Well now I’m just lazy

For a man bemoaning about his lack of consistency, I put a shockingly small amount of effort into fixing the situation. Oh well, on to the news.

This weekend, my wife has taken our two-year old Max on a plane ride to see Grandma and Grandpa in Thunder Bay. This has left me here to exist in some kind of unfettered bachelor life for 4 days.  The first problem? I have no idea how to be a solitary individual anymore. Just like a prison inmate, I’ve become institutionalized and I don’t know how to behave in the real world.

Bits are coming back to me, as well as a realization that I’ve always accomplished very little when left entirely to my own devices. So, the lists have come out and the push is on. To Productivity! (with a side order of fun).

There is such an amazing sense of comfort and confidence that I get from spending my days with my little guy. Even on his rare grumpy days, he  is an ever-present source of validation and love. I know exactly who I am and what I have to do: I am dad. So it’s a little hard to remember who I am when I don’t have to be dad.

There have been two moments of profound sadness so far. First, all of the moving around and cleaning that I’m doing reminds me of the frenzied cleaning I did when we bought the house. I did that cleaning all alone, and it was a very stressful and emotionally draining time (as  it was for Kristen as well).  The second one was when I went to bed last night, all by myself in a big empty room. I have to admit that I really like all three of us sleeping in the same room, and I miss  both of them terribly. I actually stood at the foot of the bed and pouted.

So, now off to shampoo the carpets, clean and arrange the living room and play area, edit my book, clean out the disaster zone in the car, have some fun, eat lunch and a thousand other things before Monday.

Yes I’m Complaining about a Cartoon

I’ve had to endure the normal amount of children’s programming, maybe a little more than average. I don’t think that there is anything detrimental to watching educational programming, and Treehouse Tv doesn’t show commercials (well, almost. They sneak ‘sponsors’ in at the start of a show, but before the show actually starts, and only once every half hour) so no harm done. I even like some of the shows. I’m officially a fan of the Wiggles, for example.

But to the point, there is one show that irritates me with its lack of logical cohesion. That show is Little Bear, a Canadian cartoon that stopped production years ago. The main character, Little Bear, capers happily around the forest with his diminished-capacity friends. Sure, his friends could be all children themselves, but then why do they have adult voices? Anyway, they all frolic without any clothes on, yet Little Bear’s parents are always wearing clothes. What?

The first reasonable excuse you could use is that the need for clothes is a symptom of growing up, and youthful innocence is represented by the nudity. I don’t like that explanation, but I went with it until there was an episode that displayed a picture of Mother Bear when she was a child AND SHE WAS WEARING CLOTHES! So, the nudity is not an established tradition in their culture, it’s just the wierd, hippy decision of this bear’s parents to let him run around with his business in the breeze.

One other facet that bothers me, is using a character’s species as their name. What happens when the new ducklings grow up-are they all named ‘Duck’? Is ‘Duck’ now ‘Old Duck’? Are they numbered ducks 1 through 9? Way to confuse children, Little Bear.

Album Review-“Heaven is Whenever” by The Hold Steady

I would have never thought that the absence of a keyboard player would be so sorely felt, especially from a rock band. When a vocalist leaves, the voice of the band is altered and the strangeness puts an awkward distance between the audience and the band, until the audience reconnects with the old songs in a new way. Instrumentalists are more easily replaced, but their contribution to the songwriting and overall chemistry of the band can be just as identifiable. The Hold Steady has just released their fifth album, and it’s the first without keyboardist Franz Nicolay. The songs on Heaven Is Whenever are missing an element of strangeness, an almost out-of-place oddness that somehow fit nicely in with a given song and brought it to an interesting new presentation, and that strangeness was Nicolay’s contribution. He is as varied an artist as you can get, making music with gypsy punks and klezmer aficionados, as well as playing in The Hold Steady, so whenever a weird sound popped up in a Hold Steady song, I attributed it to him. A great example would be the song ‘This One’s For The Cutters’ off of the last album, Stay Positive, a rock song that prominently features a harpsichord.

The best moments of Heaven Is Whenever escape the history and expectations of the band’s previous work, but more often than not, the good parts of the new songs remind you of older, better Hold Steady songs. It’s growing on me, but it will take a lot to match its predecessors. 6 out of 10.