So many things...

Sometimes I don't post anything on here for a long time because I don't have anything to write. Other times its because I actually have too much to write about. Then again, sometimes its for different reasons entirely. But recently, it's basically been the second reason.

I know I put up a picture from Beth and my wedding, but I haven't actually written a single word about the wedding itself. Or the week leading up to the wedding. Or what life as a married man is like (hint: just like my recent life as an unmarried man). I haven't mentioned going to the beach in North Carolina for a week back in early July, or going back to Canada this month for a memorial for Beth's grandparents as well as some much needed R&R. Speaking of Beth, did I mention that she and I are starting to plan our honeymoon? Nope. I didn't mention that she's changed her name, either, or any of the construction projects that she and I have worked on this summer. Also, I got a promotion at work. This makes me a 30-something married homeowning doctor with a career, none of which was true 2 years ago, which is probably worth a post in its own right but still hasn't gotten one. Lets see what else has happened.... well, there was a full season of softball in which I went from being incredibly rusty and the worst player on the team for the first couple of games to getting back in a groove and starting to rake like the old days, to making the mistake of stretching for home and sliding and losing significant chunks of skin from my arm, shin and butt. Our friend Jen moved back to town about a month ago and has been hanging out a lot, serving as a valuable consultant as I continue to try to perfect my margarita and bloody mary recipes. Meanwhile, our friend Chris is in the process of moving out of town, but he, Beth and I bought packrafts and took them out for a quicker-than-expected float down the Eagle River, just north of town....

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that there are a lot of things I probably should have written about, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Let me know if there's anything above that I should try to write about ASAP, otherwise I'll just see if anything grabs me in the coming days.

The point of summer

The point of summer in Alaska, it seems to me, is to miss as much sleep as possible while doing outdoorsy things…. Well, maybe that’s not exactly true but there’s definitely a grain of truth in there. After all, salmon fishermen brag about “suicide runs,” (where they drive 2+ hours from Anchorage to the Kenai River after work, fish all night, and drive straight back for work the next morning) like they’re war medals. That’s hardly the only example, although it might be the best, and anyone who has ever tried to go to bed at 10 despite the sound of their neighbor’s lawn mower knows the just about everyone gets caught up in summer one way or another.

So its been busy up here for the last month or two, even if you don’t count the wedding. We’ve gone hiking after work, making it back around 10:30 in full sunlight. We’ve tried our new packrafts on a beautiful, sunny, warm Saturday. We’ve jogged and biked. We’ve grilled. We’ve gardened, including building new raised beds and making a small pseudo-greenhouse. We’ve done other projects, too, from making new shelves in the storage shed to a doghouse to new dividers for our silverware drawer.

All in all, its been a great summer so far. I’m looking forward to the rest of it!

Two Comedians, One Stage

Really funny clip I just saw from Conan a few nights ago: They "accidentaly" booked two comedians for the same night, so instead of asking one to go home they just had them share the stage

Dear loyal blogreader Jenn Wade

Happy birthday - I hope it was a great one!

I'm listening to an old episode of "All Songs Considered" right now. It's a review of music from 2000-2010, where they talk about the songs, albums, and trends that defined the decade. In it they talk a lot about how digitization and the internet have made music so much easier to access, from subscription music services that give access to practically any song at any time for dollars a month to a computer program that you can type any sentence into and it will find samples of the words from songs and play them back to you (Here it is, but in my opinion it needs some work).

Anyway, this got me thinking about how easy it is to find songs now. It used to be that if you heard a new song for the first time on the radio but missed its introduction, you just had to wait until you heard it again if you ever wanted to know who it was by. Or maybe you heard a song and knew it was a remake, but you might never find out who the original was by.

Well now you can just get on your phone, google a couple of lyrics, and out comes the result. For instance, Beth played a song I really liked a few months ago that was from an unlabeled mix CD and she didn't even know who the artist was. So I got to work and typed in the only words I could remember: "It's far too early in the morning." If you think about it, that isn't the most specific search term, but first on the list was "The Kooks - Tick of Time Lyrics" and next was an actual music video for the song.

Pretty good, but what if you don't really even know the exact lyrics. Say the song came on the radio as you were waking up or you just weren't really paying attention until you realized later that a song was still in your head. Well I was thinking back to an episode of Married... With Children (Oldies but Young 'Uns - 1991) where Al has a song stuck in his head and spends the first 29 minutes of the episode trying to track it down based on the lyric "hmmmmm hmmmmm him." In the last minute, he serendipitously finds the song and buys the album, only to have someone accidentally smash the record after he gets it home. These days, that episode couldn't happen, because if it did, it would go like this:

0:00:00.00 episode starts, Al hears 5 seconds of song
0:00:12.00 Al has his cell phone out and types "hmm hmm him" into Google
0:00:12.08 Google has returned about 62,800 results
0:00:13.08 Al clicks on the first
0:00:15.08 Al reaches the Wikipedia page "Anna (Go to Him)"
0:00:25.08 Al searches for: Amazon "Anna (Go to Him)" arthur alexander
0:00:27.08 Al uses "1-Click Ordering" to buy the CD
0:00:27.28 Al grins smugly
0:00:30.00 Credits

Anyway, I love that its now so easy to find a good song based on just a snippet or even a little echo thats rattling around in your brain. And after listening to this and some other NPR shows (like this, or this), I've got quite a few songs to search for.

too much digging

Back when I first heard the phrase "the world needs ditchdiggers," I didn't think it really applied to me. So I hit the books, kept to my studies and years later found myself knee deep in a trench on a beautiful May weekend in Anchorage.

When we buried insulation around the foundation of our house last year, we only buried it to a depth of about 2 feet. This meant that we got some frost heaving of the blueboards along the back of the house, where the soil is the wettest, which put our precious siding into jeapordy as the insulation crept upwards. So this weekend we buried more insulation, to insulate the insulation that was already there, and hopefully that should solve the problem.

Next winter, here's what things should look like alongside our house. By keeping the soil under the older (vertical) blueboard from freezing, we should prevent any further frost heaving.