There is some reasoning to this, of course. My musical tastes change from week to week; sometimes I'm really in to organic music (case in point: right now Thelonious Monk is giving me heebie-jeebies) and other times I'm really in to electronic music (last month, Amon Tobin's latest was my favoritest album in the whole world). What I'm working on at any given moment reflects two things: what I'm listening to at that moment, and what kind of gear I have when I'm working. The latter gets switched out all the time, with different results.

An example of this would be something like "Psychosis" on Ganymede. I happened to borrow this little synth from my friend Paul Norman (a Korg MS-10, if you're curious) and the day I got it, I did "Psychosis" end to end. Every sound in that song aside from Miguel's guitar is from that synth. The flip side to that is that I used pretty much every sound that synth is capable of in one song, so it wasn't any good for the rest of the album.

In any case, inspiration aside, I've got extra songs once again, so unless I decide to make Callisto a triple-record set (gasp, choke) there are gonna be some pretty fly leftovers from the Organic Phase of the album's writing. That is, of course, unless I decide that all the electronic stuff I'm doing now doesn't fit, in which case there will be some pretty fly leftovers from the Electronic Phase. You never know with me.

DO NOT FORGET: Bounte show tomorrow night. Info is on the front page of his site. Time to get out and support Positron. If you're lucky, Dave McAnally will show up, and you can make fun of him once he's whiskey drunk. Always good for a laugh. Wade will be there as well, and Van and Jim (or at least Jim) from Die Warzau should be making an appearance.

And then the next night, June 15th, make your way over to The Double Door to catch The Most Dangerous Race, Matt Walker's new project. Doors at 8, show at 9.

Okay, that may have got away from me, but you see my point. (Okie? Really?) Today's homework assignment: make a sentence, ten words or less, with the highest possible O.Q. according to the Random House Sensitive Language Guide.

"...I invariably find myself walking there, considering how the cheap, flashy goods of the 21st century resemble the cheap flashy goods of the 20th. An immortality of battery-operated plastic crap, the business of its retail sheltering the actual texture of the gone world..."

We've begun searching for a place to buy in earnest now. I imagine that next summer we'll be moving in to what will ironically be our first home. It's kind of a trick to find a place that is conducive to all our needs. We only need one bedroom, really. But we need an office for the label, a not-insignificant amount of property, and a place to put the studio where it won't drive Elle insane.

(Although I'm not bothered by it, I'm given to understand that hearing a kick drum going in the same pattern all day can push people to thoughts of homicide.)

We've spent the last year visiting many towns in Oregon that might fit our needs, and we'll continue to do so over the next few months. Just when we think we've narrowed down our list, we find a new little town that is The Best Place Ever. Mill City, while having its benefits, is unfortunately not the Best Place Ever, so it isn't really on our list at all. So far, we give pretty high marks to Forest Grove, McMinnville, Hood River, Silverton, and the like. We were okay with Ashland and environs, but in retrospect, I don't think we'll be calling it Home. We'd need a lot more money to get anything livable there.

For the readers that have purchased a home, hit the blog thread with your thoughts on the matter. I'm relatively lucky inasmuch as Elle's father is a Realtor, and has forgotten more about buying a house than I'll ever know. So there's some guidance there. Obviously, we could give two shits about being in a good school district or whatever (in actual fact, the farther away from a school we are, the better, IMO) but we're new to this whole game, and any nuggets of wisdom would be helpful. Especially if you've purchased rural property.

I'm officially okay with other people's kids now, if they're not completely retarded, and they're occasionally funny. Case in point: my niece Nadia.

I've noticed, in my time on this mortal coil, that every child is above average, according to that child's parents. I can't count the number of times I've heard someone say "well, they did this or that much earlier than all other kids, so logically they are far smarter/cuter/better/whatever than all other kids." If that statement was always true, where do loggers and cops come from? Some kids are, in actual fact, not smart at all, not even remotely cute, and are destined to be assholes. Sorry to all you parents out there, but it's a fact.

I should point out that I come from a large family. Some child members of this family are _not_ above average. In fact, they're very much on the left side of the bell curve, where "average" means a productive (or at least un-annoying) member of society. However, I don't think this is the case with my niece Nicole. This occurred to me when I was having a 2-sided conversation with her about the difference between a dogwood and a rhododendron in my yard today. I don't know exactly how smart a 2-year-old is supposed to be, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't include the ability to retain and repeat the word "rhododendron," and be able to apply it to a specific plant.

Maybe it does, and all children are above average after all. But if that's the case, things are looking up for America when this current crop comes of age, because if they're all like this, then we're in good shape.

Anyways, back to our regularly scheduled programming now. My sister and family have moved on to other relatives, and we can go back to relative peace for the time being.

What I wasn't fully aware of, not even having one little tiny kid, let alone two, is that you need a certain amount of infrastructure to travel any distance at all, even a day trip. And every single time you stop the vehicle, all of this infrastructure has to be adjusted to circumstance. It is really quite amazing. When Elle and I go to the coast by ourselves, we can easily leave after breakfast, drive straight over to coast, go north all the way to Washington, or south as far as we feel like, stop at all kinds of sights and stores, and be home in time for dinner, without ever having hurried at all.

That simply isn't the case with today's journey, something entirely outside our realm of experience. It was very much a case of "two steps forward, one step back." The initial plan was, I think, to go to either Seaside or Florence. Nobody but me seemed to be aware of the fact that each of those towns is a nearly 3-hour drive from Lincoln City (when we go to the further extremes, we tend to do it in a diagonal fashion, rather than the "drive until you hit the ocean then turn left" vibe that seems to prevail among others) but I managed to talk them off the ledge during breakfast, and we decided to go along the ocean from Lincoln City to Newport, then turn back towards Salem and be back before dinner. I still felt that this was somewhat optimistic, but I have to say that even _I_ couldn't have predicted the complete and total meltdown in our ability to embrace the concept of forward motion.

We got to Lincoln City, then actually went out on the beach, at the first opportunity. People that don't have much experience with the Oregon Coast can perhaps not be blamed: "there's a nice sandy beach. It is 328 miles long. It must be nice." No. It isn't. As I've said many times on this very blog, the Oregon Coast is not an actual place, but rather a confluence of natural forces, most of which are unpleasant to the unprotected homo sapien (e.g. high wind, rain, temperature c. 45-55, sharks, jagged rocks, dirty seagulls, et al.) These natural forces come together in a visually stunning, but otherwise thoroughly unpleasant vortex that can be loosely described using the blanket term "The Oregon Coast."

Anyways, my visiting relatives were able to stand their walk along the beach for a sum total of about 7 minutes (as I stood by the car, smoking a cigarette in roughly 60% of the outdoor clothing I normally wear to go snowboarding in) then it was on to less hostile sights.

I sort of lost track of what we did after that; it seems like we did a lot, but in retrospect, I can only remember driving roughly all day, crossing the Siletz River (which demarcates the southern border of Lincoln City) not less than six times, watching a guy make a vase out of glass, and getting as far away from Lincoln City as Depot Bay, which is 7 miles south.

The interesting thing to note here is that there isn't a specific instance I can think of where I could say "we lost N units of time due to event X, caused by child Y." These children, unlike most every child I have ever met, are not only incredibly attractive, but as well behaved as I could possibly imagine a child being. I couldn't say whether they are intelligent or not, as I have no frame of reference (when you're an adult that isn't ever around children, they all seem a little bit demented, so there's that...) but these aren't the sort of kids where you have to stop the entire program to try to keep them from knocking over an entire store during a temper tantrum.

The entire point of this post? I'm not really sure. I guess I'm just surprised to learn how much more time having a kid or two along adds to the program, and how it informs your decision-making paradigm viz. leisure activities. I couldn't, for the life of me, come up with even one thing that I thought a 2-year-old might find fun on the Oregon Coast. After today, I still can't, except to say that the only 2-year-old I know seems to find glassblowing something that is worth watching. Go figure.

I don't think I need to go in to great detail about the whole Goat Incident; I'll just let the following statements lay the groundwork, and you can color around the edges as you see fit:

1. Pygmy goats aren't as small as I thought they were. However, they are quite small. I don't know how small I expected them to be, but it was smaller than they turned out to be. At 8 weeks old, they're about the same size as Pablo. Full grown, they'll be a bit smaller than your average lab. But they have hillarious pot bellies.

2. While pygmy goats do smell, it's not necessarily a bad smell. It's just a smell. My '07 Dodge Caliber now smells like it had goats in it, which it did.

3. Pygmy goats aren't especially fond of riding in a car. On the other hand (hoof? paw? something...) they don't really mind it, either. They like to talk about their feelings on the matter, in any case. The guy that pumped our gas was no doubt amused. Today is the one time in my life I actually _wanted_ to get pulled over by a cop. That would have been funny as fuck.

4. Male pygmy goats are motherfuckers. Our little man Phil just got lo-jacked, wormed, vaccinated, _AND_ had a rubber band put around his balls, and he still went toe-to-toe (hoof to paw?) with a 110-lb rottweiler and won. This little goat is a fucking bad ass. In order to go fight with the rott, he physically knocked me over. He weighs 13 lbs. What a little bad-ass he is.

5. I've obviously gone quite insane. Today I purchased and transported livestock. The only thing that would make the transformation from city slick to country hick 100% complete would be a pickup truck. I'm thinking a '56 Willys, maybe. If I'm gonna go completely around the bend, it might as well be in style, right?