Virtually Home

Birthday Suits I try to write about the shows that I go to. Rock concerts are one of my favorite things, but they are fleeting experiences, and it's easy to forget the little magics that make them what they are. I failed to blog about this show for too long, and I fear I have lost some details. Here goes anyway. Birthday Suits opened. They were a strange, two piece band from the Twin Cities -- a gritty, loud guitar, and a long-haired, head-banging drummer who was fond of theatrics. At one point, he was playing with fistfuls of drumsticks in each hand. During one song, he tied a harmonica to his head with coils and coils of pink surveying tape. The lyrics were incomprehensible, and the music was not my favorite, but there was something really captivating about this band. There are worse ways to open the show than with a trainwreck. Desaparecidos: Conor Oberst, Landon Hedges, and Matt Baum Desaparecidos released one album in 2002 and then broke up. They played a r...

Summer brought back all the things I liked about the Twin Cities in the first place. Or, maybe, they just weren't swamped by the oppressive snow anymore. My mood is much improved. I'm trying to spend a lot of time outside -- gardening, biking, etc. It's working out as well as can be expected, considering I'm working the night schedule and the weather is months behind schedule. I thought I knew what I was getting into for this summer, since I did a lot of testing and frog collecting last year. This summer's spotty 9 p.m. to 5ish a.m. schedule has been weird, and complicated by the unseasonable cold that has kept the frog supply down. Not nearly enough has gotten done, and we will probably run out of frogs any day now. I have only gone out collecting twice, to my great surprise. I've gone back to swimming, and I put new strings on my guitar yesterday. It's kind of a wonder how much difference that made. I'm trying to get more done -- more fun stuff and...

I'm pretty excited about this result (and the upcoming senate vote), and about living in a place where this kind of thing is remotely possible. At the risk of sounding grandiose or whatever, gay rights are the civil rights issue of our time. Oklahoma, by contrast, will have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to marriage equality by the Supreme Court. And so I am taking a minute, today, to be happy about where I live. (But no, Minnesota, that doesn't mean I forgive you for the winter.)

Sea Wolf A few years ago I caught Josh Ritter at a sparsely attended Cain's Ballroom show in Tulsa. Instead of the lackluster performance I expected based on the small audience, he and his band put on a stellar performance, and Ritter blew me away with the pure joy he exudes while performing. I was hoping for a similar experience at First Ave in Minneapolis, and I was not disappointed. Sea Wolf opened -- or just Sea Wolf's frontman, Alex Brown Church. I hadn't ever heard his music before. He said he'd planned on playing some low key things, but on taking the stage realized it was more of a rock venue and changed his setlist. It seems like he would have been better served to play the slower ones -- those were the best, as far as I was concerned. His voice was nice, but not remarkable. His guitar sounded pretty good, but wasn't interesting. I didn't really feel strongly about it one way or another. It was music, and so I accepted it. Josh Ritter, early ...

I knew Minnesota winter would be depressing, but I told myself it would only be bad November to February. Here we are on April 22, and it's snowing outside my window. We should have flowers and leaves and thunderstorms this time of year, but we have snow instead.

If you're a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire, or of the show Game of Thrones, you might be interested in this website . They've compiled recipes from all over Westeros and, with a fair amount of research into medieval cooking, put together a cookbook organized by region. You can get lots of their recipes on their site. With our Game of Thrones watch group, we made the honeyed chicken that Jon feeds to his direwolf early in book one. And it was delicious. Other group members made the Salad on the Wall, the blueberries in crème bastard, and an awesome loaf of bread. Many recipes come with medieval versions (often in archaic English or French) and modern versions (with ingredients easier to find at your grocery store). Happy GoT'ing.

I've been feeling what might be called wanderlust recently...missing what it felt like to move to be in a new country or on a long road trip, with few responsibilities and new things to try. I think winter's clinginess is responsible. I haven't spent any significant amount of time outside in months, except while walking to a car or waiting for a bus. The weather is gloomy today: freezing rain and snow by turns, to kick off "spring" break. I wish it were warm enough to go camping (and that the ground were not still covered in snow). I'm dreaming about my next big adventure -- I'm thinking Yellowstone and Grand Teton.