Entry Sixty-Eight.
Monday, 2008.03.31, 12:09 AM CST.
Black walnut, shooting hoops, and mixing practice.

It has been an interesting weekend...  In some ways it feels like it hasn't been that eventful, but in other ways it seems like a lot has happened.

As a lot of you know, I'm a fairly nostalgic person.  Even though I know that I am a very blessed person in my current life, I often look back with fondness (and sadness) at times gone by.

Black walnut.
A mighty interesting thing happened about a week ago.  Target (I love Target, but hate Wal-Mart) had a special on Blue Bell ice cream, and having recently tried their mint chocolate chip ice cream and realizing how insanely good it is, I figured I would buy some.

However, when looking at it, I saw the black walnut ice cream.  It had been, quite possibly, over 20 years since I last ate black walnut ice cream.

I remember, long ago, that my mother used to buy it often.  I became a fan of the unusual flavour of black walnut, but then as time went by I actually forgot that it was black walnut at all.  In my confusion, as years passed, I somehow thought that the taste I remembered was butter pecan.

So, every once in a while, I would buy butter pecan, trying desperately to find a variety of butter pecan that tasted like I thought I remembered.  Little did I know that I didn't even have the right flavour picked out!  Ha!  What a maroon!

So, anyway...  I saw the Blue Bell black walnut at Target, I realized my folly, and I ended up buying some black walnut a week ago... and absolutely loving it.

If you have never tried black walnut ice cream, you owe it to yourself to try some.

And, for those who are curious... yeah, I bought some mint chocolate chip, too.  A man can't live completely in the past.  :)

Shooting hoops.
I did something else fun this weekend.  On Saturday, Lanna, X and I went into a sporting goods store (I didn't burst into flames!) and I purchased a basketball.  A real-life, honest-to-goodness basketball.  Of course, I bought a non-leather one due to my own personal convictions... but still a genuine basketball.

Later in the day, I ran out to a park somewhat nearby our house and tried a few shots.  I stayed there, alone, shooting hoops repeatedly.  There was no pressure or competition; I just ran around this little half-court taking shots (and missing most of them).  It was another thing I hadn't done in an extremely long time, and it felt wonderful.  It really took me back to the old days, walking out in front of my parents house and shooting hoops while back in high school, usually with a cassette tape of Depeche Mode or various dubbed-off 12" singles playing in the background.

On Sunday, Lanna and I brought X to the same park; Lanna pushed him around the park a bit while I shot more baskets.  It was a lot of fun, and gave me a bit more physical exercise than that to which I usually subject myself.  I think I can see myself doing this a lot more often in the near future.

Mixing practice.
On Friday night, after we got X to sleep, I headed into the studio and played around on the turntables.  I started off with some of the newer remixes that I'd recently purchased, but then found myself pulling more and more of "the rare stuff" out of the Wall of Records to play with.  Since my time at 3316 ended, I hadn't really given myself a good span of time to really do mixing practice.

Oh, the feeling was incredible.  I mixed back and forth from rare remix to rare remix, incorporating tracks by Digital Underground and Crystal Waters and N-Joi and Eric B + Rakim and Madonna and... oh, it was just an amalgam of awesome stuff.  I could close my eyes and imagine myself before a crowd, feeling the rush of a live performance for an actual, live, dancing throng of people.

Damn it...  I have to DJ again, and soon.

In the meantime...
For now, I need to get to bed.  Gotta get up and go to my "day job."  Hoorah.  Incidentally, I'm currently listening to an old Duran Duran song:  "Secret Oktober," the B-side to "Union of the Snake."  I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up including a cover version of "Secret Oktober" on one of my future releases.  Nope, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

More later...  God bless.

Badger