My New Gig: Columnist for a Parenting Journal

Yes, a professional publication is actually having me write for them.

Readers of this blog may recall a blog entry I posted in August about our somewhat disastrous family trip to Disneyland. Well, through a series of events that I won't go into here, I was asked if I would be interested in adopting that entry into a column for Parenting on the Peninsula, a monthly journal dedicated to exactly what its title implies.

Shortly after submitting my repurposed "vacation disaster" article, I was asked if I'd be interested in taking over one of POP's regular feature columns beginning next month. For the purposes of suspense, I'll going to wait to share the details about what that encompasses until then. But just know that I hope to add a healthy dose of schtick to the Bay Area parenting community on a monthly basis.

As for this month, my debut column has just been published. You can now see it on page 18 of the December issue. If you don't want to download the whole thing (it's a pretty big download), you can also download just the one page with my column here.

Happy reading!

'Tis the Season for Tim Rivers

A few years ago, I posted this tribute to Tim Rivers, a very dear friend who left us far too early. I hope anyone who didn’t have a chance to read that post will take a few minutes to do so and learn more about this incredibly talented and generous person.

To continue celebrating Tim's life and music, every year I post a new entry to this blog with a link to his very impressive holiday recordings. My original post has the whole history of those recordings and how I was fortunate enough to produce a couple of them myself. In them, Tim created very rich four-part a-cappella vocal performances, singing all the parts himself through the magic of multi-track recording technology. Even more impressive was that all the recordings were from the ‘80s/early ‘90s, meaning there was no pitch correction available and I don’t believe he even a used a click track to keep time (he certainly didn’t for our recordings).

So for some great holiday music, I encourage you to check out A Tim Rivers Collection, available for free. As I said in my original post, I felt making these recordings available to as many people as possible was the least I could do to pay tribute to someone who had such a big impact on my life and on countless others.