cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bang To Rights Trish got me 3 Richard Hawley albums for Christmas. Naturally I could not digest them all at once. It just doesn't work that way. You put one on and listen to it all the way through. Sort of shrug probably. Then put it on again the next day, decide that it's the best record ever made and keep it in heavy rotation for the next few months. So I'd started with 'Lady's Bridge' in December, moved on to 'Late Night Final' some time in February or maybe early March. Then there's the eponymous album, his first. I'd put it on once and decided that it wasn't really his best work. Sort of forgot about it. A couple weeks ago I came back to it when I was looking for something to listen to while building. I don't normally play music out there while I am working but that day I wanted to. So I grabbed just that one CD and listened to it again and again for a few days while I finished framing the roof. There is some weak songwriting on it. However, the stuff that's good is really, really good. I just want to listen to 'Bang to Rights' and the instrumental 'Aran Loop' again and again and again forever at the moment. 'Bang to Rights' in particular has this sort of 1950's dance hall rock and roll crooner vibe that Hawley does so well on occasion. Sigh. I've got something to dread at the moment. Several things, actually. The first thing is that we're supposed to go to the beach next week. My parents rent this beach house at the Outer Banks of NC for 2 weeks every year and we're supposed to drive down for the first week. However, it's becoming clear that this just isn't going to work out. We have nobody to dog-sit the 3 dogs, no money to pay someone to do it and we definitely don't even have the money for gas to drive down there and back. Gas is four bucks a gallon right now and it's about a 5 or 6 hour drive each way. If at least the gas money can be scraped up then we're talking about just Trish and the kids driving down while I stay home. Ida is really looking forward to going to the beach and I hate to screw her out of that. But what a horrible pain in the ass for Trish to drive that far with the kids by herself. In particular, putting a 15 month old in a car seat for that long without an adult back there to keep him entertained is kind of brutal. Whether none of us go or if just I stay home, there is horrible drama waiting. Because my mother will kick up a big, petulant, passive-aggressive fuss about us not all being there. She has no fucking clue what the real cost of this would be to us, since she hasn't had a proper job in about 30 years and my father takes care of all of their bills. The other thing to dread is that a week after that, Trish is flying to Minneapolis (she bought the tickets months ago out of my big annual dividend check) for 4 days to visit friends and I have to take care of the kids. The problem is that I have, you know, a job to go to. And she still hasn't weaned the baby so I guarantee you that the whole time she's gone is going to be a very sad scene of the baby crying for his mother. Taking care of Ida is fine. We're ok there. But a 15 month old baby who has never been apart from his mother for longer than 10 hours in his life? This is going to be rough. Oh, and throw in the fact that the State Democratic Party convention is right in the middle of that and I'm an elected delegate for Obama. It's really not the kind of thing that you can drag a 4 year old and a 15 month old to. We're working out babysitting for that day, but the whole thing is going to be a shitty 4 days of shuttling around and crying and not being able to give the baby the one thing that he wants. One way or another I have to get this beach thing settled today. 10:13 - 2008-05-30 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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