Music Meme

Tam started it, and now all the cool kids are doing it, so I'm jumping on the bandwagon.

Top 25 songs on your playlist. (I will say that about a third of these are of Sweet Daughter's choosing, and no, she doesn't listen to Nine Inch Nails. )

Rolling in the Deep; Adele

Hey Soul Sister; Train

Say Hey (I Love You); Michael Franti & Spearhead

Twilight Zone; Golden Earring

Perfect; Pink

Rhythm of Love; Plain White T's

Fall at Your Feet, Crowded House

Firework; Katy Perry

Take Me Home Tonight; Eddie Money

Pain Lies on the Riverside; Live

Amazing Grace; Dropkick Murphys

Fields of Gold, Sting

I Still Believe; The Call

Everlong; Foo Fighters

Let there be Love; Ice House & Iva Davies

The Impression that I get; The Mighty Mighty Bosstones

Favourite Shirts; Haircut 100

Cuts You Up; Peter Murphy

Good Enough; Evanescence

Walk the Last Mile; Love and Money

Our Day Will Come; Seven Nations

Take Me on the Floor; The Veronicas

No One Like You; Scorpions

Private Idaho; B-52's

Head Like a Hole; Nine Inch Nails

Deleted my blog roll

So, I was attempting to do a little blog maintenance yesterday and all I managed to do was delete my "I haven't met you yet" blog roll. So if you link to me, or you're one of my favorite blogs, please let me know in the comments. I managed to reconstruct/update some of it, but that was a bit of a cluster in and of itself and I know I'm still missing a bunch.

Let's hope this is the last of 2011messing with me, and not a harbinger of 2012.

Guest blog from Gramps

He would have been 77 when he wrote the following. (Updated to show the Dutch Roll links ...)

Thursday, December 26th. 1974. This evening, when I went out for my walk, I passed Hawthorne School, where I attended the grades sixty-five years ago. Part of the playground has been flooded by the city to make a skating rink. The field of ice is 90 ft. by 200 ft., perfectly smooth and level. The temperature is 28 degrees, a three-quarter moon, light south breeze, a perfect night for out­door skating. But not one person was using the ice. I wondered where the children and young adults were and what they were doing.

When I was a boy, there would have been at least fifty people using this ideal facility. Perhaps they are inside watching tele­vision, or attending a movie. Our ice skating was done on Bear Creek, or on Kirkham’s pond, just west of third Avenue and Sixth Streets southeast. Or on the pond, just above Uncle Joe Alexander’s dam. Sometimes we would skate all the way down Bear Creek to the Zumbro River and on down to the Hill Pond in Northeast Rochester, a little southeast of where the Kruse Lumber Company is located.

Quite often there would be at least thirty of our own cousins and relatives in the group. We would form a long line, hands on shoul­ders, as we did the “Dutch Roll”* down the ice. As we got close to the Mill Pond, we would hear someone shout, “Here come the Alex­anders”. Then the leader, usually Big Walt, would “Crack the whip” and the last one in line, usually Evelyn, and two or three others would go sprawling on the ice.

As I take my daily walks, I notice that there are no people on the streets, walking. I travel a mile or a mile and half without meet­ing a single person. Occasionally I will meet another older per­son walking home from Erdmans Super Market with a sack of groceries. But it is a rare occasion when I meet someone. They are all in their cars. If they are out at all, and certainly they have for­gotten how to walk.

* More interesting information here at the Virtual Ice Skates Museum, including the history of ice skates.

An apology to my doppelganger*.

Christmas with Shorter Half’s family took place today. The adult siblings draw names for a gift exchange, SH’s mother buys for everyone, the cousins get to squirrel around, we graze on food that is generally verboten the rest of the year, and those of legal age drink Mimosas. Everyone is encouraged to keep their Amazon gift list up-to- date to simply things, and the sequence of events is fairly predictable.

This year the first round of gifts was handed out, and I had from my mother-in-law what clearly looked like a CD. I was intrigued as there were no CDs on my list, but it turned out to be the new one from Coldplay. She asked what I thought. I said I’d probably really enjoy it. We both looked puzzled.

The second round of gifts was making the circuit, and SH’s little sister was bouncing up and down on the sofa telling me how much she loved the gift I was about to open. It was a set of measuring cups shaped like a set of nested matryoshka dolls. My mother-in-law said something about them being from my Amazon list. I said I’d never seen either the CD or the measuring cups before in my life.

Yes. My Christmas presents came off the list of another Nancy R., which we all found hilarious. And then it occurred to me that this other Nancy R. might actually be monitoring her list and wondering why nobody ever gave her the CD or the measuring cups or the Harry Potter movie that had been purchased.  And so I offer my humble apologies to the other Nancy R. I’m sorry if you’re feeling shortchanged. But I’m also really, really glad that my MIL didn’t find the Nancy R. that wanted the 3 lbs. of diatomaceous earth and the bedbug-proof pillowcases.

* It was pointed out to me that it was much more likely that I was the doppelganger.

Survived

Skating today was a success. Sweet Daughter and I made the first circuit of the rink at a snail's pace, both frantically clutching the boards. The second pass got easier. She fell a lot, but she was prepared for that. By the end of 90 minutes she was skating without help in the middle of the rink. I improved to the point that I made several loops without SD, at a reasonable speed, and didn't care that I was yelling "WhoaAAAH!" with my arms wind-milling  in front of the high school kids. I even remembered how to go backwards, which was helpful in keeping ahead of, and an eye on SD at the same time. When one of the moms (17 years my junior) jokingly accused me of being a slacker while standing around, I challenged her to a race around the rink. Ha. She backed down.

One very cute couple asked me to take their picture. "Say 'Brian Boitano'!" I chirped. They looked confused. "Say 'Dorothy Hammill!" No better luck. I'm hoping I at least got eccentricity points.

I only made one "controlled descent" (NOT on my bum, thank-you-very-much!), and overextended into a near split once while trying not to run over SD when she fell down in front of me. (Remember how I don't remember how to stop?) Which reminded me of the last time I went skating -- it was my senior year of college and it was outside. No boards. I seem to recall more than once that night when I ran out of ice before I ran out of speed and ended up launching myself into a snowdrift. I quit when I hit the one that was like concrete. No, I don't believe there was any beer involved, at least not until I was done skating.

All-in-all it was a success. I held my own on the ice, I didn't wipe out in a spectacular manner (although that would have made a better story), and SD had a good time. Now I'm ready for some more Vitamin I, and a good stiff drink. We'll see how well I'm moving tomorrow ...

Update: I'm moving better this morning than I was earlier in the week. The only possible explanation I can come up with is that I'm still experiencing some sort of post-exercise endorphin rush and when it wears off, I’ll be unable to so much as blink my eyes.

Progress

I literally only have a half page left to re-type of the family history out of 267 pages. The OCR program worked pretty well. I'd be cruising right along, just dealing with the fact that it couldn't tell the difference between commas and periods, and the letter "i" and "l" , or "K" and "X", or "a" and "e" and "c", then it would go all Ron Paul on me, and I'd get a page of this.

I scanned the original document in case anyone needs to reference possible transcription errors (unpossible!), or formatting. The updated version is in Word so it's searchable. And much easier to read. And up-dateable. (Don't get me started on the biography of John Hart that's currently in there. A little hyperbole is good for history, right??) It's by no means perfect, but at now it's readable. And the next update will include an index just to help with the clarity. I swear, each generation had at least one John, Joseph, George and William and it gets difficult to figure out who's who when three generations are alive and living in the same town at any given time.

A test for you. According to my family history, am I descended from (it's multiple choice - it's easy!):

A. Anne Boleyn.

B. A man (Richard Stought) who saved the life of the Duke of York.
C. An illegitimate son of one of the the Kings of Norway.
D. A signer of the Magna Carta.
E. A signer of the Declaration of Independence.
F. All of the above.

Tomorrow I am going ice skating with Sweet Daughter's Daisy Scout troop. I haven't been skating in well over 20 years. Once upon a time, I could do very basic cross-over turns and I could skate backwards. But I never learned how to stop unless it involved running into the boards or the violent application of gravity. This could get interesting.


(And the answer to the test was "F" of course! I cringed through several parts of this whole thing yelling "Primary resources! I want to see primary resources!!")