I really haven’t liked Christmas much for a long time, and this year is no exception. Hell, this year is probably the worst it’s been in quite a while. Mom calls to tell me that she has cancer. Chris lets me know that she’s probably going to move (I told you that relationship was going nowhere, remember?). The price of gasoline continues to surge. It seems like it’s been raining every day for the last 6 months. I’m still in debt, so I have to keep doing that hideous job. My roof is still leaking (probably because it never stops raining).
There. I got some of the mental bile out of my head.
Two nights ago (Tuesday), I went to Dr. Tom Gibson’s house in Powder Springs and, with about 20 of my closest brass-playing friends, spent about an hour walking around Tom’s neighborhood and playing carols out of the Nestico books. I’ve always like those arrangements. The highlight of the night had to be when a car pulled up behind us while we were in the middle of playing Silent Night. The driver, having no patience for something as trivial as Christmas carolers on his street, laid on his horn for about 5 seconds. God bless our trombone players. They completely ignored him. After we finished the song, we moved out of the idiot’s way. I was so entranced by his JesusFish license plate* that I nearly missed seeing his wonderful expression of Christmas spirit – he flipped us off.
I had a fairly nice day yesterday. Drove down to Macon and spent a few hours doing nothing with Betsy Jones. We got some lunch, browsed at a Barnes and Noble, and walked a mile or two along the top of the levee that holds the Ocmulgee River away from the Macon baseball stadium (the Macon Music are a 1-A Braves affiliate, I believe). I got back to Atlanta at about 7 and went to hear my friend Robin play his guitar and sing at the Rusty Nail – but he wasn’t there. Apparently, his schedule has changed and he now plays there on Tuesdays. That really sucks, as I’ve got rehearsals on Tuesdays. So instead of watching Robin, I watched a bit of the amazingly-named “San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl” and played a few games of darts.
To be honest, I think my main reason for going there was to test myself. To see if I could spend a few hours in a smoke-filled bar doing all the stuff I used to do – except for smoke and drink. I passed.
I haven’t done a lot today. Scott (my renter) left for Minnesota yesterday (his family is there) and he’ll be gone until Monday. I’d planned to do quite a bit of cleaning and building (carpentry stuff) in his absence, but I haven’t started yet. Maybe tonight. This morning and afternoon, I’ve basically just made a couple of batches of macaroni and cheese and tried to figure out the best way to use Windows Media Center. What I desperately want to do is to rip all of my DVDs to a large hard drive, but I’ve had trouble getting WMC to play them correctly. One thing I have learned today is that the Windows 7 version of WMC (I’m running Windows 7 on the computer that I use to watch Netflix) can automatically connect to Netflix and has a much nicer interface than the actual Netflix website has. Very cool.
Tomorrow, I’m going up to Greenville to see Mom, Dad, Dianne, Zack – and I’m not sure if Greg and his family are going to be there or not. That little trip is what I made the mac and cheese for – and Jenny, who is going to give me some fudge to take to the ‘rents, has already put in her request for a couple platefuls of the stuff. I’ll bring it over to her in an hour or so after it cools.
As I understand it, Larry and company will be in SC on Saturday. That sort of sucks because I hadn’t planned on staying the night in Greenville. I’m not sure if I will or not.
Hey, Chris! If you’re reading this, *don’t move.*
*Okay, maybe it was a license plate for the Georgia Aquarium. There was some debate about that. But you’ve got to admit that the story is a LOT more interesting if you assume that the license plate was a JesusFish.