Dinosaur Act

Ah, a Saturday morning. Gotta love it. Deb let me sleep in today, which was much appreciated. Of course, she's got a lot of household chore stuff planned for me today, so I guess I shouldn't be too psyched.

The house painting is all done, finally. The place looks great. I'll post a photo sometime today.

I played hockey Thursday night for the first time in about six weeks, and the second time in the last three months. After the marathon in May, one thing after another came up; Deb was busy on some Thursday nights and I had some conflicts and all of a sudden, here we are in July. I actually felt pretty good out there, although my timing was way off. I could feel it later in the skate when I was getting winded much quicker. But I did manage to pop in a couple of goals, so that was cool. A guy on my team brought his 13-year-old son to play with us and the kid was pretty good, but damn, did he make me feel old.

Last night, I finished moving my CDs into wallets, at least the majority of them that I had alphabetized. I still have soundtracks, EPs, and a ton of bootlegs to file away. One thing I discovered during this exhaustive process was that jewel cases aren't recyclable; I had just assumed they were, but the type of plastic they're made of isn't accepted by our city recycling program (or pretty much any city's program). There's one place up in Salem, NH, that accepts them, but I wasn't about to ship 1,000 jewel cases up there. So I had to throw them out. It's kinda mind-blowing to think of how much space they used to take up compared to now. I have the booklets stored with the CDs, but not the inserts; I saved them, so I'm trying to figure out what to do with them. Might turn into an art project or something.

Footsteps

Holy humidity! Man, it has been moist around here the last few days. Not great sleeping weather. We've also had a lot of Florida-like volatile storm systems kicking around lately, making things even more unpredictable than they usually are. On Saturday, it was actually kinda chilly as temps hovered around 60 degrees. I played nine holes of golf at Salem Muni with some buddies from work and although I shot pretty terribly (59), I had a good time. Later that afternoon, we went to a birthday party and people were actually cold at times. By Sunday, the humidity moved in. I ran 10 miles in the a.m. and figured the 65-degree temps would make for a great run. Wrong. It was so humid, I was drenched halfway through. Later in the day, Deb and I drove down to Stoughton to go to IKEA to buy a big-ass shelf unit for the guest room; took me a couple of hours to put the thing together. Then I threw myself into another huge project: Putting my entire CD collection into CD wallets. I've got over 1,200 CDs by my estimate and they were in various locations throughout the house and driving both Deb and I crazy for different reasons. I actually bought a 300-CD wallet last year and started to fill it, but got sidetracked and never went back to it. At IKEA, we found 80-CD wallets for $3 each, so we picked up five just to get me started again. Sunday night, I spent about five hours just alphabetizing everything, as well as separating bootlegs, mix CDs, EPs, soundtracks, and other crap. Then I started refilling the big wallet; right now, I'm up to the D's. This is going to take a while.

I've been pretty wiped out all day because last night I went to the Pearl Jam show at the Comcast Center in Mansfield with my friend Gary and Brad. Awesome show. It was the last night of a short 12-show tour of the East Coast; they don't have a new album to promote, they just toured for the hell of it. As such, they played a ton of old stuff, especially from the first three albums, and generally seemed to have a blast. We got there and saw the last half of Ted Leo's set; he rules. Walking around, we saw a ton of frat boys and their girlfriends, but we also saw a fair amount of parents and their kids. I guess some of those parents were in their 30s when Pearl Jam released their first album in 1991, 17 freakin' years ago. The band played for about two hours, culminating in a smoking version of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World" with Ted Leo and his band. PJ probably would have played another hour if it wasn't for the stupid Mansfield 11 p.m. curfew. Just as well, since I had a long way to go. We parked in a side lot behind a nearby business, so we didn't have to wait quite as long as the folks in the official parking lots. Finally got home a little after 1:30, so I'm pretty fried right about now.

Flyin' the flannel:

• The NHL's silly season, aka free agency, began today. The two biggest available free agents, Mats Sundin and Marian Hossa, were still unsigned as of this writing, but they have received some huge offers; Sundin was offered $10 million a year for two years. He's a great player, but that's crazy money. The Leafs signed three players--forward Niklas Hagman, defenseman Jeff Finger and goalie Curtis Joseph--but none of them are particuarly impressive to me. Lots of moves are being made, but it looks like my team will continue to suck next season.
• We're getting ready to head up to Maine on Thursday. I'm running with some friends in the Around Mount Desert Island Relay on Friday; it's an eight-leg, 61-mile race. It takes place at Acadia National Park and should be fun. We head back on Saturday to beat the traffic hopefully.
• Happy Canada Day! To celebrate, here's some Canadian content for you: Rush performing "YYZ" in Brazil. The amazing part is that the audience is actually singing along to an instrumental. Of course, it's a terrific instrumental.