we by proxy) discovered that, lo! This was not a pair of panties, but a beanie animal toy that looked like a cross between a rat and a cat. The tag declared, apprently, that it was a scrat. The scrat stayed on the middle microphone for much of the rest of the evening, even after Jonathan Coulton came out to do his set. It was pretty funny. Actually, our audience was engaged and entertaining as well as being entertained. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a crowd that animated, and it made the whole evening a joy. I’m pretty sure the guys on stage were enjoying us, too.
After that, they did a song that was a knock-off of schoolhouse rock themes, a song about chicken nuggets (sort of), a song about boxing nuns, some imitations, a lewd song about a sea captain’s wife, and a song in the style of Jonathan Coulton, which was written as part of a “Song Fu” competition. I really enjoyed their set and was genuinely sad to see them leave the stage until I remembered that I got to have more geeky fun after that. It wasn’t the last we saw of them, either.
Jonathan Coulton started his set with a song called “The Future Soon,” which could go either way for me. It was both amusing and sad in its sentiment, maybe because I remember feelings like that all too well, and I’m a freaking bleeding heart about everything. He then sang the Ikea song (always funny) and Shop Vac (love it!). After that was Skullcrusher Mountain, which I had never heard before (I know, shame on me!), and I really enjoyed it. Paul and Storm joined him onstage after that to sing Tom Cruise Crazy (funnnyyyyy), Code Monkey (yay!), Soft Rocked by Me (not one of my favorites, but still enjoyable), Birdhouse in Your Soul (never heard it, and couldn’t exactly figure it out…), Creepy Doll (much better live), I Feel Fantastic (very amusing - I hadn’t heard it before), and then Paul and Storm left the stage and oh. “Mr. Fancy Pants” came next. He didn’t sing it straight through, which is probably for the better, because it is a fairly short song. He had a crazy-looking instrument onto which I assume one can record bits of sound. He started a repeating beat, then sang the first verse and chorus, then started riffing on it with some of the sounds. At some point in there, we heard a song that was actually not Fancy Pants. “Never gonna give…” OH MY GOD. We got Rickrolled by Jonathan Coulton. Yup. It was hilarious and also monumentally lame at the same time. Which made it more awesome. We did move on, and he sang a song about a giant squid who crushes everything he loves named, aptly, “I Crush Everything.” Then it was Mandelbrot Set (which made very little sense to me - hey, I’m just being honest), You Ruined Everything (which I never actually listened to past the first occurrence of the line “You Ruined Everything”. It’s a very sweet song when the actual meaning is explained), and we ended up with the ever-popular Re: Your Brains. I love that one, and hey, audience participation for the win! We got to sound like zombies!
After much persistent stomping and clapping, we did get them to come back out, and they did two more songs together: First of May (which was so hilarious) and Sweet Caroline (with stil more audience participation).
It was a really good night. If my head hadn’t been pounding because I’ve been without glasses for over a week now, I would have liked to have stayed and met the guys and maybe had some things signed. Johnathan got hit in the leg with Jonathan Coulton’s guitar pick (which, incidentally, has an illustration of his face on it), so we kept that as a souvenir, and I’m going to make him either take a picture of it or scan it and post it up here later. Really, it was a good night, and I hope that we can go and do more things like that. (And maybe demand that they come back this way sooner rather than later.)
If you haven’t already, check out Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm.
July 3rd, 2008 by Laura
I think Beethoven and Pixel have reached an understanding if nothing else.
July 1st, 2008 by Laura
For a long time now, I’ve been using “out of the box” wordpress themes because I’m not familiar enough with CSS to be able to get it to do what I want (yet) and I haven’t frankly had the patience for it. I found what I thought was a great resource for wordpress themes in the website BlogohBlog (would link but that would be like advertising), from which I’ve gotten three or four themes, all of which made both Johnathan and me happy in terms of scheme, layout and utility. The current theme is from there as well. I browsed over there only to find out that that his adsense account had been suspended because he was including his adsense information in his free themes. Well, that’s not very nice - he’s piggybacking off of any traffic information from any sites that use his free themes, and since this one uses one of his as does The Golden Road, another of my blogs, and I know of a couple of other sites that friends use which use his themes. I understand that these themes are free, but gleaning our traffic stats as part of his stats is just not cool. This is particularly annoying since I discovered that one of the feed links on the site was a direct link to his site’s feed - very misleading to the newbie blogger or feed user.
I will be changing the theme here and at TGR as well as encouraging anyone I know who uses these themes to change as soon as possible. I didn’t agree to boost his stats, and even though he won’t be doing that in the future (his promise to Google in exchange for a new adsense account), it’s the principle which infuriates me. He’s taking advantage of bloggers who don’t necessarily know any better. That is not okay with me. I’m going to be shopping for new themes as soon as I get home today.
I am not willing to support someone who is willing to take advantage of those who are less web-savvy in the name of statistics and money.
July 1st, 2008 by Johnathan
I’m not sure this is what they meant when they said “Park diagonally.”
The young man in the striped shirt swears he was traveling at 10 miles per hour.
This is why I bring my camera to work with me.
June 28th, 2008 by Johnathan
Over the last seven months or so of taking public transportation on an almost daily basis, I’ve gotten quite the list of annoyances. Here they are, my 8 commandments of public transportation. I have a feeling this will grow over time, but this is it for now.
1. Don’t occupy more than one seat.
If you have a bag, hold it on your lap or out it under your seat. Don’t put it on the seat next to you. Don’t be the guy who takes the outside seat on the train or bus and refuses to scoot over so someone else can sit down. If you are so incredibly large in the behind that you absolutely must take two seats, fine. Just promise me you will work with your doctor to lose some weight. Now.
2. Let people off before you try to get on.
I know we all get in a rush when we are commuting but for the safety and sanity of all those involved wait until everyone vacates the train or bus (or elevator) before you try to board. People may be trying to make a connection somewhere and your instance on shoving into the vehicle might be the last little thing that makes them late. Your bus or train won’t leave without you (usually). Plus, if you’re shoving your way through you’re slowing everyone down and the vehicle will spend longer at this stop than necessary because of you.
3. Don’t smell.
Anyone who has a job that doesn’t require them to be at a desk 100% of the time is going to work up a little bit of natural odor during the day. It happens. But if you smell like you haven’t showered in a week that is not okay. Maybe you took a shower this morning but your jacket hasn’t been washed since 1992 and you are a heavy smoker. That is also not okay. Heavy perfume or cologne? Not okay. It can make people gag.. Worst of all, if you smell like poop, expect to be thrown off the bus into a river. After being sprayed down with Lysol.
4. Use the back door to exit.
If your bus has two doors use the back door to leave because that’s what its there for. Using the front door to exit delays the people who are getting on and trying to pay their fare because they can’t board until you’re off the bus and that holds up the rest of us. Two reasonable exceptions are if you’re sitting in the priority seating at the front or if you have a bike in the rack on the front of the bus.
5. Don’t smoke at bus stops and train stations.
Here in Ohio this is state law. Depending on your city or state this may be transit system policy or state or local law. The signs that say “no smoking” apply to everyone. Yes, even you. No, just because its an outdoor place does not make it okay. Its rude. Stop it.
6. Don’t strike up a conversation just to deliver a sales pitch.
There is a young woman on my train that every morning and afternoon will strike up a conversation with the person next to them, sound interested in what they have to say, and then try to sell them weight loss supplements, energy drinks, and vitamins. She got me with this once. I made the mistake of thinking she was actually interested in talking to me, or even being flirtatious so I engaged in her conversation. Next thing I know I’m getting emails at work asking me when my wife (!) and I wanted to meet with her to go over her products with her. A few days ago she started talking to me again, but this time about babysitting her little brother when she was 12. Don’t be creepy like this! If you want to talk to someone that’s fine. But don’t pitch to them and stop talking if they look disinterested. This rule also applies to pyramid schemes and panhandling, through most panhandlers in Cleveland are also subject to rule three.
7. Stop noise pollution.
Your cell phone plays music? Awesome. Get headphones. You got a new ringtone? Cool. Test it out when you’re not in a metal box with a few dozen other people. A while back I was lightly napping on the bus and got jarred awake by “Dat dat dat dah dah, dat dat dat dat dah dah…” (also known as the Sonic The Hedgehog theme music). While I have to give the guy points for being nerdy enough to have this on his phone, I was over it when thePac Man and Dig Dug music started playing.
8. Control your children
Sometimes kids throw tantrums or are cranky. It happens. But if your child is running up and down the aisle of the bus or train screaming while you swear loudly at them from your seat and do nothing to actually control them you have earned yourself a spot on my “you suck” list. Seriously, the behavior of your child reflects on you whether you like it or not.
June 26th, 2008 by Laura
It’s so sad to watch old movies like Singin’ in the Rain and think about the actors and actresses who were in them.
Gene Kelly was in so many good movies (and not-so-good movies) and has an undenyable talent as well as a great deal of charm. He died in 1996 from complications from two strokes. He was 84.
Donald O’Connor was also a fixture of the 40’s and 50’s musicals. He died in 2003 from heart failure at the age of 78.
Jean Hagen, who is most well-known for playing Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain, died in 1977 from throat cancer. She was 54.
Millard Mitchell, who played R.F. Simpson, died in 1953 from lung cancer. He was 50 years old.
Douglas Fowley, who played the over-exuberant director in the movie, died in 1998 at the age of 87.
Cyd Charisse, whose legs are not only gorgeous but iconic, died on June 17 at the age of 81 from complications from a heart attack.
From this one movie, four of the actors playing main (and memorable) roles have since died. It feels like we’re losing legends of the screen, and our only way to keep remembering them is to keep watching the movies and seeing the interviews that they gave.
I, for one, was sad to find out that Cyd Charisse died this year, but was even more sad when I decided to investigate the health and well-being of her former co-stars for the first time. The only two who remain alive and well whose credits are significant are Debbie Reynolds and Rita Moreno (who played Zelda Zanders). It was a sad thing to realize that most of the cast of one of my favorite movies have died. I know this is the way that life goes, but it’s still a hard realization.
I guess all there is left to be said is: May they all rest in peace.
June 13th, 2008 by Laura
After stopping classes last year so that I could work full time in order to save up for my move, I am now pursuing school once again. This job will be a good one for it as it has a fairly steady schedule, even though it’s during the time that most on-campus classes would be.
Every time I go through the process of getting “into” a school, I’m reminded by just how much it sucks. There is no more eloquent way to articulate it: it sucks. First, there’s filling out the FAFSA, which is an adventure all on its own. Mine took me several disjointed times to finally get it all filled out, and even still, I have to wait for my mom to get back from her latest cruise before I can do anything further with it.
FAFSA, actually, is entirely silly. If I were to wait until the spring term, I would be able to file on my own, without needing any parental information. The reason being that I would be nearing 24, and would also be married. Somehow, these things make a huge difference in my independence, despite the fact that my parents will not be able to claim me as a dependent this year and indeed will not be sponsoring, cosigning or otherwise helping me out with my loans in any way. It’s a silly kind of rule, but in order for me to start school in the fall rather than waiting until the spring, I still need information from my mom. I was able to get the appropriate information, and now all I need is an electronic signature, which will just have to wait. It’s nice to know that’s done, though.
The next item on the list of Things To Do is to figure out which community college I’ll attend. We’re in the county for one of them, but it has a difficult website to navigate and I found it very frustrating. I also could find almost no online classes, which is a big problem for me, since I won’t be able to attend on campus unless it’s a once-a-week class. The other is out of county for me, but has ample online classes, including language classes. I know there will be times that I’ll have to go to the campus, for exams and such (at least that’s how it worked for the classes I took online in Oregon), but if there’s a window that includes Wednesday or Thursday (which my days off seem to alternate between), then I’ll be able to get down and take an exam at the college and still be able to work full time like I’m doing.
I’m excited for the prospect of getting back to school, especially now that I have a better idea of what I’d like to do “when I grow up.” I’m getting six or seven architecture books from someone who is studying architecture so I’ll see if maybe architecture would be a good career path for me. I’d like to take some culinary courses to see if perhaps a career in food is for me. Whether I study architecture, music or food, though, I’m bound to find some class or another that will be relevant to my ultimate pursuance of said career.
I guess, to put it bluntly, I’m going back to school, and darn it, I’m excited about it!
June 10th, 2008 by Laura
June is here, and that means a few things for me. First of all, my birthday is this month. I’ll be the ripe old age of 23 in a couple of weeks. I’m not really overly excited about it as it’s just another birthday, but I enjoy celebrating it even still. My birthday has always been a good holiday type day for me. I’ll be at work that day, but hopefully it won’t be bad. Johnathan and I are planning to go out to dinner somewhere, but I haven’t figured out where yet. We wanted, originally, to go to The Melting Pot, but given our current finances, that’s a bit out of our price range. I’d like to go somewhere we haven’t been, though, so I’m going to do a little research to find out what’s good around here and what would be a unique experience for my birthday. If anyone around the Cleveland area has any suggestions, I’d be glad to hear them!
June also means that summer is here. It’s summertime, whoo! It means that we’ve been alternating between (or coping simultaneously with) thunderstorms and 90+ degree weather. The humidity some of the days in the last week has been unbelievable. It’s a marked difference, however, from what I was dealing with this past winter, when it came to figuring out how to survive the cold and still have skin that felt human. My skin feels quite normal again and it’s wonderful. I think I’m going to have to decide through the course of the summer, though, whether it’s worth the heat to have the beautiful feeling skin.
Another glorious thing that June has brought to us is the opening of the apartment complex pool. We went for a swim on Sunday and it was wonderful. I was very tired after we got out of the water (likely a side-effect of my treading water - gently - for an hour or so), but my skin felt wonderful, my muscles felt wonderful and I felt that I was exactly in my element. I think, had the pool been a bit less packed, I would have been willing to spend more time in the water. Unfortunately, there were boisterous children and even more boisterous twenty-somethings hanging out about the pool which made it difficult to have peaceful enjoyment. We were constantly getting splashed by a thrashing child or nearly getting hit with a football because the twenty-something guys decided to throw one around, in and out of the pool. However, the pool being open will provide us with some opportunities for low-impact exercise and relief from the heat. It’s also given my skin some color, as we were out in nearly direct sunlight for that hour, in the water. Despite the 55 SPF sunscreen, I did get a little bit of color. I don’t look quite as sallow as I have all winter! 
June also means that we’re starting the apartment hunting process. Our lease is up in a couple of months, so we’ve decided it’s time to move. We’ve already looked at one place and put feelers out at a few others, so we should hopefully be able to narrow down our options by the end of June or early/mid July. I’m excited to look at these places. They’re all going to be easier on our budget, and hopefully we can find one that better suits our immediate needs. I’m getting pretty excited about the move, even though it’s still a couple of months away. It will be a place that we’re able to pick together, rather than the current place we’re in, which was where we ended up out of convenience more than anything else.
At any rate, I’m happy that June is here. Summer isn’t my favorite season, but I’m glad it’s here. The trees are green, the roads are mostly drivable and I’ll be spending more time out-of-doors than I did through the winter.
