Potpourri Week! and J. Geils Band

Potpourri: meaning medley or miscellaneous collection. Like the Jeopardy! category, not the dried flowers.

Occasionally I'll come up with something to write about that doesn't really lend itself to an entire entry: enter potpourri week. These are some (unrelated and in no particular order) miscellaneous favorite things.

Thunderstorms- When I was little my family lived in a house with a great front porch. It had a swing, a brick ledge that went around and was a great place to watch thunderstorms.

I distinctly remember sitting on the porch one night with my family watching the lightning from a particularly exciting thunderstorm thinking this must be what it looks like if you were inside an egg when it was cracked. I’m sure my love of watching storms came from my Dad. One time, while the tornado sirens were going off, my Dad was outside looking for the tornado while I was inside, duck-and-covered in an interior closet, (like you are supposed to be if you don’t have a basement) because he wouldn’t let me go outside too. If I was better at advanced math I might have majored in meteorology. Of course, then my friends and family would have had to deal with me shouting out weather patters rather than rock formations in the car. I’m not sure which is worse.

Avocados- When I was in high school there was a rumor going around that our mascot, the warriors, was going to be changed. To the fighting avocados. Seriously. And it was semi-believable because Fallbrook is the avocado capital of the United States and former avocado capital of the world.

My appetite for avocados is a new one. They are kind of a weird texture (some say it’s the same as butter) and don’t have a ton of flavor on their own. Maybe it’s an acquired taste, because I’ll put them on just about anything.

Newspapers- I’m sort of contrary when it comes to newfangled business. I still would prefer a letter to an email I refuse to use any sort of e-reader contraption, I don’t want my phone to be able to tell me where the nearest Starbucks is, and I like reading the newspaper. Not Wall Street Journal Online, not Anchorage Daily News’ AND.com, the actual printed copy of the newspaper. I like flipping through the sections, I like getting ink on my fingers, I like doing the crossword puzzle, I like feeling like a dad in a 1960s television show. My perfect morning would involve a sunny, warm porch, a cup of coffee, and the newspaper. Pure heaven.

Chocolate Milk- There’s a little restaurant in Metamora, IL, where my grandparents live, called the Family Fountain. It’s a typical small town café. There are unofficial men and women tables, (men generally talk farming, women talk knitting/crocheting/other crafts), they serve biscuits and gravy, pie and other comfort foods, and everyone always orders the same thing. I order 1 pancake (which is the size of a dinner plate) and chocolate milk. No fancy pre-mixed chocolate milk here. It’s regular milk with Hershey’s syrup and you have to stir it in yourself. And it’s my favorite part of breakfast.

This week's hot jam is Centerfold by the J. Geils Band. Centerfold was the band's only big hit, but it was a big one. It hit number 1 on the Hot 100 in 1982 and was a regular video in the early years of MTV. For some reason, the oldies station my alarm is set to often plays this song in the morning, and I catch myself sleepily humming along. (Not that I'm complaining, it's not a bad way to wake up.) Centerfold tells the story of a boy surprised to find his high school crush in a "girly magazine". That has to happen in real life. I mean someone sat next to Pamela Anderson in history, right?

Jergen's Natural Glow and Ricky Skaggs

So my world looks like this these days:

Which means I look like this these days (it's an evolutionary advantage to blend in with the snow, right?):

Pre Jergen's Natural Glow

Needless to say, 5ish hours of weak sunlight does not a healthy glow make. But thanks to Jergen's Natural Glow I can go from being so pale I'm clear to being off-white. (or white lion to slightly-less-white lion)

Post Jergen's Natural Glow

And by this time of the winter I'm happy to be slightly less white lion colored. Natural Glow doesn't turn you orange and won't suddenly make you tan, which I consider to be a good thing. (Who wants to go to work practically clear one day and Snooki the next? That's tacky). The only downside is it does make you smell vaguely of self tanner, but the smell fades pretty quickly and the color lasts for a long time so you don't constantly have to smell like a spray tan booth.

Bonus: No risk of turning out like this

Jergen's isn't paying me for this, but if they want to send me some free lotion, I wouldn't turn it down. It will be a long time before my skin sees the sun again.

This week's hot jam is Little Maggie by Ricky Skaggs. Maggies aren't painted in a very flattering light in most songs. Rod Stewart's Maggie May is a cougar keeping Rod out of school and The Beatles' Maggie Mae is a sailor-robbing prostitute. Not to great for the Maggies of the world. Little Maggie is a traditional bluegrass song and it isn't particularly flattering either, I guess. Maggie has a dram glass and a shot gun and she's courtin' another man, but I've always liked it anyway. Maggie seems sassy rather than sad. I like the version by Ricky Skaggs because he plays a mean-mandolin and I don't get to write things like that very often.

Rollerskating and Aerosmith

Growing up, if you wanted an AWESOME birthday party, you had it at Funway. Or maybe Pizza Hut, but Funway was a better choice.

This is from my friend Sarah's birthday. It hung on the bulletin board at Funway for probably 10 years.

Funway provided pre-teens of the far-west Chicago suburbs with all recreation they could possibly want: video games, bumper boats, batting cages, and the most popular of all activities: rollerskating.

I did my share of skating in my formative years and I loved it. I wasn’t particularly good, I couldn’t do turns or skate backwards (I always HATED when the DJ decide it was backward skate time. Backward skate meant nacho time for me), but I could stay on my feet and generally avoided embarrassing myself.

I hadn’t been on skates since the last day of 8^th grade, when kids with good grades got to go to Funway, while everyone else finished up their missing work. That all changed when, while doing my student teaching, we decided to take the kids on a trip to Skateland. (Anchorage’s answer to suburban Chicago’s Funway). I didn’t plan on skating, since it had been 10+ years since I’d been on skates, I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of my students, and I didn’t have health insurance, but after some begging and pleading from my students, I begrudgingly laced up some roller skates. Turns out, I can still do it. (Thank goodness, because a broken bone would have been really expensive…)

I was pleased to see all my students on roller SKATES not roller BLADES. In fact, I don’t even think Skateland offers roller blades. I was even more pleased to see that my kids were REALLY good at it. They could do tricks and spins and skate backwards (which is still impossible for me). I always kind of feared that rollerskating would become a dying art, left to roller derby girls and former roller disco fans. But there’s a whole new generation of roller skaters hanging out at the roller rink on Friday nights trying to get the object of their desire to couple skate with them, so all must be right with the world.

Keeping with the era, this week's hot jam is Don't Want to Miss a Thing by Aerosmith. Picture it, it’s 1999, you’re skating around in overalls and an Adidas/Old Navy t-shirt, and you hear the DJ say in his smooth DJ voice, “Alright folks, this skate is for couples and trios only.” Cue those fateful first chords of Don’t Want to Miss a Thing. You think, “Is he going to ask me to skate with him? Oh my gosh, I would totally die if he did.” No, he’s probably not. (Middle school boys are generally not known for brazenness with the opposite sex) So you grab two girl friends and skate around pretending you don’t care that you don’t have a boy to skate with. Or, if you're a more sensitive young lady, you go cry in the bathroom. Regardless of your sensitivity levels, Don't Want to Miss a Thing is a hot jam. Because couple skating to Mambo No. 5 just isn't as romantic.

Special Edition: Books of the Year and Billy Joel

So I finally got around to tallying up my book list for 2011. I've been keeping a list of books I've finished for the past couple years and it turns out I must have had A LOT of time on my hands in 2011. I read a lot of books. I mean a lot. 64 of them. (6 were young adult so those don't really count, but 58 is still a lot.)

These are my favorites from 2011 in chronological order (there were actually a few more favorites, but no one wants to read that many book reviews, nor do I want to write them.):

The Forgotten Garden - Kate Morton

This was my Christmas book last year. My mom was recommended it, and got it for me because it's long and she hates when I finish my book by 2:00 on Christmas day. The Forgotten Garden weaves together two stories taking place hundreds of years apart but in the same place. There's mystery and intrigue and self discovery. Not to mention, it's incredibly well written.

The Diaries of Adam and Eve - Mark Twain

Mark Twain is the cleverist (yes, I realize that's not a word) guy around. The Diaries of Adam and Eve are clever and witty and an excellent love story. Several times while reading it, I thought to myself, "Hmmm, I bet that would have been weird..." I mean, can you imagine suddenly being not only alive, but a grown-up, and having complex mental processes. That would have been very confusing. He humanized the first humans (if those are you religious leanings) and did so beautifully.

The Third Coast - Ted McClelland

I don't know what to say when people ask me where I'm from. I have a few "homes" and the Midwest has always felt like one of them. The Third Coast is a memoir-y nonfiction book that tells the story of the author's trip around all of the Great Lakes. He started in Chicago (actually near the Calumet River, so he was so far east he was practically in Indiana) and drove all the way around, exploring cities and meeting some very interesting characters. I've been to a good chunk of the places he went so reading it was a little like going home.

In the Heart of the Sea - Nathaniel Philbrick

I picked up In the Heart of the Sea because it was on a list of books about cannibalism on NPR, and I was intrigued. There was actually far less cannibalism than I thought there was going to be, but it was good nonetheless, so that's saying something. In the Heart of the Sea is the true story that Herman Melville based Moby Dick on, and the since I know the real story now, I don't feel like I have to read Moby Dick, so it's a win-win. It's non-fiction, but reads like a novel and makes you wonder what you would do if you were lost at sea.

Of Time, Space, and Other Things - Isaac Asimov

My friend Jonathan recommended Of Time, Space, and Other Things to me because it would make me feel smart. Not in a "Man, that Asimov is an idiot. I'm WAY smarter than him" kind of way, more of a "Holy cow, this book is blowing my mind" kind of way. Generally, one would expect a book like this to be dry and confusing. Of Time, Space, and Other Things may be a little confusing, but it's anything but dry. You can tell by Asimov's writing how passionate he was about history and science (and other things). It reads almost frantically, like he couldn't write fast enough for his ideas. Asimov is funny and clever and makes some deep concepts seem almost understandable.

The hot jam of the week is She's Always a Woman by Billy Joel. There a lot of things to love about this video, regardless of how you feel about the song. Just look at his hair. It would only be more amazing if he had a rat tail. I also really like the cheesy psuedo-surprised look after he checks, what I assume to be, the set list. But I happen to love both the video and the song. It's a great ballad about loving a lady for being tough as nails and not takin' nothin' from nobody, if you will. According to Wikipedia (which is always right, right?) he wrote it for his then-wife Elizabeth who took over managing his career and was known for being a tough and savvy business lady. (But the ended up divorced, so maybe a woman who will "carelessly cut you, and laugh while you're bleeding" isn't the marrying type.)

Bonus! A few people/bands have covered this song, but I really like this version by Copeland.

Beaches and Doris Troy

Happy New Year, Folks. Apologies for the hiatus, but I took the holidays off.

I enjoyed a lovely Christmas at home in California. I love a good White Christmas, but it’s hard to argue with a sunny and 70 Christmas instead. Christmas eve eve (yes, I do mean eve eve) my parents and I went to the tidepools at Cabrillo National Monument.

I think beaches, whether they are ocean, lake, river, creek, pond, etc, are pretty much the best thing ever. I did my senior thesis on the correlation between sand grain size and beach slope which allowed me to spend a few afternoons on the beach with a tape measure. When we mapped near the Colorado River I made sure my independent project allowed me to hang out by the water as much as possible.

You know how some people say they wouldn’t want to go to a beach resort just to sit on the sand all day? I’m not one of those people. I’m really good at sitting on the sand all day. I think it’s related to my porch sitting abilities.

I’ve been to some pretty amazing beaches, like these:

I think Just One Look by Doris Troy is just about the cutest song of all time. Not to mention Doris has an amazing voice. Doris Troy was a one-hit wonder, and I really wish she had released more songs. At the time though, she had some pretty stiff competition. 1963 saw hits from The Chiffons, Martha and the Vandellas, The Crystals, The Shirelles, Leslie Gore, and The Angels so there wasn’t a lot of room for more songstresses. But one hit is better than none, and this is a pretty good one.