Strange Pulse

They’re a metal band my husband loves. His bosses love them too, so when they had to choose a band to do a snowboard for this season (they do a band board every year), they immediately thought of Three Inches.

I already posted about how Three Inches are playing a show in Vegas while we’re going to be there for a ski industry trade show next week. They also played a show in Corona last night, which I didn’t think we’d go to, since we’re seeing them in Vegas next week. But Daniel’s boss needed to drop off some snowboard graphic designs for them to check out so we went to see them play last night. They’re one of my favorite bands to see live–just so powerful and fun.

We took Elijah, our 11 year old, because it was an all-ages show. His first metal show. The venue was cool, and the crowd very young–and enthusiastic. Lots of stage diving and crowd surfing, even though the crowd wasn’t that big. We stood up on the balcony and had a great view of all the action. Several kids there knew all the words to all the songs, and one of the singers kept sharing his mic with any kid that got up on stage. They (we) all had a blast.

Afterward, we hung out while the band sold merch, talking to a couple of the guys. The guitarist (one of them–there’s two) was super nice and hung out for a long time talking to Elijah. They talked videogames (one of the Tony Hawk games has a Three Inches song in it), they talked guitar (Elijah’s been teaching himself some songs, Shane gave him some tips).

Elijah’s a kid that will ramble on about anything that pops into his head, and he kept saying kid-stuff that I thought would bore the guitarist out of his mind and he’d leave, but he totally just responded in kind and was super nice. For instance, Elijah said, “Me and my friend were at school and this girl came up and said, ‘How you doin’?’ So now whenever me and my friend see each other, we say, ‘How you doin’?’” Scintillating conversation, yes? Here’s what the guitarist said. “That’s funny. You ever seen such-and-such a tv show? It’s a reality show, there’s this white guy on it who totally wants to be a black rapper, and he’s always saying, ‘How you doin’? How you doin’?How you doin’?’ Over and over. Then someone said, like, ‘put a limit on the How you doin’s–cap it at five.’ It was funny.”

Cutest moment at the show: When we first went the staircase to check out the balcony, Elijah held my hand as we moved through the crowd. And it wasn’t very crowded. I think he was intimidated by all the leather and metal armbands.

I didn’t get many good pictures because my batteries were dying, so no flash, and the venue’s lighting was uneven. I didn’t get any of the guitarist Elijah talked to cuz he was in a dark corner of the stage. But here’s a few that came out somewhat decent.

This is Jamie and Cam, the two singers:

There’s a big difference between all ages shows and adults-only shows. All ages shows, especially all ages metal shows, have mosh pits and stage diving. Adults are too old for that crap and just stand around. But the young ‘uns have fun. I love all ages shows–even though it makes it hard to get a spot against the stage. (They also get done earlier.)

Here’s Jamie sharing his mic with some kid that jumped on stage–it’s hard to see it, but I think there’s a kid crowd surfing, too:

A kid stage diving:

There was a teenage girl, maybe 16 years old, on the edge of the pit (which was in the back, rather than right in front of the stage), who had on a black mini skirt, fishnet stockings, and HUGE platform boots. She got taken down a couple times–guys in the pit would just throw themselves around and knock her down. She went sprawling a few times. Then she climbed on stage and did a stage dive–front first! So you know some guys were copping feels. Note to girls who stage dive: you jump in backwards.

Sorry, no photos of her. But here’s some more kids sharing the mic.

In this one you can see a blur of a kid as he stage dives:

This kid (in the back, in front of the drums) was checking his cell phone–several kids jumped on stage and took pictures with their cells of themselves up there.

That’s entertainment.

80’s-thrash-metal metal. Sort of the opposite of doom metal. Doom metal is usually slooooow. It’s often all about the (down-tuned) bass. And the singing is usually low and growly. (Think Cookie Monster.)

Thrash metal is very fast, with speedy guitarwork, and often has high-pitched vocals. Think Iron Maiden.

A year ago my husband’s employer gave him an iPod for Christmas, and ever since, he’s been on a mission to collect Metal. With a capital M. Metal is much more than just metal in our household.

His iPod is 20 GB, and he’s managed to fill it up with Metal. So much so that he’s had to start culling out the lesser metal to make room for the greater Metal. In his own words:

“Yeah, I have a 20 gig iPod that is full. I keep bumping the lesser metal for new, more-metal metal. Soon I will have the most metal 20 gigs ever.”

He came home from work last night and asked me how my day was. I said fine. He said, “OK…but was there any METAL in your day?”

His first words just before that when he walked in the door with his cruiser bike, after removing his iPod earbuds, were to our youngest son, who happens to be a redhead with a temper, just like his dad. He said, “Someday, you will discover Slayer, and you’ll realize that you’ve got a soulmate. There’s someone out there who understands you: Slayer.”

(My husband hated being told as a kid that redheads have bad tempers, and figured the reason he had one was that everyone assumed he would, because he had red hair. So when our third kid came along with red hair, we were very careful to never use the word temper or anything like unto it. Didn’t help. He has a giant one.)

I’ll post some thrash metal and some doom metal to the radio.blog. See if you can identify which is which. Come on, it’ll be fun. Metal Church - My Favorite Nightmare, and Electric Wizard - A Chosen Few.

Technically, it wasn’t our first date–but it’s close enough. Let me explain.

I won tickets to a movie preview, a teeny-bopper movie about suicide, and I needed someone to go with me to see it. I stopped by my ex-boyfriend’s house to see if he wanted to go, and he suggested I ask Audra, my husband’s younger sister. She lived just around the corner. But that gave me the idea to ask Daniel, which my ex-boyfriend didn’t seem too thrilled about, but oh well, he’d had his chance!

So I drove over to their house, but he must not have been home, cuz I think I called him later to ask. Answering the phone, he said, “You’re calling for ME? No one ever calls for me!” I guess since he’d been away to college for a year in Hawaii most of his friends had been neglecting him (or were off at school themselves). He told me he’d pick me up for the movie, and we had a date.

Except he was late picking me up. And I was steamed–my ex-boyfriend used to always stand me up, so I was not happy. We finally made it to the movie, and I think we’d already missed half of it. It was stupid, anyway. And that date was such a flop, I don’t think of it as our first date at all.

Our second date–the one I think of as our first–was on my birthday. June 4, 1988, the day I turned 18. It was a Saturday. My family had cake and presents for me, then everyone took off to whatever they had going on. I was home alone. Kind of pathetic, right? I called the guy I was dating then because I felt like I should, although I really wanted to call Daniel. But Chad was at a party at a friend’s house. I could’ve headed over there, but I jumped at the opportunity to call Daniel instead.

He came over to pick me up and came inside for a few minutes. Seeing the birthday cake, he asked whose birthday it was. And I had to say, “Mine.” Boy did that make me feel like a loser. He grabbed some eyeglasses that were sitting out that belonged to another friend of mine–they were plain glass, not perscription–I grabbed my camera, and we left.

We went to a park in south Seattle called Lincoln Park. It’s right on the shore of the Puget Sound. I took a few pictures of Daniel:

He had his hair dyed blonde, you can see he’s wearing the eyeglasses.

These were some kids playing there that day. I can remember wondering at the time whose kids they were and if they cared whether I took their picture.

There was some great clouds as the sun was starting to go down, and I wanted to get some silhouette shots, so I asked Daniel to do something to create a cool silhouette. This is what he did:

That last is my favorite, because it’s just so Daniel.

I developed these pictures myself in our basement, which is more accurately called a cellar, and it was like something from a horror movie–worse, because the spiders and cobwebs were all real…anyway, the chemicals weren’t that great and you can see where they’ve aged poorly with the weird blotches.

After we went to the beach, we drove around to a couple other spots, just talking and hanging out. He mostly talked about how much he missed his girlfriend from Hawaii. Haha.

I’m so used to having these pictures sitting around, I never think about how cool it is to have one of our first dates documented on film. But it’s pretty rad, huh?

Well, technically, it was on the way to a Cure concert. It was the Head on the Door tour. Daniel was friends with my older brother, William, so I’d heard about him, but hadn’t met him.

William and I used to go to concerts together all the time, we’d take the bus from the mall in the suburbs where we lived to downtown Seattle, and then our dad would pick us up after the show (the buses didn’t run that late). Daniel wanted to go to the Cure, but he’d never taken the bus to a concert before, so William told him he should come along with us.

I remember vividly sitting at the bus stop with the sun slanting through the plastic panes and Daniel completely ignoring me.

He ignored me pretty much all through high school, even though I spent one year eating lunch with him and his friends because none of my friends had the same lunch period.

The other thing I remember about that day was he had a broken rib from skateboarding. And when we got to the venue–the Arena at the Seattle Center–he went running and leaping–bounding–through the parking lot. With a broken rib.

The concert itself was amazing. Also the loudest we’ve ever been to, except for one doom metal show (Spirit Caravan) in more recent years. Our ears were ringing the next day, after the Cure. Or at least still buzzing. (After Spirit Caravan, we were literally sick the next day from the hearing damage–never go to a doom metal show without earplugs.)

Anyway, that’s the way I’ve always remembered it–I met Daniel at a Cure concert. But I could be completely wrong, maybe William will chime in and say no, no, it was the day he came over with his girlfriend (who just happened to be named Suzie). But I’m pretty sure it was the Cure concert.

Daniel recently went on a father-son church camp out with our oldest, and the guy they rode up there with as well as one of the other teenage boys were really into the Cure. And other current indie bands that sound just like all the new wave 80’s bands we were into. We laughed because the Cure has actually lasted long enough that they’re new again. Pretty remarkable, actually. If only Robert Smith didn’t do that whiny thing so often when he sings.

I’ll post “In Between Days” to the radio.blog. Enjoy.

This is the house I lived in as a teenager. It sat on two acres and had a ton of fruit trees. (Mowing the lawn was always fun.) At different points we had a pony, sheep, pigs, chickens, a goat, and of course dogs and cats. The goat could get loose from anything and was a real pain–my parents like to recall the time they came home to find me sitting next to the goat reading a book. It kept getting loose while they were gone so I was babysitting it.

This is me as a teenager behind the house. My brother took this for his photography class, he was standing on a ladder. The dog you see in my shadow was Sidney (named for Sid Vicious). That window above the back porch was my room. In the summers it’d get really hot up there, so I’d often sit out on the porch roof.

When we first got married, we lived in Hawaii. We were only there for six months, but we lived in two different houses. The first was a two-bedroom apartment we shared with our friend Brian in the basement of a house, in Hauula. This is us with our Plymouth Scamp (loved that car):

The apartment is the window you see and the sliding glass door with the white curtain. This is the whole house–you can see we’re up on a hillside:

This was the view from our yard of the ocean:

We were walking distance to the Laie temple:

We moved to an area of Honolulu called Aina Haina, where we rented a house that was in really bad shape from a guy my mom’s cousin knew. The house was right next door to my mom’s cousin’s house. It was huge, and if we’d had time to clean it up a little we could’ve gotten a bunch of roommates and not had to pay rent at all, but of course we didn’t have time.

When we moved back to Washington we shared an apartment with some friends, then stayed with my parents for awhile when our oldest son was born, then we moved to the ghetto–downtown Tacoma. This is a picture of that house taken from the street in front:

That’s Daniel on the porch. I don’t remember what was going on with the window upstairs. This was the house where we’d wake up in the middle of the night to find strangers sitting on our porch getting drunk. It was really hard to mow that steep bit of grass. Especially after our lawn mower was stolen.

My teenage niece came to live with us when we were in this house, this is her in the living room.

This is Nathaniel in his high chair:

And me teaching him to write (he could actually write “VW”–his dad worked on VW’s):

He could also, at that age, point at any engine part you named, when looking at a picture of a VW engine. Carburator, air cleaner, fan belt, coil, distributor cap, etc.

My parents bought a small rental house next door to their big farmhouse and let us rent it. It was nice to get out of the slum, and it was in this house that Elijah was born.

That’s Catherine and Nathaniel out front, above. This is Catherine and my niece’s son Dominick (my grand-nephew, son of my niece pictures above) on the front porch:

This is Daniel in the yard hosing down his wetsuit after getting home from surfing.

I’m not sure, but I think that house in the background is the one that burned down. A story for a different post.

Then we moved to Sequim, when Daniel got a job with a snowboard company that opened a plant out there. It’s a small town on the Olympic Peninsula, and it was like living in a postcard. We rented an old pioneer farmhouse when we first moved out there, then later bought a house. The farmhouse was like a dream house for me. I don’t have many pictures of it, these are all from the back side, so you don’t get to see the front porch:

The back porch, that’s Catherine peeking out the window, Nathaniel on the stairs, and my shadow against the wall.

The house we bought wasn’t much to look at, but our backyard became quite famous in the area:

After Sequim, we moved back to the Seattle area and stayed in a condo Daniel’s parents owned while he went to school for a mechanical engineering degree. No pictures of any places we’ve lived since, but they’re all just boring apartments anyway. Oh but wait, here’s Daniel in our current livingroom:

Here’s Cat walking through the pool area of our apts when the rain caused a flood last year:

Cat and her friend, if you keep walking straight you hit our door:

That was a long trip down memory lane. Maybe next I’ll do a post: Cars we’ve owned.

I haven’t posted a song from the double-mix cd I made, My Life as a Soundtrack, in a long time, so I’m gonna try to get back to it.

I think I spent an entire year listening to nothing but the Indigo Girls, sometime in the early 90’s. I love their harmonizing, which this song doesn’t really demonstrate very well. I also love their lyrics, they have some real gems, like:

The curse and the blessing, they’re one and the same
It’s all such a treacherous gain

And:

We are fortunate ones, fortunate ones
I swear

I recently dug out an old album of theirs I hadn’t listened to in a long, long time, and I still knew all the words. And all the harmony parts. I think one of the reasons I’ve always loved them is they sing low, like me. I don’t have much range–I can’t do some of the high parts they do, but they don’t go high very often.

They’re also going to have to represent Sarah McLachlan, who I really got into a little bit later.

I’m posting “The Fugitive” from their album, Swamp Ophelia.

My daughter, Cat, went to school today all dressed in black, wearing her headband with little cat ears on it. She plans on walking in front of all her enemies and jinxing them.

She also wore lipstick today for the very first time.

Yesterday at seminary (early morning scripture study class) her teacher asked the class to raise their hand if they’d never used a swear word in their entire life. Catherine was the only kid to raise her hand. (I guess sometimes having a dad with a violent temper who swears a lot when angry pays off! My kids *hate* swearing.)

Nathaniel heard us talking about it and said, “I’ve sworn before.” I said, “Does typing count?” (Cuz he’s always on his computer.) I was thinking, of course a kid nearly 16 has sworn before, I mean kids all over the place swear up and down. Then he said, “It was when Alex wouldn’t let me have my backpack.” Alex was his friend when he was 8 years old. Haha! It was probably something along the lines of “Go to hell!” or just calling him a bad name.

Nathaniel told us a kid in his autoshop class was having trouble using a wrench, and he was getting all frustrated. He kept saying, “This gay ratchet keeps stripping!” Nathaniel of course found that hilarious (as did my husband). Then the kid tried another one and yelled, “This one’s ALREADY stripping!”

For the record, I don’t let my kids use the word “gay” in the sense of “stupid” or “lame,” but every other kid in the world sure seems to.

And funny things are always coming out of Elijah’s mouth, although he doesn’t realize how funny they are. Last night he said, “Did you know most of the greatest inventions were discovered by accident? Like soda…and potato chips!”

I’ve posted before how for a really long time we were totally focused on getting my husband through college, and now that we’re done with that I feel kind of at a loss, because I don’t have any long-term goals anymore.

Working fulltime and having such a long commute makes getting anything else done nearly impossible. I generally manage to get one thing done on Saturdays, plus grocery shopping. Last Saturday, it was getting my daughter’s hair cut and dyed! No laundry, no housework–our house is always a complete wreck. The kids have daily chores they’re supposed to keep up on, but they’re never consistent, and even if they were, it wouldn’t cover everything that needs to be done to keep the house in order.

Did I mention that in addition to working fulltime and commuting two hours a day, I also do freelance work in my “free” time at home?

I had a week off over Christmas, and I managed to get a new IKEA bookcase put together for the living room. I even managed to load all our books into it from the three or four other old, grody bookcases it’s replacing. And Daniel finally managed to build a rack for his surfboards and skateboards and snowboards in the living room. But the old bookcases are still taking up space in the living room–blocking the way into the apartment, basically. And all the camping gear from the father-son campout on New Year’s Eve weekend is in a pile in the living room because neither of us have the energy to pack it up all tight again and shove it into the closet. Because it would also require reorganizing the closet!

I suppose that’ll be what I get done this Saturday. But what about the bathrooms, steam-cleaning the carpets, the extra bank account I want to open for our car loan, and the million other errands I need to run?

Now you wanna hear something funny? Sometimes I start feeling like I want to do more than what I’m doing. Something worthwhile. I start thinking about trying to do some volunteer work on Sunday mornings. And then I remind myself that I can’t even do what I need to, let alone do anything extra. But I don’t like this feeling of just biding my time. Just going to work. Nothing else on the horizon. I want to be working towards something. But I don’t know what.

I was listening to this song by Ted Leo last night on my way home from work and I could really identify with a lot of what he’s singing about. Ignore the political stuff–I’m not political at all. But if you look at the message of the song, it’s a really great one. Get off your butt and do something, don’t just sit around feeling helpless.

I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do, if anything. Besides get rid of those bookcases and pack the camping gear away. Hopefully.

Shake the Sheets by Ted Leo & the Pharmacists

I said, “I wonder how it is I’m standing here,
while war is raging everywhere under the sky?
I feel defeated here by everything,
cheated here by everyone on every side.
I want to take you to a quiet place,
and never ask the meaninglessness to reply.
When will we get an hour to celebrate,
find the time to breathe a sigh?

I’ve been working too hard to be living, and later
Walking all night, until I’m shivering, and is it
Wasting the time I’ve been given, to maybe
Wait for the day of oblivion?

I want to take it to the President
him and all his cabinet, with a broom
I want to sweep the halls of arrogance,
sweep the walls of the excrement of these baboons
But I respect and prize the covenant-
I respect the process, I respect the rules
When will we find a chord as resonant
As to shake the sheets and make us move?

You’ve been working too hard to be living, and later
Walking all night, until you’re shivering, and is it
Wasting the time I’ve been given, to maybe
Wait for the day of oblivion?” and she said

“Roll out and make your mark.
Pull on your boots and march
Then roll on and meet me where
you’ll find me doing my own part
Roll out your dented car. Maybe it won’t roll far
But if you do everything you can, well babe,
that’s more than a start

Roll out and make your mark.
Pull on your boots and march
Then roll on and meet me where
you’ll find me good and ready
Sometimes it’s going to hurt,
sometimes you’re gonna deserve it
But if you hold on to what you’ve got,
I know you’ll keep it steady, keep it steady

So there’s no end to work, so there’s no end to murk
So everything else is dirt, but I am pure and steady
So cut out the morbid verse, I know you’ll make it work
And how’re you gonna save the world, when the world ain’t ready?”

I’ll post it to the radio.blog, top right.

I found a good doctor. After 11 years of being diabetic, I can tell the good from the bad almost immediately. And this one is awesome.

He’s also a bit of a kook. His practice is in the ghetto area of Long Beach, in a really old, run down building. But he came highly recommended, and I liked him immediately.

I want to try to get on an insulin pump. Not sure if I will though. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve seen some bad doctors. Seriously. Bad. There’s a reason I don’t trust doctors or the medical establishment. So when I find a good doctor, I cling.

It’s expensive to be diabetic. I used to (semi-) joke around that they’ll never find a cure for diabetes because they make too much money off the diabetic supplies. I just read an article that made me wonder even more.

It’s a long feature article in the NY Times called “In the Treatment of Diabetes, Success Often Does Not Pay.” It talks about some diabetic treatment centers that used intensive classes and regimens to improve diabetics’ blood sugar control, and it was very successful. So successful, they were losing money from preventing all the expensive surgeries and treatments required for diabetic complications (amputations, transplants, dialysis). And they got closed down.

One part of the article I found very interesting:

They did not shut down because they had failed their patients. They closed because they had failed to make money. They were victims of the byzantine world of American health care, in which the real profit is made not by controlling chronic diseases like diabetes but by treating their many complications.

Insurers, for example, will often refuse to pay $150 for a diabetic to see a podiatrist, who can help prevent foot ailments associated with the disease. Nearly all of them, though, cover amputations, which typically cost more than $30,000.

Patients have trouble securing a reimbursement for a $75 visit to the nutritionist who counsels them on controlling their diabetes. Insurers do not balk, however, at paying $315 for a single session of dialysis, which treats one of the disease’s serious complications.

And also:

With an average diabetic spending more than $2,500 per year on drugs and equipment, pharmaceutical companies have good reason to focus their attention on the more than $10 billion market in controlling the disease’s complications.

But there is only so much the drugs can do, they add, if they are not accompanied by the sort of changes in patient habits that the centers fostered through education and monitoring.

Health economists suggest that if these preventive measures were practiced on a wide scale, complications from diabetes would be largely eliminated and the American medical system, and by extension taxpayers, could save as much as $30 billion over 10 years. The experts disagree on what such an effort would cost. (How much nutrition counseling does it take to wean the average person from French fries?) Nonetheless, many of them believe the cost would be largely offset by the savings.

Before:

After:

We had fun this weekend.