Lydia Archives - Page 29 of 51 - Ramblin' with Roger

The Lydster, Part 140: PTX

The Daughter uses The Wife’s iPad more than The Wife does. Among other things, she watches music videos. Sometimes, while riding the stationary bike, she listens to her second favorite group (after the Beatles, of course.)

That would be Pentatonix, an a cappella quintet: Scott Hoying, Mitch Grassi, Kirstie Maldonado, Kevin Olusola, and Avi Kaplan. From the website:

Since bursting onto the scene in 2011, Grammy Award-winners and platinum selling recording artists, Pentatonix, has sold more than 2 million albums in the U.S. alone and amassed over 905 million views on their YouTube channel with more than 7.8 million subscribers. Their latest holiday album – That’s Christmas To Me – sold more than 1.1 million copies in the U. S., becoming one of only four acts to release a platinum album in 2014.

The Daughter came up with her Top 10 favorite songs.

10. White Winter Hymnal. OK, I don’t “get” the song from their 2014 Christmas album, originally recorded by Fleet Foxes on their 2008 debut album.

9. I Need Your Love. I like this more than the Calvin Harris feat. Ellie Goulding original.

8. Daft Punk. I find the blue eyes…distracting, and not in a good way. This is a medley of Daft Punk songs, including Get Lucky. In February 2015, the group received their first GRAMMY® Award for Best Arrangement, Instrumental and A Cappella for the medley.

7. Radioactive, featuring Lindsey Stirling. A cover of a 2012 Imagine Dragons song.

6. Rather Be. Originally done by Clean Bandit, featuring Jess Glynne. I’ll admit that I had never heard either version before.

5. Can’t Hold Us. I wonder if the Daughter’s seen the Macklemore & Ryan Lewis video featuring Ray Dalton from 2013.

4. Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Now we’re into very familiar source material: Tchaikovsky. Let’s watch Nina Kaptsova dance to it.

3. Love Again. Is this an original? If not, I have no idea of the source material.

2. The Evolution Of Music. This is the first recording of theirs I heard, a medley of songs MOSTLY from the 20th and 21st century. I like how it changes from black & white to color in the 1960s. Here it is again, with the “thank you” tag. Here’s the list of songs covered.

My twin nieces and The Daughter performed this at the Olin family reunion in July. Let’s watch Minnie the Moocher by Cab Calloway.

1. Wizard Of Ahhhs, starring Todrick Hall. A Wizard of OZ motif, featuring a medley of these songs. I had no idea who Hall was – here’s his Evolution of Disney.

I need to listen to Somewhere Over The Rainbow, by Judy Garland and by Israel “IZ” Kamakawiwoʻole, plus the IZ medley of Rainbow and What a Wonderful World.

Bathroom archeology

If that design were in the whole room, it would have been like showering in an aquarium.

When we first bought into our house in 2000, one of the things The Wife and I knew we needed to get fixed, sooner rather than later was the bathroom. It was so bad, I actually entered some contest called “America’s ugliest bathroom.” Alas, we did not win. But it was UGLY, SO ugly… I must have those pictures somewhere.

Unfortunately, other home improvements, including, but not limited to, a new kitchen floor, a new roof built by a Trusted and Recommended Roofing Repair Company near me, and having someone dig a big hole in our front lawn to stop sewage from coming to our basement, and replacing our deteriorating above ground pool patio with grass all took precedence. In the summer of 2014, we contracted work to begin on our bathroom starting with a glass shower enclosure.

These pictures do not do their ugliness justice. The pink toilet, pink sink, terrible wallpaper. Worse, a shower where the tile was falling down. Well, the shower was replaced, and the bathroom expanded. The new vanity was purchased in August 2014. But then, for reasons I cannot explain, the work stopped. The vanity was moved from the living room to the room adjacent to the bathroom just before Thanksgiving. In July 2015, after looking at the panel above for nearly 11 months, work commenced again.

The white, pink and light blue wallpaper was taken off, and somewhere below was this:

If that design were in the whole room, it would have been like showering in an aquarium. Then, the very next level down, we discovered this:

It made us laugh heartily.

The house is around 100 years old, so it’s quite believable that someone would have used this design.

Sorry that the pics are so dark. they were taken on the Wife’s iPad, before the dim lighting of the bathroom was enhanced.

EDIT: My friend Arthur lightened the top pic and especially the lower three. GRACIAS!

The Lydster, Part 139: Random music

She sees a title she recognizes, because Pentatonix had subsequently performed it.

The Daughter likes to perform, on her own terms.

Over the summer, she arranged an impromptu dance performance, which is not all that unusual, having taken ballet in the past. What was noteworthy was that she danced to Sail On by the Commodores [LISTEN]. She just took a random compact disc from my CD holder, a greatest hits album, and decided on that. She was unfamiliar with the song, and the group. Yet it was a nice routine.

A couple of weeks later, she decided that she and her mother ought to do a fashion show of some of the clothes they bought over a weekend in anticipation of going back to school. Again, she picks a random CD, Hand on the Torch by US3, also a group unknown to her. She sees a title she recognizes, because Pentatonix had subsequently performed it, and she uses that for the show. The song was I Got It Goin’ On [LISTEN]. It fit with the fashion model motif, and at a little more than five minutes, it was just the right length.

It’d be one thing if she’d perused a list of MP3 tracks and glommed onto these titles, but this was some sort of inspired musical alchemy where she takes a random disc, from over a thousand of them, and makes something of it.

(Image from here.)

The Lydster, Part 138: Dining in public with an infant

I have an odd fascination with that story about the mom whose encounter with an angry Maine diner owner went viral.

Without rehashing the whole thing, I was taken by this sentence in the mom’s version: “When the food came, my daughter was still fussing.” After extensive observation, I’ve discovered that parents have very different criteria for what constitutes “fussing,” and moreover, whether to stay or go.

I’ve decided that there are two types of parents of children `who are under two years old: those who don’t think other people would mind a little bit of adorable noise because ADORABLE, and those who are mortified by their child’s disruption. Maybe it’s because we became parents relatively late, but the Wife, and especially I, are most assuredly in the latter category.

The first time The Wife and I decided to go out to dinner after the Daughter was born was when she was six months old, give or take a couple weeks. She had been nursed before we went to a nice Vietnamese restaurant in Albany. She seemed fine in one of those car seat carriers.

Very soon after we were seated, the Daughter began wailing. Maybe it sounded like wailing to us because the stone floor was very echoey, but as it didn’t seem to stop, even as we took turns holding her. We left, leaving an enormous tip for a couple cups of tea.

Seems we went somewhere else to eat – McDonald’s? – and she was cheerful.

I told The Daughter this story about herself fairly recently. She felt badly about it, which was NOT the intent.

We avoided taking a transcontinental trip to Washington state when she was two, because she didn’t travel always well in the car, where we could control the environment. Surely, I didn’t want us to be those parents all the passengers glowered at for hours.

The Lydster, Part 137: The GOP debates

Larry Wilmore, on Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show, asked if he had to explain to Trump Prejudice 101.

"I really don't know if Obama was born in the US" — “I really don’t know if Obama was born in the US”

The morning after the list of candidates who would appear on the Republic Presidential primetime debate on August 6, the Daughter wanted to stop the news broadcast so she could get the names.

I told her she had to get ready for camp, and that I would print out the roster of 10 who made the main stage (Trump, Bush, Walker, Huckabee, Carson, Cruz, Rubio, Paul, Christie, Kasich) and the seven who were relegated to an earlier event (Perry, Santorum, Jindal, Fiorina, Graham, Pataki, Gilmore).

Of course, she didn’t actually WATCH the debates – heck, neither did I – because sanity. Still, of the 17 candidates running, she can name more than half of them, which is more than most people. She’s particularly irritated by three:

3) Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana for his debacle of an announcement for President. (No, this is NOT faked.) “He can’t even win his own household!”

2) Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, who is a bully, and who she believes is more culpable for Bridgegate than he’s acknowledged.

1) Donald Trump, real estate guy, NOT because he said that President Obama was the worst President in history, but because Trump suggested that, as a result, there wouldn’t be another black president for generations.

Larry Wilmore, on Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show, asked if he had to explain to Trump Prejudice 101. Now, The Daughter doesn’t actually watch The Nightly Show, which is on at 11:30 p.m., but she saw the clip on CBS News This Morning.

Still, she has the makings of a political junkie.