It's only occasionally that we buy bacon these days. It's expensive and we only buy uncured, nitrite/trate free, when it does find it's way into the grocery cart. This week was a bacon week and the twins discovered a true breakfast treasure...waffle, egg, cheese, and bacon sandwich! Halfway through their meal I realized I hadn't given them water yet.
Me: I almost forgot your water boys.
Evan: I almost forgot my mind.
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Friday, August 22, 2014
Return of the Jedi
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The force flows freely in the universe, and we here at Rockstardaddydaycare let it flow like the Mississippi. I was sketching out this Vader rocking the electric, before I move it to the canvas, this afternoon. Tristan sleeps in our bed still, due to his eczema related sleep issues, and he was napping there at the time. I had the monitor right next to me in case he awoke and tried to get over the guard bumpers. Suddenly he appears from around the corner, I helped him up on the couch with me, he cried for a minute and then fell right back to sleep! So I guess he's getting out of bed okay now...
The twins went to preschool this morning for the first time with underwear on. The significance of this is, for three and a half years, i've been changing 10-20 diapers a day! That's one sore fu&%ing back. It hasn't even really hit me yet, but the fact that I can stop feeling sorry for myself long enough to bang out some art, it's a sign of things to come.
I've changed in a few ways since becoming a dad but haven't had the personal energy to let those changes come out. With two out of three boys exiting diapers, not to mention Tristan is walking, not shoving everything in his mouth, and his eczema is showing signs of fading, a renewed sense of self will hopefully be seeing the light of day. Obviously most of my attention will be directed toward my family, but watch out world...this rebel has completed his Jedi training!
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Sunday, August 3, 2014
The Rebel Alliance
Time doth fly! Shakespeare probably said that...so true. A little over five years ago while finishing up my first album "Sketches of San Diego", a hodge-podge, multi genre, melting pot, mixed bag of a solo effort, I dreamed up the "Country Rockin' Rebels". It was time to pick a vector for this jack of all genres, musician. I laid the concept on Mike Head(owner/operator Cabeza Records), another jack of all things in the music trade. He was engineering, co-producing, and playing on 'Sketches' at his San Diego studio when I brought in a couple demoed out tunes I had been working on. The next thing you know we were laying down tracks for one album while finishing the mixes on another. Soon after that...well if you read the blog you know the story, I got married and started having kids by the bunches!
Mike and I continued to grow the concept of the Rebels eventually joining forces with our current line-up of fellow SD country rockers, to form one of the shit hottest bands in the county! We have been gigging like mad around lower so-cal, supporting our new single "Summer Days" for the upcoming second rebel album. In truth we are really just supporting our own music addictions! Here is a still cam video of us rocking out as the Friday house band at "Spike Africa's Seafood". Here we strip it down to four guys and use a rotating line-up where as most shows you can catch us six deep with fiddles and pedal steel guitars! Either way we are rocking this city to it's foundations. All of us rebs live busy lives but stay dedicated to the cause of making you move your feet and doing that hip shake thang! Check us out at www.countryrockinrebels.com for music, merch, and show dates. And above all things...keep it rebel!
Mike and I continued to grow the concept of the Rebels eventually joining forces with our current line-up of fellow SD country rockers, to form one of the shit hottest bands in the county! We have been gigging like mad around lower so-cal, supporting our new single "Summer Days" for the upcoming second rebel album. In truth we are really just supporting our own music addictions! Here is a still cam video of us rocking out as the Friday house band at "Spike Africa's Seafood". Here we strip it down to four guys and use a rotating line-up where as most shows you can catch us six deep with fiddles and pedal steel guitars! Either way we are rocking this city to it's foundations. All of us rebs live busy lives but stay dedicated to the cause of making you move your feet and doing that hip shake thang! Check us out at www.countryrockinrebels.com for music, merch, and show dates. And above all things...keep it rebel!
Friday, August 1, 2014
The Human Drought and the New Western Rainmakers...Part 2.
Part 2. The Great Drain.
The Colorado River flows, at least it used too, about fourteen hundred miles long, from way up in the rockies all the way down to the Gulf of California. On it's way down to the gulf it carves it's path through arid desert sand and stone until finally reaching sea level. If you have ever been to the Grand Canyon maybe you can relate when I say I can close my eyes and envision a million years ago when this mighty river was still shaping the land. In just under one hundred years humanity has harnessed this wild bronco of rushing water, and diverted it's flow to make life possible throughout the Southwest. It's a beautiful thing to see how we can all thrive from this one water source without living near it. San Diego alone and it's one million plus population gets seventy percent of its water from the Colorado. Then there's Las Vegas, Phoenix, etc. all in the millions of h2o reliant people, all sticking our straws into the same cup. I repeat this is a beautiful thing as long as we can live in a state of balance with the give and take process of messing with nature. Unfortunately the last decade has revealed that not only are we completely out of balance with nature, but we also have slipped quite a ways into the danger zone where we aren't sure if we have taken it too far.
I won't post anymore pictures, there are so many and so easy to find online, i'll leave that to you if so desire, but the damage that's been done is plain to see. Lake Mead the nations largest reservoir, located on the southern Nevada and Arizona border, created after the great depression has a now famous white ring all along it's giant stone container, giving us a visual measuring stick of just how desperate the situation has become. It's half empty! It's at it's lowest level since it was created. Throughout California there are twelve major reservoirs. If you add up their average total capacity and figure the difference for what they operate at today, the number winds up at less than forty percent! Folsom is one of them, if you saw the time lapse photo I inserted into the previous post of Folsom lake, the visuals are shocking, the numbers are heart sinking. Recently however we've just learned that the situation is a whole bunch worse than we could've ever imagined.
A study published a few weeks ago by UC Irvine scientists has dropped the equivalent of a bomb on the community of concerned citizens, scientists, lawmakers, etc. It's the first of its kind, an analysis of data collected from the Grace satellite mission. Since 2004 it's been measuring the land mass via gravitational pull, above and below the ground of certain regions. Scientists were able to confirm the nightmare scenario that the Colorado Basin under ground water supply has disappeared at a rate nearly four times that of the surface water! They estimate that of the fifty-three million acre feet of water that has been sapped during this drought, forty million of it came from underground.
What does this mean? Well imagine for a moment that you just inherited a couple million dollars from a newly deceased, distant relative. Congratulations! You are now rich and it couldn't have come at a better time because recently life has been tough. You have been without a job for awhile and this cash means a lot. The weird thing though is that your uncle put some conditions on this money. You don't get to know how much there is, you just know it's a lot. You can't go to the bank yourself to withdraw the money, it has to be delivered by a bank rep in suitcases whenever you call them up. It seems a bit strange but who cares, once it's delivered it's good to go! Immediately you start paying people back that you owed, and of course others start calling you up now for a loan. You treat yourself nice and spread it around. At first you count the money in the suitcases but there is so much of it that over time you stop. Then one day while you're sitting at your giant swimming pool sipping a margarita, the delivery guy shows up with a message that over the years you have spent so much that soon the account will be empty. Not only that but because it's so low you aren't earning enough interest to replenish the supply at the rate you spend, and maybe worst of all the government has been slowly taking its cut which is making the balance disappear so fast that a life change may not reverse the flow of your fortune. Of course you panic, you haven't worked in so long that your job prospects are almost nothing and you can't go back to borrowing because like the blues man sings, "No one knows you when you're down and out."
If you haven't sniffed out the comparison, the rich uncle is nature, the money is water, the bank account is our under ground supply, the government is...well the government, and the delivery guy is the water companies who, despite their great efforts, are just the messengers who are basically not sure how much water is left either. Actually the government isn't just the government though, I was just trying to stay humorous. They represent the exponential decrease of our water supply as we continue along our path. Let me explain.
If we take the water off the surface and from below the ground we take away nature's ability to replenish it through the process of evaporation, transpiration, precipitation...all across the nation, etc. From there it takes care of itself. If the plants can't drink they can't give off moisture, which won't create rain clouds. The snow pack in the Sierras this year was about twenty percent of what it normally is, clearly demonstrating that this ancient process has been heavily compromised. I want to say again that I don't work for Greenpeace and I'm not trying to get preachy. I don't know where you stand on global warming and I don't care. Our existence isn't a millionth of a fraction of the Earth's existence so it has been hard for me to believe that in a few blinks we have burned enough fuel to dirty up the fish bowl that fast. If we keep it up, sure we will fuck it all up, but in light of this most recent historic finding by the good folks at UC Irvine my mind has arrived at some scary thoughts. Allow me.
For decades the cities throughout the southwest have exploded in population, throwing the balance of supply and demand for water completely out of whack. I believe this drought has less to do with us living in an unfortunate dry spell or fossil fuel driven global warming. Are they contributing? Of course they are. One would be a fool to not consider all factors. We are in fact about 40,000 years removed from the last North American ice age. At one time the five great lakes were one giant lake and the grand canyon wasn't yet so grand. Many things are in play here but it is now my overwhelming belief that we have withdrawn so much water from a part of the globe in such a short amount of time that we've taken nature's ability to cycle it back to us. In summation I'm saying that this is a man made drought...to be continued. (Thanks for reading please check out previous posts to view the whole story).
The Colorado River flows, at least it used too, about fourteen hundred miles long, from way up in the rockies all the way down to the Gulf of California. On it's way down to the gulf it carves it's path through arid desert sand and stone until finally reaching sea level. If you have ever been to the Grand Canyon maybe you can relate when I say I can close my eyes and envision a million years ago when this mighty river was still shaping the land. In just under one hundred years humanity has harnessed this wild bronco of rushing water, and diverted it's flow to make life possible throughout the Southwest. It's a beautiful thing to see how we can all thrive from this one water source without living near it. San Diego alone and it's one million plus population gets seventy percent of its water from the Colorado. Then there's Las Vegas, Phoenix, etc. all in the millions of h2o reliant people, all sticking our straws into the same cup. I repeat this is a beautiful thing as long as we can live in a state of balance with the give and take process of messing with nature. Unfortunately the last decade has revealed that not only are we completely out of balance with nature, but we also have slipped quite a ways into the danger zone where we aren't sure if we have taken it too far.
I won't post anymore pictures, there are so many and so easy to find online, i'll leave that to you if so desire, but the damage that's been done is plain to see. Lake Mead the nations largest reservoir, located on the southern Nevada and Arizona border, created after the great depression has a now famous white ring all along it's giant stone container, giving us a visual measuring stick of just how desperate the situation has become. It's half empty! It's at it's lowest level since it was created. Throughout California there are twelve major reservoirs. If you add up their average total capacity and figure the difference for what they operate at today, the number winds up at less than forty percent! Folsom is one of them, if you saw the time lapse photo I inserted into the previous post of Folsom lake, the visuals are shocking, the numbers are heart sinking. Recently however we've just learned that the situation is a whole bunch worse than we could've ever imagined.
A study published a few weeks ago by UC Irvine scientists has dropped the equivalent of a bomb on the community of concerned citizens, scientists, lawmakers, etc. It's the first of its kind, an analysis of data collected from the Grace satellite mission. Since 2004 it's been measuring the land mass via gravitational pull, above and below the ground of certain regions. Scientists were able to confirm the nightmare scenario that the Colorado Basin under ground water supply has disappeared at a rate nearly four times that of the surface water! They estimate that of the fifty-three million acre feet of water that has been sapped during this drought, forty million of it came from underground.
What does this mean? Well imagine for a moment that you just inherited a couple million dollars from a newly deceased, distant relative. Congratulations! You are now rich and it couldn't have come at a better time because recently life has been tough. You have been without a job for awhile and this cash means a lot. The weird thing though is that your uncle put some conditions on this money. You don't get to know how much there is, you just know it's a lot. You can't go to the bank yourself to withdraw the money, it has to be delivered by a bank rep in suitcases whenever you call them up. It seems a bit strange but who cares, once it's delivered it's good to go! Immediately you start paying people back that you owed, and of course others start calling you up now for a loan. You treat yourself nice and spread it around. At first you count the money in the suitcases but there is so much of it that over time you stop. Then one day while you're sitting at your giant swimming pool sipping a margarita, the delivery guy shows up with a message that over the years you have spent so much that soon the account will be empty. Not only that but because it's so low you aren't earning enough interest to replenish the supply at the rate you spend, and maybe worst of all the government has been slowly taking its cut which is making the balance disappear so fast that a life change may not reverse the flow of your fortune. Of course you panic, you haven't worked in so long that your job prospects are almost nothing and you can't go back to borrowing because like the blues man sings, "No one knows you when you're down and out."
If you haven't sniffed out the comparison, the rich uncle is nature, the money is water, the bank account is our under ground supply, the government is...well the government, and the delivery guy is the water companies who, despite their great efforts, are just the messengers who are basically not sure how much water is left either. Actually the government isn't just the government though, I was just trying to stay humorous. They represent the exponential decrease of our water supply as we continue along our path. Let me explain.
If we take the water off the surface and from below the ground we take away nature's ability to replenish it through the process of evaporation, transpiration, precipitation...all across the nation, etc. From there it takes care of itself. If the plants can't drink they can't give off moisture, which won't create rain clouds. The snow pack in the Sierras this year was about twenty percent of what it normally is, clearly demonstrating that this ancient process has been heavily compromised. I want to say again that I don't work for Greenpeace and I'm not trying to get preachy. I don't know where you stand on global warming and I don't care. Our existence isn't a millionth of a fraction of the Earth's existence so it has been hard for me to believe that in a few blinks we have burned enough fuel to dirty up the fish bowl that fast. If we keep it up, sure we will fuck it all up, but in light of this most recent historic finding by the good folks at UC Irvine my mind has arrived at some scary thoughts. Allow me.
For decades the cities throughout the southwest have exploded in population, throwing the balance of supply and demand for water completely out of whack. I believe this drought has less to do with us living in an unfortunate dry spell or fossil fuel driven global warming. Are they contributing? Of course they are. One would be a fool to not consider all factors. We are in fact about 40,000 years removed from the last North American ice age. At one time the five great lakes were one giant lake and the grand canyon wasn't yet so grand. Many things are in play here but it is now my overwhelming belief that we have withdrawn so much water from a part of the globe in such a short amount of time that we've taken nature's ability to cycle it back to us. In summation I'm saying that this is a man made drought...to be continued. (Thanks for reading please check out previous posts to view the whole story).
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
The Human Drought and the New Western Rainmakers (An Essay on Hope for the Promised Land) Part 1 continued.
Part 1 continued.
...If I did I have a care back then I still wouldn't have known, that my arrival to San Diego was coinciding with the beginning of the longest and largest drought in man's recorded history, west of the Rockies. Growing up in Minnesota where, in one year the weather swings anywhere from thirty below zero in February to one hundred above in July with an eighty percent humidity, one can't help but be pretty in tune with the weather. Mother nature dictates a Minnesotans daily life on a whole different level than most other people in the world! The last time I checked, International Falls, MN still holds the USA's record for coldest recorded temperature at about minus seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit! But I was twenty-two years old and I think the first time I even glimpsed the news back then was when September eleventh happened.
In case this information is new news to anyone reading, allow me to catch you up. The entire southwest, California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico have been in drought conditions since the year 2000. In the last four or five years the drought has intensified and taken on new catastrophic levels unseen by humans in this part of the country. Only now is it really going to hit home as California prepares to get serious and start issuing fines for water wasters. Starting tomorrow, August 1, for the first time in state history, people will be getting dinged up to five hundred buckaroos if their sprinklers get the sidewalk wet. I have done some reading but don't know the full details of how the new rules will be carried out from one city to another, I just know that it's finally here and the realities of what is going on will start to be felt by all. I've been monitoring the whole thing from my desktop for the last couple of years as my life has radically changed from carefree rocker to stay at home dad for three sons. But now I'm getting ahead of myself here...let's jump back to, oh let's say about three years ago.
Marie and I had just welcomed our twins to the world and we were taking them on their first road trip up to the Sacramento area, where Marie's mom and dad had just purchased a palace of a house in Eldorado Hills. It was our yearly Thanksgiving trip and we had not seen the new place yet. We arrived at night after a brutal twelve hour trip that included a puke fest, leading to an extended clean up at a roadside truck stop. The next morning I drove out for groceries and a quick kid break. The navigation system led me around the back way from where we drove in, up to the top of the hill that looked down on Folsom Lake. I'll never forget when it came into my view. I pulled over and got out to give a gaze. It instantly made me miss Minnesota as I looked upon the giant man made lake. I grew up a fisherman in the land of lakes, walleye country! One day my boys will fish also and seeing what nana and papa were living next to now I was filled with happy thoughts of getting them started as little outdoors men. But now flash forward through three years of rapidly intensifying drought...
...pictures don't lie. To stand in that same spot today, I feel like the native American with the tear streaming down his cheek while someone drives by on the highway and hucks their trash on to the roadside. It's all been let out into the central valley to alleviate the drought. It's gone, in short and when or if it will ever come back...well that's why I'm writing this.
I suppose some sort of thesis or mission statement is owed to you, my reader, by now. Before you think I'm trying to get a donation out of you or tear your heart asunder with horrifying images and bleeding heart stories. I'm not working for Greenpeace or asking you to hug a tree and stop flushing your toilet. I'm quite simply condensing the info for you that I've acquired through tracking this drought and imparting a message of hope in what appears to be an increasingly hopeless situation. In short, I'm telling a personal story.
The fact of my life is that I have three young boys to raise, in a city that has to have it's water delivered. The Colorado river basin and the Sierra Nevada runoff that we Californians depend on is disappearing so fast that my sleepless nights are spent wondering what my sons world will look like in ten years. And when I say ten I'm not exaggerating, we are that close to the edge here. It's not like I get to sleep much these nights anyway, but I admit that the fear and stress I've been feeling when I look at scenes like the above picture, has had a grip on me for too long now. If it were not for the good news that my reading eventually led me to, I don't think I would even be able to write this because then... I would start preaching, and no one wants that. Before I keep droning on about this subject though, I would like to mix it up a bit and drone on about a little geography. It isn't my favorite subject, just to let you know, so i'll try to be funny for both of us...to be continued.
...If I did I have a care back then I still wouldn't have known, that my arrival to San Diego was coinciding with the beginning of the longest and largest drought in man's recorded history, west of the Rockies. Growing up in Minnesota where, in one year the weather swings anywhere from thirty below zero in February to one hundred above in July with an eighty percent humidity, one can't help but be pretty in tune with the weather. Mother nature dictates a Minnesotans daily life on a whole different level than most other people in the world! The last time I checked, International Falls, MN still holds the USA's record for coldest recorded temperature at about minus seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit! But I was twenty-two years old and I think the first time I even glimpsed the news back then was when September eleventh happened.
In case this information is new news to anyone reading, allow me to catch you up. The entire southwest, California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico have been in drought conditions since the year 2000. In the last four or five years the drought has intensified and taken on new catastrophic levels unseen by humans in this part of the country. Only now is it really going to hit home as California prepares to get serious and start issuing fines for water wasters. Starting tomorrow, August 1, for the first time in state history, people will be getting dinged up to five hundred buckaroos if their sprinklers get the sidewalk wet. I have done some reading but don't know the full details of how the new rules will be carried out from one city to another, I just know that it's finally here and the realities of what is going on will start to be felt by all. I've been monitoring the whole thing from my desktop for the last couple of years as my life has radically changed from carefree rocker to stay at home dad for three sons. But now I'm getting ahead of myself here...let's jump back to, oh let's say about three years ago.
Marie and I had just welcomed our twins to the world and we were taking them on their first road trip up to the Sacramento area, where Marie's mom and dad had just purchased a palace of a house in Eldorado Hills. It was our yearly Thanksgiving trip and we had not seen the new place yet. We arrived at night after a brutal twelve hour trip that included a puke fest, leading to an extended clean up at a roadside truck stop. The next morning I drove out for groceries and a quick kid break. The navigation system led me around the back way from where we drove in, up to the top of the hill that looked down on Folsom Lake. I'll never forget when it came into my view. I pulled over and got out to give a gaze. It instantly made me miss Minnesota as I looked upon the giant man made lake. I grew up a fisherman in the land of lakes, walleye country! One day my boys will fish also and seeing what nana and papa were living next to now I was filled with happy thoughts of getting them started as little outdoors men. But now flash forward through three years of rapidly intensifying drought...
I suppose some sort of thesis or mission statement is owed to you, my reader, by now. Before you think I'm trying to get a donation out of you or tear your heart asunder with horrifying images and bleeding heart stories. I'm not working for Greenpeace or asking you to hug a tree and stop flushing your toilet. I'm quite simply condensing the info for you that I've acquired through tracking this drought and imparting a message of hope in what appears to be an increasingly hopeless situation. In short, I'm telling a personal story.
The fact of my life is that I have three young boys to raise, in a city that has to have it's water delivered. The Colorado river basin and the Sierra Nevada runoff that we Californians depend on is disappearing so fast that my sleepless nights are spent wondering what my sons world will look like in ten years. And when I say ten I'm not exaggerating, we are that close to the edge here. It's not like I get to sleep much these nights anyway, but I admit that the fear and stress I've been feeling when I look at scenes like the above picture, has had a grip on me for too long now. If it were not for the good news that my reading eventually led me to, I don't think I would even be able to write this because then... I would start preaching, and no one wants that. Before I keep droning on about this subject though, I would like to mix it up a bit and drone on about a little geography. It isn't my favorite subject, just to let you know, so i'll try to be funny for both of us...to be continued.
Monday, July 28, 2014
The Human Drought and the New Western Rainmakers (An Essay on Hope for the Promised Land) By Tristan Luhrs
"Go west young man."
"Okay." And so I did. In August of 1999, the last summer of the century, I packed up my hand me down Geo Prism, gave grandpa a big hug and a handshake, and drove off into the sunshine with tears streaming down my cheeks. One electric guitar, two amplifiers, a Tascam four-track recorder, and all the other obvious stuff, not so neatly smashed into a small four cylinder car purchased by my mom seven years earlier. That car had seen a lot of traveling in a short time. Mom, brother, and me had road tripped across half the country, and now it would be my trusty steed up through the rockies, down through the desert, and straight into my manifest destiny.
San Diego was the place I would land first and the great state of Minnesota was where I was leaving. For the previous four years I had been living in Minneapolis attending the University of Minnesota for the liberal arts and the hell of it. At the end of my junior year I stood one hundred credits to the good, $20,000 + in debt and once again, on academic probation. Back then that was a lot of greenbacks to be in the hole and the free money had long since run out. I could've toughed out another two winters, doubled my debt, and walked away with the degree but my mind had been long since made up to leave. When the winter gave up it's hold on the land and my wanderlust mind thawed, the idea of leaving exploded like the spring pollen in my eyes. I hadn't been to California since I was nine years old on a family vacation, but now had a friend who would let me couch crash. Knowing that I was due for a sizeable tax return, the conditions for my adventures to begin had a green light to hit the highway. Also contributing to my decision to leave was the fact that I was an artist who wanted to do it all. Acting, music, writing, directing, you name it baby, I was a regular Brando meets Dylan meets Coppola all rolled into one. A true jack of all trades master of none, throwing myself at whatever seemed fun and interesting, so if it isn't already apparent then let's make clear now, yes I planned to head up to L.A.
I was a big party guy back then so when I arrived to the west coast it was as though I was shaking hands with my wildest dreams come true. San Diego had it all, girls, surfing, affordable year round golf, nightly legend making parties from Mexico to Vegas and up to San Fran. Letting the good times roll was easy and affordable and without six months of winter dragging me down I had a lot of stored up energy! Heading into a new century I had not a care in the world and nothing but time, luck and good looks to spend, and the greatest playground on the planet to do it on. All I needed to fund this wild kid was a steady table waiting gig and a cheap roommate situation. I wanted a lot but could get by on little, expenses like cell phone bills didn't exist for me yet so there was plenty to play with...to be continued.
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Midweek Mutterings
Evan exits his bedroom to inform me he doesn't want to take a nap
"You take a nap everyday Evan."
"I want some water."
"Okay." After drinking his water he hands me the cup.
"I was so thirsty because I'm done taking my nap."
"You take a nap everyday Evan."
"I want some water."
"Okay." After drinking his water he hands me the cup.
"I was so thirsty because I'm done taking my nap."
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