San Francisco!

Click the picture below for more pictures from our trip to San Francisco [2/14/08-2/18/08].

Lynette Knackstedt

this morning during my regular net-tooling around i stumbled across a story stating that Lynette Knackstedt, once guitarist for Skankin' Pickle died a couple of months ago, she was only 37. now, until reading that it had probably been a good five or six years since listening to a pickle album. for some reason i felt the need to write it down. i feel strangely sad, i usually am unaffected by such things, i guess i just realized this morning how important that music was/is to me.

when i was in high school we had a band director that would let us start off a class period by sharing a snippet of some music that we liked. one day during my freshman (1994?) year, john (a wise learned senior who played trombone) brought in a cd and played a song titled "racist world." the song caught my attention for some reason. the lyrics now so obvious, struck me as meaningful and spoke to what was at that point my catholic school social justice core. until then i had been raised listening to an odd combination of Garth Brooks, the Beach Boys, John Denver, and Glenn Miller tunes. the next day i had my mother take me to the record store where i purchased a cd with an animated pickle on the cover, Skankin' Pickle's Skafunkrastapunk.

that was nearly 14 years ago...i can't believe it, i feel so old. anyways, i know this sounds cliche, but that album changed my life forever. music has always been such a huge part of my life, and i think i largely owe my experience playing in bands to skankin' pickle. Lynette was a big part of that, too young, "i never wanted to be half as cool."

Caucus!

I caucused tonight, did you?! They were running out of sign-in sheets and ballots at my location, so cool!