Good lord, it really has been almost a year since I posted here. Wow. I have 27 drafts here in OPW land, which is both amusing and pathetic. I'm slowly starting to think I have ADD. (I can hear you all saying, "Ya think?")

Lots to report, which is also to say hardly anything to report.  This is gonna be a boring post. 

I should be at Burning Man now, but I tested positive for Covid after Beatlefest (Beatlefest was August 9-13), and it kicked my ass... so much so that I couldn't do my usual pre-BurningMan prep. I was really disappointed to sell my Burning Man tickets, but it was the right thing to do. Anyone who says Omicron is mild can smooch my 'ttocks. It wasn't easy, and there was a day there where I thought it might be hospital time. The good news is that out of 40+ musicians involved in a week-long music festival, only two people got sick, and I was one of them. Oddly, Matt never got sick, and we shared a bed for pretty much the whole thing. 

I also had Delta in November 2021, and while that bout wasn't a treat by any means, Omicron was harder in many ways. I lost taste/smell with Delta and had a pretty high fever for several days, but Omicron was quite different: a low-grade fever that was on and off, and a headache that was so awful that I spent the better part of 5 days with a knee sock tied tightly around my head like a tourniquet to hold my skull together... and then I had a black t-shirt over my head for a few days because any and all light hurt my eyes and head (including my phone) I only ever had a migraine once in my life back in the 90s (it was a reaction to a prescription), and this felt like that. Ooooof. 

I tested positive on the 15th, and finally tested negative on the 23rd, but I waited until I had three negative tests under my belt before feeling like it was safe to emerge. 

Like my Delta experience, it feels oddly good to have a few weeks of immunity. 

I find that I'm sometimes having a hard time finding my words... moreso than usual. It's frustrating, and unnerving. I didn't have that experience with Delta. 

I also can't believe I've had covid twice; I feel like it's a moral failing or like I was careless. I tested every day leading up to BeatleFest, I tested before leaving the house for the theater each night, I ate well, I wasn't stupid, I masked up... I never shared a mic with anyone, I had my own platform on stage with plenty of room around me.... so I dunno. 

Anyway. 

This post is all doom and gloom, but things are otherwise good.  

Matt and I have been playing a lot of disc golf, which I suck at but also really enjoy. It's been cool noticing improvements. I got my first birdie (one under par) yesterday! Wheeeee! 

This time of year is always a bit bittersweet... I know we're going into the cooler months and I know winter is around the corner which I Do Not Like. But I bought I neat sweater that I'm excited to wear. (It's the little things.)

I wish I took advantage of fresh summer vegetables this season... I look at Annie Mollo's meal posts and I wanna drive up to Vermont and eat everything. :)

I miss my friends very much; I just haven't had a chance to see my peeps and I would like to do that. 

During my recent covid haze, I had an idea: Maybe the time is right to sell my house, get rid of all of the excess nouns in my possession, and go check out other cities. My house has been good to me, but I never really wanted a house and only bought it because everyone told me it was something I was supposed to do. I'm tired of doing things that other people tell me to do. I'm not getting any younger here, and Matt and I wanna live places that aren't Delaware.  We have no concrete plans or anything, but it's fun to think about. 

In other news, Dad is now 82 and he's doing great. He's found a groove and a routine that works for him. He misses Mom (we all do), but I think he's also enjoying being a bachelor. He never lived alone ever in his life, and I think it's good for him. 

Lastly: After Mom passed, I got myself a therapist and HOLY CRAP she's awesome. It's all self-pay, but it's pretty reasonable. I'm grateful. 

OK, this is a boring post. It'll be more interestin*

I love y'all. 

I'll be back*

--

* I didn't actually stop typing mid-sentence... my phone just randomly starts deleting words. Good times. 😁 It's all part of the, um, "charm" of using a 2017-ish phone. La la la!

Hi!

We are back from Burning Man and had a lovely time and are very excited to go again next year.  Lots to report, and a full writeup will likely be coming soonish.

But in the meantime... I have not had a chance to read OPW since right before we left... Say August 24th or so.  I will start reading what y'all wrote and getting caught up... but if I missed anything huge while we were gone, please lemme know!  :)

We are en route to my folks' house today where we'll be until Saturday morning. My mom is having knee surgery tomorrow-- she was supposed to have it done before Burning Man but when she showed up to the surgi-center the morning of her surgery, the anesthesiologist said, "I had no idea you had emphysema and AFib and COPD and all these other risk factors... I don't have the equipment to keep you alive here. We have to reschedule you so we can operate in a real hospital and not an outpatient surgi-center like this."  So tomorrow's the day. I'm praying she gets the relief she's been needing, poor thing.

We then have a wedding to attend Saturday afternoon back here in DE.  We fly to Arizona a few days later on Wednesday the 19th for a week to help my friend Jeff figure his life and house out since his wife (and my good friend) Debbie passed away last month... man. 

I've got a bunch of work travel scheduled between now and early December, so when it rains, it pours travel-wise.

Ok, imma get crackin'.

Hope everyone's rockin' in the free-ish world.

Hi, all!

It's been forever since I've posted here, though I have about 98734 drafts just none of them finished.  I'll summarize the last month with a listo:

• Beatlefest (wow, a month ago) was one of the most musically satisfying things I've ever done, tribute-wise.  The band Joe hired was full of some of the best musicians I've had the pleasure to work with here. Everyone has extensive musical training and reads music like a motherfucker... you needed those skills if you were gonna get through 215 songs... yet they also had rock chops so we knew how to feel an ending that just fades out on the record.  There were times we had 40 musicians on stage which includes string a section, a horn section... we also had musicians who specialized in Indian instruments.  There was one instrument that pretty much nobody in north America plays called a Dilruba, so we flew my dear friend Stefan in from Arizona to approximate the part using a hurdy gurdy.  Stefan was the real MVP.  We have dates for Beatlefest 2019 already, and FINALLY the City of Wilmingon sees this as the lucrative, exciting thing that it is and will be putting their marketing hype behind it next year, making Beatlefest a destination with hotel deals and stuff.  It was nice that we sold out the last 3 nights of the six-night run, and we all made a really nice chunk of change. (This is unusual for these tribute shows... usually we make a few hundred bucks, but this was quite nice, especially considering that we'd been rehearsing since January.)
• Through the hype of Beatlefest, I didn't really notice how anemic I was getting... adrenaline is a hell of a chemical.  The following week we had Hot Breakfast's 8th Annnual Summer Blowout at the Bellefonte Cafe (which was sold out 3 days before the event-- yay!) and I kinda noticed I was having a hard time singing medium-length phrases, but again, I just pushed it aside because adrenaline.
• The thing with anemia (or at least my anemia-- my hematologists insists I'm weird for this) is that I'm able to hit "snooze" on the Iron Alarm when there are more pressing things in front of me... so Beatlefest, Hot Breakfast show... caring for my Mom for a week... being in NJ for Sunnyvale rehearsals... and then BAM, I was almost dead. 
• So yeah... I put myself in the hospital for 5 days because I got too damn anemic.  That was last week.  I was gonna go for iron anyway because I would never go to Burning Man without being freshly ironed-up... but still.  Damn.   It also turns out that there's a manufacturer's shortage of my usual iron preparation, Iron Dextran, which is normally a 6-hour infusion when I'm not so low I'm a fuckface, so I had to do a 5-day infusion of this other formulation anyway.  
• SO!  BURNING MAN!  After a 7-year hiatus, we are headed back to The Thing In The Desert. We leave for the airport in a few hours, and we'll be in Reno getting supplies tomorrow (Friday), and then Saturday we will head out to the playa.  We have Early Access Passes which normally I don't really care about, but with the city having 70,000 people in it, I'm happy to get out a day early so we can beat some of the line at the gate.  We will be there (assuming all goes well) until Labor Day Monday. We'll head back to Reno on Labor Day, clean the car on Tuesday, and then fly home early on Wednesday the 5th.  So we will be totally incommunicado from Saturday August 25 - Monday September 3rd.  Yes, I know that Katy Perry updates her Instagram from the playa and that there is scant wifi if you look hard enough, but I am not going to do that. The phone stays in the car, which stays locked for a week.
• Matt is very excited to be heading back out there, too... this will be his 2nd burn, and my 8th.  I'm a little worried about his anxiety, but we have a nice, newish trailer, so if he gets squoodgy, we can just hang there where it's comfy.
• We were in NJ for a week (before my iron infusion) and my dad was out to breakfast and my mom fell.  It was a huge deal, and Matt and I managed to get her back up after her being on the floor for 90-ish minutes.  I wrote a long OPW post about it, but haven't posted it yet because I didn't finish it. But she was trapped on the floor and it was awful, and she was basically suffocating because she didn't have her oxygen.  More on this later.
• My mom's mobility is seriously hindered and her body has basically told her to fuck off.  Her biggest pain is her knee, and she's not allowed to take any pain medication (not even Advil or other NSAIDS) because of all the other medications she's on.  My mom was supposed to have her knee fixed on Monday at a surgicenter, but once she got there, the anesthesiologist was like "Um, your heart is A-Fib, your lungs don't work from emphysema, you need supplemental oxygen... I can't believe anyone thought we could accomodate your surgery here.  We can't.  Go home, and we'll do it at the hospital where I have more ways of keeping you alive, yo."  So she was VERY disappointed... but I admit I was kinda relieved because she would have been recovering while we were at Burning Man and unable to give my dad a hand.  We want to be up there with her during and after the surgery... my dad can't handle it all.
• Life continues to be happy. I'm in a much better place mentally than I was 2 weeks ago-- I was feeling really dark and angry and sad and frustrated and overwhelmed and unable to cope... and in retrospect this was probably because my iron was so low.  
• Please don't give me crap about ignoring my iron. I know. I know. It won't happen again, Mom. :-)

OK, that's all I can think of for now.  There's more to write, but no time... I need to get in the shower... our ride to the airport comes in less than 3 hours and I still have to throw together a few more things. 

I love you all, and I hope you have a spiffy few weeks!

xoxo,

Jill-o

I've never said or typed "herml-blermbl" before, but it just seems to fit.

I have a buncha half-written drafts here on OPW and I want to finish them and tell y'all what's been happenin' (and also to remind myself later what was happenin'), but I just... don't do it. Herml-blermbl.

So, here's a redux:

-- Beatlefest (July 16-21) was unfathomably satisfying and I really feel like we pulled off a nigh-impossible feat with very high quality... the highest to date. We had top-notch musicians/players who were all incredible readers, which was gonna be the only way we'd ever get to play 215 songs over 6 nights. Reading the charts, listening to each other, and watch Rich or Joe for the ending for the songs that faded out on the actual record. I'm really proud of what we did, and I'm excited it's now officially an annual thing and has caught the attention of all of the Delaware tourism groups and chamber of commerce and politicians and hoteliers and stuff... so they're gonna throw money and marketing behind it next year to make it something that the state celebrates and hotels offer package deals and yadda yadda yadda.  They're also trying to move it to the 1200-seat Grand Opera House, which is pretty amazing. 

-- I jumped back on Facebook because people were "very upset" they couldn't tag me in BeatleFest photos. #firstworldproblems  It is time to disable that shit nowwwww. 

-- We are derg-sitting Riley The Mutt again; she belongs to Nick and Nancy D'Argenio. They actually spell her name "Rylee" but when this derg is here she is MY derg and that's how I spell it, so there. I love having a doggo in the house. She is such a good, good, good, and pretty girl. JD was such a guy-dog, but Rhieleighe is so dainty and girlie, even though she's a mutt and not any kind of fancy foo-foo breed. She's still very much a doggo, though. 

-- I give the WeRateDogs guy sole credit for inventing the little dog-lingo the entire internetz now uses have when talking about dogs. The whole "heckin' good doggo 12/10 would pet" sentence structure amuses and delights me (and I didn't even do it right).

-- I've had a co-worker for the last 6-ish years that I've only ever worked with remotely... I'd never met him before in person. But this week he was teaching in Philly so we invited him down for dinner and for a jam session, because he's about to retire and do music full-time. I'm so happy for him! We had a great time. He said that he's the only democrat/non-Trump guy in his entire neighborhood... ugh, poor guy. I let him drink from our ITMFA mug and he was delighted!

-- Andrew Durkin (my musical collaborator since 1986) flew to the east coast today, and he'll be here for a week. From this-coming Monday to Thursday we're gonna get together and work on Sunnyvale material... Sunnyvale is the band that is me, Matt, Andrew, and Leo. (In the '90s I was in a regionally-successful band called The Evelyn Situation with both Andrew and Leo (and some other folks)... so getting to make music with them plus Matt is a musical dream come true for me.  We're gonna rehearse and record at my folks' place in north Jersey. 

-- My parents' 51st anniversary is this coming week, so we're taking them out to dinner on Sunday night. I asked my brother how many folks from his clan were coming, and he said "Just me and Mindy" (his wife).  I said, "No kids?" He said, "One kid is at camp and the other one has something else going on, and the oldest lives near college now. So yeah, just me and Mindy."  Call me weird, but whether I was 14, 17, or 22 (the ages of their 3 kids), I never had a choice about whether or not I'd attend a grandparent-related event... it was expected I'd go.  It feels weird to me that it's just kinda optional for them.  My folks are gonna be really disappointed, but hey, it's not my call. 

-- Matt and I are going to Burning Man this year... the last time we went was 2011, which was Matt's first time, and we left before the man even burned.  This year we are determined to stay for the man burning (Saturday before Labor Day) as well as the temple burn (Labor Day eve), but I'm not sure if it'll be do-able given his near-daily anxiety attacks.  He is hoping for some mystical, magical, cosmic ass-kicking. Perhaps some, um, molecular encouragement will help... or it'll kill him when his brain separates from his body permanently. We'll see. Or we won't.  But either way, this is the 10th Anniversary of Patty and Mike's Burning Man wedding that I officiated, so they wanna have a Vow Renewal Ceremony with me at the helm again. It won't be nearly as elaborate, but just a little something to commemorate a decade of awesome. 

-- We had our 8th Hot Breakfast Summer Blowout at Bellefonte Cafe on Friday the 27th and it was sold out since the Wednesday before. That was nice to hear. 

-- My music schedule is super-busy between now and the end of November. This is cool.

-- There's a new edition of ITIL (the thing I teach) coming out in Q1 2019, and the ITIL Mothership has chosen me (me!) and my videos to be the one they wanna help be first to market.  This pleases and flatters me greatly. It's nice to be recognized by the creator of the thing I'm a specialist in that yep, they agree I don't suck.  Woot! 

-- Food has been getting stuck in my dumb esophagus for years, which means I only eat a few bites per meal... which means I'm down to 111 pounds which is TOO DAMN SCRAWNY​​​​​​.  So my GP finally prescribed a thing I can take before I eat that will loosen things up and allow me to eat a full meal without having to pause after two bites and sit awkwardly and uncomfortably.  I'm so excited!! Hopefully I'll get some friggin' meat back on my bones. I look like Skeletor. 

-- I sleep on a towel every night and soak through it every night. Very sexy. I wish someone would yank out my girl parts... I DON'T NEED THEM.

--Matt's MiniCooper (Janice) doesn't have too much life left in her, unfortunately. So we need to decide: New Mini? Or Chevy Cruze which we fell in love with unexpectedly on a business trip when I was randomly assigned one by the rental car place?

-- I paid for the NYTimes digital edition as well as for access to the digital versions of their crosswords. I loooove their mini-crosswords (they take me anywhere from 40 seconds to 2-3 mins). But their full-size crosswords start easy on Monday and get harder through the week. I can only do their Monday and Tuesday ones, and then they get too hard for me because I'm dummm. But I love doing them. 

-- I'm sorry I haven't been posting or commenting here much... but I have been reading everything.  I love you all very much. 

-- I'm forgetting stuff but I need to sleep. 

(In fact I just nodded off and dreamt that Nik Everett is Matt's cousin Amy's grandfather and he was giving a speech on a baseballfield about having to give her away at her wedding. But she wasn't there to hear the speech so I was recording it with my phone and then a muslim hardcore/speedmetal band started setting up around him and just started playing playing in full burqas... but they turned out to be guys just trying to push the envelope... but they were really good! My brain is weird.)

Okbye.