I first started listening to Wilco in 1999 (I think), when “Summerteeth” came out. Rockford bought it on the way to a summer vacation in Minnesota, and I spent an entire day in the cabin, reading and listening to the album. I don’t often listen to an album all the way through, but that one hooked me. I still love it.

Whether you want to call them “experimental” or not (lead singer Jeff Tweedy certainly doesn’t), Wilco’s subsequent albums were a bit of a departure, sonically, from “Summerteeth.” The dissonance made it hard to listen to “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” at first, but it’s grown on me. I loved “A Ghost is Born” from the first time I heard it, even though it hurt to listen to it. I was not in a terribly happy place when it came out, and some of the lyrics can still bring me to tears:

I’m going away
Where you will look for me
Where I’m going you cannot come.

No one’s ever gonna take my life from me
I lay it down
A ghost is born.

I know that’s very junior high, but it’s true. It was a cathartic album for me.

I’ve been reading about the new Wilco album, “Sky Blue Sky,” for a month or so now. I’d only heard one song from it, even though the band has been streaming the whole album on their Web site for a good long while. (I wasn’t avoiding hearing it; I just couldn’t get it to download.) Rockford pre-ordered it, and it finally arrived today.

And I love it. Right away, without hesitation. I love the bittersweet humor of “Hate it Here.” I love everything about “Walken,” which I first heard in September 2005 on our whirlwind Wilco-following tour. I love the resigned optimism of “Either Way.” I love the guitar work, and I love that Mr. Tweedy doesn’t seem to be hiding his voice behind a wall of noise.

EW called it “the best Eagles album the Eagles never made.” It’s probably the most accessible album Wilco has made. I think my dad might even like it, and he doesn’t like any music that I like.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) stood before the refrigerated section of the Safeway on Capitol Hill yesterday and looked longingly at the eggs.

At $1.29 for a half-dozen, he couldn’t afford them.

Ryan and three other members of Congress have pledged to live for one week on $21 worth of food, the amount the average food stamp recipient receives in federal assistance. That’s $3 a day or $1 a meal. They started yesterday.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.), co-chairmen of the House Hunger Caucus, called on lawmakers to take the “Food Stamp Challenge” to raise awareness of hunger and what they say are inadequate benefits for food stamp recipients. Only two others, Ryan and Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.), took them up on it.

from the Washington Post’s “Lawmakers Find $21 a Week Doesn’t Buy a Lot of Groceries.

It’s discouraging that so few representatives were willing to take on the “challenge,” but I hope those that are involved are affected enough by the experience to try to change something.

Jim McGovern and Tim Ryan are blogging about the challenge this week.

We picked up a fun new game at the toy store yesterday. It’s called Bananagrams, and it’s similar to Scrabble. But there’s no board, and you don’t have to take turns, and the tiles are stored inside a banana.

We’ve been enjoying it, even though it’s a little slow with two players (there are 144 tiles, and the object is to use them all up) and Rockford keeps playing made-up words like “gits” and “ix.” When I challenged him on that one, he said “Ix” is “the planets the Mentats come from.” Sadly for Rockford, it still doesn’t count because proper nouns aren’t allowed.

We played a few rounds after I watched the very last “Gilmore Girls,” which I thought was just lovely.