So Julie and Stella are currently in Kerbyville visiting Julie’s grandparents. I have low tolerance for spending vacation days traveling to the middle of nowhere to sit around and do nothing, so I stayed at home.

I’m really enjoying the sleep. I just go to sleep at night, and it’s this satisfying solid sleep. I wake up feeling like I’ve been hibernating. So good.

So last night, I was painting the front door and listening to the 2008 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductions on TV.

The front door will be orange. I picked out the color myself. It matches the blue, so it’s not like I picked out a really ugly color, but I worry it might be too bright. Of course, bright was the point. I don’t know. We’ll see. We’re going to water down some black paint and get it into the cracks of the scrollwork to give it an aged look, so that should dim the wattage a bit. On the upside, you can now actually see the scrollwork from the street.

Did anyone else see Iggy Pop performed Madonna’s songs? That was really strange. Talk about covers that sound nothing like the original.

Damien Rice sang Hallelujah when they inducted Leonard Cohen. It was nice, but you could tell everyone there was thinking about Jeff Buckley’s version. Even Damien was channeling it. I really don’t know of a more beautiful song than Jeff Buckley singing it.

I think this might be Leonard Cohen’s acceptance speech. Which is a poem and perhaps the best speech I have ever heard.:

It speaks so eloquently about why we create art and the meaning of it. Beautiful.

So, I was listening to “The Luxury Gap” by Heaven 17 again today. I got it for Christmas. I got introduced to the band with their song “Temptation” which was the club music in Trainspotting. Upon hearing it, I just couldn’t help wondering how this band wasn’t bigger.

Then I got “The Luxury Gap” and it all became clear. The entire album is essentially about the pitfalls of Thatcherism and commercialism. There’s a song about mindlessly slaving away. A song about the dangers of easy credit. A song about trophy wives. The first track on the album is “Crushed by the Wheels of Industry”. Which screams to me “happy-go-lucky dance song”.

I love it. I can see how most people wouldn’t. And I have no clue how they played this in clubs in the eighties. I know people don’t listen to lyrics, but still…

Just read this CNN article on people’s reactions to rising gas prices. It’s fascinating to see that people are starting to get it. It’s starting to hit home. They do these fairly frequently and in the past they’ve had a lot of mixed opinions. This is the first one that has been overwhelmingly negative.

Personally, we’re getting hit by the rising food prices a lot more than gas. We had our first $30 tank of gas recently, but that’s not really that big of a deal. We use about 2-3 tanks of gas a month. So $15-20 isn’t gonna break us. But we did fuel up my parent’s truck last week as part of moving in our set for The Automat, and it was $50. I don’t know how people who commute can afford 4 tanks of gas a month at $50 a pop. You really start to see how moving to the city can become affordable. If you have two sub-20mpg vehicles and two commutes that require filling up a gas tank weekly, you could afford about $40,000 more house for the price of your commute. That’s nuts.

In the past a lot of artists have drawn images of what they imagine suburbia will look like during a nuclear winter. I wonder if we’ll see that in an

So today I got hungry. And I decide to make popcorn.

We had some unpopped pop corn in the pantry from our Oscar party. And I had read on Treehugger how you can make microwave popcorn with the normal stuff. You don’t need to buy the bags. And you really shouldn’t buy the bags, since they can kill you. And not just in laboratory rats. Real-life microwave popcorn eaters have gotten cancer from cooking the fake butter. But I digress.

You’re supposed to put the corn in a brown paper lunch bag. But that doesn’t seem very treehugger-y.

First, I tried a paper boat. Which I realize is also disposable and negates my argument above. But I didn’t have any brown paper lunch bags, so the environmental reasoning came later. It’s one of those boats that they served French Fries in at your school cafeteria. We got about 100 of them when we purchased our house. I don’t know why the previous owners needed so many paper boats (and obviously they didn’t either since they left them). But I like to imagine the previous owner sitting down to lunch every day for a steaming paper boat full of Frito pie. Mmmm… sounds good.

So, I put them in the boat. This resulted in some really cool visuals and a bit of popping, but not enough. I cleaned out the microwave. Put the popped popcorn in a bowl and put the unpopped kernels in another bowl. Then I put a third bowl on top of the unpopped kernels and threw that back into the microwave. This time the popping was more contained, although not as entertaining. Ok, it was still pretty entertaining. I like watching the top bowl, slowly separate from the bottom as the popcorn inside gets bigger and bigger. What can I say, I wasn’t allowed to watch much TV as a kid.

This worked pretty well. Still too many unpopped kernels, but a lot more popcorn. The only problem is that it kind of fuses to the bowls. So, I’ll have to work on that. At this point I had enough popcorn to eat, but I’ll return to my experimentation at a later date.