Joshua Zamrycki’s Weblog

The good new is that Jan will not be going to jail.

Jan received a phone call from our doorman this morning requesting her presence down in the lobby where a small mob had apparently gathered. When she got there, she was met by a sea of disapproving eyes and a dirty crunchy mess on the sidewalk outside. We live on the fifth floor. That is a very long fall for a depressed plant pot looking to end it all.

Luckily, the woman passing beneath our balcony when the aforementioned pot met its untimely death was not injured in the incident. That did not stop an unknown concerned citizen from calling the police to report my sweet wife.

The police soon arrived and the crowd logically grew larger. All the while, Jan was turning redder and redder and poor little barefoot Emily filled her time by scowling at the bystanders and waving at the sidewalk saying, “Bye bye, flower!”.

The law that states that all plant pots must be kept on the inside of the balcony railing is apparently of the “unwritten” variety so Jan got off with nothing more than a slap on the wrist and an elevated public profile in our neighborhood. A quick glance up and down the street revealed that few, if any, people abide by this unwritten rule. I don’t think the woman who was almost done in by our daffodils took any solace in this interesting statistic.

Jan has locked herself in house, drawn all the curtains, and will be wearing sunglasses for the rest of the day.

Sorry, but I had these photos and video just burning a hole in my pocket so I figured I’d unload them on you. What’s the point of having them if I’m not gonna share, right?

And finally, here is a video where Emily (19 months) reads us a story about Winnie the Pooh and the moon and then disappears into a cave. Watch out for the point at 1:26!

Happy 468 month birthday, Jan.

Here are just a few of the things that our little girl has accomplished this past year:

• Returned to the stage to regain her title as Best Darn Penguin In A Children’s Theatre Production.
• Successfully hid any physical evidence of ever having given birth. That’s right, Jan is looking mighty fine! (contrary to what any photo immediately above this bulleted list may lead you to believe)
• Became a full-time Linux user – and grew a little closer to her husband in the process.
• Learned all sorts of new words and refused to stop jumping off the couch. No wait, that was my other little girl. Or was it…
• With a caring hand and an attentive eye, helped to raise one of the most wonderful kids this backwater Spanish village has ever seen – and, in the process, make her husband one of the happiest men alive.

Thank you, Jan. Now go out and get pissed.

I like music.

I like listening to my favorite music, sharing my music with others, and discovering new music.

Remember mixtapes? How many do you thikn you made over the years? I’m sure a few people made “mix 8-tracks” and I know my dad made a few “mix reel-to-reel” projects, but cassette tape mixes were a cultural phenomenon that forever changed the way we interact with music. The world has since moved on to CDs and MP3s, but the mixtape – and the artistry involved in the creation of one of these works of art – will always have a special place in my heart. Nick Hornby’s geeky and emotional obsession with the “rules” for creating a quality mixtape ring very true for me:

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with “Got to Get You Off My Mind”, but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and…oh, there are loads of rules.

I remember working for hours – sometimes days – making mixes for girlfriends in high school and college. There were so many subtleties involved in making the perfect mixtape and I enjoyed paying attention to every single one of them. I think the Aesthetics section of the Wikipedia entry on mixtapes touches on anything I could possible mention here (check it out!). It was hard work, always remaining both a science and an art, but the finished product was something to be proud of. And the creation process probably offered some sneaky self-reflection time, too.

Nowadays, music is too easy to come by. I can download every single major album that was released last year in just a few hours. The discovery of new music has lost some of its magic for me. People may create MP3 playlists for jogging or driving but I don’t see too many people putting the thought or love into these that we once did with mixtapes. It’s too easy. Hell, we just drag-and-drop a hundred quickly selected tracks onto our players, hit random, and go! The exception to this rule, of course, is my dad who continues to whip out a few mixes every year. I hope the digital age and newfound ease haven’t watered down the end result.

I started thinking about mixtapes again when my cousin Marli recently asked her “social network” for music compilation donations for a road trip she was planning. It made me think how I hadn’t made or received a quality mix in years (not since Jeremy’s world wide mixtape project of 2003). Whenever I listen to music nowadays I just select my entire MP3 music library and set it to random. Every once in a while I’ll make a playlist that’s filtered by genre or I’ll listen to a single album in it’s entirety, but these don’t happen all that often.

Anyone wanting to listen to music via their computer has a bevy of options from which to choose. You’ve got Last.fm, internet radio stations, Live365, Napster, SHOUTcast, or SeeqPod (just to name a few!). But they all seem to lack that personal touch. There’s nobody behind these playlists giving their content and order any serious thought. And then I discovered Muxtape.

Muxtape, the online mixtape creation service, has been streaming free, user-generated playlists to the masses since its launch in late March. The idea is simple enough: Upload 12 MP3s and share your newly mixed (or is that muxed?) playlist with pals. A similar service exists at Mixwit, but I haven’t played with that one yet.

I don’t necessarily think that Muxtape is the end-all answer to my nostalgic longings (there was no need to add up the running time of each side of the tape to minimize the empty space at the end), but I did enjoy the hour or two it took me to plan and create my mix. I played around with the idea of a “nostalgic classic rock with a message theme”, but in the end I opted for the “modern energetic indie make-you-smile infusion” theme:
joshzam.muxtape.com

1. Ani DiFranco – Little Plastic Castle
2. Cake – Sheep Go To Heaven
3. Kaiser Chiefs – Everyday I Love You Less And Less
4. Klaxons – Golden Skans
5. Hot Chip – Over And Over
6. Fatboy Slim – Wonderful Night
7. Beastie Boys – Body Movin’
8. Squirrel Nut Zippers – Ghost Of Stephen Foster
9. William Shatner – I Can’t Get Behind That
10. TMBG – Nightgown Of The Sullen Moon
11. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – Better Dean than Lead
12. LCD Soundsystem – North American Scum

I’m happy with this mix even though I recognize that it lacks soul as a result of the fact that it was made with no single person in mind. If anyone wants to play around with this site and try their hand at their own mix (when was the last time?) please leave the link to your creation in the comments. I’d love to hear what you’ve got to share!

Happy 19 month birthday, Emily.

Traveling to far off places is one of the most amazing things you can do for a toddler. Their brains explode from all of the new sights, sounds, people, and activities. They develop impressive new skills, learn a plethora of new words, and that dangerous glint in their eye becomes that much brighter. After just two weeks in the US, our little girl has changed so much that you’d swear she was a different child. Well, maybe not a completely different child. And you probably shouldn’t swear. But I digress…

Half of Emily’s 19th month was spent in sunny Florida with the express purpose of celebrating GG’s (great grandma’s) 85th birthday. In the process, we got to spend quality time with my mom (nana), my dad (grandpapa), sisters, and all the cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends who traveled from near and far for the grand occasion. Sure, they came for GG’s birthday (and maybe a little Purim action), but we couldn’t help but feel that we were stealing some of the limelight. Emily is, after all, the first and only of her generation in a large and loving family.

When asked what her favorite parts of her trip were, Emily responded:

• climbing up new furniture and jumping off
• jumping into swimming pools
• brushing the goats at the petting zoo
• rocking out on the bema at nana’s temple
• riding in cars
• seeing cats, searching for more cats, following cats, speaking to cats, and poking cats
• spending time with family, of course

And then we came home. Oh boy. As you may have gleaned from my previous two blog entries, jet lag hit us pretty hard after the return trip home. It would normally take me just two or three days to get back into the swing of things but, with someone smaller and less adaptable than myself waking up all night every night screaming her head off (no, not Jan), it took us a little longer to sort ourselves out.

And then Ms. Hyde showed up – the moody, contrary, bossy, tantrum throwing alter ego of our lovely little angel. Yes, it looks like the Terrible Two’s have come early this year. Never before had I seen our little girl hurl herself onto the floor when something didn’t go her way. I don’t like it. But we don’t let it get to us. I’m pretty good at keeping my cool and talking her through some deep breathing exercises. New mantra: this is just a phase.

It’s all about the language skills this month. I almost feel like I can have a normal conversation with Emily! It’s a very one-sided conversation, but she’s very patient and is apparently able to follow everything I say.

Emily’s vocabulary has grown exponentially this month. OK, maybe not exponentially, but definitely cubically. There has been a trade off of quantity for quality, though. Whereas Emily’s vocabulary was limited before, she was able to pronounce all of the words rather well. Almost anyone could understand her. Now, she’s got tons of new words but isn’t paying as close attention to the correct pronunciation. I mean, what the heck is a “paba”? Oh, it means “pasta”! We know exactly what she means but visitors are clueless.

Oh, and she calls her dummy a “dadoo”. That’s not even close! I refuse to add this word to her vocabulary list. It’s simply unacceptable.

But it isn’t only the fact that she has practically doubled her entire vocabulary over the course of this past month. It’s what she’s doing with those words. She’s combining them into complex thoughts. Before, Emily would say, “more” and have to point at whatever it was that she wanted more of. Or she would just say a noun and we understood that it was a request. “Orange!” Now, we’re hearing things like, “More orange!”, “Bye bye daddy!”, “Mummy belly!”, or even more impressive, “More pasta, please!” (yes, she ends most sentences with an exclamation point).

I don’t know how much longer I can realistically expect to update Emily’s lexicon in these blog entries. It’s causing too much scrolling! Maybe I’ll come up with some sort of dynamic dictionary where you only have to click on a letter of the alphabet and all of the relevant words for that letter will pop up and you can select each one to get an interactive menu of its current pronunciation status, interesting anecdotes attached to that word, and hyperlinks leading to Emily’s YouTube videos where that word is featured. Yeah, that’s the ticket!

While I’m searching through my day planner for enough free time to create this new and fanciful bit of web wonderment, here is this month’s installment of Emily’s Communication Breakdown:

And, saving the best for last, here are two lifelike videos of our favorite little redhead… in stunning 3-D Dolby Digital Surround Sound!!!

What’s that? No, it can’t be. Wait a minute. Oh boy, I think it could be… yes, I think it is… it’s cerebral coherence!

Just one week after our return from the Eastern Time Zone, we are back on track, baby!

————–

OK, I wrote those first two celebratory paragraphs at about 1am. It’s now almost 4am. I have spent the past three hours trying to get our little maladjusted monster to sleep. It could be jet lag. It could be teething. It could be nightmares. It could be the final two vaccinations Emily received yesterday. It could be anything, she won’t honestly tell us! All she does is wake up and cry and then, when one of us goes in to her room, she begs for mummy or daddy (whichever isn’t present at the moment of the request), demands more milk (even though she doesn’t really want it), and then, when she calms down, she starts singing one of her favorite songs or she points at random animals around the room to make sure we know what noises they make. Settle down, go to sleep, wait 10 minutes, and repeat.

This is far from over.