All Fall Down

So various members of the NCC Staff have been posting blogs about moments in life when they've fallen. Why, because when people fall down, it's funny.

And of course I decided I should join them. I mean, I fall all the time. I'm a tripping machine. It's like the sidewalk just grows to inches in my path to try and make sure that I find myself stumbling in public like an idiot. Just on Monday, my brother and me were walking when the sidealk attacked me.

Will Johnston Talks about falling off bikes and the dumb things done when a kid. I can relate. Between snowboarding (standing up on sleds, building ice ramps down narrow paths) and skateboarding I've experienced a ton of falling moments (and many bleeding moments) because of general being a boy and being dumb.

So what's a good falling story? I feel like ice has to be involved because ice is the catalyst for the best moments of falling. I know this year it took me a good 10 minutes to try and walk up hill on ice to get into work before I decided I would around to where the ice was not.

But this story does not involve ice. It involves coffee. Hot, very hot coffee. If you are unaware I drink a lot of coffee. I used to drink too much coffee. For all 8 hours of the work day I would consume coffee at the rate of about a cup an hour. Sometimes laziness was involved and I wouldn't make a pot of coffee, I'd just go over to Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks, or the little bakery below our studio for a cup.

One morning before going into the office I went over to Dunkin Donuts for a bagel and coffee. Walked back over to our building and began the climb up the stairs to our office. Stairs are hard at 6:30 in the morning and I had yet to get that coffee into my tired body. I missed a step and fell backwards. The coffee cup was squeezed just a little too tightly and the top pop off sending my yummy Dunkin Donuts coffee into the air and all over me. A great way to start your morning. Not sure I laughed at myself that time...

Of course I had tripped on those stairs while carrying coffee many MANY times. Oh my.

Thanks to Will, Jennilee, Heather Zempel, and Maegan Stout for the inspiration.

Here is Grits with They All Fall Down.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

I'm going to talk about baseball. Is that ok?

So I went to see my Atlanta Braves play the Washington Nationals yesterday and it was awesome. The Braves murder the Nats 11-2. Great game for me as a Braves fan. But even had the Braves lost, it would have been awesome. Because I was at a baseball game.

I tweeted yesterday that the combo of beer and hotdogs was the smell of baseball. It's funny but not untrue. Is there anything better then a hotdog at a baseball game? They smell and taste so much better then any hotdog I make at home. It's a great childhood memory, eating hotdogs at baseball games. Or as my dad would call them, Cal Dogs.

I guess I should explain that reference. The price of hotdogs being $4.50 or whatever they cost back when I was 7 made my father frustrated. Expensive ballpark food. Since the food went towards paying the players my dad would eat his hotdog for Cal Ripken and called it a Cal dog.

I didn't get a hotdog yesterday. I was hungry and didn't feel like wandering the ballpark or standing in a long line so I hot an Italian Sausage.

I love baseball. Not as much as hockey but probably more then football. I played baseball as a kid, although not for very long. I was a pretty awful baseball player. My dreams of playing left field in the MLB were crushed pretty early on. I tried. I played spring baseball, which was fun. I had one good hit that would have been a home run but I was so shocked that I had hit the ball that hard and far that I stood for too long watching the ball instead of running the bases. I tried out for a summer travel all-star type league but didn't make the cut. I played fall ball but it got too cold and when I got sick I quit.

I'm a much better fielder in my older age but I still can't hit. I played softball for two years and was a solid fielder but my batting is just awful. A painful reminder that I suck at baseball.

I collected baseball cards as a kid. I still have most of them. It's not a huge collection (unless my grandparents still have the trunk of cards I was given). Kids don't collect ball cards anymore do they? Their used to be specialty shops for kids like me. I'm pretty sure those don't exist either.

Another funny side story. I used to throw the baseball with my grandma when I was little. She used to tell me that she taught Cal Ripken how to pitch. I knew it was ridiculous back then, because Cal was obviously not a pitcher.

I loved going to games. Going with my dad to Camden Yards to see the Baltimore Orioles play. Going to Frederick to see their minor league team the Keys play (as it was said to me yesterday, before we knew better).

The question I get most asked is how I, being from Maryland, became a Braves fan. The story is simple. My dad didn't like the owner of the Baltimore Orioles. When Peter Angelos fired Johnny Oates after the 1994 season my dad wasn't happy and disowned the O's. SO at the age of 10 I also decided to jump ship.

The Braves' games used to be on TBS everyday. I watched their opening day game in 1995 and was a fan from that day on. It didn't hurt that the team won the World Series that year (it must have been because I was now a fan). A pretty simple story. When the Nationals came to DC in 2005 I had already had 10 years of being a Braves fan under my belt and wasn't going to jump ship for the team in DC.

And thus my completely random baseball blog.

Supersize Me

This post has nothing to with McDonalds or being fat.

I'm talking about the soon to be new Starbucks Trenta. I for one am excited about this. Why am excited about this much coffee? Because it's for the iced drinks and the iced drinks are half ice anyway.

I love the iced chai at Starbucks. It's amazing. Seriosuly, if you haven't had one go get one when it warms up. Killer stuff. But my beef is the ice to drink ratio sucks. I always get a Venti because any other size is not worth it. There's just too much damn ice in the drink.

Now of course I will be paying more for a drink that again will probably be half ice but there will be more chai and that's awesome. And that is why the Trenta is exciting to me.

Side note:

If anyone can drink 2 Trenta Frappucinos in a half hour without vomitting, I will give them $50. Let's set this up!

Super Sunday

So the Super Bowl has come and gone. Congrats to the Packers on making sure no one had to listen to their Steeler friends talk about how their team is the greatest. You made the world a better place.

The most important sporting event on Super Sunday was of course the Washington Capitals shutting out the Pittsburgh Penguins (rough day Steel Town). I missed the first period listened to the second on the radio, and got to watch the third and celebrate another Caps win.

My Super Bowl review is simple.

The national anthem was sad. Christina botched the lyrics and sounded like she's been smoking a pack a day.

The game was actually alright but I couldn't really get into it. I was excited when the Packers scored and indifferent to any success the Steelers had.

The commercials were mostly awful. Ok, not awful but boring. The VW Darth Vader kid commercial was funny but everything else was pretty forgetable.

The halftime show was bad for humankind. In 15 minutes the Black Eyed Peas made everyone person in America hate them. Dear NFl, If you have season next year, Mettalica is your halftime show.

I persoanlly let my inner fat kid go and ate a lot of food, most of which isn't good for me but I love pizza, nachos, and ice cream.

I think that's it.

Food Review - Pizza Hut's Big Dipper

I'm going to throw some food knowledge at you. Although I am skinny and most people thing I could stand to eat more, I do eat a lot. I love food. So why not put my food eating to use and help some people avoid making mistakes.

So Pizza Hut is offering the Big Dipper, 24 dipping slices of pizza. It's huge. You party all night with one...

Wrong! Let's start with the obvious, it's not pizza. It's really a cheese breadstick with pepperoni. The sauce is why they're dippers and not pizza. So fail right from the start. I take a huge bite and am instantly mad that this "pizza" has no sauce.

So let's get to sauce. It's pretty good. I mean, the marinara sauce at Pizza Hut is probably the best item they offer. So it's good. But the breadstick to sauce ratio is hard to get right. I either always had too much or too little. While I like the sauce, my attempts to have the big dipper taste like pizza was all in vain.

While at least there was a lot right? Yeah....No. Split between 4 of us, we each had 6 slices and each was hungry for more when we were done. The big dipper didn't offer the all night party lasting pizza as they promise on the commercial.

My advice, don't order this crap.

The Snow Day That Wasn't

So we got a foot of snow in the DMV. It was really a short lived snow storm but thurnder dropping nearly 4 inches an hour makes a nice impression.

So a foot of snow. All schools are closed and most everyone is taking it easy today. It's a good fire, movie, and bottle of wine type of day. I've been waiting for a snow day pretty much all winter. It's been a little disappointing to this point. But we got a foot of snow. Awesome!

Well... Not awesome. I'm at work. The price of being a "full-time musician" is that I had to move back in with my parents. And although I'm working part time right now, I still live with the family.

So my brothers went out last night around 9 when the snow was slowing down and shoveled the driveway and around the cars. Thanks bros...

Also my dad called a guy to come and plow the rest of our driveway (it's half a mile long) and he showed up at 10:30 last night. So the driveway was cleared. I let my car heat up for 20 minutes and pushed the snow off my car and it was off to work for me.

Lame.

At least the snow is pretty to look at.

The Science of Sleep

As I sit here and blankly stare at my computer screen in my current zombie like state, I think to myself, “What did I do to deserve this?”

Ok not really. But I’m freaking tired. I haven’t had a night of enough hours of sleep since… oh let’s say December 1st. To give you an idea on how much sleep I need, if I could stay in bed and just sleep for an entire week, I might be close to making up the hours I’ve missed.

And all this does is led me to question how I ever was able to function on 2-4 hours of sleep every day. I used to go to bed at 12:30-1:00 every night and wake up at 5:30 and, while tired, painfully so on some days, I could function close to normal. Yeah, my eye twitched and I drank coffee like it was water, but I could sit at my desk, put my headphones on and work (mostly) hard.

But I spent 10 months in 2010 as a full time musician (aka jobless). And while I didn’t always get the 8 hours of sleep my body needs (Alarm was set for 8 so I could wake up and run) I could afford myself time to rest, or get extra sleep when I was lacking. If I woke up early on Sunday for church, I good just stay in bed an extra hour or 2 on Monday. And who doesn’t need more sleep on a Monday?

I also was able to go back to sleep, I technique that had escaped me sometime during my high school years. I used to have issues getting to and getting back to sleep. If I got a late night phone call that woke me up, I wasn’t going back to bed. If there was some loud thunder, I wasn’t going back to bed. Awful, I know. But over those 10 months this wasn’t the case. I had to let the cat out of my room every morning to use the litter box and eat but I could walk to the door, open it up and then go right back to bed. Now that I’m working though, I let the cat out, I’m up too.

And I know you’re asking, Bryan why don’t you just leave your door cracked so that cat can come and go as she pleases? It’s a simple answer, when the sun comes up in the morning, even that small crack in the door will let in enough sun light to disturb my sleep. It sounds dumb, and it probably is, but hey, when you have sleeping issues like I do you take care to try and provide the best available sleep possible. And to those who wonder why I just don’t wait to let the cat out until I get up at 7:15, she’s loud and her cries to leave the room have already woken me up.

This morning I even got up at 6:30 of my own accord, without her prompting, and let her out. I hate that my body has learned when I need to be up.

So why am I so tired now? Is it because I’m older and my body is demanding more sleep? Is it because my current job isn’t stimulating enough and I’m just bored? Have I gotten too used to the cushy musicians lifestyle? Whatever the reason, I’m tired of being a zombie and I’d like to spend more time in bed.