Rock & Roll Mom vs. The Slacker Nannies

As much as I write (and write and write and write) about The Replacements and Paul Westerberg, I guess one would think I should be writing this on my music blog instead, but I thought I’d write about it over here because it’s not about music and I thought some of you (especially you moms) would dig reading this tale.

Former leader of Zuzu’s Petals, Laurie Lindeen (also known as Mrs. Paul Westerberg) has a blog and recently wrote a funny, yet poignant and kind of pitiful, take on her experience being put in the unwanted position recently of a “nanny narc”. It’s a good read, go check it out (and down with slacker nannies everywhere!).

Westerberg Fans – Got 49 Cents?

Got 49 cents?  Get the latest Paul Westerberg album, just COMPLETED last week.

Yes, I said COMPLETED.  Read about it here:

LA Times: One Paul Westerberg Album, 49 Cents

And go buy it and download it here:

Amazon link

Enjoy.

(BIG thanks to vivalalesley for the heads up!)

Meeting Old New Friends & Once Upon a Time

Woo!  I finally got the opportunity today to meet yet another person I’ve “known” online for somewhere around 13-15 years, another of the Hoodoo Gurus faithful (and ‘Mats fan, she’s a Replacements fan too) from way back when in the original early days of the congregation of fans around the world online.  Nese is from Texas and had trekked up here for the weekend for the big Webb Wilder shindig in Knoxville and was coming thru here on the way back, so I met her downtown at the Hard Rock on Beale Street and we had a fine afternoon lunching and visiting… and what awesome weather, couldn’t have picked a better day.  And naturally, she is awesome.  So woohoo!

I gotta say it was awfully weird hanging out downtown though.  Once upon a time I spent a significant amount of spare time in downtown Memphis, especially hanging around Beale and the riverfront on the nicer weekends, and the last several years I am almost never down there.  So much has changed… and I don’t know that I’d really say for the better.  To me it looks kind of just dressed up to look prettier.

My love-hate relationship with this town continues.  Strange, I don’t even really remember when I used to just love it, though I know once upon a time I did.

I Got One Sometimes Too

Arrrgh. Just Arrgh.

ARRRGH. I know everyone that still bothers to read here is tired of reading me griping. I’M tired of reading me griping. It’s probably going to last a little longer, though. All of this post-wreck car stuff and insurance stuff has turned my brain to mush, and I can just barely deal with blogging right now, I’m so whacked out. I just want to go stand somewhere and scream for about ten hours, and this is one of those times it would be nice to live more conveniently to Hooterville so I could go stand in Newscoma’s corn field or whatever the hell kind of field it is she has up there that’s so good for standing and screaming in, and I would do it.

It has really just been one thing after another over and over, and I’m tired of it. I was actually pretty satisfied – not only satisfied but very happy – with my insurance company until I learned yesterday that my rental car coverage is now over. I wouldn’t be so annoyed, except for the fact I asked at least twice, if not three times, about the timeframe of that. So now, not only have they left me hanging when I have plans for the weekend, but BECAUSE I had asked about the timeframe and thought they were covering that longer, guess what? I hadn’t really even seriously looked at replacement vehicles yet because we thought there was still plenty of time to do so! So now I’m stuck, in a major crunch, and pissed.

I think it’s all going to work out eventually but that just made things a much bigger pain than they already were, and it’s just been one thing after another and every little thing and I’m just, like, enough already. Tired of it. And there’s plenty of other things upsetting my little apple cart of life besides this car stuff right now, so I’m just really unhappy with a ton of stuff right now. But I will be SO glad when there is just SOME resolution, whatever it’s going to be, to this car junk. It was a tremendous headache I really didn’t need on top of all other frustrations with many other things right now.

And my brain really has turned to mush, even more so in the last couple of days that I have looked at ALL this new car stuff and used car stuff and more car stuff . Ugh. You know, all of my friends that ever moved to New York, the first thing they did just about was get rid of their cars. That would be SO nice. I thought car prices were getting a little ridiculous already back in the prehistoric times when I first started driving, but they’re just outrageous now. It’s insane. Necessary for the most part in this area (especially when you have responsibilities out of town), but insane.

I’m trying to look on the bright side of things if there is one, and I guess it stands to reason that I have had a car, and then two cars, neither of which I was very comfortable with driving out of town for various reasons for a few years now. So I don’t know that I’d go so far to say this was all a blessing in disguise, but there’s that. I just really wasn’t ready to start having to take on car payments again and late model car insurance and all that, but oh well, guess that decision got made for me.

And the IRS just screwed me so much it was insane, and then other things going on too – I just really could beat my head on the desk right now. That is, if I didn’t already still have a knot on my head from the wreck. At least the remaining black eye is finally going away.

What DOESN’T seem to be going away is our new little visitor. Which, you know, when you already have a bunch of pets, you don’t really notice another mouth to feed, so big deal, even though I really wish his owners would turn up. But if they don’t, we’ll manage. He really is very sweet but he’s completely psycho. He’s even wearing Quincy out (which is kind of poetic justice) wrestling and banging around the house playing with Quince. And he’s so funny looking. He’ll certainly make for humorous blog fodder and photos if he’s gonna stick around.

He’s also probably going to have a slight name change if he sticks around. His name was Tokyo, but there’s a Hoodoo Gurus song called “Tojo”, and I had a cat for 16 years that was named after a Replacements song, so it’s only fitting that this one gets a Gurus name, really.

Oh, and Buster and Petey apparently tried to kill each other while I was gone overnight this weekend, but though Buster’s fur is a nice shade of faded blood right now, I can’t find a wound on either of them except for a small one on Petey. Petey has a tendency to hurt his mouth when he gets too rough so that’s probably where the blood came from, but I really didn’t need to be scared to death like that when I got home Sunday night. But they’re fine, as they always are. And I was glad to see no signs of Bruiser having gotten into it, since he so often ends up inadvertently in the middle when he had nothing to do with it. Buster is just mad at the world because he’s smaller than his brothers and apparently hates Petey because he’s the biggest, and he and Petey are constantly growling at each other. Bruiser growls too, sometimes, but he really doesn’t know what he’s growling about.

So there you go, my big lame update for the moment. I know there’s lots more extremely important stuff going on in the world this week but I’m not even going to begin to address all that, many more people already have and so much better than I would have anyway.

One thing that IS important is that there will be at least a few of us having lunch at the Mothership this Saturday around noonish – nothing formal or planned, I just know Hutch and K-Co and I will be there, and maybe Finn, and I dunno who else – but if you want to join us for some BBQ or crack-n-cheese, come on down. We’ll probably be there until Knuck kicks us out at two-ish.

Now excuse me while I go bang the uninjured back side of my head against the nearest wall for a while. ARRRGH.

Seven Best in 2006

I got tagged by Newscoma almost a couple of weeks ago for this, so I saved it for New Year’s since I thought that would be a good topic to reflect on for the holiday. However, I think it would have been a lot easier for me to come up with the seven worst things I did in 2006 than the best. But still, I’m willing to give it a go, boring though it may be. 2006 just wasn’t a real great year. Funny, almost all of my “bests” have something to do with blogging or bloggers or something otherwise online. Guess that makes sense since this is where I spend most of my free time.

By the way, my favorite number is seven. Just in case you didn’t know.

So anyway, here – The Seven Best Things I Did in 2006.

1. I ditched cable TV. I got tired of paying almost $70 a month (not long before that, it was $90 a month) for cable I never watched and ditched it forever. With the exception of the first year or two I was in Memphis, this is just about the first time in almost all my life I have never had cable. My grandparents’ house was the first home in Paris, Tennessee to get cable when it was available there, and my house was probably among the first dozen. The ex and I did without it for a little over a year when we first moved down here, but then some plant started getting built up the street a ways and the more that got built, the worse our reception got, so we broke down and got cable again.

Cable was reasonable when I was in my twenties and it was $15-20 a month. $70 and $90 a month for cable is ridiculous, I don’t care HOW many channels there are.

The other best thing in relation to that was opening my Netflix account, and once I cut off cable, I upgraded my Netflix account. And am STILL paying less than half of what I was for cable, only now I can watch what I want to when I want to, and stuff that’s been long gone from current television. I am very happy with this tradeoff. Between that, YouTube, and networks themselves finally getting smart and airing many of their shows online, who needs it. Screw cable.

2. Traveled to Texas and hung out with old friends. I spent a couple of days in Houston and renewed some bonds with old friends, most of whom I talk to often but hadn’t seen and hung out with in over two years because we’re spread out all over – Houston, Memphis, Florida, Brooklyn, Boston, and eastern Canada. It was too short a visit, but it was worthwhile and an extra special couple of days. Also my first visit ever to Texas.

So that was fabulous, and the only real traveling I did in 2006. The only other places I went last year were to Birmingham and otherwise all in Tennessee – Jackson, McKenzie, Paris, and Chattanooga – none of them except the last really count as “travel”.

3. Opened my MySpace account. You may laugh, but while MySpace as a whole is kind of silly (and I swore for years I was never going to have one), if you’re as much into music as I am, it’s an AMAZING resource for musical interests. I have found new “local” music from around the globe that has just been incredible, and likely stuff I never would have known about otherwise. And not only have I gained a lot of new contacts and acquaintances in the music world, but I have renewed communication with an unbelievable number of old music contacts and friends, some of whom I’d thought dropped off the face of the earth and I’m sure some thought the same of me. That’s been really cool.

It’s also been quite a humbling experience, like when I found that a kid half my age who’s newly become a Replacements fanatic had a link to my old ‘Mats pages along with other more “academic” (for lack of a better word) links, or the occasional commenter or mailer who says they remember my old Hoodoo Gurus page. Or when someone whose work I have had a huge amount of respect for, for years – when I said I was pleased to finally meet “the famous (name)” – replied that I was more famous (LOL, don’t get excited, only in Australia and only among circles of a certain music genre). I was simply taken aback by that. Come to think of it, not really sure why I never made an effort to make a career out of it.

On the other hand, I do know the answer to that. I have never made a dime from efforts helping to promote other people’s music that I like, but I’ve spent a significant amount of my free time over the years doing it, online for the most part in many online mediums. I’m not sure it would have all been anywhere near as much fun and as satisfying if it were a job rather than a labor of love.

4. Volunteer work and trying to be a little more charitable in general. Hopefully the volunteer work I have involved myself in the last several years helps folks, at least I hope so – I’m really not at liberty to speak publicly about it because it’s generally an anonymous organization, and I do a lot more technical work these days rather than personal involvement, but it’s one of those situations where I figure if I helped one person make a good decision because I knew the answer to their question, or helped one person find the information they needed because of some tech work I did, then I feel like I’ve done something good.

I also did a couple of other things I generally never have much done. In 2006, I started donating a small part of my monthly salary to an Episcopal church in Mississippi that could use it as a way to honor my grandmother’s memory, after she passed away right before Christmas in 2005. There’s a reason why I picked this church in particular that I won’t go into here (not that interesting of a story), but given the fact I have been a severely lapsed Episcopalian for many years and the fact that this would make my grandmother happy, it’s pretty significant for me. I also did some more donating I don’t generally do to some stuff I strongly believed in. So that was all cool.

5. Started blogging regularly again after a really long mostly-break. Pretty soon it will be ten years since I started “journaling online” and whew, that’s a long time. For about five years, though, I took what was mostly a long break and was really haphazard about it, especially the three year period from 2003 to 2005. I skipped 2004 altogether.

In January of 2006, I finally left behind HTML hell for good and started moving all my old archives to Blogger, with a mirror on LiveJournal, and wow – how much easier was it to do after that. I started blogging more often and before the year was through, I got back into almost daily blogging (mostly thanks to the kickstart of pledging to do so during NaBloPoMo). Apparently that was the kick in the butt I needed to get back in the swing of things again.

And then in December and sick of the hassle of Blogger Beta, I jumped to WordPress for good, which is the other aspect of this best thing I did in 2006. In retrospect, I wish now I had just gone to WordPress to begin with. It ROCKS.

But it’s been good to get back in the regular blogging habit again and loads of fun. A little bittersweet for me since some of my old longtime peanut gallery is gone (actually, sometimes that’s a relief depending on the day’s blogging subject matter, heh). But having not only gotten back into it, but also becoming involved in a fabulous blogging community of other Tennesseans has been terrific and great fun. I’ve made a lot of good new friends this past year, and maybe a couple of enemies, but one can never have too many friends! And, speaking of, another of the best things I did in 2006 was…

6. The best dinner date I ever had. Getting to meet Hutchmo in person and getting to know him, with an extra bonus being that we both share a longtime mutual friend we just recently found out each other knew, was terrific. We had a fabulous and fun dinner at one of my fave Mexican restaurants in Memphis in December, and the two guys just had me laughing till I almost cried all night, and John is just a really good friend now who I absolutely adore, plus it’s extra cool that we share so many of the same musical interests. Like I said, friends are good, can’t have too many of them!

My post-Christmas tour plans to meet some more Middle TN bloggers got waylaid by my post-holiday tardiness getting on the road, but I hope in 2007 to meet everyone else I’m dying to meet and hang out with and feel sure I will meet most everyone, at least. Planning to make many trips to Middle Tennessee in the coming year, and anyone who may be coming to Memphis (like Newscoma in a couple of weeks, matter of fact – can’t wait to see her and her Squirrelly sidekick!) – let’s do BBQ, Mexican, veggie pizza, Huey burgers, or whatever!

7. I didn’t cry. Nope, I didn’t cry when my kid sister and brother-in-law left Memphis, after being here for five years prior, moved to Nebraska for good. At least not where they could see. Granted, they were in Florida, then northern Ohio, then Rhode Island for years before they moved down here for a while. But that was different. Even though sometimes we’d go months without seeing each other, for five years they were right across on the other side of town, and now they’re in freakin’ Nebraska. Sigh.

But right now in freakin’ Nebraska with 14+ inches of snow. Heh heh. I am trying very hard not to say “I told you so” right now!

Well, OK, there’s my Seven Things. I’m not tagging anyone, but feel free to tag yourself by proxy if you get a mind to do so. This one was kind of hard; like I said, I could have probably easily come up with The 100 Worst Things I Did in 2006 in comparison.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Westerberg

Because I suck and nodded off last night, I missed my annual activity of Happy Birthday shout-outing in honor of Paul Westerberg’s birthday, which comes around every New Year’s Eve. So, slightly belated birthday honors for my faaavorite singer/songwriter in the world ever.

By the way, I mentioned his birthday the other day and got the age wrong, I think. Mr. Westerberg turned 47 yesterday, not 46. Which makes me old, even though I am younger. Eek.

This Makes Me Happy

OK… My beloved Replacements graphic is now residing on all the secondary pages of this site now, except for the Radio Lynnster page. NOW I feel like I really live here.

There’s a history behind that Pleased to Meet Me-era graphic, which I have been using on my websites for now over a decade. Back in the latter half of the ’90s, a bunch of us from the alt.music.replacements newsgroup used to hang out on IRC most nights out of the week in the #mats channel on EfNet. It started out as a weekly Replacements chat, but eventually evolved into a daily thing. Others from a.m.r would drop in and often, but there was a core group of us that was there just about every night. I’d come in from a date or out doing whatever and fire up IRC and we’d deconstruct my evening in discussion, or we’d all work together to play the music trivia on the ’80s site, and sometimes we’d actually talk about The Replacements or Paul once in a while. Those were fun days, and just about every night from around 10 p.m. on until daylight (and sometimes later) there’d usually be someone hanging around.

The talented fellow who created that ‘Mats graphic was one of our core group and a big Replacements fan, Mike Monello. Some longtime online Replacements fans may remember he used to have a website back in the ’90s that was a fabulous repository of rare ‘Mats video and more graphic stuff called Bob’s Barber Shop. Mike was also one of the producers on the film The Blair Witch Project. Super talented and super nice guy (and dead funny to chat with on IRC when he’d had a few – he was a bunch of fun to have hanging around #mats in those old days).

Anyway, at the time I had my old Replacements pages running and regularly updated, and when Mike made that graphic ’round about 1996, I thought it was the coolest thing ever and asked if I could use it on my ‘Mats news page, to which he generously agreed ‘cos he was just that kinda nice guy. And I’ve been using it ever since, over ten years now.

It is one of my favorite things in the world and it just makes me happy every time I look at it. And sometimes, depending on what music I have playing on my MySpace profile, Paul and the boys tap their toes and shake their heads right exactly and perfectly in time to the music, and that makes me giggle.

Sometime it’s the little things that are the best things and make one the happiest, and this is one of my little things. And now it’s here, so I officially have moved in for sure. Yay!

Music is the Victim

So at Christmas, my mom and my godmother were completely enamored by my sister’s fancy expensive new iPod. And bigtime dissed my own unassuming, generic and meek little MP3 player but hell, it was free.

So, even though she has a birthday coming up in barely a week, my mother bought herself a pretty sweet MP3 player, which should arrive today or Tuesday. (It’s OK that she bought it because I’m buying her something else for her birthday, and she basically knows it.) I can’t stand iTunes (too clunky) and we both generally avoid anything Apple anyway and always have. And as it turns out after doing some checking, we can share an account I already have elsewhere anyway.

Only thing is there’s no easy way to separate my stuff from hers, so I’ll be wading thru the entire Jimmy Buffett catalog to get to the K’s and L’s. And, in turn, I’ve already got pretty much the entire Replacements, Hoodoo Gurus, Black Flag, and Cheap Trick catalogs already in the library that she’ll have to muddle through, as well as a crapload of old school ’70s punk and ’70s and ’80s Aussie garage rock and whatnot.

Of course, we should meet in the middle in a few places. She’ll no doubt enjoy some of the voluminous Hendrix and Stones and Jefferson Airplane and such I’ve already got in there, as well as some Billie Holiday, R.E.M., and Raiders. And I’m sure there’ll be some stuff she downloads that I dig OK.

In any case, this should get pretty interesting, to say the least.

Bad News for Westerberg Fans

Some bad news for Paul Westerberg and Replacements fans today, good reason to be a little down in the dumps. Paul suffered a massive hand injury, and it’s speculated that he may not be able to play guitar for a year.

I’m guessing we can probably hang up hopes for a 2007 tour now. Hope that hand heals swiftly and without complications though, that’s got to hurt like crap. And just days before not only Christmas but Paul’s 46th birthday upcoming on New Year’s Eve.

(Hat tip to Frank at Left of the Dial for sharing the scoop)