I've Been Here and I've Been There and I've Been In Between

Okay, so I think that's a long enough hiatus for anyone.

It's been an odd couple of months, though I won't exhaustively detail the ins and outs just yet; more fragments, perhaps, as I (promise, really) do more updates. Suffice to say that life continues to be good despite the odd stumble, and I think it's a measure of something profound or other that in a year about which I must sigh and say, "So far, not in the top five," I'm reminded how very lucky I am.

On the subject of setbacks, I was in yesterday for my last day at the job I'd done since December, which I'd been waiting since March or so for the other shoe to drop on, so no big tragedy. I will miss the nice people I worked with; the work itself, not so much, which is why I didn't make it the start of a New Career Path inna first place. No word yet from the Agency on a new assignment, but I continue to pursue promising leads. (Yes, those of you who have been following the Missus' posts of late: this means we are both, at the moment, out of work. We trust this is a fleeting development, and revel in the meantime in being able to stay up late on a school night.) Anyway, I had a good final half-week of training my replacement, imparting the weight of five months' worth of file-management wisdom in an impressively short span. And I was good, and did not once refer to her as "My young apprentice" in a spooky Ian McDiarmid voice.

I've also been attending, since March, the Tuesday night open mic at Huckleberry's, the local independent caffeine clinic, and got some good reaction out of my quirky originals before it got so popular that getting a slot on the lineup only happens on a Critical Success. ("The place is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.") I've also met fellow tuneslinger and offbeat-music-fan Bob Parrott that way, who has been especially kind to me about my work (he calls "One of Those Nights" my first breakout radio hit), and was cool enough to invite me to play at his solo show a couple of weeks back. (Bass on Sublime's "What I Got," and recorder on "Ruby Tuesday." Tony Levin and Ian Anderson are not in fear for their careers.) As a result of our weekly meetups, Bob's now got me plunged headfirst into reading Tom Robbins, an experience I was long overdue for anyway, though I must now plot whether an intro to Ligotti or Pratchett is the more suitably addictive revenge.

And, as Big Tony relates, I am now the proud owner of PaPa's station wagon, something that turned out to be a bigger bag of mixed feelings than I anticipated. It's a huge potential boon for our working lives to have two cars now, but there's still something very sad about having that car in my driveway and having it not mean that my grandparents are here. In a way, it was the last bit of laying him to rest for me. Weird and a little hard. It's almost a sense of... responsibility.

Anyway, this weekend's our big Memorial Day/Hurrah, We're Unemployed party, with a nice gathering of our out-of-town circle converging on Chez L-K (and at least a dropin, hopefully, on Balticon), so I suppose I should go wash dishes or something. Which is not to say that I will, mind, just that I'm aware of duty even as I shirk it. The deep ethical implications are left as an excercise for the reader.