Sufjan Stevens: Songs for Christmas

These songs have been floating around P2P networks for some time now, but Asthmatic Kitty have finally decided to make an official release of it. This five disc set is due out on 11/21 and available for preorder now (preorders ship on 11/14). If you haven’t heard these songs yet, then do yourself a favor and scrounge up the paltry $19 and order it. There are some really beautiful songs in here, and uh – hello, STICKERz!

If you’re already in the Christmas spirit, you can stream the entire set here.

and thanks to Luke for pointing this out to me!

Still more Tokyo to show

Not to be outdone by Mr. English, I’ve finally gotten around to posting my photos from Tokyo for days four and five of our trip. I hope to finish up the last group of photos sometime this week. Maybe then I’ll finally get a chance to start that solid brass statue of Dakota Fanning that I’ve been dreaming about!

Cokers <3 Romers!

…and here’s the photoset to prove it.

Getting normal

I did something absolutely mind-blowing this weekend; I refrained from starting a new house project. In fact, today I doted around the house, walked the dog, did some laundry, retouched some photos, and made three meals for my wife. Perhaps all this sounds pretty insignificant, but for me it was monumental. My self-imposed deadline at the end of October is finally here, and I’ve managed to finish everything except the porch painting. I’ll still have some residual stuff to do next Spring, but I feel like I’ve reached a good stopping point.

Of course, I’m still busy with small things around here. I spent the entire day Saturday cleaning out debris from my basement that has been left over from the myriad projects over the last two years. I’m slowly reclaiming portions of my basement floor not seen for months.

My agenda for the next two months is relatively relaxed. I’ll be focusing mainly on getting ready for our son (his room still needs to be decorated and organized). The only other real project is getting my studio up and running. The extra bedroom on our third floor will serve this purpose, and luckily it only needs some paint, a workbench, and some shelves. And of course it would be nice to spend some time with my wife before the baby gets here.

Face Time

I can’t wait to meet this guy.

Week’s End

Yay:
Romers! (who cares about cruises anyway?)
Baby shower
City jaunt
Tea with Ghenovs
Half the Allards
Chocolate cake
New CDs
Talking music with someone who “gets it”
Absolutely no house projects

Boo:
Cruises
Joanna Newsom: soldout
Lost tee shirts
Squashed rats
Only half the Allards
Working through your friends’ vacation

Seriously:
Loads of blessings from our friends manifested as a baby shower and evident by the stack of goods in our nursery right now. Thank you everyone.

Wii preorders (you make a grown man cry!)

GoNintendo (as well as most gaming sites on the web) has posted a ton of reader accounts/photos of their Wii presale efforts around the country. As expected most presales were gone shortly after opening. In fact, most systems were gone within an hour. Clearly this is a good sign for Nintendo. Hopefully it’s not a bad sign for people like me who plan on walking into a store on launch day and picking one up. I’m equally hopeful that someone will buy the bloated, over-priced PS3 from me on eBay to finance my Wii purchase.

I’m often taken aback at just how superficial I can sound when posting stuff like this. Now give me my Wii!

Crushed

That crunching sound you just heard was my skull cracking under the weight of enormous amounts of stress. Working on my house every night and all weekend week after week is getting to me, no doubt, but it’s the emotional stress that’s really starting to get to me. Surely I’ve got no more stress than the average American, but it just all seems to be coming to a head at the same time. Home repairs, car repairs, dysfunctional family, pets with medical problems, abandoned social life, absence of self, etc. While juggling all of these I’m trying to keep everything in perspective, and focus on being a father (soon) and a decent husband. Meanwhile, my brain is literally in a thousand places at once, and I feel as though I’m making no progress in any of these areas.

This wasn’t an attempt to bring you all down (although I’m sure I succeeded). I have a feeling that I’ve reached the perigee of this orbit, so I’ve got to be on my way back up right? I promise to be a better friend (and blogger) once I make it to the other side of all this “stuff.” Perhaps in November things will start to resemble “normal” again.

Windows to the soul

When I start a new project in my house I often learn, as with the Transformers, that there’s more than meets the eye. What started out as a “paint the windows” project quickly turned into a “replace the windows” project. It’s all for the better I guess. These were the only original windows remaining in the house, and they were quite an eyesore. So, I ripped them out and replaced them. I’m still in the process of painting, so I spent most of the weekend dangling from, standing on, or sitting on this spot. I hope I get a chance to take a nap before my son gets here.

Don’t cry Luke

Here are a couple videos of a Majesty Snowbird performance. This is from a show in New York the night after our own at the Tower. The first was posted by Brooklyn Vegan and the second comes from Live Music Blog. I was handsome enough to post them here. There’s also a MP3 of the (live) song here.

Also, our very own Rubens posted a much more eloquent (than my own) synopsis of the evening over at The Fourth Samba.

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