My Mind: Lifesized

SXSW Deliciousness from NPR

Just wait until about 10:30 in to have your mind fully blown

\ "Maybe you thought love was just a game", "maybe you thought your life was just a little strange"...oft used but the way delivered here 'tis exceptional.

Day three of riding the Mountain Line bus and I had my first foul up, learning my first lesson in bus riding...don't try to beat the system!  Smarter people then me figured out the routes and I need to follow them. I tried to jump off route 12, walk 4 blocks and catch route 6 to beat the 12 bus to the transfer station. Only I looked at the wrong line on the route map. So I walked 4 more blocks and caught the U Dash bus to campus and got back on track. My move cost me 30 minutes. Why am I taking the bus? Beyond wanting to support public transportation and Mountain Line being zero fare, we have no working go car at the moment.  Our van is in Coeur d'Alene after it took the brunt of the elk collision and two days ago my car went kaput. We have to either get a new head gasket or drop in a refurbished engine and considering our budget is in shambles, not looking forward to either option. Maybe we'll move to Australia! (Reference to kids book and movie intended).  I am lov...

The bad luck train made yet another stop at the O'Connor house Sunday night, but as the title of this posts suggests, divine intervention and happenstance stepped in and saved the day and our lives. We hit a bull elk at 75 mph on Interstate 90 heading towards Missoula at about 10pm Pacific Time. He was bigger than a horse and, for a flash, a thing of beauty. It had been a glorious day. Liam won a free pass to Silverwood from his school last year for reading and had asked us at least 50 times when we could go...and after all we've been through this year it seemed right to take a day off from the stress of the house and do something fun with the kids. His buddy Rowan spent the night on Saturday and we'd cleared it with his folks, so on Sunday morning I jumped in the van with Jen, Quinn, Rowan, and Liam and headed west to  Silverwood Theme Park  to take in the last day of the season. We rode roller coasters, krazy bumper kars, the log flume (I got soaked much to their d...

Must see video. What insight by Atul Gawande, MD on being mortal The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes , The Daily Show on Facebook , Daily Show Video Archive

I've been a fan for some time and am really enjoying the new music from Stuff Like That There . Here is a link to their First Listen session on NPR  First Listen: Yo La Tengo

The pace of work on our basement has increased daily for the past two weeks. Our construction crew is doing everything they can to try and get us back into the basement before the 25th of August, which marks the 8th month "anniversary" of our troubles.  They are hard-working young men who all seemingly pity us and all we've been through. Yesterday there were painters and electricians, carpenters, and excavators (did I mention we have another problem?) all scurrying about and the basement is really coming into shape. This insurance claim stuff is a funny business. It seems such a long time ago now that the insurance adjuster came to our house with his tape measure, utility knife, and laser pointer to measure and take samples as to put a value on our damaged property. Later, when the work began, it became clear the claim was going to be much bigger than originally anticipated, which made the insurance adjuster quite uneasy. Asbestos and mold were discovered and shortly t...

Wow, they are playing tonight at the Top Hat here in Missoula...while Wilco is playing at Big Sky Brewery. And we are supposed to be camping. Oh what to do, what to do.

A shout out to this morning to all my Aussie friends, especially Mark & Heidi Sowerby. This is a great Australian band, The Twerps. First song of the day on random play was "Peculiar" There is something about how the vocals are just a bit off of the music and how they dance together that strike me and sort of put me in a trance. Combine it with the lyrics and you have a really good song...albeit not for everybody.  Oh, Go, Mark GO!!!!  As you swim the English Channel this weekend. Cheers!

Those who've been following the travails of our house woes know that our journey has lasted 7 months as of the 25th of July. Water first appeared in our basement on Christmas day and has been the gift that keeps giving. At first we thought it was a small leak of some kind, but it turned into a problem big enough that we ended up having to reconstruct our entire basement, including removing a large portion of the slab. We discovered a lake of grossness under our house, fed for some years by a burst pipe. We also discovered an underground spring manifested under the slab as well, a spring that has probably flowed through our property off and on since the home was built...at least that is one theory. Like an onion, each time we thought we'd solved the problem we were simply peeling off a layer to another problem. Over the past 7 months we've discovered hidden floor drains, asbestos, mold (the really nasty black kind) and improperly installed electrical work, much of this in ...

Liam dragging me home. 9:54 for an 8 year-old with no training is not too shabby. Way to go buddy! We are at the 7:10 mark of the video.

Thanks to Kevin Kronner, I've discovered a whole new group of artists collaborating through Earthworks Music in Michigan. I guess I have another excuse to head back to that wonderful state soon!

Since my last entry about our home disaster, much has changed and life keeps marching on. We are now well into our 5th month of disaster recovery and still quite some way from getting our home and life back, but we are definitely on the way. It's been almost a month since Grant Creek Excavating showed up in front of our home on a Wednesday morning at 6:30 am with a large backhoe. The owner was there to go over the job with the crew and introduce himself. It was an incredible gesture as, you see, they were supposed to begin work two days earlier but had gotten delayed on another job.  He wanted me to know how sorry he was for our problems and to tell me his crew had every intention of doing whatever it took to finish the job still in the original time frame. And boy did they ever. I'm not sure I've seen a group of harder working guys. By 8:00 am they started ripping up our front lawn and having at it in earnest. They worked 12-14 hours each day digging, ripping, laying pip...

Over the course of the past several weeks friends have asked us how they could help with our ongoing personal disaster involving our house. Due to some complications and exclusions in our homeowners insurance agreement, we are faced with a little over $50,000.00 in out of pocket repair/restoration costs. Our patent answer was the same, "we're fine, We are still eating three meals a day, the kids are still doing their thing, we have a roof over our heads...we'll get through this". One dear friend suggested we set up a site where people could donate to us if they wanted to help. No thanks was our answer, there are plenty of others who need more help. Then I had a conversation with my good friend Russ, who was the victim of a senseless attack in downtown Missoula that resulted in multiple hospital stays, a severe head injury, cracked teeth, and loads of rehab. One of Russ' friends set up a site for him and together his friends donated a significant amount of...

#TWPT (Truly Wonderful Poem Tuesday...I just started this hashtag so help it spread) Those Winter Sundays (Robert Hayden 1962) Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No on ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know, of love's austere and lonely offices?

When last we met our intrepid waterlogged homeowners (that's us), they'd played a gamble that they could tap into the old drain fields in their front yard (that's our front yard), a $950.00 gamble to be precise. The hope was by digging up the portion of the yard just outside the homes northeastern most foundation, they could replace the tiles that connected the old drain system under the slab with a newer version, connect them to an exterior gravel drain field that would allow the groundwater to seep back into the earth, button it all up, and be on the way to repair of their desolated basement.  That gamble failed and the family (us) was left with a huge hole in their front yard and no progress towards resolution. And they were poorer to boot! Now, a month later, we rejoin our story, already in progress... Today is day three of " il-proġett basmeent grand" (that's Maltese for The Grand Basement Project :) ) . Much has transpired since my last blog post. ...

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Jeff Tweedy and his son Spencer last Wednesday night at the Top Hat.  I wanted to go but missed the boat on tickets as the show sold out super fast (Missoula loves anything related to Wilco and Wilco seems to love Missoula as well). I'd resigned myself to just hear about the show, which unfortunately seems to be the trend in my life rather than the exception these days. But happenstance and luck reared their heads again and two tickets fell into my lap thanks to Alex & Nick Simmons making the state high school basketball tournament.  Jen pooped out and various friends couldn't go for one reason or another (the best excuse coming in the form of a text from Mexico apologizing he had to miss the show due to lounging on the beach....BAH), so I headed to the show with my friends Karl & Lolo sans listening partner.  As for the problem of the extra ticket, after standing out front for 15 minutes with no taker, I popped a message on...

I am blown away, even to this day, every time I hear this song. 1998...if I had heard this while in college, I just might have remained frozen in time. JTB were just down right awesome.

Our house - it just keeps getting better We were having so much fun digging trenches inside our house that we decided just to go ahead and start digging outside the house. Actually, we weren't quite so nonchalant about digging outside, but it was a roll of the dice we felt we had to take. After our attempts at using a camera to follow the drain tiles in our basement out under the foundation were met with a black sludge that resembled the old Beverly Hillbillies oil strike (but a whole lot more fragrant in a bad way), we were told we needed to expose more of the basement floor. Once again, the pros at A-Core brought their diamond-tipped blade in and sawed up more concrete and the burly men of Dayspring came in with their jackhammers and buckets to rip up and hand carry out the floor. More of our basement was removed and what used to be Coles bedroom was turned into an ode to WWI foxholes...stinky, muddy, nasty, rocky foxholes.  I'm beginning to think we could charge admissi...