So I'm back from a week's vacation. Had a wonderful time. Drank a lot of good beer, hugged a lot of fun people I hadn't seen in months or years (or ever), ate a lot of too-rich food, climbed some amazing dunes, and spent well upwards of 35 seconds partially submerged in the northern Pacific.

Also, lots of driving in a small, hot, dusty Civic and listening to mix-tapes. Also, getting a chance to have several long conversations with Peter about folk music and web philosophy that were not only enjoyable but perhaps even productive. Maybe even inventive.

Upcoming projects for this month include:

• continuing Infinite Summer
• selling my car
• and a web project involving audio files that I'm not quite ready to announce yet

I am quite pleased tonight, all-over pleased, yes I am. For almost two years now, ever since I moved back to Bellingham, I've been WiFi freeloading on the networks of generous neighbors and local latte-slingers. The hipster 'net. Tonight, I am back on the serious internet. The copper-wired, 7Mbps, streaming-video-in-HD big kids internet.

True, I was actually pulling down decent bandwidth from the various open 802.11 SSIDs that waft freely through my apartment. But it wasn't enough bits to do VoIP, and that's the one killer app I've been craving lately.

So I bought a DSL modem/router on Ebay. I saved bundles compared to the price Qwest is charging for the identical device, but it took weeks for the thing to get here. I bought a webcam. A package arrived. I called Qwest back. It took another grumbling week for them to send a kind & helpful phone guy out to flip a switch in the phone box. I created a Skype account and tested my gear. Blinky green LEDs all around.

Tomorrow night (Friday, starting  around 4pm PST) I shall be consuming several pints of powerful stout and putting that silly program through its paces. Care to join me? This little exercise won't be much fun without your sterling voices-- or better yet, your laggily webcamified faces-- on the other terminus of the line. 

my SkypeID: mwkelley360

Lots of interesting things happening. I keep saying I'm going to sit down one night and write a proper post for LJ, but it's gotten to where there's a half-dozen disparate things that I want to talk about all at once.

Maybe it'd be better to just upend the whole box and let you all fit the pieces together.


... and, er. Those were the five major topics anyway. I feel like there's a sixth one that I'm forgetting. Maybe it'll occur to me in the morning.

(*- "my car" not "a car". This complicates my vacation plans a bit, but not terribly. Don't wanna get into the fiddly bits of that right now.)

g'night.

Well, it's been almost 3 months, so I guess it's double-long update time.

The truth is, there hasn't been a whole lot of things to talk about.  I began working at the greenhouse again in mid-March, so I'm back to the same 40-hours-spread-over-7-days work schedule I had all last summer. It's not ideal, but gardening barely qualifies as work IMO. It feels more like I'm getting paid to pursue a hobby that I would probably do anyway. Plus, it's quiet and solitary; it lets me decompress my week and listen to my NPR & podcasts uninterrupted, whilst tending my army of pretty green carbon-devouring geraniums. Plus, I really needed the money. March was kind of a scary month budget-wise, and I'm breathing a lot easier now that I have two paychecks rolling in.

I made 3 New Year's Resolutions this year: "Play more", "pay off debts", and "Learn 100 songs for guitar or piano".  The first two are going great. The third, eh, not as much.

Last year I felt that I got so focused in on pursuing big picture, capital-G life Goals (e.g. taking college classes, e.g. keeping a strict no-frills budget) that I wasn't allowing myself to have any fun. Hence, "play more". In the past couple months I've joined 2 new gaming groups (plus my original one) and it's gained me some rad new friends. Also, Hunter loaned me his PS2, and I've been catching up on a bunch of great single-player console games from that generation that I completely missed. (I sat out the GC/Xbox/PS2 console wars... now I get to cherry-pick all of the best 2002-06 era games at bargain bin prices. TOTAL WIN.) Played an (almost) complete game of Axis & Allies last week, and won big. Played cribbage & hearts for the first time in years. etc. These days, when some says "Hey, do you wanna do...?" I generally say "hell yes", and that makes all the difference on my general mood. 

I'm still paying off debts with a vengeance. This February marked more than a full year without any credit transactions of any kind. (It also marks a full year since I effectively dropped out of college... but by my personal life-calculus that's still a net gain. It's a controversial statement I'm sure, but there yah go.)  By summer's end-- on my current budget-- I'll have one of my four major debts paid off completely. The remaining three (that's including my student loans) will total about 10 grand. My goal is still to pay-off all of this noise by the time I'm thirty, and $10,000 divided by 2.5 years is an achieavable figure, so I'm generally happy about it all. 

re music: Meh. I've never taken any professional lessons, and I haven't yet figured out a way to practice that feels like a fun hobby instead of work. So it's very slow going. It's not so much a problem of "sticking with it". I stuck with snowboarding, even though snowboarding is a physically painful sport to learn. The trouble, I think, is the lack of a social component. I don't know anyone else in the 'Ham that's currently learning how to play-- and so when I only have experienced musicians to compare myself too, it hardly seems like I'm making progress at all. It's silly I know, but it's hard not to get frustrated, and thus it's doubly hard to spend my leisure time on frustrating things.

'Nuff ramblin'. 'Til next time.
~Mike

I woke up at some ungodly hour this morning with the vague sensation that-- just before I'd woke up-- my bed had been rocking horizontally, back-and-forth, as if somebody had bumped into the headboard. The building is old and prone to strange vibrations-- fridge compressors kicking on, doors slamming, street sweepers rumbling by outside-- but this had felt weirdly physical, and there wasn't any noise. I remember blearily looking around the room in the darkness even, just in case there was some kind of clumsy monster in here. But no. I fell asleep again in about 30 seconds, figuring it was just a dream.

I probably wouldn't have even remembered it had I not caught a random news blip on KUGS this morning about a 4.5M earthquake that hit near Kingston this morning, which "woke up residents as far north as British Columbia".

So... WOW! My first earthquake story! I'm pretty excited about that. (There are tiny earthquakes all the time in Washington, of course, seeing as it's an active subduction zone and all. But this is the first one I'd ever noticed.)

I can't even believe I'll be getting onto an airplane in something like 12 hours. I have to make a sudden, unplanned trip to Detroit tomorrow to attend a funeral on Friday. I'm bringing my laptop, but in all likelihood I'll be AFK until I'm back in B'ham next Tuesday morning. Ugh.

 There's a new Song of the Whenever up, though it's not a song; it's a story. Kind of. It's called "Walks Into" by [I'm Not Jim].

This track came up on my college radio station today, and it had me standing there mesmerized. [Just listen.]

Oh. Right. New Year's resolutions. I haz them.

I have three this year, actually, but only one of them is new:

#1: Play more
#2: Pay off debts
#3: Learn 100 songs for piano or guitar (I just bought one of each last Tuesday.)

New song of the whenever on the [audio] page tonight. (It's "World at Large" by Modest Mouse.) This track came on the moment I logged on to [E2] today, and that hit me pretty hard.

It's sorta hard to explain. ( Lame, self-congratulatory explanation cut for the sake of decency... )

So, er... I cut my hair this fall, as you may've heard or noticed. If you're extremely bored & want to flip through some more 'before', 'after' or 'during' pictures, I just posted up a set on Flickr. I plan to keep this cut for awhile, so I figured some proper documentation was in order. Yay narcissism.

For those of you who aren't on my LJ friends list, or haven't seen me in person.... um, surprise! *grin*

[ btw, Tiffany, still waiting to see those pix of yr new 'do. *makes chicken noises* ;-) ]

 ... is [up], if yr interested.

If there was something Volume 1 needed it was a bit more rawk, so I tried to punch up the tempo a little in this mix. At my sister's request I even threw in a [Death Cab for Cutie] song, even though they totally sold out and moved to Seattle so we all hate them now. (Not really, but you know how it is.)

Share & enjoy!

Today in [the audio section]: a 16-track mix of local bands that I put together this summer called "Bellingham, Vol 1". I sent out about a dozen of these as actual, physical (if ultra-ghetto) mix CDs, but I've decided to embrace digital distribution for the second run.

It's been feeling like eternal darkness in the PacNW lately, what with the street lights coming on a 4pm and all, but this doesn't really bother me. I like winter. And by "like" I mean love love love. It is a four-month-long excuse to sit around and wear sweaters and be lazy WHAT IS NOT TO LIKE, PPL?

ALSO: I found out today that I'm getting a nice fat 4-day weekend on Jan 1-4. Anyone want to invite me out to a New Year's Eve gathering? 'Cuz right now I have zero plans-- I suspect most of my B'ham friends will be out-of-town for the holidays.

YAY! Fall quarter is over. Time to catch up on some stuff that I've been putting off due to acute & debilitating academia.

My self-prescription for this week is...
 1 LJ post [mikekelley.livejournal.com]
 + 1 Flickr photo [flickr.com/roguepoet]
 . + 1 audio upload [beyondmetamora.net/audio]
 . .  Repeat daily

I uploaded today's audio track just now, btw; it's by an oh-so-indie folk pop band from Minnesota called [Best Friends Forever]. I started randomly singing this song to void_ptr last weekend in the middle of a conversation about FDR, and then sheepishly realized that the chance of her ever having heard the song were microscopically slim... Problem solved. Now it can be stuck in your head too!

( a couple more beneath the cut... )

Mostly for sun_doth_burn , since I promised to swap "new hair" pix with her and haven't yet ponied-up the goods. There was a very brief break in the gray this afternoon, so I ran outside to snap a photo with actual sunlight in it.

For those of y'all who haven't seen my drastically redesigned hair configuration, well, there yah go.

I effed up my Linux last weekend while trying to upgrade to Ubuntu Heron, so I'm trapped in my Wintendo XP partition until I can get that figured out. Consequently, I've finally gotten around to installing Chrome (Google's XP/Vista-only web browser).

It is pretty fly. Google knows how to goddamn design a thing. I don't know why this surprises me, considering all the other well-designed Google things I use every day, but there you go.

I've been neglecting my web-presence lately. I'm not particularly busy; I just like to step away from the Internets and their constant crush of information every so often.

Here's a superficial glaze of the cool & exciting things that happened in the past couple months, while I've been largely off-line: Took the Amtrak to Portland, met & sang with Cascadian radicals, experienced (most of) a Climbing PoeTree performance in Seattle, failed to resist The Thriller at the B'ham Halloween flashmob block party, helped elect the first black president of the USA, caught a reading by Rolf Potts at Village Books (Friday), dressed up as Dr. Science for the Pickford sci-fi matinee (Them!) (yesterday!), and licked an ice-planet at Ariel's scifitastical dance party (last night!).

I've also been on a '90s nostalgia kick lately, watching DS9, playing old Super NES games, and dusting-off hipster flicks like Tank Girl and Six-String Samurai via Netflix.

Over the next week I'm going to rework my homepage a little. #1, I'm going to start posting all my blog entries here on LJ instead and then post the links into the current blog-box on BeyondMetamora. Not sure why I didn't think of that sooner. #2, I'm going to make a super-basic audio section, because GoDaddy's giving me gobs of bandwidth each month that I'm barely using, and now that I subscribe to Rhapsody it becomes trivially easy to rip a few mp3s and share them out from my webspace. #3 I'm going to make a couple tweaks to the internal whatsits of the site that are probably only interesting to me.

Lastly, I'm thinking of changing the flavor quote on the front page ("we are the same people / only farther from home") to something fresh. Ideas?

OMG have you folks seen this yet?

http://dresdencodak.com/trailer.html

So. Lately I've gotten interested in a natural clay-aggregate building material called cob. It's cool stuff. Humans have been building with cob for a thousand years, and it's literally dirt-cheap and dirt-simple: you dig a hole for a foundation, and then you use the soil you just dug up to build something over it.

More specifically, I've been feeling a bit entreprenurial, and thinking of posting a flyer at the local co-op to see if anyone else in the community would be interested in forming a cob building club. We could call it (oh-so-creatively) "The Bellingham Cob Club".

The idea would be to get a crew & pool some resources together, play around with the material, perhaps start our own business in building outdoor cob earth-ovens for people. Once that business becomes wildly successful, we could even expand it into a full-scale building company, like the Cob Cottage Company in Oregon.

Web-savvy nerd that I am, you can probably guess what Step #0 is in any creative project of mine. Yep, you got it: Sit down and ask "What would the domain name be?"

bellinghamcobclub.org ... yeah, that's obviously available.

What if I shortened it, though? How about "bhamcobclub.org"? (Meh.)

Maybe lose the "Bellingham" all together. Cuz who knows, right? We might go international. So... "cobclub.org"? (I punch that in. Available.)

And then I'm like "Huh... I wonder who owns cob.org..." So I punch that in.

And the page loads.

And I just kind of blink at the screen for a moment, dumbfounded.

Because, friends... cob.org is the official website of the City of Bellingham, Washington.

... Coincidence? Or sign from the gods? You decide!