Saw Gene Ween and Meat Puppets at a Fort Worth music festival about a week and a half ago.

This is Gene Ween, the white haired guy on the right. I only have two Ween records and I like them but not fanatic about them. It was an acoustic set, just him and some other guy playing guitars. Very relaxed and enjoyable. I looked up Ween after we got home because I was kind of surprised that they had split up. Learned that they stopped touring a few years ago with veiled references to Gene Ween's drug abuse and erratic behavior. In fact just this January he was apparently so fucked up on stage he couldn't finish any of his songs and his backup band left the stage in disgust. Hard to reconcile these stories with the amiable guy I saw. He mostly did Ween songs but had a few covers. Perhaps signifigantly, one was "The Needle And The Damage Done" by Neil Young

Here's the Meat Puppets. They were great, far better than I could have ever possibly hoped for. They played really well with a lot of enthusiasm and they played tons of songs from throughout their catalog. The only cover I remember was "Hey Baby Que Paso" Unfortunately I only got to see about 15 minutes of the show. Sammy was very rambunctious and would occasionally just tear off and run out of sight. Julie was chasing him and holding him down, etc. , but it was wearing her out so I had to take over. I got to hear the Meat Puppets but I spent most of the show supervising Sammy as he climbed trees and ran around.

Here's Corey in a tree at the show. The event was an arts festival so there were all kinds of little booths with artsy things in them. Julie and Corey walked among the booths while Sammy and I watched the Meat Puppets.

Me and Sammy

Sammy in a lawn chair

A few nights ago Julie was messing around with the camera trying to make a new profile picture. I took this one and it's my currently my favorite picture of her.

 

It was at the Meat Puppets show that I learned why people are always disparaging hipsters.  I always thought a hipster was someone who was hip,  who was really cool and knew what was going on.  Probably a bit too geeky about pop culture but looked and spoke so well that you could forgive them for going on a little too much.  Chuck Klosterman and Quentin Tarentino, at least when they were in their 20's would qualify as hipsters in my book.  There were these guys at the Meat Puppets show.  Maybe girls, too, but I noticed the guys because they wore hats, not just fedoras which is what you usually see when someone decides to wear an old timey hat, but various different kinds of sharp looking hats and nice clothes, sharp looking like people might have worn at a country club bar in the 60's or something.  It was a good look, not completely retro.  There were several of these guys at the show and I thought to myself, "Oh,I bet those are hipsters.".  Then when the Meat Puppets came on, this one guy had an old Meat Puppets 7 inch vinyl record in a plastic sleeve.  From where I could see it looked like it was in mint condition.  He was holding it up with both hands over his head trying to make sure that the guys in the band saw that he had a genuine mint condition copy of one of their old records.  I'm almost positive they don't give a shit and the guy just seemed obnoxious to me and I thought, "Oh, that's why when people say hipster these days it's a put down". 

I worked 4th of July but on Friday July 1st, Mansfield was having a fireworks display at a corporate sports facility called Big League Dreams not far from the hospital where Sammy was born.  It was a wonderful park with at least 4 different miniature baseball fields, each one modelled after a famous ballpark, like Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Dodger Stadium.  I forget what we had, I'm not a connoseur of vintage baseball parks but they were very cute and well kept.  The grass was awesome.  The place wasn't too crowded, either and it felt safe. Maybe I was just being naive but I had no problem setting up our chair and blankets, leaving most of our stuff in a cloth walmart bag under the chair and going into the other fields to see the sites.  There was a church giving away helium balloons which kids were constantly letting go of.  Within minutes of leaving our stuff to find something to do, I became the balloon and socks and shoes protector.  I eventually tied the balloons to one of Sammy's sandals and setting everything around it off to the side of a bounce house so I could walk around unencumbered, watch kids, get some pictures. 

 

 

 Riding on the bus from parking lot to stadium

First thing we did was buy cotton candy and set up our towels. 

 

 

The kids played on the various bounce houses

 

The refrigerator is sick. I noticed a few days ago that the milk wasn't as cold as it usually is but honestly thought that Julie had turned down the refrigerator thermostat.  Things in the back of the refrigerator tend to freeze.  I thought maybe after all these years she had turned the thermostat down. Last night (Wednesday), she called me at work to tell me that she was pretty sure the refrigerator wasn't cold anymore.  Fortunately we have a few mini-refrigerators that I used for home brewing.  She moved a lot of the stuff to one of the refrigerators and when I got home I found the shelves that I had taken out of the other one and moved most of the rest of the stuff to the other refrigerator.  We had to throw out a lot of long-term residents of the fridge, like 5 different jars of pickles.  I cleaned some of the inside last night, about to do some more.  Did some online searching and I don't think this is going to be too expensive to fix.  Not sure if I can do it myself but all the online information says it's not that hard.  The freezer works great and from what I've read the freezer is what cools the refrigerator so there's either some kind of blockage or needs a new fan to blow the cold air down into the fridge.  Right now we're so broke it's not even funny.  Julie's had student loans for most of her college career but this semester we have to pay for ourselves, 3 installments of 620 dollars. We've made 2 and a half with the last 310 coming out next paycheck. These last couple of months have been the most trying, financially, since before I got married.  Luckily there's unlimited overtime at work.  Unluckily, I hate work and I'm needed at home.

 I was about 45 minutes late to work today. The highway that I take into Dallas was completely shut down.  Somehow a westbound cement truck jumped the median and plowed into eastbound traffic.  Here's a picture from local paper. It was a hassle taking an alternate route but I'm glad I wasn't one of the eastbound cars involved in the mayhem. 

Here's a picture of Sammy by one of the dog crates. 

Wednesday I made lemon pepper chicken which is chicken breasts sprinkled with lemon pepper seasoning and baked, broccoli and cheese and brown rice.
This is what it looked like.

This is Sammy eating it. 

Today I used the leftover chicken and leftover broccoli and cheese in baked potatoes.  Didn't get a picture of them but they were very good. 

This morning alarm went off at 6:30AM, I got up about 6:40.  7 year old daughter Corey is in 2nd grade.  The school she's going to starts at 8:00 AM which is a bit earlier than the other schools.  I asked her what she wanted for breakfast and she said, "Pancakes!".  I wasn't too tired and cranky so I went for it.  We have Mrs. Butterworth's syrup.  I talk to Corey with the Mrs. Butterworth's voice.  "Good morning Corey, how are you today?"  "I'm okay Mrs. Butterworth, how are you?"  "I am thick and rich.".  I bought Mrs. Butterworth's a couple of months ago when we ran out of real maple syrup and I decided, for the time being, we can't afford real maple syrup all the time.  If you don't remember Mrs. Butterworh ads from the olden days, here's one of them:  

I showed Corey most of the ads available on YouTube so she has a firm grounding in Mrs. Butterworth history.  Got Corey to school, went to local Walmart Marketplace to pick up a few things that we had run out of, came home and Sammy and Julie had gotten up since I left.  Julie was woken up by phone call from her college. She didn't go to school over the summer and, apparently, that started the clock ticking on her student loans.  We've started getting notices from the various loan holders that it's about time to start making payments.  She's been calling the registrars office and I've been faxing various forms but it still hasn't all come together.  I made pancakes for Julie and Sammy then started on dishes.  We've cut back severely on eating out which is good but when we cook and eat at home it seems like the sink and counter are always piled with dirty dishes.  We even use paper plates a lot of the time but the pots and pans and cups and silverware are relentless.  Washed dishes while catching up with the Diane Rehm News Roundup from last Friday.  Then I hung up all the shirts from the basket of clean laundry on the couch.  I suck at folding towels, never got the hang of it so Julie does that but I can hang some shirts and I can fold blue jeans.  So got some laundry done and got more laundry going.  Laundry isn't quite as bad as the dishes, you can let laundry go for a while but let it slide too long and all of a sudden there's a desperate need to all the laundry as quickly as possible.  Julie usually handles most of the laundry but she's been under the weather for over a week.  Severe allergies to the changing season I think. So, I've been picking up slack where I can.  Took a nap on couch from about 10 to 10:30.  Julie went to the doctor about 11.  Me and Sammy hung out, watched some of The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.  I unloaded dishwasher and loaded it again.  Started lunch around noon.  Made Wanchai Ferry Kung Pao Chicken.

I've made some pretty terrible chinese food at home but Wanchai Ferry Kung Pao Chicken turned out really well. It's all been eaten or I would have taken a picture of lunch, only the box left. Julie got home around 1, we ate lunch, I jumped in the shower and rushed off to work. 

Son Sammy slammed kitchen door on his thumb yesterday. I was at work. Got call from a friend of Julie's that they were at the emergency room in Arlington and were about to go to Cook Children's Hospital in Fort Worth. I took off from work, Julie and Sammy rode an ambulance from Arlington to Fort Worth. We arrived at the hospital about the same time. They numbed up his hand. A nurse held a book by the side of his head so he couldn't see what was going on. Julie held an I-Pod with an episode of Barney The Dinosaur up to distract him. The doctor started working with us in the room which was kind of a trip. I've never been in the room while surgery is being done. He removed the thumbnail and did a hell of a lot of sewing. He got the thumb back into a thumb shape and re-attached the nail. The stitches he used will dissolve by themselves. He said the nail will fall off when the stitches dissolve but keeping it in place for a week or two helps the new nail to grow. All kinds of things can go wrong, the nail might not grow back, he could get a bone infection, he may have lost all feeling in his thumb, or he could heal up just fine. It's a wait and see thing. It hasn't dampened his spirit and the pain medicine seems to make him hyper instead of sleepy.