Fun Fun Fun

This being Monday, that must mean that tonite is the weekly Jessel Jam thing. Host for the night is Gordon Lustig, fine guitar player and deadpan wiseguy, and he had a little rehearsal yesterday. I was to meet him at 4pm at Jessel's, to try to figure out what we're going to do in our little guitar-duo spot, since we seem to have a hard time getting time to work on things together. Prized vocalist Mary Jenson had a rehearsal of Quilts, the musical she's going to appear in soon, and after that she was heading over to join us. Well, we didn't get much worked out before she showed, and then she and Jessel worked on a vocal chart Gordon had made for them, and then I ran over some stuff with Jessel, and then he and Mary tried to work out the lineup for tonite, and stuff just kept creeping in that needed doing, like figuring out why Gordon's guitar was much quieter through the PA than it had been, and before we knew it it was after midnite.

This was just a rehearsal! After midnite! We finally gave up after 1 am! Insane, but fun. I've never put this much time into playing music in my life. I hope it's helping. My playing seems to be getting a bit better all the time. My voice is getting better, but then it was starting pretty much from nothing -- it took decades after my voice changed to get any of it back.

A booking agent that Gordon knows told Mary that we need a demo, and there's a possibility that we could start getting gigs. How cool is that?

Meanwhile, tomorrow night is a Zephyr rehearsal here in Petaluma, at Russ Gautier's house, in preparation for a few Zephyr gigs coming up. Then there's Wednesday's weekly Jessel rehearsal. The week is filling up fast.

Also meanwhile, I finally got around to putting up some stuff on Craigslist, some stuff from my folks' house. The refrigerator got two immediate bites, and though one didn't seem to pan out, there's still the other one. I need to start moving stuff out of that house. Lisa, my old friend and garage sale specialist, keeps finding more and more stuff, uncovering unseen stashes of relics and caches of crap. It's astounding and not a little daunting. As fast as we get rid of stuff, more stuff seems to appear to take its place.

A case in point -- There's a table in the patio. It's the old oak dining room table that my folks had for years and years, and I took it with me when I moved. Now that I've moved back it's been sitting in the patio. But the top has never been visible.

First it was covered with my dad's trains, which my folks' preacher wanted. After Lisa moved them to the church (along with my mom's Fostoria, which the preacher's wife wanted) the table became covered with bags of yarn. The yarn just kept coming. Boxes of it came from the shop. More bags of it came from one of my mom's closets. It overflowed the table and spilled onto the ground. Maria, one of the nurses that watched over my mom in her last month, came over with her daughter and grandson and managed to cram all the yarn into her car and her daughter's truck, pretty well filling them both.

But is the table empty yet? No, it seems to have immmediately filled up with more piles of stuff. I don't even know what's on it now. It's as though it's a magical table, the table of plenty (of crap).

I've put together one of two steel shelving units that were found in the move, still in their boxes, unused. One down, one still to build. I'm sure they will fill up just as fast. It's astounding. It's the move that never ends.

Oh, and yesterday I had the first of what I'm sure will be many, many scavenger hunts. I needed to find my chromatic harmonicas. I knew where I used to keep them -- in a bookcase under the kitchen window. But that was in my rental. Now they were in one of the zillion boxes in either the garage or the shop or in the yard or perhaps in the house. With Lisa's help they turned up after only about an hour of looking.

I can see life will continue to get interesting.