favorites of 2009

lindsay’s 2009 favorites (albums)

t-2 discovery lp

t-2 the xx xx

1 yeah yeah yeahs its blitz!

matthew’s 2009 favorites (albums)

honorable mentions: not enough

25 music go music expressions

24 islands vapors

23 bill callahan sometimes I wish we were an eagle

22 dark was the night (various artists compilation)

21 dinosaur jr. farm

20 discovery lp

19 cymbals eat guitars why there are mountains

18 sunset rubdown dragonslayer

17 lil wayne no ceilings mixtape

16 no age losing feeling ep

15 atlas sound logos

14 animal collective fall be kind ep

13 memory tapes seek magic

12 raekwon only built 4 cuban linx...pt. 2

11 yeah yeah yeahs its blitz!

10 handsome furs face control

9 the antlers hospice

8 grizzly bear veckatimest

7 passion pit manners

6 the xx xx

5 dirty projectors bitte orca

4 washed out life of leisure ep

3 phoenix wolfgang amadeus phoenix

2 neon indian psychic chasms

1 animal collective merriweather post pavilion

Fresh Air and The Fonz

For anyone who has had the honest pleasure of meeting our neighbor than you will truly appreciate this post, if you have not had this pleasure it is unlikely that you even read our blog but you may still enjoy.

Matthew and I like to call her Henry Winkler, not because she looks like him or because we have a quirky need to give everyone nicknames but out of the necessity to speak in code when in our home. Winkler has supernatural hearing abilities and no inhibitions about eavesdropping or spying on you through cracked windows. I only write about this and publish it on the internet due to some recent conversations that have convinced me that her knowledge of the internet is limited.

Winkler is fond of writing us passive aggressive notes and taping them to our door, our gate or car windshield like the one below. Apparently thinly veiled threats are easier to swallow when accompanied by smiley faces and exclamation marks.

This very lengthy note was purely informative. You can't call yourself a good neighbor if you are not getting the word out about Tongan Floor Shows! WOW is right!

This afternoon I made a discovery that has shed a whole new light on Winkler. After spending close to twenty minutes trying to figure out how to open my bedroom windows I succeeded and spyed with my little eye.....

Henry Winkler's lacey, red unmentionables hanging on the line.

I had no idea she was packing that kind of heat underneath her flowing animal print robes and pastel colored sweat suits. To use an early 90's catchphrase that is no longer relevant(unless you are Annette Smart), You Go Girl!

happy BFF-day

happy birthday to the brown's best bro, ryan. this year he is turning the same age as matthew did in february, amar'e stoudemire did yesterday, Nov 16, and lindsay will in 3 years! this has happened every year since 1982. we are all bonded in this way. we all understand.

thanks amar'e (and you too T.I. i hope prison's been easy on you. miss you).

they say that with age comes wisdom. from time spent around the lower/middle class elderly, it seems that wisdom is all about reminiscing about things from the past that are of mild to medium importance. so here is our chance to reminisce about the past year of ryan's life as seen through our eyes.

we made a movie about Cannibal Corpse, under his direction. it grossed $0.00 in the box office and it won no awards from hollywood or from robert redford's land, but it was still good.

we started an indiefolk band and broke up the same night. he could really sing back then.

we murdered a mystery together.

he got together with amar'e and they compared their physical prowess. they both have great bodies for what they do.

we watched the x-files. this was a sad episode.

he let matthew ride his dad's bike.

we all hung onto the edge of our sofa cushions during the 2009 modern classic, Fast & Furious.

it was a good year for ryan. here's hoping all of us live to see a million more together. happy birthday ryan. thinking of you.

Our Wildest Dreams

I would love to be posting about the wild times we have been having, but things have been terribly unwild lately. I am only documenting how lame October has been in an effort to shame Matthew and I in to pumping up the volume for November.

You would think finally receiving our pre-ordered copy of Dave Eggers, The Wild Things, covered in fake fur would be an omen of wild times to come, but it has quietly sat on our bookshelf molting since it arrived.

October was not a total loss, Matthew did buy a trampoline and a book for $1.75(total) at a garage sale.

Other than getting wild and falling in a fire, even the wildest guy we know has been pretty tame lately.

I will try harder to not let you down November, here is to hoping that I get arrested.

Happy Halloween 2k9

180k

we've been gearing up for a party to celebrate our car's impending 180,000 mile milestone for some time now, and a lot of wild words have been shared on how exactly we should get down. we've known all along that the car deserved to be invited to the party, and we've known that it would wish for nothing less than to be revved up to 8,000 rpm's with the horn blasting la cucaracha while it farted some kid's bmx tires at the exact moment it reached the 180k summit. so we tried to keep these humble criteria in mind while we party planned. but sometimes the best parties are surprises. so imagine ours when we got into the car and noticed that we were only 171 miles away from our long awaited event. we decided to let the party become the journey. we'd come so far and at that point we couldn't stop if we'd wanted to. we'd pollute our way to our goal and we wouldn't go home even a digit short of 180,000. it was a true coming of age story for the camry.

along the way we took some pictures as if they were through the car's eyes. so forgive us if the photos are streaked with tears.

The toyota may not be a luxury sedan but it loves delicious gourmet pizza and quaint patio dining so we obliged and ate at Cibo.

Don't be played for a fool and order bruschetta without pronouncing the hard k in the middle, okay?

our car happened upon a latin celebration, possibly wedding oriented, in the middle of the dark desert farmlands of Laveen or Avondale or some other southwestern valley town. this party was like the vip room within the vip room at club rockin' rodeo back in 1999. it was exclusive. you really would have to love to party to make it to this thing because it was so remote. we probably hadn't driven by a structure with lights on in at least four miles, and then suddenly like a desert oasis that sprang with chilled horchata, it appeared ten feet off the road in-between an irrigation ditch and a metal scrap yard.

It turns out that 171 miles is actually a lot of city driving. who knew? so we got tired and called it quits at 179,905 with plans of an epic part two of the 180k party. Then two days later we saw that the odometer had betrayed us with a measurement of 180,024 miles. we don't know where we were at 180k, but i imagine it was uneventful. and now we'll probably have to sell our car out of disgust.
it also turns out that al gore and company are filing a class action law suit against us for our crimes against the ecosystem on that fate-less night last weekend. but here's my question, if global warming is real, why did the temperature in phoenix drop twenty degrees the week after our fantastic fossil fuel burn?
by lindsay & matthew

Pittsburgh, Pa

Our niece Macey had a baptism and birthday in Pittsburgh last month. She was nice enough to invite us. Actually, I don't really recall being invited at all. I think we invited ourselves. So, a big thanks to my sister Katie and her husband Levy for letting us come stay in their house and use all of their oscillating fans while we slept in their guest room for a long weekend. It was a lot of fun for us as we hadn't previously had the chance to meet our 9 month old, very smiley neice named Adeline. Also, my sister Kelsey showed up, too, after a year of partying in Hong Kong. It was good to have her back on American soil. The baptism was very sweet, and Macey was successfully cleansed of her sins. All of the kids were fun and they made sure that Lindsay and I were thoroughly entertained. We can't wait to see the Minharo family again.

Levy and I grew up together in the same ward and now we are brother-in-laws. We have the kind of long term bond that allows us to eat shaved ice + custard deserts in touristy areas and still look totally raw.

We spent a lot of time around the Universities of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, which neighbor each other with campuses that seemed a lot more beautiful than Arizona State's.

The city of Pittsburgh loves the Steelers and dinosaurs. One of the dozens of dino monuments all over the city. Levy is lurking in the background wishing it were a real life jurassic beast so he could lay on its side and feel it breathe, and then inspect its droppings to better diagnose why it is so sick.

The Minharo house and 2/3 of its kids.

Just trying to blend in.

Hold onto your butts. Samuel L. Jackson would be so proud of these real T-Rex bones. Pittsburgh loves dinos so much that they would settle for nothing less than real bones and real marrow at their Museum of Natural History.

On Saturday night we got club-weary after a long night of bumpin' and grindin' so we left the spot and walked across the street to a train/trolley that takes you up the side of Mt. Washington for a scenic look at the three rivers and downtown.

Lindsay kicked a tree root raised sidewalk slab on accident while carrying Adeline in the dark on our way to a psychedelic fireworks show for Community Night. It seemed a little too real for me because we were creeping around this old colonial style neighborhood, while tons of rockets were booming and red-glaring right above us, and then one of my soldiers got wounded and started losing too much blood all over the place. It all felt so George Washington.

Earlier in the year we saw a show on food network with a bleached haired host about great eats in Pittsburgh, Pa. It had a place called Primanti's on it, which it turns out was the first place Katie, Levy and my mom took us after picking us up from the airport. It was so nice we had to go twice. Lindsay loves sandwiches.

Macey loves journaling at the bar with the locals.

From the look of terror on Adeline's face, Macey must have been whispering some crazy threats. Adeline already had a black eye from a bathtub brawl with Atticus, and she wanted no more violence.

We hit the Falls Ravine Trail on the last and most humid day of our trip to work up a Richard Simmons worthy sweat and cleanse our pores of all the Primanti's we ate.