There was a snafu (technical information technology term) with the folks that host this blog for me that was resolved this morning. On the plus side, I’ve apparently been upgraded to a faster service and so you should see pages loading quicker now. I’m covering two weeks in this post due to the snafu and because there really hasn’t been too much out of the ordinary going on with us.
On October 8th there was another terrible disaster in Santa Rosa, California. A fire that started in the hills between Santa Rosa and Calistoga spread so rapidly during the night that several thousand homes and over twenty lives were lost. One of Diana’s schoolmates from San Domenico lost her house and several of Will’s friends were also impacted. We’re really hoping that natural disasters take a pause for a few months. Our sister-in-law, Amy, took these amazing pictures showing the layer of smoke and the amazing sunsets that caused.
Last Wednesday evening D and I attended a “Chalk Talk” at the Cowboys Club. This is a talk given by Will Clay, VP of Player Personnel, who breaks down the previous game using film clips. He also previews the upcoming game and what to look out for. We both learned a lot and came away with a much deeper appreciation for all of the decisions and adjustments that a quarterback has to make in a few seconds.
The highlight on Saturday was a trip over to Wiley (been a long time since I drove so far on a 2 lane road) to watch Alicia’s band perform in a competition. The music this year is called “Ballet-Ro” – a mashup (interesting that term passes spell check these days) of Bolero and music by Tchaikovsky and I really enjoyed it. The Boyd band won 2nd place overall and 1st in their division. Here’s a video of the winning performance.
On Sunday I packed McD off to San Francisco to check up on her Mom. The Cowboys were on a bye week and so I didn’t have that 3 hour long distraction – just caught up on some reading and crosswords. Diana returned safely on Wednesday night with no obvious regression in the healing process of her foot. We chuckled because she returned early so that she could rest and repack for the trip to San Diego over the weekend – only issue was that was another week away. We clearly didn’t consult the McCoo calendar effectively during that planning session.
After Diana settled back in we took Alicia over to the Cowboys Club with us to watch Dallas play the San Francisco 49ers (who currently have the worst record in football). The game was very enjoyable with Dallas winning 40-10 and having the luxury of putting our backup quarterback and running back into the game in the last quarter. They have a DJ, photo booth and other entertainment at the Club on game days and we convinced Alicia (reportedly a 49ers fan) to take this picture in the photo booth.
Podcasts are really becoming a savior on my ever lengthening commutes to the other side of the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex. This week I listened to Alec Baldwin interviewing Herb Alpert on his podcast, “Here’s the Thing”. I learned a lot that I didn’t know about Herb – I’m only familiar with him from the Tijuana Brass albums that my Dad played in the car. For example, Woody Allen and George Carlin were both opening acts for “The Brass” in their heyday. Do you know who sold more records than the Beatles in 1966? Imagining you guessed correctly. In the 1970s, Alpert co-founded A&M records and was personally responsible for finding and signing The Carpenters, The Police, and Cat Stevens. There’s a great story about him giving the song “Close to You” to The Carpenters and his labors to make it sound the way he thought it should on the podcast. He sold A&M for half a billion dollars and has since enjoyed playing cabaret style small audience shows with his wife. We heard a couple of songs from them at the New Orleans jazzfest last year.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/heresthething
On another commute I heard a song that took me back to high school: “Oh Yeah” by Roxy Music – what a great song and band. By some weird synchronicity I was thinking that the way Bryan Ferry sings the high part of the chorus sounded a lot like David Sylvan from the band Japan. And who do you think the next artist to come on the Sirius channel was? Imagining you guessed correctly again. The Japan song was “Talking Drum” which I also enjoy very much. Soon after that I heard a song from the Kinks that I wasn’t familiar with, “Sitting in the Midday Sun”. It’s an excellent song and had me thinking of their other songs “Sunny Afternoon” and “Waterloo Sunset”. The start of a “sun” related Kinks playlist.
Series 2 of a short video series called “UpStanders” was released in the last week or two. It’s sponsored by Starbucks and is a series of films that are 5 minutes or less and feature people that are not “ByStanders” but “UpStanders”. There are some truly inspiring stories of kindness and creativity here and I recommend checking a few out. Our favorite is the car wash operated almost exclusively by folks with varying degrees of autism.
https://starbuckschannel.com/originals/upstanders-season-2/
One of the positives when a music hero passes is the amazing tribute songs that are performed by their peers. Here’s an excellent cover of “American Girl” by Jason Isbell and the 400 unit. Who knew he could pull of that very speedy Mike Campbell guitar lick at the end?
And finally, here’s one of my favorite lesser known Petty songs, “Good Enough”, from the often overlooked but excellent 2010 album “Mojo”.
Here’s a special langiappe if you made it this far – a picture of me with W, who managed to get the twitter troll spun up with his comments this week.
