Hello from a while ago...

I will make no excuses for not having posted in a while...true, I've been busy with conference calls and email-jockeying at CRAB, with music mixing for The Preons and songwriting with Sun Vow, but I haven't forgotten about you, blog audience! I will work to make my musings less frequent, ever-more scintillating and random as always.

Summer 2006 was a happy blur, with the wedding and honeymoon dominating much of it. Autumn has been pleasant enough...Kirsten and I have been feeling the urge to stay indoors, out of the wind and dampness of the past few weeks.

This time of year, every year, I get nostalgic for my Anchorage childhood, and particularly for the snow...by "the snow" I mean snow in my front and backyard, all over the street, everywhere. Many friends and acquaintances will give me a crazy look when I state that I miss such precipitation. I don't know how to describe it exactly...I enjoy the quietness that I remember, in my little cul-de-sac East Anchorage neighborhood, when the streets were covered in snow, sometimes three feet of it. I miss the way that such weather would slow people down...I even miss freezing my nose off in -20F weather in downtown Anchorage, standing with my mom at the Fur Rendezvous parade. I've been away from all of this stuff for eighteen years now, and yet I can't help but miss it, especially around the holidays.

I came to hate this time of year after my mom died in '88, basically because I missed her. With eighteen years between me and her death I guess I've come to hate this season less...on that tangent: I have decided to celebrate El Dia de los Muertos for the first time this year, to honor my late mother, Nereida. Day of the Dead is gaining more notoriety each year, or it seems to gain notoriety in Seattle, anyway...like a good computer geek I have looked up a wiki on how one might keep this holiday, heh. The first time I heard about this holiday was in seventh-grade Spanish class...indeed, we watched a filmstrip on Mexican history that featured a long segment on El Dia de los Muertos at the end. I marvelled at the sugar skulls, the little dioramas of skeleton mariachi bands, the colors of the displays...all of it looked great to me. I liked the ideas of celebrating life and death, of seeing death as a necessary component of life, as opposed to an inevitable flaw to suffer. I still like these ideas...so, I decided: What the hell? I will keep Day of the Dead this year. My altar and ofrenda will be modest: a copied photo of Nereida, a chocolate skull that Kirsten brought back from a recent trip to Chicago, a candle in a candelabra that a friend in San Antonio bought us for Christmas three years ago...maybe I'll post a picture of it for you, pageant audience, up on my Flickr page.

I have to get back to work, but I hope this little note finds you all well. Happy Day of the Dead to you!

Con sincero,
JMHT