Tag: memories

Wezda’s Theme Music

Mood: sunshiny

Man, it’s a gorgeous day outside my windows. My first look was south and west. Blue sky. A few clouds and contrails. Sunshine. Appeared to be a late fall day. A litle deceiving as further gazing brought out frost speckling the bare earth and laying on roofs. Temp was 30 F. High of 51 could be. After looking out that side and inhaling sunshine, I headed for the back windows and a view to the east and south. Still sunny. Woo hoo.

Amazed and amused how the MSM addressed PINO-elect Trump’s Monday comments. These were regarding the possible invasion of other countries. Adding states like Panama, Canada, and Greenland. No doubt he (DJT) loves the attention he gets from saying such garbage. It also distracts from the real business taking place. Like he’s the Wizard of Trump, faking people out, insisting, pay no attention to the man behind the curtains. But a CNN article summarized Trump’s comments as — paraphrasing — different from presidents of both parties in the last few decades. Yeah, NS; you’d need to go back in history for a point where the POTUS was talking about taking land from other countries. I guess they felt a need to make a sober and unbiased statement about it.

Of course, if you’re talking about invading other countries, you know, just for the sake of that other country and, you know, freedom and democracy, or regime change, you don’t need to go so far. And just like true Republicans of the last few decades, they’re eager to look at other countries — say, the UK — and declare how that country needs to be changed while ignoring the shit conditions their policies build at home. Their vision is often shaped by greed, so it’s frequently myopic and narrow. They are very good at Orwell-speak though, and doubletalk, so they can’t be discounted. And, with a third of the country voting them in and a third not voting at all, well, hell, they feel a mandate to do whatever they want has been achieved.

Good news on the social media front. Women can now be called household objects on Meta platforms. I’m sure that will advance the causes of freedom of speech and democracy. Yep, that was snark.

The sunny weather has inspired today’s theme music. Live local, right? So looking out those windows and seeing sunshine, The Neurons adopted a cheerful attitude and put “On the Sunny Side of the Street” into the morning mental music stream (Trademark warming). Mom played versions of the song by several while I was a child. I became familiar with versions by L. Armstrong, T. Dorset, D. Day, and Nat King Cole, among others. I checked out several versions online and stayed with Satchmo on The Ed Sullivan Show. Hope you found it favorable as your day’s theme music. I find it a song that’s amenable to lyric variations. Fer instance, I used to sing, “Life can be so sweet with a cat sitting on your feet.” That was inspired by our cat, who liked to sit on our feet. Strange girl but ever so sweet.

Coffee and I ground out an agreement in the kitchen. Here’s the music, and away we go. Have a good Wezda, Jan 8, 2025. Cheers

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Grenday’s Theme Music

Mood: Coffeerockin

Good morning to you on this Grenday, January 5, 2025. It’s a foggy-cloudy-sunny-raining day out there. Eastern sunshine is narrowly prevailing, giving us a grey Sunday, or Grenday. Currently, we’re sitting at 42 F in our valley with a high of 51 F possible. All this is an improvement over yesterday. It saw us have a few minutes of sunshine. Hours of subsequent cold rain turned it into a gloomfest.

So today is better! Not better than places which are warm and sunshiny, but better than places smothered in ice and snow, wrecked with winds and burdened by freezing temperatures. Yes, definitely better than them.

A bright spot is that snow has accumulated in the mountains in southern Oregon. Our snowpack is at 164% of normal. That’s good news for the summer, as we depend on that slow melting ice to keep our cisterns, reservoirs, streams, and rivers filled during the long hot months when rain is rarely experienced. And it’s good to have the ground soaked again against another drought striking up. The wet ground and vegetation is a significant buffer against wildfires starting and spreading. So, it’s all good news, as long as it can be sustained for another month. That puts me at a point of grimacing agains the rain and mildly chilly temperatures with its gloom, and cheering for it for what it brings us.

Today’s song is an upbeat one. Last time — only time — that I shared it on here was when the lovely Quinn was diagnosed with lymphoma and living out his final month. Such a sweetheart, but that’s how life treats us all, regardless of how we live or our merits and debits. Unlike then, the cats are not to blame for the song’s morning mental music stream (Trademark spinning) residency. Jimmy Eat World came out with “The Middle” in 2001. Written when the band had been dropped by their first record company, it’s an upbeat rocker with some affirming lyrics.

Hey
Don’t write yourself off yet
It’s only in your head you feel left out or looked down on
Just try your best
Try everything you can
And don’t you worry what they tell themselves when you’re away

It just takes some time
Little girl, you’re in the middle of the ride
Everything, everything will be just fine
Everything, everything will be alright, alright

h/t to Songfacts.com

Today, the song emerged after I witnessed the clouds moving out, letting the sunshine wax bright.

Coffee and I have achieved cofftente. It’s kind of like detente but it’s not. Here’s the music. Hope an awesome day carries you through to tomorrow. Cheers

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Satrda’s Theme Music

Mood: Sleepsatisfied

It’s the fourth day of the year, Jan 4, 2025. Satrda. 38 degrees F. Cloudy. Blue sky has been banished. The meek, subservient sun does little to warm and light us. We’re prepped for another day of rain with a high of 48 F. But, corresponding with my sister in Plum, PA, it’s not bad. They received a few issues of snow yesterday and then dealt with a snow squall. Monday is forecasted to be a heavy and cold snowy day for her. She’s worrying about patients canceling and travel issues. So, rainy and gloomy will suffice.

Today’s music is “Green Tambourine” by the Lemon Pipers. Came out in 1968. I was twelve. The song became a hit and was rotated on all the regular pop stations heard on transistor radios and car radios. With all that exposure, I remember it well. Don’t know why it’s in my morning mental music stream (Trademark old). I slept heavily last night after feeling pretty gloomy yesterday evening. Didn’t have any cat visitations that I know of. No wind or wife disrupted my Zzzs. No need for visiting the bathroom during the night, and nothing amiss with my foot and ankle broke into my sleep. Only one dream floats around my noggin, and tambourines aren’t featured. The song just rose up as I went about opening blinds on another dull day, feeding cats, and making breakfast and coffee.

I enjoyed this video. Such a black and white throwback, including a sexist commercial for ‘Neet’ hair removal cream. Look how young Dick Clark appears. Check out the clothes and dancing. Trippy.

Coffee and I are doing our daily two-step. Hope your weather and fates are kind to you wherever you are. Here’s the music. Cheers

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Twosda’s Theme Music

Mood: Coffeemollified

This is it, 2024’s final day. Twosday, December 31. Seems ordinary in every way when I just look out the window.

Winter has descended. Our temperature is muscling to 30 F. The high will be 42 F. Sun shimmers through fog’s pearly teeth. Frost crisps grass blades into white shoestrings. No snow or rain falling. While walking in late afternoon yesterday, though, I looked across the valley. A fog line huddled against the mountains at about three thousand feet. Above the fog, a snowy mountain ridge turned apricot by the setting sun stood sentry. Now that, I thought, looks cold.

My Neurons took to quizzing me as I took care of brekkie duties, asking me who starred in different televsion shows and movies. Yes, I agree, it’s an odd thing to be doing. Then they pivoted, “Okay, who sang the ‘Friends’ theme music?” Easy peasy, the Rembrandts, right? “Now name the Supreme Court Justices, smart guy,” The Neurons returned. Before coffee? I protested. That’s hardly fair.

Today’s music was brought in by The Neurons when my wife and I were driving home from a shopping expedition yesterday. The radio played Luke Combs’s version of Tracy Chapman’s song, “Fast Car”. My wife commented that it revitalized her sales, especially after the Grammies, when Combs and Chapman performed the song together. We then talked about how good her first album was. That resulted in The Neurons installing another song from the album, “For My Lover”, in the morning mental music stream (Trademark tariff protected).

Coffee is now approaching The Neurons with a peace offering. Yes, it’s caffeine. Usually sufficiently mollifies The Neurons into being more companionable. Hope your final day of 2024 is memorable for you in good ways. Here’s the music. Cheers

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Munda’s Theme Music

Mood: Timeflective

G’ mornin’, peeps of the online written word. It’s 2024’s final Monday, December 20, 2024. To celebrate, my other and I will go out for brekkie after she returns from her exercise class. Then we’ll do some groc shopping. Breakfast will be had at Crackin & Stackin in downtown Medford, I think.

It’s 33 F outside. Sunshine and clouds war again. Blue sky wins as the sun prevails. The ground is wet but drying for the moment after a few days of rain on a heavier scale and flooding in other parts of the county. No rain is forecast for the next two days. Today’s high will be 43 F.

I experienced vigorous, positive dreams last night and that’s put me in a solidly upbeat mood. Seeing sunshine reinforced it. Also contributing is that my foot/ankle are happier, and I had a lengthy solid if interesting writing outing yesterday.

Spoke with Mom on the phone last night. Says she’s feelin’ tired. Not surprising. Holidays always sap. Like many, it pushes her out of her comfortable returns. Now at 89, with several major health issues as part of her history, her energy is low, and every day is a new exploration of something in her body contending for attention. Her other, Frank, is doing great, she said. He’ll be 95 next month.

However, one of my younger sisters now has the flu. She is the Trumper who has had COVID three times. Believe she vaccinated before but she reportedly has underlying lung issues. She won’t tell anyone deets so we rumble about what it is. Her husband, a year younger than moi, went through open heart surgery a few years ago and is now dealing with kidney stones.

One of my other younger sister’s boyfriend lost his brother. But 66 years old, the man had a stroke and then a heart attack. Home alone while his wife was away visiting family in another state for the holidays, he was found on the kitchen floor after a day. Rushed to the hospital, he was pronounced dead and was removed from life support. He passed away yesterday morning.

Meanwhile, the boyfriend himself went into the hospital Friday for some scans after he complained about feeling ill and not breathing right. Turns out that he was experiencing congestive heart failure a 56 years old, astonishing us all. He’s 56 and is a regular runner. Those who saw him on Christmas thought he looked healthy and fit. It’s the way of life, I guess.

All that news and subsequent thinking gave permissions to The Neurons to introduce Joni Mitchell into the morning mental music stream (Trademark aging) with “The Circle Game”. A simple song, very poetic.

Coffee downed, here we go, putting another Monday into the books. Have the best you can, right? Don’t know how the next day will change your expectations.

Here’s the music. Cheers

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Sa’day’s Theme Music

Mood: Grrrrumpy

It’s raining again. Alexa notified me at 8 PM (or 2000 hours if you prefer) that it was going to start raining near me, starting around 12 AM and going intermittently until 8 PM. About 1.3 inches of rain was expected.

I was listening to the rain hitting the roof, pinging off the vents, splattering the windows, and asked, “Is it raining now?”

“Rain is expected to start at 9:30 PM.”

“Alexa, feedback. It’s 8 PM and it’s raining now.”

Rainy, gray, it’s warmish again, 50 F with a high of 52 F suggested and a low of 46 F. The gray light slanting in through the windows does nada to brighten my mood. Fog swirls around mountain pines and peaks. Dark and pretty in a tragic “Wuthering Heights” sort of fashion.

A perusal of news headlines has me opimistic for 2025. (Yes, that was snark.) Things like the costs of owning and driving a car are jumping. This was a California story. The average price paid for a new car was over $47K. Now it’s jumped to over $52K. And insurance is climbing as well. Again, it’s California, but what happens in California usually ripples out. And, this is before any PINO Trump tariffs are issued.

Then a jolly story covered how the Alum Rock school district is closing or consolidating schools. Oh, boy, let me quit reading that.

Another story told me eggs, already pricy, are going up because of the bird flu. And a related news article informed me that animals were dying from being infected with the bird flu from eating tainted meat.

Next came a recounting that those anti-vaxxing efforts in Louisana are having an effect. Louisana is seeing cases of the flu climb. Surprised? No. They’re one of two states in a ‘Very High ILI’ category. The other state is…Oregon.

What? My state. WTF? Chasing that down, I learn, gosh, vaccinations for COVID-19, RSV, and the flu are trailing data from last year, which was already trailing data from the year before. So the flu, etc., are up.

Grrrrrreat. Yes, that is sarcasm.

I got out of the news before I turned to the national and international scenes. Mood was cratered enough, thanks.

The Neurons already had music picked out and going in the morning mental music stream (Trademark sagging). “Forty Days and Forty Nights” is a 1956 blues number by Muddy Waters. The Neurons had it in my head solely on the line, “Sun shinin’ all day long, but the rain keep falling down.” Yes, it hasn’t been forty solid days if I judge on empirical evidence; it just feels like it to the wife, me, and others who engage in conversations about the weather. The ground is saturated. Rivers and creeks are up. Flooding is possible. On the possy side, our drought seems over for our part of Oregon. Other parts of the state remain abnormally dry.

Could be worse, I remind myself. We are not snowbound, etc.

The Forty Days version I selected was a Steppenwolf cover. Mom bought me the album, Steppnwolf 7, for Christmas in 1970, when the song and I were both fourteen. It has sentimenal attachments to me, see.

Okay, coffee and I have worked out an arrangement for this morning whereby I’ll brew it and pour it into my mouth and swallow. Seems like I’m doing all the work here, but I benefit from it. I don’t think coffee gets anything except perhaps some emotional satisfaction from helping me through the day. Here’s the music. Cheers

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Friday’s Theme Music

Mood: Friazing

Friday morning, December 20, 2024, has arrived. It crowned us with fog, wind, and surprisingly warm temps. While weather services claim our temp is 46 F, my system say 56 F. I went out there to check and agree with my system. Meanwhile, in the space to think and type that, I turned around and the fog was gone. A white slate has been dropped onto the valley. Sunshine squeezes through where and when it can.

We went around town doing stuff yesterday. People were frequently overheard or encountered remarking about the short day. We’re all eager for the solstice to arrive so more sunshine will fill our days. Just a few more nights to endure.

So much news to digest and comment upon but my brain is warning, no, slow down. Back away from that toxic stuff. But watching the Musk call the shots for the inept GOP as they try to game the system to favor PINO Trump threatens to plant a permanent scowl on my mien.

Meanwhile, a fellow blogger reminded me of The Specials, and a terrific ditty they wrote back in 1982. “The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum” is gleefully playing in the morning mental music stream (Trademark sedated). A Canadian in the U.S. military who was a dozen years older than me introduced me to group and this song. The of us, along with a third, and the four children — two boys and two girls — were camping out at Okuma on Okinawa. End of a good day, a fire going as the Pacific lapped at the beach a few hundred yards away, sipping cognac, he played this on the boombox. It’s the perfect song for now. While it’s a mellow, lazy bouncy flow, the words are ideal. To wit:

The Cowboy has told us to go nuclear,

who am I to disagree?

Remember, back when they wrote this, Ronnie Reagan was the Power. Now with PINO Trump, we have a perfect crowning line:

Cuz when the madman flips the switch,

the nuclear will go for me.

Between Ronnie back then and Putin and Trump now, that’s a real fear. Putin doesn’t give a shit and PINO Trump is too empty-headed to understand the consequences of going nuclear. But the song goes on to capture capitalism’s insanity in another verse:

I’ve seen the faces of starvation,

but I just cannot see the point.

Cuz there’s so much food here today

that no one wants to take away.

Yes, there is so much wasted food in the world, often because people are overeating in restaurants or it’s prohibitively priced, goes unsold, and gets tossed. Meanwhile, people starve and beg around the corner.

Gotta move on. I introduced coffee to my neurons today, and they’re getting along well. Here’s the music, and I hope you enjoy. Here we go. Cheers

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Thursday’s Theme Music

Mood: Nostalgic

Today is Thursday, December 19, 2024. A temptation to change Thursday to Throughsday almost conquered my fingers. ‘Throughsday’ because the week is almost finished. I didn’t change it, as I’m disinclined toward misinformation and confusing people.

In other morning news, a crowd of zombies went through our town. Ha, ha, just kidding. It wasn’t a crowd. Just a couple.

Our weather today looks as if someone delivered elements of fog, clouds, sunshine, and rain. All were tossed together in a big blue bowl. Now they’re up there, waiting to be mixed and blended.

Just after observing and writing all of that, Papi the ginger blade floof, returned with a scouting report. He didn’t need to say anything. Fog had shut down the sunshine, clouds, and blue skies. 46 F out there, it ‘feels like 38’, with a high of 57 dangling over us.

I met with my beer buddies last night. Two new members joined us. She is a retired teacher and physician’s assistant. He is a retired electrical engineer. They have a daughter who works for NASA, and he was a big science fiction fan when he was a kid. Others told him that I sometimes write science fiction. He shifted over to sit by me later in the night and discuss the genre. Lot of fun remembering the novels we had in common which influenced us.

Today’s theme music arrives on the shoulders of a conversation I had with several women last night. They expressed deep disappointment and frustration that more women didn’t turn out to vote in the 2024 election. I didn’t have any insights into that and they couldn’t cite any stats. Young me from several different groups were the dissappointing difference to me. I read interviews with and stories about young black men, for example, who thought Trump would be better for the economy. That still makes me shake my head.

Anyway, after returning home with that conversation in mind, “American Woman” by the Guess Who from 1970 rose into the morning mental music stream (Trademark peeling) today. I always thought the song was about the United States, represented by a woman, seducing countries to be like the United States. The singer was resisting because the United States was a war machine filled with ghettos. The ‘colored lights’ referred to in the song was Hollywood glamor. Remember, the Vietnam War was underway and protests were taking place in the U.S. In light of that backdrop, my interpretation made sense to me. But different interviews with the Guess Who band members painted a different story. The songwriter and vocalist, Burton Cummings, said it was just a comparison of women from the U.S. and Canada.

“What was on my mind was that girls in the States seemed to get older quicker than our girls and that made them, well, dangerous. When I said ‘American woman, stay away from me,’ I really meant ‘Canadian woman, I prefer you.’ It was all a happy accident.”

h/t to Wikipedia.

I became fourteen around the time of the song’s release. It’s uptempo beat, rich bass, unique riffs, lead guitar, lyrics, and vocals all worked for me. Cummings sang it with an angry, contemptuous sneer in my opinion. That spoke to my own burgeoning contempt for how our world and society works. Ah, to be young and idealistic.

Coffee and I have negotiated arrangements and I’m taking advantage of that to warm my throat. Time to light the candle on another day. Here’s the music. Cheers

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A Race Car Dream

I was a young man. And I was at some kind of car race where I was to be a participant. Several emerging factors swirled and fell and rose. Nobody was expecting me. I wasn’t sure what was going on. I then confirmed, gosh, I am in this race.

Employing strange dream logic, the race was sometimes played as a card game with a board track. Other times, it seemed like a slot car setup, but then it was sometimes full-sized race cars. I’d seamlessly skip between those motifs but the dream itself was mostly centered on race control where I’d check the time sheets, find out where I was on the track, and learn my position. The people populating race control were all tall, older, and white. Most seemed British. I never saw any of the cars so I can’t comment on their colors or livery. But I would identify them. Like I told some once that another driver was piloting a Porsche 917 and another was driving a P3 Ferrari. Someone else was wheeling the Silk Cut Jaguar XJ9.

I swapped cars. I don’t know what I was driving but I suddenly announced, grinning, “I’m driving a Ford GT.” This is a car which won LeMans and the world championship in the mid 1960s and helped seduce me as a racing fan when I was nine. I didn’t specify which variant I was driving.

I learned that I’d qualified fourth but some bureaucratic snafu shuffled me to the pack’s tail end. That didn’t bother me; I shrugged it off with a grin. I was confident that I would win, as I’d qualified fourth with minimal effort. Now, recalling, I actually did have one segment where I was in the car, on the track, during the race, passing clusters of other cars. I then left the car, blink, and was back at race control to check my standing. They didn’t know who I was. I was certain I was leading but they dismissed it. I was told that I’d done something incorrectly and my laps hadn’t been counted. I didn’t know I was supposed to do that, I protested, but that wasn’t their issue.

None of that fazed me. Grinning, I told them, “But I have all these chits.” The chits were small red paper rectangles, like the old-time ticket stubs given at movies in decades past. I received them every time I completed a lap. As I told them about the chits, I held up a fistful of them. Expressing astonishment, they counted the chits and announced that I was in the lead.

I met the news with a happy grin and readied myself to keep racing. Dream end.

I enjoyed discovering this footage of the 1966 LeMans race featuring the Ford GTs. Nice to hear the voices of Bruce McLaren, Dan Gurney, Denis Hulme, etc., and see them. Of course, the staged Ford 1-2-3 finish was made famous in the movie Ford vs. Ferrari, where Ken Miles (played by Christian Bale) was first across the finish line but was deemed not to be the winner because another car started further back, so it covered more distance.

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Sunday’s Theme Music

Mood: Rocknmemorin

‘Sun’ day is just an honorific at this point today. It’s a beerlovers’ choice out there, cold and frosty. Parts of the streets are drying as the rain has finally ceased. Traces of snow have migrated in when the rain was petering out and the temperaures descending. Was 28 F when I rolled out on his ‘Sunday’, December 15, 2024. Now i’s up o 33. Ten more degrees and we’ll be at the high.

Last night’s Swedish Smörgåsbord was entertaining. Delicious food (although I passed on the lutfisk) and bracing Glühwein. Our hostess reminded me that they serve the same thing every year, part of their Swedish heritage, so she’s had some practice. Conversations revolved around the Gospel Choir concert which we’d already attended. My wife was singing its praises and several others had tickets for today’s matinee. Beyond that, last week’s quake and tsunami warning was discussed as two people were at the coast when it happened. Next, we went into the anticipation of a dark and depressing 2025 under Trump. One woman, a Quaker and Peace House member asserted that she was going to maintain a positive attitude no matter what happened. A second woman insisted that we would not see a 2026 eleciton as Trump and the GOP would go into full Hitler mode. I disagreed with that extreme pessimism. I think Trump’s adminstration, filled with alpha billionaires, few with government experience, will self-destruct with a flailing economy, and Republicans will turn on Trump. While I hope I’m right, I’m too often wrong. Fingers crossed, right?

We’re off to Sunday brunch in a little while. Up into the southern elevations where some serious snow already resides. Then back home to get cozy, read, watch football, and decompress. I like to say decompose rather than decompress; my wife always corrects me.

Today’s music was gonna be “Ventura Highway” by America. Started with the line, “You can always change your name,” in the morning mental music stream (Trademark decomposing). I don’t know why that song or line were called up. However, I walked into the living room. Sunshine was beaming in at all the windows. Flipping a switch, The Neurons called up, “Good morning, mister sunshine. You brighten up my day.” Then, yes, we were off with “Lonely Days” by the Bee Gees from 1970. The song’s variations between what almost felt like a dirge to its upbeat, jazzy rhythms always stirred me. I remember listening to it on an AM/FM radio alarm clock I had. I’d asked for it for my birthday and Mom granted my wish.

Get positive if you can. My coffee buddy helps lift me in that regard. Here’s the music. Hey ho, let’s go. Cheers

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