Things we’ll miss about Milwaukee #4 – Sprecher Sodas

Over the past several years I’ve really grown to love root beer. Being that I don’t drink beer beer, it’s nice to have this drink that people still put some effort in to adding their own personal touch to. It’s always fun to go to a different city or different bar and have the opportunity to try their root beer offering.

That being said, Milwaukee’s Sprecher Brewery has the best root beer I’ve ever tasted, hands down. I won’t go in to any adjective-riddled descriptions of its taste, but just know that it is incredibly delicious. And if you live in Milwaukee, you can pick it up at almost every grocery store and most restaurants. The Sprecher line also includes Cream Soda, Puma Cola (two of my other favorites), Lo-Cal Root Beer (Emma’s fave), Orange Dream, Ravin’ Red, Ginger Ale, and Cherry Cola.

As ridiculous as it sounds, I will really miss my daily Sprecher – so much so that I have tried to postpone the inevitable withdrawal by bringing a total of 12 4-packs of Sprecher soda with me to Pittsburgh. Sprecher Brewery does offer shipping of their sodas anywhere, but it’s a little cost prohibitive. However, if anyone cares to send me a house-warming package here in Pittsburgh, I will certainly not turn the delivery man away!

The only thing that I can say negatively about these sodas is that I really can’t stand their packaging. I always thought it would be a fun project to redesign their packaging, as I think they could do a much better job of conveying how fantastic their product is through the packaging. It’s on my list of projects I would love to tackle some day, so who knows – maybe I’ll work it out one day and sell it for a lifetime supply of root beer!

Things we’ll miss about Milwaukee #3 – Bombay Sweets

My absolute favorite way to find a new restaurant is through word of mouth. Usually, if someone goes out of the way to tell you about a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that would never grab your attention otherwise, you know you’re in for something special. One such recommendation came to us last Christmas Eve. We were at the annual Niesl Christmas party, talking about our house and our neighborhood with Emma’s cousin, when we brought up the topic of restaurants in the area. He told us that we HAVE to make our way over to Bombay Sweets for lunch sometime.

Boy, I am so grateful for that recommendation. This restaurant has become one of our favorite places in town. It’s all vegetarian, and, just as Miguel had told us, is cooked by two or three women back in he kitchen and served to you on disposable plates. It’s absolutely no frills, the way it should be, and all of the food has real soul. Oh, and did I mention that it’s dirt cheap? I haven’t had anything there that wasn’t outstanding. We recommend Roti Sabji, Samosa Chaat, or the Vegetable Korma. But honestly, my absolute favorite thing that they serve is their chai tea. Perfectly spiced and sweetened, it never fails to hit the spot. I could sit in that quiet restaurant every day with a cup of tea, watching the world go by, and be perfectly content.

Beyond the food on the menu, they also have several cases of snacks and sweet cakes and desserts. It has been awesome this year to get to try a sweet after lunch and make our way through much of what’s available. Emma and I have discovered that we have very different taste in the desserts – her preferring many of the cakes, while I prefer the overly-sweet things that have been drowned in honey.

Still kicking, sort of!

Just wanted to write a quick note to let everyone know that we’re still alive and kicking, but life has managed to take ahold of us pretty good and won’t let go. I’ve been unbelievably busy with various computer endeavors and Emma spent much of her summer working one of the million jobs she held. We’re now preparing for a big move over to Pittsburgh, where Emma will be starting her masters at Carnegie Mellon and I will continue doing what I’ve been doing here in Milwaukee. There are a million things we need to take care of with the house before we go. We still have lots of dorky things we want to show you, and we’ll be trying to renew that commitment amidst all the chaos here!

Oh, and we did manage to escape all of this last week and spend some time up at the cabin in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, where I got to enjoy the company of these two wonderful ladies. :)

Music in Schools: Someone out there is getting it right.

(found via Kitsune Noir)

The video above is one of the most wonderful things I’ve seen in a long time. Why don’t you watch it real quick, and then keep reading if you’d like.

This is the Chorus of PS22, Staten Island, New York. The kids are singing the song Lisztomania by the band Phoenix and – can you believe it – every single one of them is completely engaged and loving what they are doing! I honestly couldn’t believe what I was seeing the first time I watched this video. I have worked with music in schools in so many different ways and capacities and I almost always come away from the experience with the following feeling – music programs are completely doomed. Most of the kids don’t care. They’re only doing it because their parents are making them. They thought being in band would be a lot more fun than it actually is. They usually don’t even like the music they’re playing.

Schools everywhere are failing to show their students how learning music can be relevant to their lives. But the director of this chorus, Gregg Breinberg, is really doing something amazing.

I’m always dumbfounded when I’m reminded that creating music used to be an incredibly common pastime in this country. Amateur musicians were everywhere, and making music was a way that families connected and bonded. What happened to those days? Isn’t it amazing that the world isn’t like that any more, yet almost all of us are still incredibly passionate about the music that we listen to? Is it because, while the music around us continued to move forward, the music that schools taught remained staunchly rooted in the past? I believe that is a big part of it.

However, I’m so encouraged when I see something like this and I hope that other music educators can begin to follow suit, because I honestly feel that their jobs depend on it. I would love to see school music programs transform themselves into laboratories where students are given the tools and skills to form their own bands, write their own arrangements, and compose their own tunes. Get kids involved in music in ways that they can relate to. Help them to first form a connection to the art of music-making; worry about how Bach and Beethoven will fit in later.

What do you think? Am I way off base here? We’d love to have some discussion about this in the comments!

Learning to be more productive

As I have made my transition from the New World into the Real World I am finding myself having to deal with a lot of things that I have started calling (to myself) “life maintenance tasks”  – all of those little things that simply must get done, but they only get in the way of everything else that you’d rather be doing. Now, I know that by even writing these words I am making myself sound ridiculously underdeveloped, but let’s face it, most of us musicians are. We spend most of our lives in  La-La-Land while others our age have long since grown up. But that is a different subject entirely.

What I really want to share with you is just a couple of quick rules that I have started living by and that have helped me to be so much more productive in this vast wasteland of free time known as freelancing. These tips are by no means revolutionary or earth-shattering, but I hope that some of my friends (and maybe some strangers) in similar positions as myself will get some use out of them.

1. MONEY MONDAYS: I’ve always been pretty good with money, but this new life has lead to many more financial obligations and more complexity than I have ever experienced up to this point (I’m sure it only gets worse). So, I’ve enacted a weekly ceremony that I call Money Monday that takes place, as it were, every Monday morning. Simply put, this is the one time during the week where I really focus on all matters financial. Bills are paid. Upcoming bills are planned for. Budgets are reassessed. Net worth is reviewed. And, most importantly, the past week’s spending is picked over using the amazing Mint.com website. Every expense on record gets a looking over, gets categorized, receives a tag if it is eligible for a tax write-off, and receives additional notes if it needs them. Pretty simple stuff, but I’ve found it so helpful to deal with these things on a weekly basis. And with everything taken care of at the beginning of the week, my mind is free to worry about other matters for another 7 days. If a financial task pops up that doesn’t need need immediate attention, it is simply added to the queue to be dealt with on Monday.

2. COMPUTERLESS MORNINGS: I honestly cannot believe how much of an effect this simple change has had on my days. I don’t need to say much about what a time-suck the internet can be. We all know it. In fact, it’s kind of happening to you right now, isn’t it? ;) By simply leaving my computer closed all morning, not opening it once (because once you do, it’s all over), I get my days started at least an hour earlier every day – easily. If I didn’t have an iPhone, I don’t know how well I would do at this. I check my email in bed every morning, read some facebook updates, check in on twitter, and then I GET A FRIGGIN MOVE ON. Now, having some web and graphic design work to attend to, I can’t go all day avoiding my computer. However, by the time I do crack the laptop open in the afternoon, I am much more focused on the work ahead of me and less likely to meander around some trashy blog. Try it out out for yourself. Maybe your computer wasteland comes later in the day, say after work? Well then maybe you’ll want to be computerless until after dinner. Just find that time when you are most wasteful, and eliminate it.

So, like I said, nothing revolutionary here. But I hope it helps some folks. Do you have rules, tips, and routines that you’ve set in place for yourself that make a huge difference in your life? We’d love to hear about them in the comments!