I have a new alarm clock. It wakes me without fail sometime between 7:25 and 7:55 every morning. With enthusiastic slobbery licks to the face. And I, in turn, reinforce my alarm clock’s behavior by stumbling out of bed and taking it for a run at a nearby soccer field.

I’m swearing off of TV. Well, not entirely. Probably just live TV. The last holdout for me was my weekly Michigan football game. As of the blown tackle in the backfield by Burgess midway through the third quarter on 3rd and 4, I decided I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t put up with the disappointment. Watching Lloyd Carr coach football is not fun and I’m tired of feeling like I’ve wasted three hours of my day after the game. I have no doubt that the talent on the Maize and Blue is worthy of the preseason number three ranking, but the play is completely uninspired.

So now it’s down to watching downloaded commercial-free episodes of The Apprentice, Curb Your Enthusiasm, or maybe Kitchen Confidential. Even the usually solid Office hasn’t been doing it for me this year. Basically what I’m getting at is that TV brings me nothing but feelings of disappointment when I watch it live. So I won’t do it anymore.

I’ve been feeling unusually content for the past week or so. Feeling like maybe all my talk of simplifying might actually be finally manifesting into action. I think selling our extra property helped ($409/month payment – *poof*). I think finally selling off the last of my cd collection helped ($270 in pocket). I think a changed attitude about work helped. I think cleaning out my car helped.

But mostly, I think buying my first surfboard helped.

Sure it might simply be symbolic at this point. A temporary foam/fiberglass placebo or sorts. But I’m okay with that. The real thing is coming and I’m throwing myself at it guns a-blazin. I’ve got my wetsuit, gloves, hood, boots, leash, wax either stashed here on or on their merry FedEx way. Bring on November Lake Michigan! Bring on the falling over again and again into fifty degree water!

I’m ready to be caught up in the spirit. As a kid on a sunny Saturday day at the beach you couldn’t pull me out of the lake. I’d bounce around, dive through, and coast under the waves until most of me was blueberry. And until all of me was abuzz with the day and the medium. And, as they say, life was so good you could taste it in your spit. Well, I want that back.

So, sadly, no money pit investments right now. As great as it would be, no boss-free neighborhood shop. Stress is out. So uncool these days. The times, they are calling for liquidity. Like the lake, like the ocean.

There is a church for sale here in Grand Rapids. This seems an odd thing to me especially given the size of the place and how established it was. Usually if your church has a stately brick building on an acre an a half in the downtown area of a decent sized metropolis you’re doing alright.

I stumbled across this church listing while looking for real estate for my most recent ambition. Surf Shop. Or I suppose it could be any shop. It just would be awfully liberating to have no boss and have complete creative control over something. Mary and I checked out an old costume shop a couple of days ago that was huge (3000 sq ft) but badly in need of updating, that also had living space above it. I’ve already mentally cleared out all the goofy styrofoam heads and monster posters off the wall and replaced them with clean paint and refinished floors.

I know. I know. This is exactly what we did with the Brookview property. Quick impulse buy after getting an idea a few days prior. It certainly would be easier to just lay back a while with fewer bills to worry about. But that of course would be less interesting then, wouldn’t it?

At the gym last night I watched the bit of drama with Jet Blue flight 292 last night. My initial thoughts were, this is oh so wrong. Why would anyone show a potential human tragedy live? Why does this have to be on TV? And really the only reason it was on CNN and was a “breaking news story” was just in case it did explode on landing, killing the 145 people on board. Without the flames and loss of life it really is not a story at all and tomorrow would only be a footnote about some emergency landing in LAX.

But then, of course, I couldn’t pull myself away. I raced back to the TV between sets to see if anything had changed. And that’s the reason it’s on TV. Even as I’m mildly upset about the morality of maybe watching people die, I’m still riveted. The smoking tires, then the brief burst of flames only added to that effect in the end. I’m sure CNN was pleased by the special effects. Anyway, everyone made it, so no blood, no foul. I’m curious now what kind of compensation the passengers get from Jet Blue after all the excitement they had to put up with. Personally I’d be shooting for a lifetime of free flights.

Updated the Tunes page and added a Movies section. Lots of tiny little media pictures. Hooray! Go look.