January 1, 1999
Happy New Year to everyone! Hope the change in the calendar wasn't too tumultuous for ya. May 1999 bring you more of what you want and less of what you don't need.
People are always asking if I made any resolutions. I can't say I have any new year's resolutions but I do have garden-variety goals, so I think I'm covered. Still, I can't help but think "Here it is, a brand new year, time to make a fresh start." But ultimately I think that's bunk. You can make a fresh start anytime, and today isn't a better day to do that than, say, your birthday or June 21st or whatever. Every day can be a fresh start.
Whoa. That's a scary thought. Think I'm going to go back to bed before I have any more like that. Happy New Year!
January 24, 1999
It's been a while since I updated the front page here. See, we've had a little snow, in much the same way that the United States has a little national debt. OK, maybe not that much snow. Two feet of snow, though, between January 2 and 11. That was the first time we had two feet of snow on the ground in 30 years, according to the National Weather Service.
So, we spent a lot of time shoveling snow around here. Then last week it got warm -- as in above freezing, even at night -- and the snow melted, Or at least most of it melted. There are still big piles of what was once snow, though, only now they're crusty and full of dirt and auto exhaust and just plain filth. Can't say that the Detroit area looks terribly pretty right now. But for awhile, the snow was pretty, if you didn't think about shoveling it or having to travel down the unplowed roads.
Anyway, that's me up at the top just after I shoveled out the sidewalk and driveway for the fifth time in a week and a half. Yes, I was holding the camera at arm's length to take the photo. (It was too cold to set up the tripod.)
February 15, 1999
We don't have all that snow anymore, so the above picture isn't exactly accurate. In fact, just a few days ago we had temperatures in the 70s. This has been a bit of a strange winter so far. None of this dull boring weather like you get in places like Los Angeles where it's sunny and warm all the time.
I am so glad the impeachment proceedings are over. Even if the result wasn't what you intended, I'm sure you are too.
I finally got cable television installed at my house. The cable company made me an offer I couldn't refuse. I now spend all my time watching HGTV and The Weather Channel. Oh, and I occasionally steal guilty glances at RollerJam (the new version of roller derby). I'm going to miss my friends, going to the Eagle, sunshine, sleep, etc.
February 26, 1999
Last night at the gym, while riding the stationary bike to nowhere, I read a recent issue of Details magazine. Don't know which month, but it wasn't all torn up so it couldn't have been at the gym long. The reason why I picked up this magazine, other than the fact that all the rest of the magazines seemed to be women's fashion magazines (note to Gold's Gym: Where did all the Muscle & Fitnesses go?), was that it had an article about the S/M scene written by someone who didn't seem to be part of the scene before she did the article. She got into it enough to visit some of the more notorious New York City haunts like The Eulenspiegel Society and that restaurant with all the S/M and fetish activities on the menu -- forgot it's name. But it was still written in this "Tee-hee -- look at them over there" kind of style. Although it did make some observations that maybe scene veterans have noticed, such as her one comment about rubber shorts being a torturous piece of apparel after several hours. (Hey, that's half the fun of it, right?)
I guess the moral of the story is, it looks like kinky folks are getting a few minutes of fame before the next big fad comes around. You know your subculture is just past overexposed when a mainstream mag like Details features it alongside skinny models in impossible suits and yet another article about Beck. Maybe S/M will get to slide back into the recesses of social imagination again, which is better because it's more fun that way, plus there are a lot fewer tourists.
March 9, 1999
Well, the weather has made the photo above accurate again. We got about
8 inches of snow in my neighborhood last week, and it's snowing again today
as I write this. I think I'm over snow now. OK, I think I was over snow after
the first two feet. The thing is, this is going to turn out to be the first
year with NORMAL snowfall in a long time. Detroit's normal snowfall is
around 40 inches, but in the last few years we've averaged between 10 and 20
inches -- one big snow, a couple of minor snows, and lots of clear 35-40 degree days. So maybe we shouldn't complain, but I guess we just got used to mild winters here.
Since the weather has been, um, "inconvenient," I've been dreaming a lot
about road trips lately. My 1993 Rand McNally Road Atlas is getting worn
from all the time I spend looking at it these days. (Time to buy a new one,
huh?) I don't know what's more fun -- looking at an area I haven't visited, or
looking at a place I've been to and remembering where all the streets led and
what I saw there. It's been a while since I've had a little trip, and as long
as it keeps snowing it'll be a while longer, but when spring comes,
I think I'll plan a little adventure. Or two.
March 31, 1999
In 1989 I took a road trip to the North Dakota Badlands. For those of you who didn't know that North Dakota had badlands, they're in the western end of the state. The terrain is not quite as rugged as South Dakota's more famous Badlands, but it's definitely not flat grain country. The U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt had several ranches in the area in the 1880s, and now there is a national park named for him in the North Dakota Badlands.
This photo, though, is not from there, but from the eastern end of the state. It's on U.S. highway 2, about 50 miles west of Grand Forks. No, they're not geographically illiterate in North Dakota. They don't mean Michigan, the state. There's a small town called Michigan about two miles off Highway 2. It has a grain elevator, a couple of churches, and a nice small-town feel, at least from the few minutes I spent driving around it 10 years ago. Of course, I couldn't resist taking the photo of me and the sign. I wonder how many strange looks I got as I set up the tripod, hit the self-timer, and ran back to my car. Not many, I guess -- wasn't much traffic there, as I recall.
In case you're wondering where the picture that used to be here went -- the one with all the snow -- well, it's in the archives now. The snow is gone from Metro Detroit and it's been in the 50s and 60s for a week or so now. Spring may finally have sprung. At least the flowers in my flower bed hope so.
May 20, 1999
I haven't updated this front page section in a while, because I think I intended to redesign the site. But that hasn't happened yet. Maybe soon. In the meantime... wow, what an eventful couple of months. The school shootings in Littleton, Colorado affected me the most, I think, partly because of my friends in the Denver area, and partly because it reinforced the idea that you really can't do much when the guy next to you goes ballistic, or even predict it. We're doomed. Have a nice day.
In slightly more positive news, I managed to schedule a few music shows lately, so I'll be playing lots of music in the next couple of months. That ought to be fun. See my music page for more info.
Anyway, I hope you all are well, there are no psychos in your school, and that no major multi-national military organizations are bombing your country.....
July 19, 1999
So what've I been doing lately? Working a lot. It's been very busy at work, and I feel like I've been scrambling to keep up. Fortunately the crunch period is over ... for now. It's a fact of life in business these days that crunches are never really over, though, so I don't expect the break to last very long.
The big fun lately has been my annual trip to the Blissfest Traditional Music Festival, which takes place the second weekend of July. This year's big headliner was Richie Havens, who took the stage just after the rain had diminished to drizzle on Friday night. Halfway through "Here Comes the Sun" the drizzle stopped completely. The festival grounds stayed damp till the sun woke us up on Saturday. After that the weather was absolutely perfect in the way Northern Michigan does best. I was camping with about a dozen friends, and we spent hours and hours jamming together. It was great fun. The only downer part of the weekend was that it ended. But hey, you gotta have a break from having that much fun.
So now that I've had a short trip, I'll be more or less stuck at home for a couple of months. Then it'll be time for the big vacation, which I'm still planning and definitely looking forward to. In the meantime, I'll probably be working on more music and maybe doing some work on my house.
By the way: Since the Geocities-Yahoo merger, the guestbooks seem to be out of commission, or at least the old Geocities guestbooks seem to be dead. So for now I've removed it from the menu. When I have a chance to figure out how to set up a new one, it'll return.
August 19, 1999
Wow, updates to the web page! First, you probably noticed that I tweaked the design of the front page here. Not to mention the new photo, taken by a friend while we were at the Blissfest Traditional Music Festival in July of this year. See, I read somewhere that you should change your page frequently, or else people will think you're boring. Is it working yet?
There's also a new musing -- it's the first new article in quite a while, and it's called Driving Crazy. This is what you get when you drive 20 miles each way to work every day, and you see plenty of examples of man's inhumanity to man via motor vehicles. But then it turned into a philosophical statement or something. Check it out.
In the next few days, I hope to shuffle some of the photos around. I'm also hoping to get another trip to the Renaissance Festival, which started last weekend. I went, and the weather was great and I saw performer friends and vendor friends, so I had a great time.
October 23, 1999
Since it's been two months since any updates have been done on the ol' Web Lair, I'm sure any regular visitors I had have gone off and found something more interesting to do, like watch paint dry or clean out the lint trap in the dryer or something. I have to admit that I've got mixed feelings these days about having a web page (that is, having all the web pages I do have. I have more sites than I probably should have, but I won't go into that.) At times there is motivation to actually update them, and I even get cool ideas. But then... I dunno, real life gets in the way and I have to do laundry, say, which requires cleaning out the lint trap in the dryer.
But before I get anywhere close to the issue of whether I really even want a web page (why does anyone want one anyway?), here's some of the more interesting things I've been up to. I went to the Michigan Renaissance Festival four times this fall, and had a great time -- even went in garb the last time, which is a fun way to experience a Ren Faire. Maybe I'll spill more beans about that sometime. I had been taking a hiatus from performing music live through most of the summer, and that ended in October. This month I've had a couple of paying gigs, both in a more-or-less redneck bar west of Detroit. The best I can say about them was, they paid pretty well. And I was playing with friends, which was worthwhile. Other than that... it's getting cooler here, as it does every year around this time. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my furnace keeps working, but it's been a bit crochety lately so I'm a bit concerned.
That's all the exciting news I can come up with. I'm not going to promise more updates to the site right now, because I've done that and they haven't happened. But ya never know. If you're inclined, drop me an e-mail at songdog@ix.netcom.com and tell me what you want to see (keeping in mind that I can't put some things on my web site, like nudity or photos of me cleaning out the lint trap in my dryer).
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