(Happy Decemberween, kiddos: I tossed together a Whitman's Sampler of 20 songs plucked from the albums mentioned below, and you can [download it right here]. Share & enjoy.)

One of the things my dad sent me for my birthday last week was a double-CD of two Dave Mason LPs: It's Like You Never Left from '74 and his self-titled follow-up album, Dave Mason. These were a couple of my father's top-ten albums from that era, back when his life mirrored mine in a lot of ways. (Like me, my mom & dad left Michigan in their mid-twenties and moved to a laidback Cascadian college town-- Corvallis OR, in their case-- to go back to basics and enjoy a hippie lifestyle. Yes, this is basically where I got the idea.)

It got me thinking about what I'd choose as my top albums of this decade, the 2000s.

Furthermore, if you still haven't heard: I broke up with my girlfriend Jet last Saturday and-- although I'm still content with the decision and hope that Jet & I can still salvage a friendship-- it's thrown a ratchet into my brainpan that's been rattling around all week. For any serious topic, it has made it hard to introspect farther back in time than the last few weeks and months, what I should have said and done differently, etc. So-- in true [Rob Fleming] fashion-- talking about music seems like a nice diversion.

And thirdly, I enjoy making lists. A lot. To an embarrassing extent.

( 10 years, 20 albums. Make it so. (beneath the cut) )

It’s pretty warm in my apartment right now. It’s a 3rd story loft– a big open space– so it’s hard to keep the temperature consistent. When I turn the heat off, all the warm air tends to drift to the top. A fan would probably do the trick, but I haven’t figured out how to rig one up. Haven’t given it much thought really, to be honest. It rarely gets this cold in Bellingham. It’s been below freezing now for nearly a week. Jet predicts that it’ll snow soon. But anyway, I’m comfortable.

We’ve been busy at the mill. A lot of people dust off their cookbooks around this time of year, and that means a lot of extra demand for good flour. I’m happy to provide.

I’ve had two jobs in my life that I’ve really enjoyed. The first was my I.T. internship at Oakland CC in Auburn Hills, but that was mostly due to the laidback work environment; I loved the comraderie of hanging out in nerd central with the other I.T. guys, playing Unreal Tournament on the college LAN and waiting around for trouble tickets to roll into the queue so that we could swoop in and save the day. When it came to the actual job though– fixing finicky PCs & printers– meh, it was fun but it got boring after awhile. I didn’t feel like I was really doing anything, just maintaining other people’s tools so that they could carry on with their day.

I never get bored of making flour, though. Mostly because my job is so easy. I feel as if Kevin– the miller, or in other words, the mill’s owner, my boss (I find it an interesting statement about 21st century life that all of my friends know what an I.T. guy’s job is, but I have to explain every facet of what a miller does for a living)– I feel as if Kevin has the hard job, talking with customers & suppliers, making business decisions on what grain to buy & what prices to charge for our flour. Making the flour (my job) is the easy part. It’s so simple that there’s nothing to get bored *of*. Hell, making flour is something that hunter-gatherer societies had figured out. Using electricity to do it makes the machines more complicated, but it tends to save on labor. And since we only use organic grain purchased from trusted sources in WA, the nearby states, & Canada, I have complete confidence that the flour I make every day is at least as good or better than the flour made by every other miller’s assistant in the entire history of humanity.

So, in other words, I like my job. It doesn’t pay a lot but it pays the bills, and it helps pay my debts, and gives me a little left over on the side to have some fun and a lot of extra free-time to enjoy it. Sometimes, in moodier moments, I come down a little hard on myself for living as a modern-day peasant in a world where wealthier people have access to such incredible things– books with electronic ink, cars that run on cooking oil or get 200mpg, hiking gear made out of space-age materials, routine travel on intercontinental airliners, …. But then, I look around even within my own circle of friends and also see a lot of people who are currently looking for work & having a stressful time of it– most of them better educated & more hard-working than I am– and I feel supremely fortunate that I’ve lucked my way into such a lovely lot in life.

Though that doesn’t mean that I expect to be a miller for the next 40 years. I’d be content to do that, sure, but I have other things in mind.

More on that next time.

I’m glad I summoned up the resolve to post that last entry, despite the fairly grumpy tone. At least it’s getting my mental gears moving in the right direction again.

Current mood: improving. Tomorrow– I’m guessing it’ll be too late tonight; I’m meeting up with some friends in an hour or so– I’ll jot down another entry and take stock.

The thing that bums me out is that I feel like any update I write at the moment is going to contain a lot of “see last entry”s, “see next entry”s and “more of the same”s.

There *are* low-key things going on in my life– a lot of fun things, even– but mostly I’m just keeping myself occupied until the economy improves, my finances improve, and my savings account accumulates to an arbitrarily high number. To an outside observer it might appear that I’m just wasting my life away. But I see it differently.

One important thing to remember about me: I got where I am today by borrowing, and I don’t regret it. I borrowed to pay for my education and I borrowed to get my adult life started. Now I’m paying back. I’m happy to do it because– in case I’ve failed to mention in the last fifteen minutes or so– my life is pretty great right now. But paying back is also hard. It’s hard to stay on track when a lot of my energy is going towards honoring old debts instead of breaking new ground.

I keep reminding myself, though, that getting into debt was the correct move then and paying off that debt is the correct move now. I made a plan a couple of years ago, and its working, and I have total confidence that it’ll continue to work. It’s kind of boring to watch, though, so posting updates to this blog can be frustrating.

The silly things that I’m doing now– reading books, playing games, watching movies, messing about on websites– are mostly filler. My life is actually *about* something quite different.

I can *tell* folks what my life is about, but it’ll be much more convincing when I *show* them. And I’m not in a position to show anything yet. (I’ve been saying that for years, and yes, it’s still true.) And anyway, like I said, I have to get going… I’m headed over to Hunter & Mary’s tonight.

More soon.

Ugh. No entries for 3 months. Briefly: things are still going well for me here in B’ham. My job is still great, my town is still lovely, my always-expanding circle of friends seem by-and-large to be faring this great depression with admirable grit and an unkillable sense of fun.

My stress levels are up, though. When I get stressed I tend to withdraw into my own world and my own mind, pushing off minor responsibilities and letting my mail build up in a bin.

I am very sorry for being uncommunicative lately. My life, while still nice, seems like it’s slipping farther and farther off-tempo every day. “Off-tempo” is the best word I have to describe it, but maybe that doesn’t really explain anything.

I am tired and I have a splitting headache but I at least wanted to take a stab tonight at getting back on-track. This is that stab. I am trying to regain my stride. It is difficult to do.

Current mood: grouchy. I am going to bed now.

Tonight I decided to update Beyond Metamora to the latest version of WordPress and rearrange the site to look like a more conventional– well, more like a blog, basically.

It bums me out in one sense, but in other ways inspires me. I’m going to miss the homemade sharpie-marker design that I made in 2006, but I’m hitting a point where I need this site to be a more purely text-based & utility-rich medium. Maybe the next time I revamp the site I’ll figure out a way to combine the two styles and get my Sharpie warpaint back.

Right now, though, I just need a place to easily decompress some arbitrary text out of my brainpan. Lately the ideas have been piling up in my mind & on loose scraps scattered around my apartment without any easy place to put them. My main aim with this rebuild is to clear out the clutter and get more of those thoughts & schemes out into the light of day.

It seems I've fallen into a once-monthly update schedule for this. That suits me fine.

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

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!