YONDER BREAKS

Growing up is kind of tough. Which probably isn't fair for someone of my generation to even claim. We had it pretty easy. Sure, I worked through high school and college, and was always somewhat self-sufficient; but I also had the privilege of going to college with its slower on-ramp to life. Meanwhile, my parents had me in their very early-20s, and had to manage being a parent and newlyweds pretty much on their own, as far as resources went back in the 80s.  Now here I am at 37 and just a month or so ago I told my wife I still feel pretty unprepared for so much I'm meant to do as an adult. I'm okay at parenting , I think, though I yelled at my kids today for something dumb, so maybe not. As far as money goes, I was always just barely making it until I married my wife, and sometimes even then we still are. Since I took those years off to be a stay-at-home dad, I don't really have a career, but keep clinging to dreams someday working out, film being the one that brought m...

We currently have six chickens, which given the current cost of eggs, has been a pretty good thing (although not a good investment, really, with the cost of chicken food, a coop, the fence we built, etc...buyer beware). One of them, Zara, has recently discovered that she can get out of the run, even though we've clipped all of their wings (guess we didn't do a good enough job). When I discovered this yesterday, I put her back in and then watched to see how she got out. After blocking her path and relocating her again, it was interesting watching her next move: She frantically paced back and forth, all along the fence wall, looking for the way out she once knew, but was no longer there. For several minutes (and maybe even more, because I walked away), she kept this up, walking the same paths over and over, looking for something new that would lead to her beloved freedom, now stolen from her. Here are the happy chicks... ...and the discontented escapee. Now I know that chickens a...

I love reading, which wasn't always the case. I used to only keep non-fiction, typically spiritually-focused books around, reading one every once in a while, usually because it was referred by someone. About nine years ago, however, I had a boring desk job with lots of time to listen to things while performing menial tasks. I started listening to audiobooks, amongst other things, and since I didn't want to spend any money on them, I would often find free audiobooks of classic literature (the kind you are supposed to read in high school, but I always Spark-noted instead). I loved catching up on the greats, Dickens becoming my favorite, and so as the years went on, I decided to get into reading more fiction. Now I'm an avid reader; and with another day job that includes a lot of downtime, I have a fair amount to get into. However, I still tend to keep non-fiction, spiritually-focused books around in addition to my fiction novels. This past year I had a particularly great set...

Happy New Year! Music for me feels like a snowball that started off pretty small about eight years ago, and has slowly been growing as it rolls down the hill. I think 2022 saw the most "snow collected" so far, which I thought I'd share here. It started off with my family set to move to China for my wife's job, which was eventually squelched by Omicron, resulting in a collapse of the whole situation after six months of working towards it. I released "Two Palm Trees," a single produced by my friend Noel Molenda , which tied into the whole saga in many ways. ( You can read more about that story here. ) Later in the year, I released a music video for the single:   Shortly after that, I was contacted by an agent at the Jackson Agency , who was looking for artists for his new branch, the Wright Music Division . This came through a connection of a connection, and was something I had submitted for quite a while before that, sometime during the pandemic. To be hon...

I've been dreaming of recording a Christmas album since I was in high school, and have been slowly accumulating Christmas originals since about 2003. Fast forward to a year or two ago while I was working as an Online Worship Director for a local church during our livestream (pandemic) season. We had a big Christmas worship video shoot planned for Christmas 2020, but COVID spiked days before the shoot and so we had to cancel the whole thing. Not wanting to have a Christmas Eve livestream without any new Christmas music, I recorded a couple worship songs at home, along with some family songs as The Bickerband . I saved the Logic Pro files for those recordings, thus officially starting at least the scratch tracks to my first Christmas album. Fast forward another year-and-a-half, and my agent Kareen at The Wright Music Division of  The Jackson Agency asked for some Christmas music to pitch for those Hallmark movies we all love so much (really, I do...). So I found myself in July...