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In my freshman year of college, I only owned about twenty audio CDs. My freshman year of college was also right before MP3 and, um, free music started really taking off. I think a solid twenty-five percent of my music catalog was Led Zeppelin. So, in 1996, I listened to a lot of Led Zeppelin.

I also have this “awesome” super-human power to endure the same music over and over. Ask any of my former roommates – I remember having a 200 MB (that is an M, for Mega) partition on which I stored MP3’s. An average MP3 length was about 4 MB, so this means I had about fifty to sixty songs that I listened to. So in effect, for almost nine months, I listened to the same songs over and over. I didn’t have room for anything else, and I liked them and as a digital packrat I didn’t want to delete them. I ought to apologize to Bautz directly for forcing him to listen to Radiohead’s The Bends roughly four-hundred times over the course of a school year. So, Bautz, I’m sorry I made you listen to Radiohead, bad techno, and probably a fair share of Led Zeppelin (see above paragraph).

For music now, I’ve mostly shifted to Pandora. Pandora is nothing short of rad, because it plays random music in whatever genre I feel like. It’s also trainable. For instance, if Led Zeppelin’s Dancing Days is playing, I can hit the thumbs up button, and in the future Pandora will find more songs like this. If another song, say, anything that isn’t by Led Zeppelin shows up, I can hit thumbs down to virtually strike Pandora with a rolled up newspaper. It’s great.

So rewind to 1997, with my small music catalog chock full of the Zep. In the winter of 1997, I broke up with my high-school sweetheart, with whom I had been foolishly attempting a long-distance relationship in college. These kinds of things make you sad, from what I understand. At the time, I had Led Zeppelin III in the old musical player – and when you’re sad and have a superhuman ability to endure the same music over and over, I listened to a lot of III.

When you’re depressed over something like this, you may find it difficult to do things. And I did. I spent an inordinate amount of time playing a game nobody has ever heard of, fittingly introduced to me by McLean: Chaos Overlords.

Chaos Overlords was a tile based game that honestly wasn’t that good. But it was very good at distracting me from things such as, in order of importance: school, the ex-girlfriend, and people. And it was very good at sucking away time and being very addictive.

It has been … thirteen years since that time, and to this day, whenever I hear a song from III, I immediately think of this moustached face from the game Chaos Overlords.

Today, I went on my walk. Pandora selected Gallows Pole from III. I thought of the moustached person known as “Henchmen” and Chaos Overlords.

I laughed. And then I kept walking.

Once a year, we have pork tenderloin for dinner. Last night was that night.

For twenty-four American hours, the meat marinated in a mixture of orange juice, lime juice, and organic “purchased by Marvie” grapefruit juice – and the zest of all three, olive oil which may or may not have been previously deflowered, garlic, salt, pepper, and some chili powder. It was pretty good.

If you have trouble finding the particular type of grapefruit, you might check with Marvie.

We went with our annual pork tenderloin because it was warm enough to grill. We got’r done early and ate as a fambly. I don’t think Owen gets the whole “sitting at a table I’m not tied to” thing.

Owen is tied to the CHAIR!

When the Coffpeople were here, we went to Loveland to ski. I ran My Tracks on the phone while we skied. I assure you, there was snow on the mountains:

View Track 5 in a larger map

Our local game store gave us this game to playtest:

Seriously? Eleven months already?

This time last year, we were skiing for Joe’s bachelor party, and Anna was way pregnant. I wouldn’t say that eleven months flew by, but I am surprised that it has been eleven months with the wee one. Holy crap.

Some more photos:

• 11-mo photos
• Snowsuit photos that Anna took, which I guess are kind of cute, but not really
• Owen & the Coffpersons
• Owen knockin’ Marvie’s Boots
• ValenOwen

I was reading this post on a food blog – this gal bought a seven pound chicken roasted it, and stretched the leftovers for seventeen meals.

The meal total included leftovers for lunch, which is neat to consider. Leftovers are very important in our house. Twenty-six dollars for a work week’s worth of food is not too shabby, and makes my … thrifty … heart grow three sizes.

But, we could never do that, other than for the express purpose of saving cash – and even then, it wouldn’t be very fun. I love me some lean-protein chicken, but I don’t think I could eat chicken five days in a row. It wouldn’t be enjoyable, especially because around day four I’d start actively wondering if I was going to die if I ate the chicken. I know I probably wouldn’t die? But I would think that I could die, and that seems to be enough to give my intestines the go-ahead to speed up the process of expelling used food.

What I have been trying to do lately is to eat more vegetables, and we have been going vegetarian once or thrice a week. It’s a bit less expensive, and honestly, a lot more healthy so long as we get some sort of protein, giggity.

Tofu gets a bad rap, but if you prepare it correctly, it’s great. Owen loves it!

Doesn’t that look delicious? There are two reasons I like tofu, and Anna tolerates it. On normal weekday evenings, quickly put together dinners are the best. A tofu stir fry takes approximately ten minutes to prepare, if you don’t count the arduous process of cooking rice in the active preparation, and the pre-prep time of pressing the tofu. Bonus – it is flavorful, healthy, and inexpensive! One pound of extra-firm tofu costs us a single George Washington.

Normally we use a store bought stir-fry sauce. We used to use the Iron Chef sauces for ironic and tastiness purposes, but apparently those are difficult to find at our local grocer these days.

The only thing you would need to know is that, ahead of time, you need to press the tofu. After that, it’s a simple stir fry. Cut up a veggie or two, heat up some oil, and stir fry everything. Then, add some sauce. Add to rice. Win.

On tofu nights, we’re happily fed and on to watching Lost or Chuck. Or more correctly, Anna is watching it, and I’m bitching about it. Or, even more correctly, Anna is watching it, and I’m half watching it while playing Final Fantasy (again) on my iPod Touch, yet still bitching about it.

Look west. West is the direction that has a pleasantly disrupted horizon. If you cannot locate west by sight, well, it is going to be un-sunny soon.

Is it cold? It’s going to snow. If it isn’t cold, its going to rain.

Who says meteorologists get no respect?

What does that even mean?

Like, in 1996. So that’s what, fourteen years ago?

My friend Drew and I tried to get involved with Virginia Tech’s WUVT radio station. It was pretty awful. The drill was that freshman and rookies – basically anybody not already in the radio clique – got duty on the AM station, which could be heard by approximately four people, but only if they were standing under a certain tree, with the antenna oriented just so, and only at certain times of the day.

But wait, it gets worse – the time slots they gave for this AM station that nobody could hear were at wonderful hours such as 12am -4am. Or in our case, Saturday mornings at 9am. As a freshman in college – how many of you looked forward to getting up prior to 9am on a Saturday morning? Especially when you knew you were going to sit in a radio station and play bad music for three hours that nobody could actually hear?

And it got even worse – the powers of the FM dial claimed they recorded all airtime on AM for review. I don’t know that I believe that they actually did that.

And even more worser – we couldn’t actually play any good music. The AM station was required to play nothing but independent music. It wasn’t always so bad. For instance, there was one song by a band named Moe called Meat. It was actually a great song. Even greater was that it was approximately fifty-six minutes long, so we could put that song on at 9am and sleep for fifty-six minutes. Well, not quite fifty-six minutes, because of the FCC regulations that required us to:

1. Read PSAs every fifteen minutes, since we were on the air because of the FCC’s donation of frequency
2. Read the stations callsign on the hour, every hour

We played one Led Zeppelin song and one Red Hot Chili Peppers song to our associated high school sweethearts who had zero chance of hearing the songs at their schools in Michigan and Boston – but dang we thought we were cool. The radio powers did not. Out of all the terrible things we did as radio hosts on a station that nobody listened to, those were the only two that we got in trouble for.

Some things we did not get in trouble for:

• Failing to show up a few times
• The AM radio station was in the junk room, where all the music and stuff that was donated that nobody ever listened to would be placed. There was an entire wall of ratty classical records. One hour of one show on one day was dedicated to doing awesome record scratches of various terrible renditions of classical music. Never heard a word about it.
• Inviting friends into the studio with us. Kenny, the Mulcahy’s, and a dude named Eric Krone who had a tattoo of his own name on his back came into studio with us, and we basically just talked and swore for a while, on the air.

We actually got a phone call once. A real phone call from a person who wasn’t one of our friends who was messing with us, or actually giving a rare voice of support. They wanted us to play a good song, but as shown above, we weren’t allowed to do so. The rule was, if you could hear the song on the radio, or the song was even remotely popular in the last few decades, you couldn’t play it.

It turns out that the AM feed was what they played in the dead time before the VT PSA-broadcasting TV station started actually running. That didn’t start until about 10am on Saturday morning. I think that tripled our audience to about three people.

I think we actually “graduated” from the bullcrap assignment to move up to a terrible 2-4am slot doing international radio or something like that – playing … cultural music. I don’t actually know that, I only heard it through rumors. We never bothered to show up to see if we “made” it.

And, because I like to close the loop – here’s what made me think about that today. At the gym, I have Jessica Radio on Pandora:

Pandora picked a live version of Jessica that was twenty-one minutes long. Not fifty-six minute Meat, but still long enough.