Thursday, December 25, 2014

Yeah It's Christmas Time Again

Well it’s Christmas again. It’s a well-known fact that I’m not much for celebrating holidays and such. Right now at work they’ve been playing some abysmal Christmasy music over the loudspeaker which drives me crazy. I’m talking bland, elevator type of stuff with no vocals that just grates on my ears. It’s really the worst excuse for music ever invented and instead of putting me into a nice mood it pushes me in the opposite direction. Seriously, if I wasn’t able to listen to my IPod I’d probably end up going on a murderous rampage. Okay, I’m not serious and I don’t want to lose my job but you get my drift. It boggles my mind why they want to force this dreck on people.

Before I got married I never put up a Christmas tree nor did I decorate the house, more to the point I never decorated for any holiday. It’s just not my thing, I’m not into it. My wife, however, lives for this stuff so I indulge her and let her do what she wants so long as she leaves me out of it. My role is mainly to get things down from the attic and put them back up when she’s done with them. Other than that I’ll climb the ladder and put things up when she can’t do it but that’s about it. Of course our son gets into it, he is seven after all and yes I do love seeing his reaction when he opens his gifts.

I’m not a total Scrooge or anything. I do buy gifts and I don’t get upset (well not too much) when others can’t contain their upbeat spirits and go around wishing you a Merry Christmas. That’s alright, just don’t start waxing poetic on how much the holiday spirit means to you or you risk chunks being blown your way. Personally I am very hard to buy gifts for. Most of the things I’m interested in aren’t available at your local store. You can’t just bop out and pick something up. If it’s clothes I’m very finicky. The texture has to be right, I don’t like labels on them so, no v-necks, etc., etc., etc. Really I like plain, dark or earth tone colors but I have been trying to break out of that just a little.

Musically it’s extremely hard to know what I don’t have and would like since I get most of my stuff from smaller record labels/stores over the internet like Dirtnap or Razorcake. If it’s from a mainstream act or a large label you can generally count me out. My reading habits are quite eclectic as well so unless it’s a gift card for Powells or some like place you risk being disappointed in my reaction. At this point you might be saying “screw this guy, why should I want to get him anything?” and I can understand that but I can’t help the way I am. So deal with it.

My wife and I have learned that it’s better for us to get our own gifts or just tell each other outright what we want. It just makes sense to get somebody you love something that they actually want or like rather than something that you would like them to have. During my many years I’ve had far too many clothes sit in the bottom of my closet for a year or two before it’s okay to give them away than to ever want that again. It can be quite disappointing to receive something from family that you would never wear in a million years over and over and over.

Hey, at least look at it this way, Christmas is almost over so you won’t have to worry about reading something like this from me for another year. If you’re lucky that is, you never know when I’ll get the urge to write about anything. At least you’ve got that going for you, right? Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Bah Humbug.

Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

At Last It All Comes Together

Clearly you can see that I haven’t been writing or podcasting much later. The long and short of it is my laptop bit the big one and is down for the count. It has a black screen and beeps seven times, pauses, then repeats ad infinitum. Until I get the time to investigate it more thoroughly or the money to fix it outright I’m having to do without.

The problem is everything that had to do with my podcasts (intro music, descriptions, list of songs played, archived episodes, etc) are on there along with a ton of music that is for now unavailable to me. Even worse is all of the pictures and videos of my family and other things that I’ve done that aren’t backed up anywhere else. Piling even more on is all the things that I’ve written such as my lyrics, spoken word, movie scripts, stories and blog stuff. As you can see this makes for a rather disconcerting time for me.

In order to do something with the time I would have otherwise spent on these endeavors I’ve been consoling myself by putting together my office/mancave. Well, really it’s just the third bedroom in our house that until recently had been occupied by a friend of my wife. She moved out (the friend not the wife) on pretty short notice and immediately I seized the opportunity and started making it over in my image.

The best thing has been that as I’ve been able to consolidate all of my music in this one place. Ever since we’ve been married my music has been spread out all over the house (and garage and truck) out of necessity. One of the pleasant by products from this gathering is I’m finding a lot of stuff that I had forgotten all about and I get to re-discover it all over again. Unfortunately I’ve also found quite a few empty cd cases for some good groups that I just cannot find the cd’s for. Time will tell but for now I’ve got some focus and a purpose and that feels pretty good to me.



Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.