sing us a song you're the (traveling) piano man (who sits on the back of a truck)

in accordance with our wonderfully random life, we got an email from some guy asking if he could stay with us for a few days as he passed through town. our answer was an immediate, "no doi, yes!" and that's how we got the pleasure of hosting danny kean:

what's so great and random about this guy, you ask? why, he's spent the last four years of his life driving around the country in a truck with a piano on the back, of course. 

(i kind-of feel like i just recreated that part in disneyland's haunted mansion where they show part of the picture first and then it zooms out to the whole picture and the story completely changes...)

anyway, as i was saying before i distracted myself with my disney-like genius, we had a fun few days hanging out with danny and playing the piano on the back of a truck...naturally. we even took the whole fam out to pearl street in a desperate attempt to get people to notice us (please cover that last sentence in a good coat of sarcasm). the boy got to play (multiple versus of chopstix) while danny drived.

danny's first goal is to make people happy. danny's second goal is to get oprah to notice him and pull some strings so he can play his truck piano while someone drives him across the field at next year's superbowl...

...i have to be honest, i'm at a loss of words for what else to even write here. sometimes the pure randomness in my life awes even myself.

good luck, danny!

the first three weeks

it's weird how once you have a baby, all of a sudden posters like this make you very much wish this poor person finds his gloves that his mom made him. i'm also a little bit intrigued to know what the reward for found mittens might be...

good luck, kid!

in other news, i scheduled to get our piano tuned the other day and when i opened the door for the tuner, lo and behold, phillip seymore hoffman was standing on my front porch. i tried to take a picture to send to the boy, but it's hard to get a good, discreet shot of someone who's facing a wall to fix a piano.
but come on, who could even deny that that's clearly phillip seymore's bum??

so when he was telling me all of the things he fixed on our piano and was giving me a bill, i wasn't really listening - i mean, who could with such celebrity status in the same room? instead, i was holding my phone by my side and trying to get a better shot of him.

i mean seriously - let's compare:


and in other news, the boy got a new tat


quincy's found a love in music


milo's discovered that boppy's make for the perfect bed


and quincy's perfecting the art of both body and face contorting


ah. i love my family

this is bloody brilliant

in case you've already lost track of all the pop hits of '08, here a 4-minute mashup. 

my jaw is still on the floor with the brilliance of this video

....also, i'm feeling a little bit old because i've never heard a lot of these songs... 

music to my ears

so i'm not typically a fan of female vocalists, but this little ditty has somehow seeped into my heart and i don't even know how many times i've listened to it this week. it's both joyful and triumphant!

i think it's because i'm envious of how well their cake turned out despite having a boy playing xylophone in the fridge. maybe that's the key we're missing in our own baking

yay for unsigned bands!




they're called the mollies and are from salt lake city. other songs are on http://www.myspace.com/themolliesmusic

thoughts for a tuesday

- my new office lamp looks like a female leg pointing her toe and it’s kind-of freaking me out


- yesterday i went to heidi’s deli for lunch and soon realized that i was one of two girls in the entire restaurant of about 50 people (might i remind you – it’s a deli, not a gentlemen’s club). i could hardly focus on what i wanted to eat because i was laughing to myself the entire time and thinking of different taglines in my head that i could sell to heidi’s for a small chunk of cash. i wonder if it was called esteven’s deli would it be all women eating there?


- if you are deep frying homemade eggrolls, do not use a pot thinking maybe the oil will splatter less. it’s amazing how quickly an entire apartment can fill up with smoke so thick you can’t reach the smoke detector to rip the battery out


i'd really appreciate you not calling my apartment complex and letting them know we don’t have a battery in our front room smoke detector. thanks


- there were two new songs that i know of in the past year about girls named chelsea (this is big news – i’ve never known a song about a chelsea before). chelsea dagger by the fratellis and chelsea by stefy. sadly both of them are about cheaters/show girls… i’m scared for the future of the name chelsea


- i’m concerned that my female leg lamp is subliminally making me write about things like gentlemen’s clubs and show girls. i’m scared for the future of the men in my office who get this lamp on their desks

ding ding dong ding

300 tubas. what better way to bring in christmas? i was impressed with how silently they played silent night. they probably only had 5 tubas playing silent night and all the other ones were just pretending. joke’s on us. thanks for risking your ears and windows, denver, by letting 300 tubas congregate in a confined area to play us christmas carols. it just wouldn’t have been the same if it was oboes.

to top it all off, mr zachman was a guest conductor! mr zachman was our music teacher in junior high. he was cross-eyed. i have nothing against cross-eyeds, but it does make it rather hard to follow instructions when your conductor points at you with his baton but looks right at your neighbor. also, he was huge on lecturing on how to take good care of your instrument – keeping it clean and tightening the screws when needed and such. that’s why it was funny when he got really upset in class one time and threw his clarinet against the wall. shattered to pieces. way to take care of your instrument mr. zachman. oh…you weren’t talking to me?

what not to do at a concert

every summer isn’t complete without a good ol’ down and dirty, sit-in-the-scolding-sun-for-hours-with-some-of-the-best-people-watching-on-the-planet, rock concert. our concert of choosing (thanks to meghan winning free tickets for…well, we don’t really know why…) was the big gig. of course i was excited for this because i thought it would be some sort of pink floyd “great gig in the sky” tribute or something. i was mostly wrong except i’m pretty sure the words “pink” and “floyd” (okay, maybe not floyd) were used at one point or another during the show.

it was a 6+ hour long concert with about a dozen bands playing. i was shocked when i heard there were different groups – i thought it was the same band changing clothes and occasionally number of members during breaks. that’s how unique each band was. yay pop culture. *disclaimer: blue october has a very unique sound.* *disclaimer on my disclaimer: i have to say that so meghan doesn’t beat me up.* *disclaimer on my disclaimer on my disclaimer: she could*

now, if you’ve never been to one of these types of concerts, let me set the stage (har har) for you. imagine a huge community picnic (with more drugs). you pretty much have to come at 2pm to get a good spot on the giant lawn. it’s really ironic because at 2pm on a steamy august saturday, the “best seats in the house” are actually shoved back in the corners of the field…aka the only places dotted by shade. you can’t fall into this trap though, because these “best seats of the house” will be the absolute worst seats of the house once the sun sets and 8 billion more people come. so, even though your doctor might disagree, sitting in the spot most prone to give you heat stroke is the option for you.

the concert was fun. me, meghan and kyle swayed with the music (or because of heat stroke…i’m not really sure). more and more people piled onto the lawn, meaning by the end of the night, we were in very close proximity to the girl who mooned us, the belly dancer, any number of illegal substances and to the innocent foot that i violated.

in my defense, when there’s not enough room to even spread your personal bubble to 2 inches, you can’t be held responsible for your actions…kyle was sitting on one side of me and i had my arm around the back of him – you know, not wrapped around him or anything, just resting on the ground behind him.

i started playing with his hand a little flirtily (real word?) (p.s. it’s not...but flintily is) when it all of a sudden occurred to me “hmm…that’s kind-of an odd position for his hand to be in…” my stomach sank a little bit because i pretty much knew what was going on before i even turned around to confirm it. i turned around to see my hand, groping the barefoot attached to the lady sitting directly behind kyle. i thought her foot was kyle’s hand…my bad…

so what’s more disturbing – the fact that i was groping a strange lady’s foot or the fact that the lady behind me was letting me grope her foot without saying anything. was she getting some sort of satisfaction out of it? sick. i’m going with that’s the worst part. but maybe she was just embarrassed because what do you say to some stranger who’s fondling your foot?

the rest of the concert was good. kyle even let me hold his hand again after i washed all the random foot germs off.