Waiting For The Sun

Happy solstice to all you out there--I for one will be looking forward to our sun god’s return to the heavens, as these long nights are killing me.

Christmas is almost upon us and yes, I’ve been able to get most of the things shopped for that I was looking to shop for. Next up is some wrapping and cooking and then eating and drinking and THEN, we can call this season a done deal.

Actually that’s not quite true, before the wrapping is yet another funeral.

A friend and fellow Tacoma area musician passed away on Monday a week after going into the hospital for Pancreatic surgery to remove a cancerous mass. The surgery resulted in an infection, which then resulted in liver failure and though he hung on for as long as he could it was a losing battle.

I liked Pat and had known him somewhat for more than twenty years. In those early days I was playing in Natural Causes and he, being somewhat older had moved to LA with some other Tacoma musicians playing in a band called The Cutouts. They had a homecoming out in Ponders where they asked us to open up for them.

Pat and I weren’t close, he wasn’t someone I would ask to help me move, or pick me up if I ran out of gas, but he was someone I might buy a beer for if he wasn’t already so drunk he couldn’t stand up.

For many years he played in Mr. Blackwatch—my friend and fellow band mate Doug Mackey’s band and after that I would see him either performing solo or coming out to support other musicians, myself included. He was large and solid with a personality that matched his physique and the bars will seem a lot emptier without him being around.

This will be my fourth funeral this year, not including our cat Zane, whose ashes are sitting next to Batty’s on a shelf in the living room, and whom we have not yet had a service. That seems to be an inordinate amount of mourning for just one year—at least to me it does. But when I look back upon this year it doesn’t feel like it was all about death. We moved, put in a garden, went to Disneyland, went to the ocean, turned 40…we took what fun we could and spent more time laughing than crying, but any way you cut it, that’s a pretty full year.

I’ll miss Pat. It won't be an everyday thing, but more the kind of feeling that this world—my world, has become a quieter place.

You know I worry about that sometimes. That the voids left from old friends and relations passing, will at some point be louder than the voices of those who are left

When In Danger, When In Doubt, Run In Circles, Scream And Shout!

Now that were less than two weeks away, I should consider panicking. What good this will do is beyond me, but it seems like the next logical progression. It’s not as easy as it sounds—at least for me it isn’t. I’m good at confusion, muddled thought, inaction and sloth, but it takes a lot to arouse a good panic.

That doesn’t mean I wont.

I came into Ike’s room the other night to give him his meds and discovered that he was having a bloody nose. Things like Ike and bloody noses don’t usually go hand in hand and I wasn’t able to come up with an appropriate response, so slippers flapping and bathrobe streaming behind me I went screaming like a little girl to get a second opinion.

Fortunately for me, Sweetie isn’t used to hearing me running and yelping around the mobile home and so I was able to get her panicking alongside me pretty quickly…at least until we went back into Ike’s room and I showed her his nose. That calmed her right down.

“it’s just a little bloody nose. Do you think he’s got a sinus infection?”

Of course that seemed more plausible than my brain hemorrhage theory and once we realized that all it really was, was just a little bloody snot that he had sneezed out, Sweetie managed to calm me down a bit—of course not before laughing at the site of me in full bathrobe/slipper little girl flail.

Yeah, we all got a few laughs about that…

Anyway, what I’m trying to say here is that the Big Christmas 18 Wheeler is barreling down I5 and I’m standing in the center lane, with my eyes wide as saucers unable to get out of the way. Seems to me that now is the time to panic…but instead I still seem to be in the “I wonder what will happen if I don’t get out of the way” head space.

There are things to do!

There are places and people to see!

What’s it gonna take to wake me up?

Christmas Insulation

Come to find out that the floor in the new double wide gets pretty cold on these December mornings. Come to find out this is due to the insulation oversight that has taken place in this house for the past fifty years. In lieu of a basement, our new house has a crawl space low enough to trigger my claustrophobasense. I’ve managed to stick my head in there to look around a bit, but I’ve stopped short of wiggling my whole body in there for an up-close look around.

I’m not sure how this house has managed to survive all these years with its total lack of insulation and its thin drafty windows. Clearly I’m made of weaker stuff than this houses previous owners, though you would think since this house is old Tacoma mafia, at some point in its existence a little of that loan-sharking money might have made it’s way to pay off the Owens Corning company for a little of that R-30 batting.

Turns out that we’re the only family to live here that’s going to take the bait and make it a place where you don’t mind walking around in your stocking feet in the winter time. Yesterday the crew came over and put insulation in the floor and next week they come over and put insulation in the ceiling and a few weeks after that the new double-paned windows come and so by the middle of January, I’m hoping that our house is like a little toasty brick oven.

Last Saturday we put up Christmas lights outside. We went with the large colored lights that I talked Sweetie into using last year since the new neighbors are all about poorly placed white strands of icicle lights and those plastic lit up reindeers. We head out to get the tree on Saturday with Dewy and Ham and I imagine we’ll get to doing the inside decorations this weekend.

Slowly it’s starting to feel like Christmas around this joint. Perhaps if I got my act together and started doing a little shopping it might just be the jump kick to make it feel more full blown. Well, that and the tree should help.

I’m putting up the two Christmas songs I wrote for everyone to download. I also thought I’d put up the article that The Weekly Volcano did about me. Just look on the sidebar.