For the last five years or so, I’ve used the space next to my driveway for raised beds. I’ve got a 3,100 gallon rain cistern in my backyard and I hand dug a trench to the front yard for my drip irrigation system.

It’s worked pretty well, but there are pros and cons. For starters, the beds are pretty close to the driveway, and my wife already ripped my bumper off once and tried to pass it off as if nothing ever happened (I caught it on camera). That was just a one-off incident, thankfully.

Another negative is that I’ve had kids cutting through my side yard on the way to the light rail or on their way home from school. They’ve trampled my pumpkins and zucchini squash a handful of times, and it’s pretty annoying to have put in so much work to grow a few healthy plants from seed only to have them trampled under foot by a careless teenagers.

I’ve also had little old ladies stop by and help themselves to some tomatoes, which isn’t a huge concern, but it does feel a little weird to know my neighbors regularly steal from my garden. I’d gladly give them the food if they’d just ask. In fact, I’ve put extra food out with a “take me” sign before.

But really, I’d like to use that space along my driveway for something else someday. I’ve had this crazy idea for a while now to make our house look a bit like an old craftsman by converting the garage into living space and a front porch.

If we do decide to go through with the renovation, I’d like to shift our driveway to the right to make room for a walkway to the entrance. Since our backyard is so shaded, that leaves my front lawn as a new location for our garden beds. This poses a couple of issues though.

First, I’d have to get the beds moved pretty soon; something I’m not really looking forward to doing in the dead of rainy season. Another issue is the situation with the rain cistern and having to figure out a new solution since the underground pipes can’t really traverse the underside of the driveway and would need to go around the other side — loads of work that could be done later, but a job I don’t want to do. Finally, there’s the issue of my lawn and the appropriate way to retire it without making my yard a complete mess and nuisance.

I’m not sure I have the time, energy, budget, or motivation to tackle all of this. It’s a hobby, and one I quite enjoy, but the food is merely supplemental and the cost-benefit ratio can get out of hand fairly quickly if one’s not careful. Yet I don’t want to give it up.

Maybe some interim solutions will present themselves in my brainstorming, but right now, I’m coming up short as to how best to approach the issue.

We had some wind last night and it knocked out our electricity at around 1 a.m. My son was already sleeping in our bed, but my daughter woke up screaming bloody murder and wouldn’t go back to sleep, so I had to bring her into our bed as well.

The worst part about power outages is that I can’t sleep without my CPAP machine anymore. I have a battery for it to get me by, but I must not have charged it after camping last summer. I got another hour out of it before I was awakened again not being able to breathe.

I had to get creative because I needed sleep. I had an early morning meeting today and needed to get the kids to daycare/preschool earlier than normal since my wife is still in California and couldn’t help.

I started my car, plugged in an inverter into the cigarette lighter, and ran two extension cords connected together from my car and upstairs to my CPAP machine. I got a few more hours of sleep before I had to start getting ready for the day.

I got enough sleep to get by, but I’m charging my big back-up battery in case it happens again.

This morning, I accidentally bumped my HomePod while cleaning off the desk and some music started. Land Locked Blues by Bright Eyes came on, from his 2005 album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. It’s making me nostalgic. That is about the time I stopped listening to Bright Eyes and stopped buying CDs altogether.

I was 24 that year. It was before smart phones became popular, and 2005 was about a year after I got my first iPod. I still actively managed my library for a few more years, but that slowly started to change as streaming became more popular.

My music listening habits are so much more random since streaming became a thing. I struggle to even answer when people ask “who’s your favorite band?” or “what kind of music do you listen to?” I miss the more intentional nature of it all when I’d manage an actual library, even if it wasn’t in the form of physical media.

I have tried to go back at times and explored the underground and alternative music that I didn’t have the privilege of knowing or experiencing in my younger years before the Internet, and in this way, I love the archeological digging and discovering. However, that takes a lot of work and patience because it’s really easy to find a shinier new object of my affection, however fleeting.

I don’t think breadth of content has improved anything about the experience for me. If anything, it’s too easy to push things aside without giving them a chance and I don’t listen to entire albums very often anymore.

I’ve toyed around with having my own library again on a Plex server, but adding new music is not easy, and if we’re being honest, it can get expensive in a way that feels unnecessary. Also, I have so many other things going on in my life that I don’t have a lot of down time to manage it. But these are just excuses. If it were important enough for me, I’d make it happen.

It’s entirely likely that the shift in music medium has caused a psychological shift in me in such a way that I care much less about music now than I once did. If I sit with that feeling for any amount of time, I feel a little guilty about it.

All this to say, music feels very cheap to me these days. It’s everywhere in abundance and therefore it feels much less valuable. As a musician myself, this feels strange to admit, but it’s what I feel in my gut. I don’t have a solution, but I wish it were different.

I want that feeling of freedom again, driving around on the first warm day of the year with the windows down, listing to my favorite album. I want that feeling of finding an album and it becoming the soundtrack that defines a season, a year.

Before the holidays, I had my first phone conversation with a distant cousin I connected with on one of those genetic testing sites. I don’t make it a habit of reaching out to complete strangers with loose genetic ties, but I had been looking for Italian family on my father’s side in the United States and he had the same surname as my my paternal grandmother before she got married. I didn’t have a relationship with my father, so I didn’t have the benefit of having direct family introductions. So I sent him off a message and we’ve been connected for a few years now.

William lives down in the Berkley area, so it’s nice we’re in the same time zone. He’s in his 60s, has been married for many years, and has kids and grandkids. Our connection is that his grandfather was siblings with my great grandmother Louisa. My great grandmother’s parents moved to Iron, Wisconsin from Italy for a better life and there were a lot of mining jobs there and in Michigan’s upper peninsula in the early 1900s. That’s how one side of my Italian family got here.

Anyway, I spoke to William on the phone and we talked about his trips to Italy that I’d seen him posting about on Facebook. He’d posted some photos about his trips to the Dolomites (3 times per year!) where our Italian family is from. We exchanged a few messages and he decided to just call me up on Facebook Messenger instead of typing it all out. It was nice to have a real conversation with someone I’ve never met in real life but for whom I’ve grown to appreciate from afar.

He knew that me and my wife were planning a trip to Italy in late spring, so he wanted to give me tips. I told him of our tentative plans and he guided us to some better decisions, even connecting us with a personal friend and mutual family in Cadore. Two sides of my family are from Vigo di Cadore, and he gave me the details of a great Air BnB the next town over.

I took a sneak peak of the town on Google Street View and the walls of mountains surrounding that area are both majestic and intimidating. The town is Lorenzago di Cadore and I think we’re going to book the apartment this week.

The way Italian citizenship works through the Jure Sanguinis (citizenship by descent) is that if you weren’t born there you have to register in the comune (town) of your last Italian ancestor, so I’m registered up in Vigo di Cadore, right next door. From family records, I have the address of the place where my great grandparents lived and the cemetery where they’re buried. Although they emigrated to the U.S., they ultimately didn’t end up liking it here and moved back!

I’m excited to finally get to visit the area. We are lucky to have my parents watching the kids for us while we’re away for 10 days, which will be strange for sure, but this will be our first vacation alone of any length in 5 years since having our son. We love to hike and are really looking forward to some mid-elevation hikes in the Dolomites for a few days before we head south. I hear the people are nice and welcoming, and the family I still have there sound excited to meet distant family who were descended from the Italian diaspora of the early 20th Century.

Things are feeling more real and I’m looking forward to my first international adventure since 2007. Hopefully many more to come.