Lawnmowerpalooza 2014

September 30, 2014That Asian-Looking Chick Leave a comment

I’d insisted that I’d never write this blog post. I swore it to the point where it became an inside joke, but alas, it has come to pass… I’m writing about a lawnmower, and it’s Callaghan’s fault. He wins.

You see, ever since we moved into this house at the end of August, Callaghan and I have been debating what to do about our front and back lawns. Once we decided to keep the grass, we had to shift our focus to the issue of obtaining a lawnmower, and the never-ending lawnmower discussion ensued. New or used? Off the shelf or online? Online retailer or Craigslist or eBay or Amazon? Manual, thermal engine or electric motor? If electric, corded or cordless?

Riveting.

We’ve talked about lawnmowers more in the last month than I’d ever thought about lawnmowers in my entire life, so when the discussion finally ended and Callaghan suggested, “Why don’t you write a blog post about the lawnmower?” I could only hem and haw a little, like, “Um… yeeeah, maybe I could write about the lawnmower,” then conclude with a confession, “No… no. I really have nothing to say about the lawnmower.” I didn’t want to hurt his feelings or rain on his lawnmower parade, but honestly, he might as well have suggested that I write about a feline rectal thermometer. That would be another thing you’d purchase only because you absolutely need it, and you need it in order to perform a particular task, and that task is unpleasant. Yard work of any kind is my Number One most loathed house-related chore. I blame the Army for this. If I didn’t rake so many billions of leaves during peacetime in Germany, I might be more tolerant now. Anyway.

The end of the discussion was uneventful. Callaghan picked me up for lunch one day last week and announced, “Our lawnmower will arrive on the 30^th!” There was no prelude, and a prelude wasn’t necessary, since the lawnmower conversation had been an ongoing thing for weeks. He forged ahead with the technical details.

“It has a Briggs and Stratton engine,” he said with a slight shade of resignation in his voice, “But it was the best lawnmower for the best price I could find.”

I knew he’d been hoping for a good deal on a lawnmower with a Honda engine. Lengthy debates with his Dad and many hours of online research had led him to the conclusion that a Honda engine was the way to go, and this was the part that turned the whole lawnmower thing into a valuable learning experience for me. The world of Honda had suddenly expanded to the realm of lawnmowers. Callaghan’s Dad proclaimed that the Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engines are the absolute worst, and he cautioned him against buying one.

But Callaghan arrived at his educated decision to get a lawnmower that happened to be powered by Briggs and Stratton, and then he ordered it and eagerly tracked the progress of the lawnmower’s shipping progress. On Friday, he reported that the lawnmower had arrived.

“It’s here! We got it!” Unmitigated glee. I was happy for him.

“You mean it’s here at the house?”

“No, it’s here in Phoenix. But it says that they won’t deliver it until Monday. I’m calling them to ask if we can pick it up.”

On the phone, he learned that the lawnmower was stashed somewhere in the back of a semi, so it would be impossible to get it before Monday. We ended up cancelling the yard sale we’d been planning for Sunday. The front lawn was a jungle and not at all fit for a yard sale. Plus, an aggressive storm system was moving in quickly, and we didn’t know how long that would last. (It turned out to be a good thing that we cancelled, too, because the sprinklers came on automatically at 8:00am on Sunday morning. That would have been an unfortunate occurrence during a yard sale, slap-stick comic relief notwithstanding. We’re still figuring out the sprinkler system.)

Finally, Monday arrived. “Today, we’re getting our lawnmower!” Callaghan sang as we got ready for breakfast. This was yesterday. And indeed, the lawnmower made it to our doorstep in the middle of the afternoon. It was like UPS had delivered the Holy Grail.

Callaghan texted me:

A little while later, he messaged me a picture:

By the way, could someone explain why lawnmowers are often red? No, on second thought, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.

“You should totally write a blog post about this lawnmower,” Callaghan said, later, for the nth time.

“No,” I said, also for the nth time.

“Genesis thought it was a worthy subject!”

It took me a second.

“Genesis? As in, Phil Collins?” I thought he was joking.

“YES! He says, ‘Me, I’m a lawnmower.’”

“No way! Hahaha!!”

But he seemed to be serious. Later, my curiosity drove me into the bowels of the interwebs, where some things should stay deeply, deeply buried, like these lyrics from the old Genesis song “I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)” (first of all, WTF @ that title?!):

When the sun beats down and I lie on the bench,

I can always hear them talk.

Me, I’m just a lawnmower – you can tell me by the way I walk.

I am so not making this up:

I just can’t… I’m sorry, Genesis lawnmower song fans. I just don’t think this lawnmower thing works. And I apologize to the rest of you, too. What has been seen cannot be unseen, I know.

You know what does work perfectly, though? Take the Judas Priest song “Breaking the Law” and replace the lyrics “breaking the law” with “mowing the lawn.” There are some parodies already floating around out there – more than one person thought of it before I did – but seriously, it’s not even necessary to re-write the whole song! You can just replace those three little words and leave the rest of the song exactly the same. It’s brilliant:

There I was completely wasting, out of work and down

All inside it’s so frustrating as I drift from town to town

Feel as though nobody cares if I live or die

So I might as well begin to put some action in my life

Mowing the lawn, mowing the lawn!

So much for the golden future, I can’t even start

I’ve had every promise broken, there’s anger in my heart

You don’t know what it’s like, you don’t have a clue

If you did you’d find yourselves doing the same thing too

Mowing the lawn, mowing the lawn!

You don’t know what it’s like

Mowing the lawn, mowing the lawn

If you’re not familiar with this song, you can listen to it here:

Can’t you just hear him chanting, mowing the lawn, mowing the lawn?

Anyway, I should totally play this for Callaghan while he’s out mowing the lawn for the first time. We’re both Judas Priest/Rob Halford fans, so it’ll work on several levels. For now, though, I’m lawnmowered out.

“You Can’t Kill Rock and Roll”

July 31, 2013July 31, 2013That Asian-Looking Chick 2 Comments

On Saturday night, we went to see Black Sabbath, as in, the British hard rock band that was formed in 1968, the year I was born. As in, yeah, these guys are a bit older now, so can you believe that I actually got to see them perform?

Last month, they released 13, their first studio album in 33 years, and the album took off. After its first week, it sold 155,000 copies and inexplicably ripped its way around the Billboard obstacle course, spiraling up to hit Number One on the charts in the UK, USA and seven other countries. With this accomplishment, Sabbath secured the Number One spot for the first time in history and escorted hard rock/metal done the old-fashioned way back onto the scene. At the concert, we saw many people our age and older, but we picked out all age groups in the massive crowd. The teenagers in the seats in front of us were probably no older than fifteen.

I was beside myself with excitement over this show. It really meant a lot to me.

I’m passionate about many different types of music, including classical, EBM/industrial, (some) rap and (some) country and a smattering of other genres, but since I’m talking about Black Sabbath here, I present the following brief chronology of my history just as a hard rock/metal fan:

(First, let me just say that it’s my parents who rock. They survived the years I skulked around in a Black Sabbath t-shirt and chains while they observed other people’s daughters looking cute and preppy in pink Izod shirts [and who went off to college immediately after high school. I was the only daughter they knew who joined the Army and went to war and did the whole college/grad school thing later. But that’s another story]).

–Sixth grade: I bought Back in Black, AC/DC’s new album. I was 12, and Back in Black was the first album I ever purchased myself, which established hard rock as my first love of all the genres of music. I was taking piano lessons, so I was listening to Chopin waltzes, too, among other things, but I didn’t blast Chopin waltzes. I blasted AC/DC, loudly and frequently. My parents started to wonder what was happening.

–Grades seven and eight: my friends and I fixated on Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Oz and Diary of a Madman. We shed real tears the tragic day Randy Rhodes, Ozzy’s phenomenal guitarist, died in a plane crash. The gloom that blanketed the world of music that day fell heavily upon the halls of Steinbeck Junior High in San Jose, California. Rhodes was a legend, but we felt like we’d lost our brother. I don’t know. We were 13 years old. We were like, “Randy Rhodes is dead? WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO NOW?” It was inconceivable.

–Grades nine-twelve: High school. I listened to ALL the metal out there – and it was a lot, remember… this was the 80’s hair-band era – but AC/DC, Judas Priest, Def Leppard, Van Halen, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath and Ozzy were my favorites in the genre. Also, I spent many a Saturday afternoon listening to Iron Maiden with the guy who worked the bar at Shakey’s Pizza. (David. Funny that I still remember his name!) It was cute. Though we really liked each other, nothing “happened” when we were hanging out – he was a lot older than me – but he got me hooked on Maiden with Killers, and that was it. To this day, Killers is still my favorite Iron Maiden album, and Maiden is still one of my favorite metal bands.

–During and after the Army, Queensrÿche, D.A.D., Faith No More, Vixen, Warlock, Savatage, Megadeath, Slayer, Anthrax and Metallica were some of the bands that joined the crew in my metal music collection. I also really enjoyed guitarist Joe Satriani, and my love for Alice Cooper’s Trash album bordered on obsession.

–Flash forward to 2003, when I discovered Disturbed’s The Sickness while training in Muay Thai at an MMA gym in Arizona. My trainer kept it cranked, and I loved it so much that I had to own it. I bought it and wore it out in my little truck. The significance of this is that The Sickness was the last metal album that I actually purchased until Sabbath released 13 last month. (This is not to say that there weren’t other bands in the interim, because there were. I just didn’t go out and buy any metal CDs between Disturbed in 2003 and Black Sabbath last month.)

What can I say about Saturday’s show?

It was definitely An Experience. The guys did a fantastic job overall. We had a solid good time, and I will never forget it.

It was an incredible feeling just to be there.

Waiting for the show to start. We got there early.

What I really took away from the show was a reinforced crush (maybe not a “crush” so much as some sort of hero-worship thing) on lead guitarist Tony Iommi, who is a God.

Iommi lost two of his fingertips in a factory accident when he was a teenager, but that didn’t stop him from doing what he knew he was born to do. He fashioned some “thimble-like devices” out of a “squeezy bottle” and stuck them on the ends of his amputated digits to extend them, then went on to play guitar for Jethro Tull before co-founding Black Sabbath with Ozzy, Geezer and Bill. They were a bluesy kind of hard rock band at first. From there, they evolved into their signature sound and ultimately grandfathered heavy metal and all of its derivatives. Yes… one of history’s greatest hard rock lead guitar legends has amputated fingertips.

Tony Iommi, lead guitarist and co-founder of Black Sabbath

Quoting from wiki: “Iommi is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential rock guitarists of all time. A prolific riff-maker, he was ranked number 25 in Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of the ‘100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time’.”

Fake fingertips, okay? And I mean, not costly, sophisticated works of custom-made, medically engineereed craftsmanship, either. We’re talking homemade fake fingertips that he stores in what appears to be an old Altoids tin:

The man is tireless, in possession of a relentless drive, an admirable work ethic. He’s constantly busy. The solo album he released in 2000, called, simply, Iommi, is a veritable piece of musical collaborative genius and one of my all-time favorite metal CDs. (I introduced it to Callaghan, and it’s now one of his favorites, too.)

Yet young at 64, Iommi’s now working to beat down lymphoma. Blood cancer. Where was he on Saturday night? Here in Austin, on stage, rocking his ass off. His performance was spectacular. I sat back in my seat and closed my eyes, listening to his solos in the dark with people around us screaming, and thought, Wow. That’s Tony Iommi on that stage down there!! I never thought I’d get to hear him play live.

You know, Ronnie James Dio, who took over Sabbath’s lead vox after Ozzy’s departure in 1979, died of cancer in 2010. (Why yes, we did name our kitty Ronnie James after him!)

Ronnie James with my headphones on the left. Ronnie James Dio with his mic on the right. NOT UNLIKE.

“It’s only now, since his passing, that people are coming out saying how great he was,” Iommi says of Dio in a “good-bye message” he videotaped in 2011.

(video cuts off at 1:48)

Iommi received his own cancer diagnosis within a year of this interview, in early 2012.

News for you, Iommi: YOU are great. YOU ARE THE MAN. You’re looking good and performing like it’s no one’s business, and thank you so much. Thank you for inspiring us with your passion and dedication! Here’s to many more years of showing them all how it’s done!!

Here’s my favorite Black Sabbath song, “Megalomania” (Sabotage, 1975):