"Strange Kind of Love" by Love and Money

GO BUY THIS ALBUM ON iTUNES. Yeah, I just did, and you all know I have a PROBLEM, but I HAD to have this. This is MY album. It was purchased in the Fall of my senior year of highschool, while on a short shopping trip with our foreign exchange student Tarja. She implored that I must buy it as it looked interesting and I just needed to try it out. It was bya group called LOVE and MONEY after all, and what else was anyone in the 80's looking for? She was really good at talking me into anything, pushing me to do anything, pushing me off a cliff, but that is another story. Anyways, I purchased the TAPE and it lived in my 1980 powder blue VW Rabbit for the next several years. It was surely the soundtrack of that car, along with Stevie Nicks "The Other Side of the Mirror", an obscure non Lindsey Buckingham Fleetwood Mac album called "Behind the Mask", and two or three mixed tapes, literally labeled Car Tape, 1-4. It is a great album, and certainly worth some more detailed commentary, but here is why I mention it TODAY. I finally found it on iTunes! I have looked for it for years in CD form, and haven't found it. It is available on amazon, but only from other sellers. I mean, I had it on tape, so I wasn't desperate, but still. I am so excited to have this piece of ME in mp3...hey, that's kinda catchy.
Must go listen and drift back.
-Cheryl

...so I guess I will have to rename my alter ego. "The Friday Night Alcoholic" perhaps would be better named "The Saturday Morning Caffeine Craver," or perhaps even "The Saturday Afternoon Iced Coffee Consumer," as here it is 1:36 pm and I am finally getting to write. I blame school starting and frustratingly getting in my way of my living my LIFE. Jobs, aargh, can't live with 'em, can't quit 'em, need the paycheck to support Vera Bradley habits, etc. etc. etc. Anyways, last night was the first Friday night of the first full week of school and what started as an excitable evening where I had all kinds of plans for what I wanted to do with "my time" turned into me, in a sleeping bag, on the couch. I didn't even make it to the end of "What Not to Wear." First it was pizza for dinner and a beer, then it was relaxing and playing with the pup and the kids, then it was bedtime routines. When 9:00 rolled around, I cozied up on the couch with a second Dundee Wheat beer, and my buds, Stacy and Clinton. For whatever reason, I got chilly...probably the body shutting down, putting its own sad party pooping plans into place. Tim bought a mummy style sleeping bag this week, for an up coming Cub Scout camping adventure, and it was out on the computer room couch. I grabbed it, climbed in, zipped up and checked out. There was no way around it, the minute I was in I was down for the count. It is sad, really, how much of our leisure time we really have no control over. The past week and a half have been consumed with work getting started again, but our evenings have been usurped as well. Extracurriculars have begun, for the kids and for the adults, and any "issues" in life, which in the last week and a half have included a gas tank issue standing in the way of a car inspection, a persistant bee's nest, and a rather expensive water leak, fortunately OUTSIDE the house, have to be delt with somewhere between 4pm and total collapse. I have been reading Loving Frank, as Sue did earlier this summer, and it is easy reading, but mentally very hard, thought provoking. It is all about the affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, and it brings up so many questions about choices, committment, creativity and needs. I want to sit and consume the book and be able to think, but again, the past week and a half, reading has sent me off to dreamland even quicker than said sleeping bag. I know things will slow down, or at least become the norm. Our bodies will adjust to more activity, more stress, more work and less sleep, but I want that adjustment to be done NOW. I want to be happy to reach the weekend for reasons of fun, not just reasons of replenishment. It'll come, I know, it always does, but I need to have patience, I need to read Frank, and most of all, I think I need some more iced coffee...
-Cheryl

...and am feeling a return of "The Friday Night Alcoholic" tonight having completed our first full week of school, thankfully.  These daily reasons to drink inspire me.  More to come, post consumption of my Dundee Wheat Beer.  After all, with their tagline being "Be Unclear," what more could you ask for in Friday Night Pontification, or in a Friday night beer?

...I'm feelin' a blog comin' on!

Yep, that was the quote of the evening as I nearly drove off the road in rage.  

We headed to a movie today, and you know, it is not enough that when I go there I have to endure myriad previews, now so professionally referred to as trailers, that give away the essence of every damn movie I might want to see.  No, now I have to endure everyday advertising as well.  Today's offering was that damn JCPenney's ad, glaring down as me from the big screen now, that rips off one of my, and all children of the 80's, favorite movies, "The Breakfast Club."  There they were again, the jock, the rebel, the prom queen, or at least this generation's lame representation thereof, decked out in their JCP Back to School frocks.  "Nothing new, just new people doing it" a la Grandpa Colby came to mind.  He was, apparently, a wise, wise man.  Simple Minds' "Don't You Forget About Me," remade by some millennial emo band hummed, cloyingly, in the back of my mind the rest of the afternoon.

Fast forward a few hours and we were singing along with the radio on the way home, and I flipped by a station playing a VERY familar song.  Hey a ma ma ma...Life in a Northern Town...it sounded somewhat right, but no, it was a COUNTRY VERSION!  I mean, REALLY!  I did nearly careen into a ditch with the sad realization that, apparently, my entire youth is destined to be ripped from me and remade so a new group of people can claim it as their own.  I ranted, I raved, I threatened to drive my entire family into a lake, which was, quite literally, a mere 10 miles ahead.  Then, even with the country twang evoking in me images of waving wheat as opposed to abandoned factories and lake effect, I found myself singing along.  Tim mentioned that there are, after all, northern towns in the midwest, and maybe they just want to be heard, or perhaps, in some small way, understood.  

I came home, I downloaded off iTunes, I followed along, and I felt a blog coming on...

Sigh, I am a lemming after all.

-Cheryl

(and for anyone who wants to know, it was remade by the band Sugarland, along with Little Big Town, whom I LOVE - less country, more Fleetwood Mac.  Check them OUT!)