Slackjaw's Forum

Well I haven't posted a reply to a readers request for quite a while, but this one came in last week from a good friend and I thought I'd share. Dear Slackjaw, I'd like to hear your opinion on something. What is folk music? What is acoustic music? What is country music? What is Americana music? What is bluegrass music? What is old timey music? I'm trying to find interesting ways to explain to people what the differences are between these genre's that people often lump together. Thought you might want to weigh in on the subject. Thanks,~Angie Well now...thanks for asking, I guess. If I were to break em down I'd probebly do it like this. What is folk music? Folk is to music, what folk is to art. It’s less schooled than its counterpart, and because of this more people are able to participate. Its power comes from the masses, instead of from the elite. It became a powerful political weapon because it gave the poor and disenfranchised a voice. Unions were formed ...

Happy Valentines Day Sweetie. For all the posts I have added over the years, I don’t think I’ve ever had one that started off by saying that, and why that is I have no idea. But this much I know, that’s just not right, and so this year I’m turning this around. Happy Valentines Day! I love you. Yeah, I love the kids and the dog and the new trailer too…but at the center of it all, I love you. Here we are, a few short weeks away from our 26th year together…24 valentines’ days past…boxes of chocolate eaten and bunches of flowers wilted and thrown out. But it’s the kisses that have stayed around…Kisses layered on top of other kisses on top of other kisses. Of course this year will have chocolate. Of course this year will have flowers. Since what’s a Valentines Day without them? But I’ll also take one more kiss for the collection, because those seem to be what sticks around the most. 25 Valentines later and we’re not even half way there. xo

Tossed the chains, the dog and the Older Boy into the 402 on Saturday and headed out to the snow. Most time if we haven’t seen any of the white stuff, we take ourselves to Snoqualmie Pass, as they have an inner tube run and a play area off of I-90. This year we decided to stay in the county, and headed down Pacific Highway out past Spanaway, La Conner, Alder and Elbe to visit Mt. Rainier. It rained the entire trip to the state park, but once inside the gate after we put on our tire chains, it did nothing but snow. We crawled our way to Narada Falls where we then spent a good long time playing high up in a snow bank, throwing snow at the dog and laughing. We’d heard that Paradise has a place you can bring your sled, so we all hopped into the car and headed up. By the time we reached our destination the snow was coming down fast and heavy. The play area was more crowded and the line for the sled run was longer than we expected. We made our way up the long steep track and waited for our t...