Whoah, I better post an entry, my front page is getting too short!  Things are heating up on the homefront; mayhem will prevail until the end of the month.  The old apartment’s finally rented to new tenants who’ll move in on April 1st. John’s moving too, he found a nice little pad just a few blocks away.  I still have a few more days’ work moving the last of my stuff, but I’m about 85% there.  Yesterday the phone got installed over here, so I have dialup access at least… DSL is going to take awhile to get installed but hopefully it won’t be too long.  Everything’s such a pain using dialup, I’m totally spoiled.

I am loving the new apartment, it’s turning into a real home now.  My old pal Bill Santen (aka Birddog) sent me a cool painting he made, as a housewarming present.  I really love it!!!  It’s a giant piece of wood about 2-1/2 feet square, painted in acrylic I think.  Cool shiny paint.  The painting itself is, I don’t know, I think it’s a kid on a skateboard, but the skateboard has a propeller on the back so I guess it’s rocket-powered.  :-)

I have all these other pictures and stuff I still need to hang up too. So much artwork, I don’t think I can fit it all on my walls here.  Bill’s painting is already up, and so are a couple of my favorite framed items — a paint-by-numbers horsey scene that Deborah gave me, the Varga cowgirl that Mama gave me for my birthday one year, and a portrait of a little unknown girl in a cowgirl outfit that my pal Bernie in Philly gave me.  I also got my entire collection of long group photos hung up in the bathroom, all the way up to the ceiling.  That’s so you always have 300 pairs of eyes staring at you while you’re taking a crap, heheh.  (I openly admit to stealing that idea years ago from my pal Carol, in case she reads this!  Putting them in the bathroom I mean… It was funny then, and it just keeps gettin’ funnier.)

John, bless his heart, pitched in over the past week and helped me with the last three dreaded items that I couldn’t move myself: a 4-drawer metal filing cabinet, a tall wooden chest’o'drawers thing, and the worst one of all: my fucking 4×4 record shelf.  It was a beast, and poor John actually burst a blood vessel in his eye from helping me move that cursed thing!!  But it’s here now, and full of records which I hauled up here myself.  And there is nothing left at the old place that I can’t move myself, so man, I’m happy ’bout that, and grateful for the help!  He said he was helping me as a tradeoff for van-driving privileges through his own move… but really he knew he could use the van anyway, he only did it ‘cuz he’s a very nice guy.  :-) Also we both have a vested interest in getting the old apt cleared out just as soon as we can, so every little bit helps.

Oh yeah, John also let me have (and helped me move) this giant table he made, which we used to have set up in the music room at the old place.  I’m giving up my crappy computer desk setup, and will use this instead, as a great big music-slash-computer workspace.  And today (=yesterday) I finally got the big PC and monitor over here, so I spent this evening cleaning it all off and setting it up on the table along with some music gear I brought over.  I think when I have time I’m going to wipe that drive and put XP back on there so I can use it for music too.  Put Harmony Assistant on there and maybe play with the free version of ProTools, I dunno.  I mean it’s sitting there on the table right next to my 8-track, I might as well try to get it involved with the music somehow!

So have I been working on music, you say?  Well, no, not lately.  But I do have that table now, and I did bring the recorder over today, and it is sitting on that table so that’s a start!  And the blue Gibson is OUT of the case, baby, and on a stand, having been played with a little.  I’ve got sticky-notes on my computer with words all over ‘em ready to be massaged into songs.  So, it’s coming together.  I’m pretty excited about this table, can you tell?  It’s just so… big.  There’s room for the recorder, for a keyboard, for guitars and storage bins underneath, for a PC, a monitor, a printer and all that shit.  I could put shelves on top and make it even more workstation-like!  I’m pretty psyched.  :-)

I have a stereo now by the way.  John had taken a bunch our castoff music gear to Midwest Buy & Sell; I made two hundred bucks off the accordion, an old Alesis rack-mount reverb unit and my old half-working Peavy guitar amp.  So I traded the two hundred bucks, plus my half of the Farfisa — which we’re selling to a friend because unfortunately neither John nor I have room for it in our new places — for John’s secondary stereo amp and a small pair of speakers / studio monitors.  He didn’t have room for two stereos in his new place.  So now I can listen to my records, yayyyy!  And the broken guitar amp is out of my hair forever, it will no longer be exploding on stages across America.  Oh, if that amp could talk… remember the time it blew up at the Bottom of the Hill in S.F.?  And the time it totally exploded at Emo’s in Austin — well, not literally but it did make a big "whoomph" sound and smoke DID start spilling all over the stage. That was very real!!  And it caused me to have to tell lame jokes for like ten minutes while we set up the spare.  FUCK that amp!!!  I got me a Fender Hot Rod now.  :-)

More later, maybe in dribs and drabs or maybe in one big whoosh after the DSL’s installed.  At least the dialup’s not booting me offline while I’m typing this, that’s a good sign!