House Party Blues

Minnie came out to our neck of the wood to pay a visit last week. It had been a while since we’d seen her so we made a big to-do about getting her out here and had ourselves a party, to celebrate both her visit and to finally have ourselves that open house/housewarming we’d been wanting to throw.

The new house parties well. In that I mean, people flow nicely through the house, with only a small clog in the kitchen. We were fortunate enough to celebrate in between the downpours that have been part of our daily weather pattern and so we got to use the back yard as an extra room.

It was nice to see her, to catch up a bit on what’s been going on with her and her family. She stayed for four days which went by all to quickly and left before the house woke up last Monday morning. Since then, things have slowed down a bit around here. Sweetie and I are starting to piece together the summer so we have a bit of a better idea of what it is we want to do with it.

My brother-in-law brought over the floor plan of our house so we can start figuring out what kind of addition we want to add. Sweetie and I have narrowed it down to two different ideas, one adding on to the laundry room and putting the family room in that space with a master bedroom on top of it, the other takes over the garage and keeps within the original floor plan of the house.

This Saturday night Dave and I will be playing at Shakabra Java on 6th Ave. While right now my new guitar is at the shop having pickups installed, I’ve been told that it will be ready by show time. I went back to Dusty Strings for the pickups and had a much less eventful time than I did when I picked out the guitar.

I’m putting up a new song I wrote called 25 Over Again for anyone to download. I wrote it a few weeks back when I started getting in touch with a bunch of old friends from Germany, where I grew up. I believe that the reunion in August has more than 14 members of our class going. It’s hard to explain why this is such a big deal, not only to me, but to all of my friends as well. Though I can’t speak for the rest of them, in my case I had always assumed that I would never get to see these people together ever again. That like my youth, they were to remain faded and dusty like old newspaper clippings. And now here 25 years later and half a world away I’m getting the chance to say hello again.

And they all pretend they’re orphans
And their memories like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away
And the things you can’t remember
Tell the things you can’t forget
That history puts a saint in every dream…

-Tom Waits

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