Soccer in the Desert

Spent our Sunday watching soccer out in the desert. Pretty beautiful setting for a game.

A Ghoulish Confectionery

Found these cupcakes at a Halloween party we were at last night.

Happy Halloween!

The result of some hard work today shown here. One brother went the traditional route...

... and one opted for a drill.

Mabel in the Middle

Proud uncle and father with Mabel in the middle.

Breakfast with Mabel

Great Saturday morning visiting my brother, his wife and our new niece Mabel. Nice morning walk followed by breakfast at La Grand Orange.

Sleater-Kinney - Jumpers

A little Sleater-Kinney from back in 2005 to inspire the escape from the office for the weekend. I would try something a little safer than this path but whatever you're feeling up for.

The Tallest Man On Earth - I Won't Be Found (Live on KEXP)

Another great lyricist, The Tallest Man on Earth. Pair the lyrics with some amazing guitar work and this song is well worth a few listens.

Visualized NFL Data

If I was into fantasy football I would think this was cool. Well...actually...this is cool either way.

via FlowingData

Blitzen Trapper - The Tree

Blitzen Trapper's lyrics are what really make me like them. Check out this song called The Tree.

Local Natives - Airplanes & Who Knows Who Cares

Cool song by the Local Natives called Airplanes being performed live at SXSW. Check out the lead singer playing the keyboard, percussion and singing all at the same time.

Here's another one called Who Knows Who Cares.

Holding My Breath

At this point, as the colors of the kitchen and family room really start to appear, I am holding my breath to see if they really all work together. The trim appeared today (and obviously the blue is just primer).

White Buffalo - Two Songs

Wow. About 2:10 in and then for the next 50 seconds as this song (Love Song #1) ends. Awesome. The White Buffalo Website.

And if you are more in the mood for a drinking song, try this one called Bar and the Beer.

The bar and the beer keeps me coming back to here
This drunken stupor is not what it seems
It helps me laugh, helps me dream

I had a fight with the woman so I stop in to think
I have my psychologist poor me drink
My head is clouded so it's plain to see
We'll work things out, the bottle and me

Live Music and Boiled Crabs

We headed over to Randol's tonight to eat some boiled crabs and were treated to some live Cajun/zydeco tunes and some good company with friends. I don't eat crabs enough to make it easy to eat them...so it was hard work! Here's a blurry photo of the band and some of the local art. If you are ever passing through Lafayette, Randol's is a pretty decent local joint to drop in on. Best bread pudding in town according to some.

Two Ravens

Been a while since I posted a mix...but this one was actually made about a month ago and then I forgot to throw it up on here. Don't hate on Flo Rida too much, it's kinda catchy.

1. Animal * Miike Snow
2. Bang Pop * Free Energy
3. Driving Me Crazy * Sam Adams
4. Signs * Bloc Party
5. Ready to Start * Arcade Fire
6. On Melancholy Hill * Gorillaz
7. Home (featuring the Gulu Widows Choir) * Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros
8. The Diamond Church Street Choir * The Gaslight Anthem
9. Baby In Silence * Freshlyground
10. Backatown * Trombone Shorty
11. Zol! * BLK JKS
12. The Cave * Mumford & Sons
13. Next Girl * The Black Keys
14. Life Coach * Fang Island
15. Don't Get Old * J Roddy Walston & The Business
16. Roll Away Your Stone * Mumford & Sons
17. Coal War * Joshua James
18. American Slang * The Gaslight Anthem
19. Easy Chairs * Suckers
20. Club Can't Handle Me (feat. David Guetta) * Flo Rida
21. White Moth * Xavier Rudd

Crab and Banana Vending Machine

Another reason to potentially be interested in traveling to Japan...vending machines with live crabs and bananas.

JapanProbe dot com
Uploaded by pubjapaned.

Not sure what you do with the crab after you buy it. If you know Japanese and they happen to solve this mystery in the video, let me know. Maybe they just eat them raw.

Jozy Hunting a Chicken

Jozy Hunting a Chicken
Originally uploaded by wilabar14

That small black dot out in the distance is being hunted.

Roller Derby

Bumped into one of the women on our coed team today and she was all dressed up...


...to go to her Roller Derby match! Wow. She also playes hockey. She is a total bad ass.

Jozy at Earthshare

Jozy got to go to pick up our first fall harvest today. We gave the greens away since we don't have a kitchen anymore...

Laying Down Some Tile

A lot of the tile made it down on the kitchen floor today...and fast. Check it out.

Tile saw.

Samples

So with the tile in, I decided to lay some down on the floor, put our wall colors behind it and lay the countertop sample on top and see if Jozy liked it. I mean, we know that we like it...but it's all about Jozy. The color on the right side of the wall (the darker one) is going to be our primary wall color. The color on the left is our trim. Both of them have really silly fruity names that include the words "chic" and "shabby."

Jozy later told me that the samples met her standards and that she would be more than happy to eat food off of any of the surfaces.

Ólafur Arnalds - Ljósið

Simply beautiful music from Ólafur Arnalds, hails from Iceland.

Progress!

The past week or so have been a little slow. Primarily the drama has been dialogue with more than a few conversations centered on financial topics, scope and bid prices. It hasn't been easy but I think we have made it through. And the timing is perfect.

Today, the cabinets were delivered to the finisher and we picked out the stain that we want for them. The tile arrived and the floor is being prepped one last time so that it can be set. We picked out our paint color for the walls and the color for the trim. So following our week of conversations, we are out of the second gate with some real progress to report.

Here are some raw cabinet photos.

This is the primary section of the peninsula that will separate the kitchen from the family room. Roll out drawer with the action shot.


Door Style:


One of our corner cabinets:


The rest of the doors! Yes, we will actually have cabinet doors, for the first time in 5 years!

Cheb Khaled and Diana Haddad - Mas & Louly

A friend of mine from Morocco sent me the name of this artist to check out. Cheb Khaled is from Algeria and performs a type of music called raï which is a form of folk music that originated in Algeria from Bedouin shepherds. I don't understand the lyrics at all, but the beat and the rhythm are really cool. I'll be checking out more of Cheb Khaled when I have some more time.

Washington DC Sunset

No secret here, I travel a lot for work which can be a little tough sometimes. It's always a little better if I can find some time to appreciate the place I travel to in some fashion. This past Tuesday I was in DC and for various reasons had a 4:30-5:30 PM meeting that I needed to take outside so I went for a walk as the meeting started. I ended up at the Washington Monument and took these pictures of the sunset about 30-45 minutes after the meeting ended. Sometimes travel isn't so bad.

World Cup 2022: A Voting Dillema

Feel free to call me anti-American but I've been looking at the competing bids for World Cup 2022 from Qatar and Japan and I'm thinking that...

1. If Japan wins and I get to see holographic versions of sporting events broadcast around the world to hundreds of stadiums, the invention of Star Trek like translators and the realization of some truly useful augmented reality apps...
2. If Qatar wins and I get to arrive to a game via water taxi or see stadiums that mimic ships and seashells or have their entire internal and external facade broadcasting on 420,000 square feet of some sort of futuristic jumbotron...

...then I just might be ok if the US doesn't get the tournament. In fact, if I was voting, my vote would now be in question. Sorry.

Watch a description of what Japan is pitching below. The introduction of this type of technology into sport just seems almost too good to pass up.

Here is a video showing 5 of Qatar's proposed stadiums. These are pretty amazing.

Molding and Trim

Our molding and trim has started to appear around the kitchen and family room. At this point you can get a pretty good sense as to what the the results are going to feel like so it is pretty exciting.

Soccer Anyone?

Last Saturday the US MNT played Poland in an international friendly. It was a fun game to watch and - you can check out some highlights below. The purpose of this post though is to tell a quick story about our search for a place to watch the game on a Saturday night while we were in Baton Rouge. The game happened to be on the same time as the LSU football game so most people assumed it was a lost cause and they were pretty much right. We even tried to got o a Mexican sports bar that we stumbled across and the manager there gave us a long story about how he was a huge soccer fan but that he would get stoned if he tried to turn even one TV to the soccer game.

All was lost until we found The Fox and the Hound. These pictures are poor quality may not do this justice but it was a pretty funny scene. I'll take a guess that the bar had about 25-30 TVs and all of them had LSU on. We managed to get the manage to turn on one TV in the back corner hallway next to the shuffleboard table to the soccer game though. Thus, while there were hundreds of screaming LSU fans throughout the rest of the bar:

There was my wife and I in the back corner:

Here are the game highlights.

The Finisher

We went to go meet the guy who will be staining the cabinets for the kitchen today. We chose cherry for the wood but are not sure about the stain yet - although we know it is going to be dark. We drove out to his shop which was a huge area out behind his house. Here is the front door and yes, that is an old Chevy hanging above the door.

5 Years!

Today is our 5 year wedding anniversary - amazing how time flies! This is one of the few photos I have from our honeymoon in Kauai. Just might need to go back there sometime soon in order to refresh our memory.

Josh Ritter - Long Shadows Video

Guess I am on a Ritter kick right now. He just released a homemade video for their song Long Shadows - apparently filmed while on tour last August on one of their days off. Pretty cool transition right around 1:45 in.

"Long Shadows" Video Contest! from Josh Ritter on Vimeo.

I Kinda Live From Feel

Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy were on the Colbert Report tonight discussing Mavis' new album You Are Not Alone. They followed the interview with a live performance of the title track from the album. Some good gospel/soul music here. Check out an interview with Mavis and Tweedy below. I like her quote regarding how she kinda lives "from feel."

Here's an acoustic version of the song Wrote a Song for Everyone. Pretty sure this is an old CCR song.

Taking Out the Trash

The dumpster was picked up today and cleaned out. Jozy made sure to oversee the work so that no one got hurt.

Surprisingly enough, the grass doesn't look too dead under it. Regardless, I'm not kidding myself, the back yard is not gonna look all that great when this project is said and done.

Long Day, Live Ritter

Getting a little live Josh Ritter on today - downloaded about 10 live tracks that are available on his website last night and just hit play as I stare down the length of a long late afternoon following a morning that started at 6 AM. Long day is still ahead. Go get the tracks here.

Next Up: Robotic Germs Capable of Deception

This attempt at a world record is sad on so many levels that I do not even know where to start. If you go to the next Philadelphia Union game this Thursday, you can have a chance to set a new world record for ""the most people sanitizing their hands at once!"

Yes, the end of civilization as we know it is just around the corner. Super germs and robots capable of deception are about to take over.

Red Card

I have been ejected from a soccer game maybe twice in my life. Once when I was young and once as a coach (and the latter I was ejected primarily for an offense I was not guilty of). I say this to note that me getting ejected from a game is pretty out of character. Tonight, I broke away from character and was sent off 10 minutes into our coed game.

Not sure what I was thinking but a poor clear from our keeper while he was off the line led me to be one of two last defenders when the other team hit a shot from 30 yards out. When I went up to head it, and was unable to reach it, my hand mysteriously shot up and just batted it down like I was playing volleyball. Gut instinct? Frustration? Who knows. All I know is that 10-15 minutes in and my team went down to 10 men. I coach my kids all the time to not make stupid decisions and hurt the team - primarily related to talking back to the ref and fighting, but this was not that different.

Kinda disappointed in myself this evening as I had to watch us lose 4-2 as we tried to fight it out with 10 vs 11. No doubt in my mind that we would have won that game if I had not had that momentary laps of judgment.

Living Out of Boxes

We're doing a lot of living out of boxes these days. Well, actually, we tried to leave all of the essentials out of the boxes but sometimes you just forget you'll need some things so you have to try to go digging around. In general though, if it is not readily available, or not sitting on top of a box, we pretty much find an alternate plan.

Jozy is in the same boat. Here she is trying to find one of her toys which was left on top of a box.


And here she is sitting in the corner for almost knocking over said box and breaking our dishes.

Labels

Putting up Rock

"Putting up rock" is what the latest news is around the house. The electrician's work is done for the most part so the walls in the kitchen and laundry room are going up for real. Here is Jozy trying out the new "keeping area."

And here is what the laundry room looks like at this point. There is a new plumbing wall in here so that we can have a laundry room sink. This is where Jozy stays when we leave the house for a while (although not during renovations) so making sure she was comfortable with the lack of wood panels was important. I believe it passed her inspection for her "happy place."

The pile of rock has decreased dramatically in height in our family room. So much such that Jozy decided to claim it. Just a few walls left and then on