We had some wind last night and it knocked out our electricity at around 1 a.m. My son was already sleeping in our bed, but my daughter woke up screaming bloody murder and wouldn’t go back to sleep, so I had to bring her into our bed as well.

The worst part about power outages is that I can’t sleep without my CPAP machine anymore. I have a battery for it to get me by, but I must not have charged it after camping last summer. I got another hour out of it before I was awakened again not being able to breathe.

I had to get creative because I needed sleep. I had an early morning meeting today and needed to get the kids to daycare/preschool earlier than normal since my wife is still in California and couldn’t help.

I started my car, plugged in an inverter into the cigarette lighter, and ran two extension cords connected together from my car and upstairs to my CPAP machine. I got a few more hours of sleep before I had to start getting ready for the day.

I got enough sleep to get by, but I’m charging my big back-up battery in case it happens again.

Raising kids on the U.S. west coast sure has a way of making even a so-called ‘comfortable’ household’s budget feel pinched. I look around and wonder how others seem to be living so much better.

Veggie chili tonight, accompanied by Chelsea, Michigan’s finest.

#jiffy #michigan

This morning, I accidentally bumped my HomePod while cleaning off the desk and some music started. Land Locked Blues by Bright Eyes came on, from his 2005 album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. It’s making me nostalgic. That is about the time I stopped listening to Bright Eyes and stopped buying CDs altogether.

I was 24 that year. It was before smart phones became popular, and 2005 was about a year after I got my first iPod. I still actively managed my library for a few more years, but that slowly started to change as streaming became more popular.

My music listening habits are so much more random since streaming became a thing. I struggle to even answer when people ask “who’s your favorite band?” or “what kind of music do you listen to?” I miss the more intentional nature of it all when I’d manage an actual library, even if it wasn’t in the form of physical media.

I have tried to go back at times and explored the underground and alternative music that I didn’t have the privilege of knowing or experiencing in my younger years before the Internet, and in this way, I love the archeological digging and discovering. However, that takes a lot of work and patience because it’s really easy to find a shinier new object of my affection, however fleeting.

I don’t think breadth of content has improved anything about the experience for me. If anything, it’s too easy to push things aside without giving them a chance and I don’t listen to entire albums very often anymore.

I’ve toyed around with having my own library again on a Plex server, but adding new music is not easy, and if we’re being honest, it can get expensive in a way that feels unnecessary. Also, I have so many other things going on in my life that I don’t have a lot of down time to manage it. But these are just excuses. If it were important enough for me, I’d make it happen.

It’s entirely likely that the shift in music medium has caused a psychological shift in me in such a way that I care much less about music now than I once did. If I sit with that feeling for any amount of time, I feel a little guilty about it.

All this to say, music feels very cheap to me these days. It’s everywhere in abundance and therefore it feels much less valuable. As a musician myself, this feels strange to admit, but it’s what I feel in my gut. I don’t have a solution, but I wish it were different.

I want that feeling of freedom again, driving around on the first warm day of the year with the windows down, listing to my favorite album. I want that feeling of finding an album and it becoming the soundtrack that defines a season, a year.

Booked a spot at a State campground…for a weekend in July. Pretty wild that this is how things work.

After dropping my wife off at the airport this morning:

“Mom’s going to California, which means we can do whatever we want, sister!”

Last night we went to Hapa Pizza in downtown Beaverton. They have been included in several recent articles as a top pizza parlor in the region, so we decided to give it a try. Their Asian inspired pies are unique and tasty. We had one of the peanut sauce pizzas with tofu and it was great.

An old photo of us on NYE, when my wife and I first started dating. Time flies.

The thing that makes me nervous about Apple’s Journal app is that there’s no apparent way to get the stuff you put in there, out. I’m sure I’m missing something, but from the app itself, it’s definitely not obvious. Are the moments you record available in other apps that can ask to connect?

I realized recently that 2024 marks 20 years since I got my Gmail account. It was invite-only back then and I broke Google policy by buying an invite off eBay for something like $15. I can’t even fathom how many emails I’ve sent/received, or services I’ve signed up for with it.

Spending half my time on Micro.blog unfollowing mastodon accounts.

And won’t ever be able to get my Micro.blog followers back here that I migrated away.

Wish I would’ve known the implications of my migrations before I made those decisions. Follower management is not good.

A quote I’ve always remembered from an old coworker:

With average effort comes average results. With extraordinary effort comes extraordinary results.

This week, we started going back to 100% analog books at bedtime for the boy and I feel good about it. He’s almost 5, and we’ve read to him nearly every night of his life since before he was able to understand what was going on.

It started out as 3-4 children’s books. We ran out of material after a while, so Libby (library app) and Amazon Kids+ filled in the gaps. But over the last 6 months or so, he’s been wanting more and more to watch books read from content creators on YouTube. We’d still read him a book or two, but then allow him to watch books being read on YouTube Kids.

The great thing is, he somewhat surprisingly didn’t complain when we cut out the iPad. It seemed pretty harmless, but we agreed it was basically too much like watching cartoons. The readers often have too much commentary, or act out the characters in the books. He also wasn’t getting as much explanation or oversight. It took away the fundamental purpose of reading.

His preschool teachers say he’s ahead of where he should be, doing work of kindergartners and a little bit of first grade work. We don’t push him too hard on the learning to read and write, but I want to make sure he stays interested and engaged. It will come.

Tonight I read him four books, two of which were longer. I spent more time asking him questions and sounding out some of the words, all the while pointing to each word as I read them. He was really interested, and asked a lot of questions about the meanings of words. It was just nice to have more one on one closeness with him.

Currently reading: The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans 📚

Working from home today and my dog keeps bugging me to go for a walk. It’s pretty cold and wet outside and I just want to stay warm and dry in my hoodie. I’ll probably relent, but I wish we had an indoor dog park nearby on days like today.