Brian Lee and His Orchestra Vol 1- Album Review

One word expresses my thoughts and feelings for this album, WOW!!! This is hands down the best album that I have heard all year. It is very rare that an album can come along and literally bring tears to my eyes. Brian Lee has the ability to draw you into his music and literally feel his emotion. Lyrically, Brian Lee is amazing and sings songs about life, waking up, the otherside, God, and to top it off, all this is sung behind the eerie sounds of the south blended with twangy lap steel guitars, southern church organs, choir synths, heavy toned/twangy distortion, and harmonies of hymns and blue grass.

I rate this album a perfect 5/5!!! This album has my stamp of approval. The awesome thing is is that the album is free!!! Keeping it free like it should be! I believe in free music, but I also believe in supporting artists whether it's financially or morally.

heres a preview of his lyrics for the "help me to hold on"

oh i ache i ache
oh i burn i burn
for the owner of this heart to return
you've been gone so long and i feel my strength is done
but i know you watching me watching me from over the hill

help me to hold on help me to hold on help me to hold on to you and i will

oh my hearts grown hard but i feel you still inside
would you bring me back to when i was a child
when they see your face every man will bow then sing
it doesn't matter how they feel about you now

babies

the boys have been doing pretty good. we took them to their first ever checkup and they did great. taylor is now taller than peyton. they're eating a lot more and are sleeping a bit longer during the day.

the last 2 nights were pretty killer. the boys were hungry every 2 hours and they were waking up on off hours. so peyton would wake up at midnight and then taylor would wake up at 1 and the cycle continued til the morning. anna and i are completely wiped out. yesterday morning i had to beg anna to feed the boys at around 5 am cause i had the night shift and i was going crazy. i'm sure that i'll eventually get use to the routine.

even though there's so much chaos with: late nights, feeding, changing dirty diapers, etc etc... it's so worth it. they are so cute!!!

paperwork is killer when you have a kid..in my case, 2. i'm running around work trying to add the boys to my health insurance plan, contacting my insurance for benefits info, paperwork for certificates, ordering baby items, etc etc.. i hope i don't miss anything.

on another note, my brothers and anna's sisters will be in town this weekend. thankfully, my sis-in-laws are staying at a hotel because our little apartment would be crazy packed. peyton and taylor will get to meet the many uncles and aunties that will soon be spoiling them.

what a shame

i served for over 5 years in the USMC with a combat tour in iraq and received numurous awards and yet some people think i skated out of the military at the end of my run.. even though i left with an honorable discharge (highest you can get in the miltary). i was suppose to get a medical discharge but my sgt major respected me and gave me what i deserved.

if your wondering, i got out a year early because of post traumatic stress disorder. i wasn't mentally capable of going back to iraq for another tour and the military thought it was better if i was released early. i came to minnesota so that i could be attached to another unit, but instead my unit in chicago decided to let me go early before my contract expired. that's why i was going back in forth to illinois last summer.

it's a shame that i served my country and yet people think that of me. i know that it probably hurts me more than the original person meant it to but to put yourself in the face of death and come home alive means alot and to have someone think that of your career is a slap in the face.

maybe if i told you that i saw and tried to help bloodied and battered children, who were in the middle of an improvised explosive device, who were going to die in seconds because of wounds so severe.. maybe you might understand what PTSD is. to see a peice of shrapnel the size of a football coming out of a little girl;s back who is crying and seeing her father praying to god next to her yelling at us and cursing us to hell.. maybe you might understand what PTSD is. to see peices of a man heads on top of a building after he's been blown to peices..maybe you'd understand. to shoot a man who was coming home with his father after a vacation and didn't know that if he crossed a certain line we were told to shoot..maybe you'd understand. to raid a family's home and take their dad in the middle of the night with no true intelligence and watching the women and children beg for us to stop. maybe you'd understand..to watch a friend kill an entire family with one shot out of a 240 golf machine gun because they failed to stop their car in time..maybe.. just maybe.. to dream dreams of my family dying and covered in blood.. maybe you might understand what i went through. don't think my career meant nothing and that i tried to get out of the military. you have no idea..

work sucks!

the weekend

the weekend was crazy long!

friday night, anna and i had to do some last minute shopping. we were running around all over town buying various items for the baby shower, that she would be having with her family the following day. we hit up 2 different grocerie stores, best buy, and the dollar store. we had to do all of this in under 2 hours because the in-laws were almost in town and had not eaten anything yet. anna's family is not shy about expecting food from you! lol we hurried up and then stopped at kfc to grab some chicken to feed the family. we were dead tired when we got home. we quickly set up dinner and then the family arrived. i played with my neice and nephew. one is a 4 year old boy and the other is a 1 year old girl and man did they hate each other. lol mad fighting! have you ever seen super nanny? yep!

on saturday i had to go into work for a few hours. it gave me some time to breath. when i got home we quickly prepared all the essentials that we needed for the baby shower and did some more running around. eventually, the entire family arrived at our place and we squeezed them in to our tiny apartment. 5 o'clock eventually came around and we headed out to the shoreview community center. we set up and ate. we were in a hurry cause we only had 2 hours. the ladies did their thing and the guys and kids went swimming. it was a blast! this is the first time i've been in charge of over 13 kids in a swimming pool. it was pretty easy cause the girls in anna's family are very well disciplined and did a great job with helping me. on the other hand, the boys are mad naughty. i had to keep a 1 year old with me at all times and chase down all the boys if they were doing something naughty..like climbing on things they shouldn't be. it was great to practice watching kids since my little guys are coming in just a few months. i've really opened up to children these past few months. i definetly was not a kid person until anna got pregnate. lol

after the shower the family went to my bro-in-law's place to play poker. we were invited but got stuck baby sitting some kids at our place. so were we really invited? just kidding! some of the in-laws wanted to go to myth so we baby-sat their kids. we missed church on sunday because they never came back for them. lol

after waiting around for some of my in-laws to recover from their hang over we were finally able to run to the store to go buy audrey's birthday present. we headed out to grand slam. it was a blast hanging out with everyone and playing some arcades. i haven't been to an arcade in so long. we got audrey some clothes, which came in handy, because she had an accident so our present was used right away. good call by anna!

we got home sunday night around 8:30ish. anna and i spent a good 2 hours on our favorite hobbies. she scrap booked and i jammed on my guitar. went to bed and i talked anna to sleep and annoyed her for a good 30 minutes before knocking out myself. i think it's in the "her" genetics to annoy their spouse. hehe

magic tourney from my eyes

all in all, it was a good weekend. i'm still kinda thrown off by daylight savings though.

the magic tourney was excellent. i think for the most part we did a pretty good job at hosting the event. i hope illy will provide an awesome tournament next year.

as much as i have been anticipating the event..i'm so glad that it's finally over. i can stop stealing from my babies piggy bank and start using all our money to finally finish the baby area in our apartment. it's time that i start dedicating everything to my two boys.

i think i played a lot better than i expected and a lot better than what most people expected. having probably the least experience of everyone there, i was able to take every match the distance. this is the first time i've ever played competitively so i had lacked tons of experience, but i was really impressed with my draft. heres what i can remember from my deck:

x1 bone splitters
x2 wretched banquet
x1 call to heel
x1 unsummon
x1 cancel
x1 infest
x1 goblin assault
7

x1 bloodpyre elemental
x2 sedraxis specter
x1 rotting rats
x1 bloodhall ooze
x3 brackwater elemental
x1 goblin razerunners
x1 shambling remains
x1 corpse connoisseur
x1 firefield ogre
x1 dreadwing
x1 vithian stinger
14

x17 lands

i think i'm missing 1 or 2 cards. i really liked my draft and i thought i could go far with it, but a few misplays ruined me. the best game i played all day was against isiah during the draft portion. we ran out of time so i thought whoever won the first match would get the entire game so i started to feel pressured and felt i had to win, now. i then started playing really agressive and ended up losing the match in game 3 even though i controlled the board for the majority of the match. that's a rookie mistake by me...not knowing the full rules of the competition. that ones gonna sting for a while. awesome game though! another match that hurt was against vipat. there was one card that ruined me against him. "Cumberstone"! totally destroyed me. it completely slowed me down and eventually i lost to a bunch of flyers. i totally wasn't planning on seeing a cumberstone. for some odd reason i thought cumberstone was a 10th edition card.

i played pretty well for the standard portion. i went 2-2... i had two bad matchups and two good matchups. i played kithkin and won against lhang's elf deck and Geu's UW control/Mill deck. i lost to jimmy's realm razer deck and obe's red deck wins. i could'nt beat blong's RR deck all week so when i found out i had to play jimmy i wasn't looking forward to it. i came close to beating it though. the first game i almost won but jimmy pulled a volcanic fallout on me late game. the second game i was one turn from winning and jimmy pulled a wrath of god and left me with 3 windbrisk heights that could do nothing. i had a path under one, an ajani under one, and a glorious anthem under one. that hurt me bad!!!! against, obe's...i pretty much lost to flame javelon both turns. that card is powerful! he sided in a moonglove extract which surprised me. i should of took blong's advice and sideboarded a lapse of certainty but thought that card was weak. could've saved me..haha

my kithkin deck:
x4 figure of destiny
x4 knight of meadowgrain
x4 wizened cenn
x4 cloudgoat ranger
x2 burrenton-forgetender
x2 ranger of eos
x2 thistledown liege
22


x4 path to exile
x4 spectral procession
x2 oblivion ring
x2 glorious anthem
12

x2 ajani goldmane

x4 rustic clachan
x4 windbrisk heights
x2 mutavaults
x14 plains

sb
x2 burreton-forgetender
x2 stillmoon cavalier
x1 mark of asylum
x2 celestial purge
x1 wrath of god
x2 oblivion ring
x2 moonglove extract
x1 relic of progenitus
x2 ??? i forget

i will consider this the end of my rookie season. after only playing for a year i'm pretty satisfied with how i'm doing in the game right now. i think next year though i will be a tougher and better player.

OCB for lunch

Yesterday, our department went out for lunch at Old Country Buffet and let me tell you...that was a terrible idea. Me and my co-worker stuffed ourselves to the max. I was already getting sleepy after I finished my last plate. The rest of the work day was rediculously tough. I was bobbing for apples all day. I even went to buy a pepsi in hopes that it would wake me up. nope!

I'm still debating on 2 decks that I want to use for competitive play. I have my UW control, which is a bit slow right now but mad expensive or my white weenie. My weenie deck is pretty fun to play and is pretty impressive. We'll see how things turn our after we playtest a bit more.