Odds and Sods - January 8, 2006

So here's the latest addition to the Slick family guitar collection. We're all like little kids over this one. Cool, huh.

Hey, I'm still in that parallel universe. My book is hanging tough at #10 in best small press novels of 2005. If you haven't voted, here's the link to put a check mark next to Three Days in New York City. Thank you, thank you, thank you and if you write to me and tell me that you voted for my book, I will give you candy.

Nothing much else happening here except that I'm extremely jealous my son gets to go to The NAMM Show 2006 in Anaheim, California next week, where, among other things, he will hang out with everyone who is anyone in the music world (including his hero, Bill Bruford) and he'll perform a couple of songs with Mike Keneally on the John Lennon Bus. While he's out on the west coast, he's also got a gig Friday night at the LA Knitting Factory and is playing a party on Wednesday at the DigiTech party at NAMM.

That, and the lucky bastard gets to eat In-N-Out Burgers for five days.

In other Eric news, he's recording a new CD with his band, Flamingo and they're playing the New York Knitting Factory on February 7, 2006.

Much to Julie's dismay, she returns to Drexel University on Monday following Christmas break where she's taken a really heavy class load this semester, but she's got an upcoming gig with McRad in February and has some other fun stuff coming up this month, like her 20th birthday, so I'm not too worried about her.

Anyway, as I mentioned yesterday, a few friends of mine from Zoetrope Studios have won some pretty spectacular writing awards lately. Over at Night Train Magazine, my pals Myfanwy Collins, Kathy Fish, Todd Zuniga, and Jim Ruland were winners in the annual Richard Yates Short Story Awards. And Jim Tomlinson has won the Iowa Fiction Prize and his collection will be published in 2006. So good on them!

My life is a nightmare at the moment. It seems I have six feet of water on the roof because the gutters are filled with leaves, so yesterday's excitement had me threading a hose attached to a sump pump from the bathtub and up through the skylight in Eric's bedroom so that it could all be drained off before the dreaded visit to the roof today in freezing cold weather to do the unclogging thing. I wanted a one hundred year old house WHY? But I knew the doors weren't closing properly upstairs and then I heard a drip, drip, drip coming down through the fireplaces in my bedroom and living room, and I knew there had to be big trouble, especially as I just had a new roof put on just last year.

And now I learn Eric's girlfriend Carolyn is spending the day here, and I love her, but this is just not good...my other plan for this morning was to take down the dead, disgusting Christmas tree, but oh well, what's another day.

Right. But tomorrow I'm going to New York. Oh, okay, Tuesday then. And maybe sometime in between I'll get a chance to write?

A girl can dream...