The Super Fantastic Rempel Hour

Last weekend Lynette and i went on an exploratory drive into the mountains. Driving through the town of Lake George we saw a bald eagle following the road about 40 feet above us.

Reminded me of this song.

Our project of getting rid of things is progressing, and it’s funny how you can have a mess in a whole other realm…. the computer.

Over the past couple of days i’ve taken absurd joy in accessing our yahoo mail, finding an email from a retail store (Target, Kohls, etc…) which we no doubt signed up for at some time in the past, going to the bottom of the email and clicking the “Unsubscribe” link.

1 week ago today i would come home to a minimum of 30 emails in our inbox.. 1 or 2 MAYBE for us, the rest were advertisements. Today when i came home there were 2 emails for us, and 1 was an advertisement. In just one week of diligent unsubscribing, i’ve cut our inbox congestion down a lot. Now i know you may be wondering at this point, “who cares about email.. it only takes 30 seconds to delete it!” Well, you may recall that last week i talked a little bit about how Lynette and i use our time.. 30 minutes here, 5 minutes there, and that has inspired me to start reclaiming my time. If i spend 30 - 60 seconds per day deleting unwanted/unneeded emails, then in 1 year i will have spent 3-6 hours just deleting junk. And even though that’s still a relatively small amount of time, i can DEFINITELY find a better use for it.

In addition to unsubscribing from various things, we’ve taken the time to sort through our various email addresses and file all past emails into subfolders. In the digital world, we are lean mean machines. (no pun intended).

The cleaning and sorting of our electronic mail has inspired me to try and clean up our physical mail (snail mail). Tomorrow i will get in touch with all of the companies we make a monthly payment to, and sign up for paperless service. After that i plan on getting us set up on automatic payments so that not only do we not have to think about the paper coming into our mailbox, but we won’t have to think about manually paying our bills anymore.

Once i’m finished with emails, regular mail, payments, etc.. i hope to reclaim another day of my life back per year. I hope this is not too boring for you all =)

I guess it’s been about a year since our last minimalizing efforts. And now we’re back at it. When Lynette and i moved into our house we were able to donate about 50 boxes worth of stuff to the local Goodwill, then about a year ago we went back through our stuff and donated another 25+ boxes. We also donated and/or sold large things like our bedroom set, computer desk, bookshelves, etc…

It’s not really a “spring cleaning” type thing just because it’s definitely not springtime right now, it’s more than that.. it’s a sort of “shaking loose” of all things unneeded. For me it falls under the general label of “Minimalism.” Some folks idea of minimalism is Van Gogh’s room at Arles, others view minimalism as this. My idea of living a minimalist existence is somewhere in the middle of these two representations.

So this will be our project over the next week or two… Getting rid of things we don’t need, and better organizing the things we do.

Aside from being quite a catchy tune, this video is flippin’ awesome!

Vampire Weekend - A-Punk

I’ve spoken a lot in the past about “The Kings of Convenience.” If you haven’t yet purchased their album “Riot on an empty street” then i have completely failed. I don’t care how you do it, just go buy it!

Moving on… The Kings of Convenience consists of two members: Eirik Glambek Bøe & Erlend Øye. The band itself has taken a hiatus of unknown length, but whilst that is ongoing, our good friend Erlend Øye has continued on. He has released a couple of singles, 1 full length album and 1 full length remix album under the name Erlend Øye (imagine that) and another full length album under the name “The Whitest Boy Alive.”

I know i’ve been saying this a LOT lately, but i’m giving you pearls folks. If you at all enjoy the Kings of Convenience, you MUST go buy the album “Dreams” by “The Whitest Boy Alive.”

Below are several videos. At the time of posting it is Friday night, and therefore Youtube may or may not be working, so if these videos don’t work, make a mental note to come back and give a good listen.

Golden Cage

Burning

Fireworks

Inflation

Done With You

And just in case you haven’t headed my urgings to purchase the Kings of Convenience album “Riot on an empty street” this is just a taste of the genius. GO BUY IT!

I don’t know if I’ve posted this yet or not, but I’ve begun to take on the task of learning a new language. French to be exact.

I already speak a little Spanish, and at first I thought about just finishing that up to the point of fluency, but I figured that I’ve got the basics of Spanish already, so that’ll just be a matter of learning the vocabulary and I’ll be done. French is a dark cave.. An unexplored territory for me.. And therefore just the challenge I’d like to take on.

But as my post indicates, I almost psyched myself out. I approached learning French like walking up to this massive stone castle.. The type of building you look up at and almost fall backwards because it’s so tall. All of the sudden I wasn’t just learning French.. I was “LEARNING FRENCH.” I don’t know why, but I was under the idea that I had to learn not just the language, but the history, the culture, the gestures, and all of the sudden, learning French seemed monumentally difficult.

Today I was sitting at work thinking about languages, and I realized that it’s just like any other thing you learn. How points are scored in tennis, how to obey traffic laws, etc… it’s just something out there that i haven’t learned yet. And all of the sudden the veil was lifted, and i’m very pumped about learning something new.

Last night I had a sobering realization, some would even consider it to be a “death bed” realization. (you know how many people on their death bed express regret on the amount of time they’ve spent working etc…)

Last night after we watched a movie, I was sitting on the edge of the bed and I started thinking about wasted time. “How much time have we spent watching television during our marriage.” Truthfully, I don’t know the exact answer, but I asked Lynette how much television she would say we watch per night on the average. I took the lesser of her answer and went with the round number of 5 hours.

5 hours per night, our television is on. Coming up here in October will be our 8th anniversary. So 5 hours per night x 365 days in a year x 8 years = 14,600 hours OR 608 24 hour DAYS. That works out to the television being on for a little over 20% of our marriage!!

I’ve prepared the following statistics that basically accounts for the time spent during our marriage.
608 Days spent watching television
693 Days spent working at our jobs
849 Days spent sleeping
=
2150 Days spent

That leaves 770 days unaccounted for although you can safely deduct another 86 days of time driving to and from work. So we’re down to 684 days.

Now in our defense, we are “background noise” people. Just because our television is on, does not mean that we are sitting in front of it and watching for 5 hours per day. While the tv is on we cook, eat, play around on the computer, Lynette makes her jewelry, I paint, we fold laundry, do the dishes, clean the house, etc… I enjoy having noise in the background. Music is nice, and we do listen to it often, but there’s something about coming down the hall or turning a corner and seeing people in your television that gives you the feeling that you’re not all alone.

What really upsets me is, of the time we were actively watching the television.. what if I had of used that time on something else? I really believe that had I dedicated that time to learning a language, I’d be fluent in French and German by now. So if I could go back and spend that time learning rather than engaging in mindless activity, then as I type this right now, I could be typing in German.

So I guess my point is moot.. other than the fact that we’re going to try and take the tv time down a bit.

2 cups of crazy mother, 1 cup of teenage angst, 1 teaspoon of “coming of age,” a pinch of crossdressing and a dash of sacrilege. Voila! You have Driving lessons.

This evening Lynette and i watched the movie “Driving Lessons.”

We really enjoyed it. It had colorful scenery and several laugh out loud moments. One of the highlights for me was the strong soundtrack. I particularly enjoyed Ben Folds, Sufjan Stevens and a band that is new to my ears… Salsa Celtica (click the link and music will begin playing). In addition, it was refreshing to see Rupert Grint as someone other than a wizard in training.

The movie leaves you feeling good, and therefore i recommend it.

This week i’ve been working the 6am-2pm shift at work. Hard to get up for, but it’s great to leave at 2.

For the first hour of work each morning i’ve kept my ipod at hand so that between the occasional call i can listen to music. One of the songs that i’ve so thoroughly enjoyed this week is “I’d rather dance with you” by the Kings of Convenience. I’ve posted the video below.

And no.. that is not an actor standing in for as the dancer. That is Erlend Øye of the Kings of Convenience, and he is one of my heroes.

Okay, last week i did a post with a bunch of Nordic bands which you can still find below. Unfortunately due to some sort of issue that Youtube had, the videos wouldn’t play, so i wanted to make sure that of all the videos, you at least heard this one.

It’s by a Finnish band called Loituma. There is the original version first, then the official video (i will research this later to study all of the mens dance moves in the video so that i may reproduce them at my company’s next Christmas party), and then the third, a techno remix by Basshunter.. if it’s too loud, you’re too old!

Here we go..

Original Version

Official Video

Basshunter Remix

You can find this song on Loituma’s album “Things of Beauty” which is an album i highly recommend.