Tag Archives: chores

good news, nostalgia

Some good news…

My cousin writes that yesterday, my Uncle Brownlee got another try at the swallow test and did well enough that the staff brought him dinner. He was able to swallow some pureed food and drink tea from a straw.

Hopefully, he will be taken to his home tomorrow, which I know will make him feel a lot better. He’ll still be on hospice, but he no longer appears to be knocking at the pearly gates. Looks like he’s going to make it to his next birthday after all. He will be turning 78 next Friday, the day after I turn 47. Like me, Brownlee is a musical person. I have many memories of being accompanied by him playing his organ and listening to him play with his band, The Flames. He really is talented… plays entirely by ear. Passed on his musical genes to his son, Justin, who is a professional musician in Nashville.

I got bored yesterday at about 4:30pm, so I asked my friends to give me a song to sing. One person asked me to do “Walking on Sunshine” or “My Favorite Things”. To be honest, I never really liked the infectious pop ditty “Walking on Sunshine”. Even when it was a hit in the 1980s, it got on my nerves, probably because it was always on the radio. Then years later, it became a staple of commercials. I miss the days when jingle writers would come up with original song hooks rather than recycling pop songs like “Walking on Sunshine”. Much to my surprise, SingSnap only had one version of that song anyway, and it wasn’t a particularly good one.

I decided to try “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music, instead. It turned out pretty decently, although I shared the first version. I probably could practice it and make it better, but time was getting short. I like to do my recording before Bill comes home. I was further inspired by Julie Andrews, so I gave a stab at the duet, “Something Good”, and even scored a couple of good male partners.

Speaking of jingles and pop ditties… yesterday, while I was watching old episodes of The Price is Right, I took notice of the jingles. There was one for Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza (blecch) that had a very distinctive male voice. I was suddenly jolted back to the 80s for a moment as I remembered that voice was on so many commercials back in the day.

Jake Holmes… sang this and wrote the lyrics to this jingle, as well as so many others back in the 80s!

In the course of finding out who was singing the jingles, I learned that Jake Holmes is also the real composer of the song “Dazed and Confused”, made famous by Led Zeppelin. For many years, they never gave him any credit; Jimmy Page was listed as the composer. Holmes finally sued years later, and now gets a nominal credit… “inspired by Jake Holmes”. Shitty! I lost a little respect for Led Zeppelin after reading that, especially when Holmes contacted the band and they rebuffed him.

No… this was NOT written by Jimmy Page!
Looks like he made a nice living singing jingles, though…

He also did that infamous Army “Be all you can be” jingle I referenced the other day. His voice reminds me a little bit of the late Glenn Frey’s. Just a little bit, mind you.

A classic!

I could probably sit here all day and listen to Jake Holmes’ jingles from the 80s. It seems like they don’t make ’em like this anymore, although I’ll admit it’s been a few years since I was last subjected to American television. In a different world, maybe I would have followed a similar path, like the late Ukrainian American singer, Kasey Cisyk. She was famous for this jingle.

What a voice! Hard to believe she made her career in jingles! And she was also the original singer of “You Light Up My Life”, which was made famous by Debby Boone. Kasey’s version was in the movie by the same name.
Lovely… and Didi Conn did a great job lip syncing it to make it look like she was singing it.

Well… it’s Thursday, which means it’s time to vacuum. I hate vacuuming more than any of the other chores I do, but at least when it’s over, that means the weekend is coming. Hopefully, my uncle will continue to improve and we can have him around for a bit longer. He truly is one of my favorite people in the world. I’ve been thinking about him all week. When he does depart this life, it’ll probably hit me a lot harder than when I lost my own father.

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Uncategorized

Persistent spammers…

Boy, are they barking up the wrong tree…

This morning, I found two pages of lesbian porn spam in my Google mail account. I’m kind of amused by this, because I’m definitely not into women. I kind of wonder what causes this phenomenon. Does this spammer have a glitch that causes him or her to send out dozens of lesbian porn spam emails? Or are they just really enthusiastic about getting people to sign up?

Something tells me that this method must be, to some extent, relatively effective. Why else would they do it? There must be lesbians out there in Internet land who want to view this shit. Or maybe there are horny and curious males who want to see it. I don’t want to see it because lesbians aren’t my thing. I mean, I have lesbian friends, but I am myself straight.

Ah well… this is a problem easily dealt with with a push of a button. I won’t be viewing any lesbian porn today.

What I do hope to do is cut the grass. We have nice sunny weather this morning and my new lawnmower and weedwhacker are here. The only issue is, it’s a robotic mower, and although it will save me a lot of tedious time cutting the grass, the set up is going to require some work. We have to lay down wires around the yard that will tell the mower where to go. We have to fill in potholes and remove obstacles. We have to wait for the grass to dry. What’s really funny is that my new mower is made by a British company, but they didn’t send us any manuals in English. We have them in Spanish, French, Dutch, and German. Fortunately, I found a very helpful video made by McCulloch, the manufacturer of our mower. We watched it last night and it gave us more of an idea of what needs to be done.

Bill is working this morning. Hopefully, he’ll be finished by noon so we can get this project going. Despite my hatred of housework and substandard skills, I do like a neat yard. I probably should have just bought a plain old lawnmower, since our yard is so small. At our first German house, we had a non-motorized push mower. It did the job. We could have opted for another one at this house, but I don’t really want to hassle with it. It wasn’t very easy to use, although it was quiet, clean, and needed no fuel other than my muscles.

At our last house, our landlady insisted on doing the yard work. She did a good job, but frequently let the grass grow too high for my liking– especially during our last year in her house. More than once, I wanted to cut the grass myself, but knew it would cause her to freak. We never did complain about it, but I have a sense that she knew she was shirking her duties, since she showed up to mow the day Bill asked to stop by to speak with her. I think she assumed we were going to complain about the lawn, but actually, Bill served her notice that we were leaving. I was oddly happy to hear that we’d be doing our own lawn work at this house. It means more privacy and less bad juju coming from a resentful person.

So far, I’ve spent the morning mopping the kitchen floor, doing laundry, and cleaning one of the bathrooms. For such a filthy person, I sure do a lot of chores. I probably should do more of them, so my house will be sparkling clean… only to get dirty again.

March has been a pretty crappy month. I spent most of it by myself, watching too much TV and not reading enough. I also got hooked on Sims 4 again. It’s kind of fun, although my favorite of the Sims franchise was Sims 2. It had more quirky humor and more interesting gameplay. The original Sims was fun, too. I didn’t like Sims 3 and never even bought any of the expansions.

Hopefully, April will be more fun. I’m ready to go see some more stuff and remember why we left Texas.

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complaints

TDYs SUCK…

So… Bill has now been gone for eight days. He’ll be gone for ten more. I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself. Yesterday, I got extremely bored and drank a lot of wine, which I had managed not to do all week. I now feel like warmed over crap.

I need to go to the store and could actually walk there, but it’s cold and rainy outside and I really just want to crawl back into bed. Bed would probably be the worst thing for me, though, because I have really bad lower back and hip pain that is only alleviated when I move around. I really think it may be time for a better mattress, but we’d probably need to order one from AAFES, because German mattresses are not the same size as American mattresses are.

The store can wait until Monday, I guess. I have enough of what I need to get through the weekend. Nothing is open on Sundays. However, I’d kind of like to get that little chore done. I might just drive to the store, even though it’s so close. That way, I won’t get rained on and will be able to haul all of the plastic water bottles I’ve used up rather than trying to carry them. Edited to add: I just went to the store. Piece of cake! And I traded in 7,50 euros worth of plastic bottles. Go me. Seriously, that is the first time I’ve driven my car since late November. I’ve turned into a true hermit.

I really hate how long this TDY is. I miss my husband. I hope he doesn’t have to do another one of these again anytime soon. I can’t believe he’s been gone eight days and we’re not even halfway through this crap yet. It sucks. I need to get a life in the worst way.

Oh well… I did manage to upload a couple of new tracks to SingSnap a couple of days ago. They turned out relatively nicely. Here’s the first one. I swore I’d never sing a Celtic Woman song. I thought I didn’t like Celtic Woman, but then I heard “You Raise Me Up” and decided I should try it. This version was done when I was a little tired. I messed up the ending a little and decided to say “fuck it”…

I like the other one better… This is my impression of Linda Ronstadt singing “When I Grow Too Old To Dream“. I was excited to find a karaoke version of it. I may have to do this one on Garage Band, so I can eliminate the Internet fuzz from the sound. When I record on SingSnap, I get static. Hell, it would give me something else to do besides drink wine… Edited to add: I was listening to Linda Ronstadt last night and this morning and was inspired to learn this song. I think it turned out even better than the other two.

Or maybe you’d rather hear Linda do it. Most people would.

I’m also reading about Chernobyl, the nuclear reactor in Ukraine that blew up in the 1980s and killed many people. Very cheery topic. Actually, it’s an interesting topic, particularly since I remember when the nuclear accident happened in 1986. I was a couple of months shy of turning 14. That was when we thought the Soviet Union would never die. Little did we know, the whole thing would collapse just a few years later. And little did I know that I would one day live in what used to be the USSR.

I surprised myself a little. The book I’m reading explains how nukes work. As I was reading the process, I thought to myself “That’s fission”. Sure enough, it was. I was never that good at science classes, but obviously I learned something. So a very special thanks goes out to the teachers at Gloucester County Public Schools for doing their jobs. I recently read a sad story about dogs who are living in the nuclear wasteland now. They want to be petted, but they’re all full of radiation… just like everything else is in that area. It won’t be safe to live there for hundreds more years. There’s also a former Soviet era listening device there. It’s huge. Legend has it that Phil Donahue was one of the first allowed to visit it. He saw the spy equipment in the distance and was told it was unfinished hotel. Having seen a couple of bare boned hotel skeletons in Armenia, I would agree that’s what it looks like. The link will take you to a post that includes some pictures of naked, unfinished buildings… or maybe they were just buildings that were really messed up after Gyumri’s earthquake in 1988.

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