Since I got an MP3 jukebox I’ve been ripping CDs
left and right, and the upshot is that I’ve been listening to tunes I
hadn’t heard in years. It’s been fun, but also a tad unsettling, as I’m
having to reconsider some of my earlier purchases. There’s a whole slew
of CDs that I’m not going to put on the jukebox, ever, and a bunch of
others that might make it on if there’s room later. And then there are
some CDs I’ve put on it already that I’m now wondering about.

All of this is dismaying in two different ways.

First, I’m a bit of a hoarder. My recent purge of our bookshelves (which
purge isn’t really finished yet, either) is an extremely rare event. I
get rid of CDs even less often. Who knows–it might not appeal to me
today, but perhaps it will appeal to me tomorrow. I hold on to things.

But if I can’t be bothered to put a CD on my Jukebox, is there any point
in keeping it at all? Some of them, of course, simply reflect Jane’s
taste rather than mine, and those we’re obviously keeping. But what about
the rest? If I don’t want to listen to them, why keep them? But what if
I change my mind later? It is a puzzlement, as the King of Siam would
say.

(A digression: some would say that if this is the extent of the problems
in my life, I am singularly blessed. And, God be thanked, they would be
right to say so. 🙂

The second problem is even sillier. I’m one of the guys that
Album-Oriented Rock was created for. I like to listen to entire
albums–if you just listen to the hits, you miss some good stuff. It’s
been an unconsidered article of faith with me that you don’t pick and
choose; you listen to the whole thing, and get to know it well. And I
still think that that’s a good approach, on the whole; not everything you
hear is accessible on first listening, and some things that are
delightful at first breed contempt with familiarity.

And yet, as I listen to some discs I hadn’t heard in years, I find that
some of the songs simply don’t measure up. I’ll take David Bowie’s
“Let’s Dance” album as an example. I went through a serious Bowie phase
while I was in college, and bought this album when it was new. And yet,
as I listen to it now, I find that most of the songs are dated, boring,
or just plain dumb. There are maybe two songs on the album that I’d care
to hear again–and even those I wonder about.

So what do I do? Delete the songs I’ve decided I dislike, and keep the
rest? But then I can’t listen to the album as a whole any more. Delete
the whole album? There’s some attraction to that, in this case anyway.
At least that way I won’t ever be puzzled over which songs I deleted and
why. But then I can’t listen to the ones I like.

The whole issue is academic at this point, as I still have 8 GB of space
left on the jukebox. But as it gets full, I suspect I’ll be forced to be
more exclusive. Eventually I’ll prune it down until every track is a
(possibly flawed) gem.

…to one of our good friends. She knows who she is.

Real bees. They seem to be building a hive in
the wall of our house, and a few have gotten inside.

On the one hand, this is encouraging. I haven’t seen any bees around in
ages; there was a big die-off all across the country a few years ago, and
all we’ve seen since then are wasps, whose nest building attempts we’ve
had to fend off several times. This time it’s real, genuine honey bees.
It’s nice to see them making a comeback.

On the other hand, this is nostalgic. When I was a kid growing up in
this same house we had a bee problem every summer in the upper reaches of our
house. They weren’t living in the house as such, but every day one or
two or three would get into my room or my brothers’ room and would have
to be dealt with.

And then they did move into the house and built a hive in the wall of my
room. Instead of two or three bees a day, I’d have ten or twenty, a few
buzzing about, but most dead or dying. I took to keeping the vacuum
cleaner in my room–it was the easiest way to get rid of them.
Meanwhile, the wall of my room began to sound like rain on a tin roof.

Things came to a head the day I found at least a hundred dead bees on and
about my bed; my parents finally found an exterminator willing to tackle
the job, and the hive was killed.

So on the third hand, this is really kind of sad. If the bees
build a hive in a tree, you can get a beekeeper to come get them,
especially these days. But when they are in the wall of your house,
and there’s no way to get at the hive, there’s no choice but to call
the exterminator. It’s a shame, but there it is.

…by
Iam Hamet’s new blog, which is mostly
about The Movies. I do believe this is a first, and I hope it leads to
Great Things. 🙂

Or, anyway, ripping CDs. I’ve just gotten a
Nomad Jukebox ‘Zen’ MP3 player, and
now I’m in the process of downloading my CDs onto it. It’s a tedious
process, made more tedious by the fact that all I’ve got here at home is
a dial-up connection.

Why does my Internet connection matter? Because of “CDDB”. If you’re
on-line, you can look up the title and track names and
other data about almost any CD you put into your computer’s CD drive.
Plus, it’s easy; the CD-ripping software that comes with the Nomad
Jukebox gets all of the data it needs automatically. This saves a lot of
typing.

The sequence goes like this: dial-up to my ISP, put the CD in the drive,
wait until the software downloads the track titles, ask the software to
rip the CD, close the ISP connection. And then, ten minutes later, do it
again.

It’s enough to make a guy seriously consider broadband.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how
we were moving my study from the nice quiet room in which it’s been for
the last couple of years to another less private space, so as to free up
a bedroom for Anne. Now, one of the chief pieces of furniture in my
study is a big comfortable easy chair and foot stool; that’s where I
usually sit when I’m working with my laptop. It’s an old chair, one we
inherited from my parents, and the fabric was finally beginning to fall
to pieces. So one of the first things we did was load it up and take it
down to the local upholstery shop to get reupholstered.

We were supposed to get it back toward the end of January, but
it came home today! I’ve had to work at my desk the whole time it’s been
gone, and so I’ve been missing it dreadfully. And now it’s back (joy!).

Of course, it’s not the chair I knew. It’s now dark blue, for one thing;
and for another, it has all new padding and springs. It no longer
conforms beautifully and comfortably to the shape of my body.
It’s like a new chair.

In short, it isn’t Broken Down — uh, In. That’s it. It isn’t Broken In.

Ah, well. Some things take time to mature.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been singing with the praise team at
our Church on Sunday mornings.

Looking back at it, I see that that statement doesn’t have the air of
absurdity on the screen that it has in my mind. Let me explain: I love
to sing. I sing wandering about the house, I sing to the kids, I sing to
Jane (usually silly made up lyrics to tunes I know). But as it happens,
I have very little musical training. I sang in the Glee Club for part of
a year when I was in third or fourth grade; I’ve taken a piano lesson or
two; I’ve taught myself to read music and play the recorder middling
well. I’ve had no training in choral singing whatsoever beyond singing in
the congregation on Sundays. I might add, Jane was in choir all the way
through Junior College–her best and oldest friends are mostly from those
days–so I have some notion of what I’m lacking.

Now, our praise team. Our music director has sung with the a
capella group Chanticleer; he also plays a mean piano. Among the
other volunteers are folks who play flute, saxophone, cello, and bass
professionally. The musicianship of these folks makes my mind boggle–or,
more precisely, boggle is just what my mind would do if I had to deal
with the changes and complications they take in stride. And then most
(probably all) of the other singers have considerably more choral
experience than I do.

And I get to sing with these folks! I feel rather like the smoldering
wick of Matthew 12:20.

Now, I don’t mean to say that I sing badly, so that it’s an act of mercy
to allow me to sing with the praise team; nor do I mean to say that
somehow, miraculously, I sing with such natural talent that I can perform
at their level. Frankly, I have no real idea how well I sing.
Adequately, apparently. But it’s a real blessing for me to be able to
sing in church in this way, worshipping God, and nowhere has this been
more apparent than this Christmas.

This is the first year since I–

A digression: Jane, David, and James are next door in the bedroom,
singing, “No, no, no, no, yes yes, yes yes,” to the tune of the Blue
Danube Waltz. It’s a moment I thought should be remembered.

This is the first time since I began singing with the team that I was
available to sing at the Christmas service. It was a big time
commitment, as there were lots of rehearsals, but when the service came
around, we were good. Our service music is always a mixture of
traditional and contemporary styles, and so we began with a traditional
reading of “Joy to the World”. We followed that with one of my
favorites, a song called “The Hands That First Held Mary’s Child”. It’s
our music director’s arrangement (and I think maybe his words too), to
what he calls a “traditional Scottish tune” but which I know as the melody
to the Irish song “Star of the County Down”. It’s got a rhythm that just
about picks you up out of your chair. Then we did a rocking, swinging
version of “Go Tell It On The Mountain” that begins quietly with a sax
solo and grows until by the end the roof is practically coming down. And
then a modern arrangement of “Angels We Have Heard On High” with that
beautiful “gloria in excelsis”. Later we did “What Child Is This”,
“Silent Night” (never my favorite, but it was still soft and lovely) and
then the amazing piece of the night, a Latin seven-part Ave Maria. I
sang bass, more or less. I don’t know how we pulled it off, but we
sounded really good, much better than we ever did in rehearsal. And
finally, we ended with an arrangement of Mannheim Steamroller’s version
of “Deck the Halls”.

In short, I spent more time preparing myself for Christmas this year than
maybe I ever have; and more of that preparation time in plain worship
than I would usually engage in either. And it shows. I can feel it.
Christ is more present to me this Christmas than ever before.

Go, tell it on the mountain,
Over the hills and everywhere!
Go, tell it on the mountain,
That Jesus Christ is born!

Again, God bless you and your families during the coming year. Merry
Christmas.

May the Good Lord bless you and keep you and your family in health
and happiness during the coming year!

A couple of years ago, we turned the spare bedroom into my study. It was
outstanding: plenty of bookshelves, a big comfy chair with an ottoman, a
big desk, a phone, and a bed for taking a nap. Maybe a month later, we
found that our little girl Anne was on the way, and that my study’s days
were numbered. Today, finally, the process of moving me out began.

There’s actually no rush on Anne’s part–she’s been sleeping in a playpen
in the living room for the last six months or so, her choice. (It’s a
long story.) But two things come together this week–time off work for
me, and an impending visit from an old friend and his family. They will
be staying with us for a week, and they need a place to sleep. My study
doubles as the guest room–but being without the things in my
study for a week would be difficult. So we’re making virtue of necessity
and taking the time to move most of the stuff before they arrive.

On top of that, we’re getting rid of lots of stuff. I’ve dropped off
four big bags of stuff at the local Good Will, and Jane’s about to drop
off three bags of books at the public library. And there’s more to come,
I feel sure.

Traditionally on Halloween we pack up the kids and go
over to my oldest boy’s best friend’s house and go trick-or-treating with
them in their neighborhood where they have little amenities like street
lights. This year was no exception, but thanks to a lingering cold I
declined to follow the crew about the streets. Instead, I and Dave’s
best friend’s dad (who is also named Dave, and who is also getting over a
lingering cold) spent a pleasant evening sitting in front of the fire and
chatting. Colds to the side, it turned out to be quite a nice time.