It was quite lovely. On the same day that I stepped off the plane I was photographing manatees in Blue Springs with my new camera. I got to see a pre-dawn Space Shuttle launch (sadly, the last). I got to watch the Superbowl with my dad. My mom gave me a sewing lesson and I stitched a hole in my favorite sweater; it’s good as new. I paddled a kayak through a mangrove swamp with my sis, mom & aunts. I won four games of ping-pong, three games of Scrabble. Climbed an orange tree, and scrapped-up my hands leaping out of it. (plus, the oranges I picked were under-ripe and mercilessly bitter. oh well, it was fun anyway.) I saw hawks, herons, huge pelicans, ibises, ospreys… birds of all shapes and descriptions, everywhere. Watched some charming films: Up in the Air, Pixar’s Up, The Hangover (also, an old favorite: Jean Reno & the 13-y.o. Natalie Portman in The Professional). Just a fun week all around.

Last year my family went through some serious upheavals, so– most of all– it was good to get back together with my sister & parents and see that each of us is falling into our new routines pretty well.

Now I’m back in B’ham. Mostly ignoring the big Winter Olympics hubbub going on 50 miles to the north of me. I may wander over to the brewery later this week and do some spectating, but right now I have other things on my mind.

Since it’s been such a warm winter here in Whatcom County, folks at the greenhouse are talking about planting even earlier this year. I could be starting my “summer” weekend job this month(!), maybe even this weekend. That means going back to a no-days-off schedule again– kind of a bummer– but I’m excited by the prospect of two more paychecks each month. If my budget stays on track, I could have more than 50%(!) of my remaining debts paid off by October.

In the off-hours, I have my usual spread of pursuits and hobbies. Getting more serious about practicing on my guitar and piano again. My friends & I are still playing a lot of MtG, and I’ve also started playing Pauper Magic on MTG Online, which is a surprising amount of fun. I bought a new-used camera (a Canon G10) with the intention of improving my photography and getting back into Flickr. I’ll be restarting Nodeslam.com this week, finally. I’ve also been recording myself reading The Silmarillion outloud, purely for my own amusement. (I may upload the recordings at some point, but in a more out-of-the-way location. I don’t want to run afoul of the Tolkien estate. I’ll let you know.)

One of the things my dad sent me for my birthday last week was a double-CD of two Dave Mason LPs: It’s Like You Never Left from ‘74 and his self-titled follow-up album, Dave Mason. These were a couple of my father’s top-ten albums from that era, back when his life mirrored mine in a lot of ways. (Like me, my mom & dad left Michigan in their mid-twenties and moved to a laidback Cascadian college town– Corvallis OR, in their case– to go back to basics and enjoy a hippie lifestyle. Yes, this is basically where I got the idea.)

It got me thinking about what I’d choose as my top albums of this decade, the 2000s.

Furthermore, if you still haven’t heard: I broke up with my girlfriend Jet last Saturday and– although I’m still content with the decision and hope that Jet & I can still salvage a friendship– it’s thrown a ratchet into my brainpan that’s been rattling around all week. For any serious topic, it has made it hard to introspect farther back in time than the last few weeks and months, what I should have said and done differently, etc. So– in true [Rob Fleming] fashion– talking about music seems like a nice diversion.

And thirdly, I enjoy making lists. A lot. To an embarrassing extent.

10 years, 20 albums. Make it so.

2009

* Far, by Regina Spektor

I’d been predicting since mid-June that this would be my top album of 2009, and sure enough.

2008

* 3-WAY TIE: albums by local Bellingham bands that you’ve never heard of, but yet are better than most anything released on a major label that year =
All of My Friends Are Good People, by Go Slowpoke
Take This and Go, by Jenni Potts
New Ocean Waves, by Your Heart Breaks

These three, plus I Love You Avalanche– aka Anna Arvan, another B’hamster who plays in a half-dozen groups (including Go Slowpoke) yet shockingly has never released an album– really grabbed my attention in the summer of 2008 and made me realize that Bellingham has a local music scene worth listening to… and more generally, made me realize that most of the truly good music in the world is made in bars and basements, not music studios.

* 3-WAY TIE: some particularly awesome mix CDs =
Horace Phair 6 by fweez, icicle & ouroboros
Audiovisceral Club 1&2 by danndalf and indigoe
Indieboy Heartbreaker by chaotic_poet

I debated whether to include mix CDs on this list, but truth is I love love love mixes and I tend to reach for them a lot. So if you mailed or handed me a mix at some point this decade, it’s a safe bet that I’ve listened to it at least as many times as each of the other albums on here.

Special mention needed to go out to three, though, for containing a dangerously pressurized quantity of awesome-sauce and being my first intro to several excellent acts.

(technically Robbie gave me Indieboy Heartbreaker in 2007 but whatev, it fits here better.)

2007

* Faces in the Rocks, by Mariee Sioux
* Romance Conflict Adventure, by Best Friends Forever

2007 was the year I moved from my ski lodge in the Cascades back to Metamora for the summer, then I moved (to stay) in Bellingham that fall. Mariee Sioux is beautiful, mysterious, sublime Native-American-inflected folk music from the Pacific Northwest. Best Friends Forever is happy, happy, happy two-girls-and-some-drums pop music from Minnesota. I’d be hard-pressed to locate a better soundtrack for summer in the Midwest and winter in Cascadia.

The rest of these records are (slightly) less obscure, so I’ll slim down the commentary.

2006

* The Body, The Blood, The Machine by The Thermals
* Gulag Orkestar, by Beirut

2005

* The Woman King EP, by Iron & Wine

The only EP on the list, but I’d pick these 6 songs over anything else in the Sam Beam songbook.

* Illinois, by Sufjan Stevens
* Picaresque, by The Decemberists

2004

* Sanctuary, by Charlie Musselwhite

Given to me by an old co-worker of mine, “Barnacle” Bob Baker, an Alaskan deep-sea fisherman turned I.T. guy that I used to work with at the college. He knew I liked Jack White and Kurt Cobain, so one day he dropped some real blues on me. 2004 was the year I moved into my first apartment, and songs like “Homeless Child” and “Let’s Burn Down the Cornfield” packed (and still pack) a lot of wallop.

2003

* Her Majesty, The Decemberists

2002

* (), by Sigur Rós

2001

* White Blood Cells, by The White Stripes
* Space Lullabies and Other Fantasmagore, by Ekova

Ekova is Afro-Parisienne electronic/worldbeat something something something fusion… Probably the first truly strange album I’d ever sought out and purchased (at age 19) and it’s left a big impression. This album and another, similar disc (Bothy Culture by Irish musician Martyn Bennett, which I’d discovered via dad) opened up a massive new sonic landscape for me.

2000

* De Stijl, The White Stripes

This album came out literally a week after I graduated high school, although I wasn’t cool enough to know it at the time. (Like most everyone else, I’d only found out about the Stripes after White Blood Cells hit Top 40 and Jack & Meg became kind of a big deal.) Of all the albums on this list, De Stijl is the one that I can see myself still raving about 30 years hence. It deserves a spot in the rock-gods’ canon, somewhere between Led Zeppelin IV and Electric Ladyland.

Hell, De Stijl would also make my desert island top-five, next to The White Album and Tigermilk, but that list would be another long excursion all together.

We’ve been busy at the mill. A lot of people dust off their cookbooks around this time of year, and that means a lot of extra demand for good flour. I’m happy to provide.

I’ve had two jobs in my life that I’ve really enjoyed. The first was my I.T. internship at Oakland CC in Auburn Hills, but that was mostly due to the laidback work environment; I loved the comraderie of hanging out in nerd central with the other I.T. guys, playing Unreal Tournament on the college LAN and waiting around for trouble tickets to roll into the queue so that we could swoop in and save the day. When it came to the actual job though– fixing finicky PCs & printers– meh, it was fun but it got boring after awhile. I didn’t feel like I was really doing anything, just maintaining other people’s tools so that they could carry on with their day.

I never get bored of making flour, though. Mostly because my job is so easy. I feel as if Kevin– the miller, or in other words, the mill’s owner, my boss (I find it an interesting statement about 21st century life that all of my friends know what an I.T. guy’s job is, but I have to explain every facet of what a miller does for a living)– I feel as if Kevin has the hard job, talking with customers & suppliers, making business decisions on what grain to buy & what prices to charge for our flour. Making the flour (my job) is the easy part. It’s so simple that there’s nothing to get bored *of*. Hell, making flour is something that hunter-gatherer societies had figured out. Using electricity to do it makes the machines more complicated, but it tends to save on labor. And since we only use organic grain purchased from trusted sources in WA, the nearby states, & Canada, I have complete confidence that the flour I make every day is at least as good or better than the flour made by every other miller’s assistant in the entire history of humanity.

So, in other words, I like my job. It doesn’t pay a lot but it pays the bills, and it helps pay my debts, and gives me a little left over on the side to have some fun and a lot of extra free-time to enjoy it. Sometimes, in moodier moments, I come down a little hard on myself for living as a modern-day peasant in a world where wealthier people have access to such incredible things– books with electronic ink, cars that run on cooking oil or get 200mpg, hiking gear made out of space-age materials, routine travel on intercontinental airliners, …. But then, I look around even within my own circle of friends and also see a lot of people who are currently looking for work & having a stressful time of it– most of them better educated & more hard-working than I am– and I feel supremely fortunate that I’ve lucked my way into such a lovely lot in life.

Though that doesn’t mean that I expect to be a miller for the next 40 years. I’d be content to do that, sure, but I have other things in mind.

More on that next time.

Current mood: improving. Tomorrow– I’m guessing it’ll be too late tonight; I’m meeting up with some friends in an hour or so– I’ll jot down another entry and take stock.

The thing that bums me out is that I feel like any update I write at the moment is going to contain a lot of “see last entry”s, “see next entry”s and “more of the same”s.

There *are* low-key things going on in my life– a lot of fun things, even– but mostly I’m just keeping myself occupied until the economy improves, my finances improve, and my savings account accumulates to an arbitrarily high number. To an outside observer it might appear that I’m just wasting my life away. But I see it differently.

One important thing to remember about me: I got where I am today by borrowing, and I don’t regret it. I borrowed to pay for my education and I borrowed to get my adult life started. Now I’m paying back. I’m happy to do it because– in case I’ve failed to mention in the last fifteen minutes or so– my life is pretty great right now. But paying back is also hard. It’s hard to stay on track when a lot of my energy is going towards honoring old debts instead of breaking new ground.

I keep reminding myself, though, that getting into debt was the correct move then and paying off that debt is the correct move now. I made a plan a couple of years ago, and its working, and I have total confidence that it’ll continue to work. It’s kind of boring to watch, though, so posting updates to this blog can be frustrating.

The silly things that I’m doing now– reading books, playing games, watching movies, messing about on websites– are mostly filler. My life is actually *about* something quite different.

I can *tell* folks what my life is about, but it’ll be much more convincing when I *show* them. And I’m not in a position to show anything yet. (I’ve been saying that for years, and yes, it’s still true.) And anyway, like I said, I have to get going… I’m headed over to Hunter & Mary’s tonight.

More soon.

My stress levels are up, though. When I get stressed I tend to withdraw into my own world and my own mind, pushing off minor responsibilities and letting my mail build up in a bin.

I am very sorry for being uncommunicative lately. My life, while still nice, seems like it’s slipping farther and farther off-tempo every day. “Off-tempo” is the best word I have to describe it, but maybe that doesn’t really explain anything.

I am tired and I have a splitting headache but I at least wanted to take a stab tonight at getting back on-track. This is that stab. I am trying to regain my stride. It is difficult to do.

Current mood: grouchy. I am going to bed now.

It bums me out in one sense, but in other ways inspires me. I’m going to miss the homemade sharpie-marker design that I made in 2006, but I’m hitting a point where I need this site to be a more purely text-based & utility-rich medium. Maybe the next time I revamp the site I’ll figure out a way to combine the two styles and get my Sharpie warpaint back.

Right now, though, I just need a place to easily decompress some arbitrary text out of my brainpan. Lately the ideas have been piling up in my mind & on loose scraps scattered around my apartment without any easy place to put them. My main aim with this rebuild is to clear out the clutter and get more of those thoughts & schemes out into the light of day.

How are things? Outstanding. Those of you who’ve known me for any length of time know that I’m running out of  …

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Maybe it’d be better to just upend the whole box and let you all fit the pieces together. …
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