beautiful, funny, sad & true

Saturday I got up early to drive to tiny little Welches, Oregon to see my friend Andrea play and to hang out with my recording friend Jim.  (He and I produced Andrea’s CD.)  Since she’s living in Europe now, we’ll take any chances we can get to hang out with her.  Jim and I talked over breakfast, and she arrived while we were finishing up.  Huge hugs all around.

She played her set and sounded awesome.  There were a few songs that were new to me.  One in particular (which I don’t remember the name of, but I do remember that it was in E minor!) was especially stellar.  At the end of her set, I stood up and clapped, and then motioned with my arms for everyone else to stand up and join me, and we all gave her a nice, big ovation.  It was a great way to welcome her home and send her off again, all at the same time.

Tonight she and I got together for dinner at Queen of Sheba, one of the better Ethiopian restaurants in town.  Portland is known for, among other things, being a very ‘white’ town (to put it kindly), but for some reason we have a plethora of Ethiopian restaurants here.  In fact, another new one just opened up recently, and it’s not even very far from where I live.  Must. . .investigate. . .

After we were done with dinner, she asked if we could drive down to EliteHippieCollege.  She had just finished reading a book called ‘Blue Like Jazz’, the author of which had gone to that college, and had written movingly about a park with a little bridge.  She wanted to find it.  I said, “Let’s go.”

We drove all over and found nothing until we went around to the back side of the campus, and sure enough, we came to a large, forested area, replete with two bridges.  We parked the car and walked across one of them, and found a slightly overgrown path to walk down along the pond at the bottom of the ravine.  We ended up here:

The picture quality isn’t the greatest because it was starting to get dark, which meant that my poor little camera was trying to compensate, and it was hard for me to hold it still while the shutter was open.  (Have I mentioned how much I want a better camera?  And a tripod?)  But the place was beautiful, the conversation was great, and the mosquitoes weren’t too bloodthirsty.

It really started to get dark quickly, so we headed back up the forested path.  We stopped under the bridge to take more pictures, and here’s the best one:

It was just. . .an excellent evening.  I don’t want to trivialize it any further by reducing it to mere language.

OneYearAgo

Late last night, one of my friends sent me an e-mail containing a link to a WebSiteLikeTV video of pictures that were taken at my high school reunion, which happened about a month ago.  Naturally, I gave it a miss, because it’s a well-established fact by now that I hated both high school and the town I grew up in. I have no nostalgia for that time of my life at all.  I think if I could have it surgically excised from my head, I’d sign up for that procedure before you could finish saying, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.’

Based on the pictures from the event, it looks as if about thirty people attended the reunion, out of a graduating class of around four hundred.  Normally for something like this, I would post a link to the video so that you could experience it too, but believe me when I tell you that in this case I’m doing you a favor by not including it.  I recognized about five people, and only one or maybe two would have been nice to chat with for a while. 

Everyone went bar hopping on both Friday and Saturday night, and then had a picnic in the park on Sunday, which involved all their kids and families, and sounded pretty awful.  Most, it seems, married others from the class and stayed in town.  If that had been my fate, I have no doubt that I would not be alive today.  I feel very fortunate to have escaped Yakima’s event horizon.

[shudder]

Moving on.

In other news, I got a call from my friend Jim, whose studio I’ve been planning to use for both new recording projects starting this month, to tell me that the golf course outside his place is being completely torn up, redesigned, and then rebuilt.  Construction started Monday and will last until spring.  The crews, with their huge earth movers, will be working approximately ten hours per day, six days a week.  This leaves only Sundays for recording purposes.  This is not the end of the world, or the end of either project, but it sure puts a cramp on our collective style.

Work has been extremely stressful this week.  Thank gawd for the play-reading group tonight, a gig with IrishBand tomorrow night, and a gig down in Salem with Breanna ‘n’ Justin on Friday night.   And remember Andrea, who moved to Switzerland right after we finished her CD?  She’s in town this week and next, so I’m going to go see her play a show on Saturday, and hopefully make some time to get some Ethiopian food while she’s here.

Our apartment building is getting a new heating system this week.  The good news is that the people whose apartments are freezing in the winter will no longer have to freeze, the people whose apartments are boiling will no longer have to boil, and the fuel tank which runs out of fuel on the coldest nights of the year will no longer have to be filled.  The bad news is that we’ll each have to pay for our own heat, which we haven’t had to do thus far.  I know; I know.  I shouldn’t complain about that, because we have such a good thing going here.  But it will be a tremendous improvement over the antiquated boiler and heating system.  I’ll miss the central fan, though.  I sure hope they keep that around for the summers.

Hmm.  How to end this entry. . .

Well, here you go. Since we were talking about YouTube (no, I’m not going to include the reunion), here’s a funny video about an Australian oil tanker crash.

. . .this is awesome, and beautiful.  I want a Stylophone like you cannot believe.

OneYearAgo

OneYearAgo

“Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “Wind, Sand, and Stars”