This is Chili. He's my long hair chihuahua with the face that begs affection and teeth that'll change that attitude abruptly! That is, until he's known you for about 2 hours. Then he'll be curled up like this in your lap. He came home from the breeder in the top pocket of Deb's flannel shirt - yep, a purebred. But with a slight turn-in of his front shoulders, the breeder didn't intend to register him and he was advertised in the paper. She would only sell him to us if...and only if...he was being taken to a loving home. He quickly became a part of our family and has been ever since. Chili is a bag of neuroses, habits, quirks, and just plain strangeness. His first toy was a stuffed bunny that Brian donated to ease his first night in his new home. It was a small plain brown and tan plush toy that stood about as tall as Chili did. Absolutely nothing specialabout it, but to Chili, that bunny is a life companion. After more than a decade the bunny is still here...torn to shreds from the many bouts of seek and kill and lick and cuddle and hump and hump and hump...it has been a long and tempestuous love/hate relationship!

Chili grew up sleeping with us in our bed. This was NOT my idea but the opinions of others held much higher sway in matter. Consequently, Chili became accustomed, even downright insistent that he be on the bed anytime Debbie and I were. That meant ANYTIME! and not later - NOW! or we would hear this low cough from around the edges of the bed... Huofff!... Huofff!...until one of us would scoop him up and put him up in the "bleachers" - the pillow on the unused side of the king size bed. That's where he'd perch watching intently as the deed went down...er, so to speak! After, he would anxiously leap off his perch as soon as we were up to get over the sogginess and begin to lick up the love. Deb would try to shoo him away and I would just egg'im on! My revenge for letting him live there in the first place. Guess where he still sleeps?

Tonight I was lovin' on Chili up close...you know, rubbin' his face (a favorite) and gettin' kisses in return. He lays on my chest and sorta grunts with my kneading. I was marveling at how gray he's gotten over the years. Where his jaw was always white, it now comes up nearly to his eyes. He's getting old, there's no denying it. And it really hit me. He won't be with me forever. And losing him will be losing such a memorable link to Debbie and some of our most intimate moments together. Oh how that hurt right at that moment. But I know that loosing Chili won't be the end of my world any more than loosing Deb two years ago has been. I'm just not looking forward to another piece of my heart dying without me being able to die along with it.

And Chili? No, he's not 14. He's 12.

Tomorrow, June 11, 2008 would have been my 14th wedding anniversary.

In another of my personal brushes with greatness, a client of mine is in the position of a lifetime to have his band play with YES. His name is Jonathan Clark and his band "Silverwood" is one of three finalists selected by YES to compete for a spot on the lineup in their next tour. Jonathan is a great guy and one of the best customers I've ever worked with. He commissioned the most ambitious instrument I have built to date and was very, very patient during it's completion - which is saying a LOT!!! Coincidentally, he loved the bass! (whew!)

As a favor to me and Jon, would you please vote for his band to tour with YES? Just follow the link below to cast your vote:

http://www.addictedtonoise.com/contest/?name=your-move-with-yes

or to paraphrase Pogo "How 'bout that, Friday the Thurteenth came on a Sunday!"



I got an unexpected call from an old friend named Tim last week. We hadn't spoken with each other in at least 10 years even though we both live in the Atlanta area. His mother was my landlady when I first moved to Atlanta 23 years ago and I lived with her for many years. Debbie and I had our first kiss in her driveway when we were dating and it was Tim's mom that baked the grooms cake for my wedding. I was sort of an adopted son to her 4 other, already grown boys, the youngest being 5 years older than me! That's not to say that we were all solemn and mature citizens of the community - no, that's where Tim and I let the rest of the family down!

Tim was a hairdresser and a Rod Stewart look-alike, and I was a budding graphic designer with the nickname "Tomahawk". We along with a nefarious crew of society's cast-offs ranging from lawyers to plumbers to car salesmen, played softball under the team name "The Ants". Tim was captain/coach and general manager and the rest of us just showed up like it was a regular job. It's been difficult to research exactly which came first - the name "Ants" or the slogan we used to strike fear in our opponents - "WE'RE NO PICNIC!"- we would shout when the other team giggled at our name. If that didn't do it, the logo on our uniforms of a picnic basket with the restricted circle and stripe was usually all the visual horror our victims could endure. Then we added an ant crawling up the back out of our pants and the whole concept went from terrifyingly cute to decidedly macabre. That was our kind of humor! The Ants were regulars at one of the largest country club complexes in the south in the ASA slow pitch D leagues. We boasted that we never finished lower than second place in our league. Then again, we never finished higher than second in 8 or so seasons. It didn't really matter to us, our one loss was usually to the winning team anyway. We were even the winners in a very rare no-hit game. Got a writeup in the Atlanta Journal and everything. CC games were Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights. We also played in the Atlanta restaurant league. Our sponsor was a ritzy little downtown bistro called "Vickerys" and our Ant uniforms had all of the above mentioned graphics as well as the restaurant's logo. Hey, those NASCAR boys couldn't hold a dadblamed candle to our marketing program, no sir! We played the Restaurant league games on Saturday afternoons with a slightly different lineup but it was just as good as the the CC team. One season in that league, our infield turned 38 double plays in 16 games! Then there was the Church League. We were sponsored by Rehobeth Baptist Church ...ok, we weren't really "sponsored" by the church. We had team members that went to the church and that's how we entered the league...well, we didn't really have team member(s) that went to the church, we only had one guy on the team that went to the church and he stopped going there when he moved to a different section of town. So we were really ringers poaching in the league but they didn't know that and it wasn't an issue until one Sunday when we were playing Decatur Baptist and I hit two homers further than anyone had before and they began to ask questions. Let's just say that the ensuing discussion wasn't very Christian like and certainly wasn't suitable for the Sabbath.

So the call went like this...

Tim: "Hey, you want to come to the Ants Reunion?!"

Me: "Are you kidding me?"

Tim: "No, April 13th around 2 o'clock. I've been getting limbered up by throwing a baseball about 3-5 minutes every day"

Me: "Yeah?, How's that going?"

Tim: "It's about to kill me"

Me: "That's my thought. Man, we haven't played in almost 20 years. I can see an orthopedic surgery in my future."

Tim: "That's why you've gotta start now. You'll be fine. We've got about 16 guys coming. Some from as far away as Oklahoma"

Me: "Wow!, Jeez this really would be great"

Tim: "Yeah man, c'mon! We're going to meet here at the house to warm up. Everyone brings a dish, then we go over to Toby Grant Park and we'll play until someone gets injured. I figure about an hour!"

Me: "Wait, there's going to be food?...I'm in!"

As I hung up the phone, my elbow and shoulder both began tingling. I don't know if it was in anticipation of the competition or the impending cortisone injections they would need to bend in the right direction. I suppose it didn't matter much. I was committed.

Now to figure out what to put in the leave request for Monday, the day after...

I've been chided by a couple of friends about not putting anything up in awhile so it's time to dust it off and catch everyone up. The only reason you haven't seen anything till now is that I haven't seen anything interesting to report on - things are getting along pretty well - except where they aren't and I'm not comfortable now whipping up a big whine. I'm happy and getting better. There aren't many bad days at all and it's mostly due to coming to the realization that I wasn't making progress of any kind if I wasn't controlling my depression with medication. I fooled myself into thinking that the level of clarity I was functioning at was all I needed and I was absolutely wrong. It took several months of emotional turmoil and being off balance in most every aspect of my life for me to finally see the signs and get back into the regimen. Everything is different now. Not only have I come to some complete terms with my grief over my loss, but my outlook for the future is being buoyed just enough so that I can make progress without constantly being hauled down by the past.

I can report that Brian is making my job as a dad very easy. He happily piped up a couple of weeks ago while my brother was up from Florida visiting that he didn't see any way that he wouldn't be finishing out with his PhD in Psychology. It was just the thing to do. All I had to say was "Hell Yeah!! and that means you'll be getting a job right?" Probably not what he wanted to hear right at that time but I had to take the shot when it was open. He's setting himself up for graduate stuff already by doing real well right now. He has a 3.65 GPA, is the Vice-President of his fraternity - Tau Kappa Epsilon TKE, and is a staff writer for the university paper, all as a sophomore. He's traveling to Charleston this month for a TKE Enclave, to San Francisco next month for the Collegiate Press Association Convention, and has been selected as a research assistant by one of his professors and will present their findings at a conference up in Seattle in June sometime. His mom would be awfully proud of how good he's doing.

The housing market dilemma has hit me pretty hard. It's been 6 months and my old house still hasn't sold. The note on the new place was acceptable as a short term thing only...60 days at the outside. At the time I bought the new place, that was a pretty reasonable time to expect a sale - even with some slight disturbances in the market at the time. Now at 6 months, I'm bailing about as fast as I can to keep up with things until the old house sells. I've gone through the small amount of savings I had left after the move and I'm selling some basses to make ends meet. I'm not forcing the issue - God will cover me if and when it's time. But I sure wish it was sooner than later. That's about the last major concern I have before really being able to get on with other pursuits that would make me a lot more happy right now!

I've found a lovely church that I'm going to call home. It's an Anglican congregation and it's like being home after a long, long time away. I was baptized Episcopalian and the Anglican liturgy, iconography, and doctrine is what I grew up with. Of course the Episcopal church has become nearly unrecognizable to the one that I knew then and it's comforting to see that the traditional values are upheld and practiced with joy and reverence. I am going to enjoy going here. They have a strong music program that I want to be a part of eventually but that's much later when I've settled in a little better.

So there you have it - 70 miles round trip to work every day - the occasional date - and Brian home on the weekends - It's a different life than I might have imagined but I'm a different person than I was when all this started. I guess everything needed to change for it to have a snowball's chance in hell of it all working together anyway eh?