Heartily Getting Over It

Almost back! Despite some weakness, I can almost say I'm back. Pretty brutal, although this stomach flu was not as bad as the one I had in the spring of 1980. That was still probably the sickest I've ever been. The type where you have to hold a bucket as you sit on the toilet, because there will be a dual spray with each heave. (Aren't you glad you're reading this?) Single spray with this illness, folks, single spray. I feel somewhat lucky.

I did not talk about anything else in the last post, because of, well, sick. I did play a couple of shows last weekend that were quite fun. The first one was the Harvey McLaughlin Quartet at the Black Sparrow Music Parlor in Taylor. Nice place. Actually....very nice place. The green room was part of a very fancy apartment in the back of the club, with antique furniture and a wisely-padded-in-certain-places spiral staircase. The staff were really friendly, and I can tell they just want to build something up there. There's even a house drum kit (which is almost a necessity, due to the lack of both parking near the door of the club and no close place to offload gear), although I was told the house kit's hardware is garbage. I did not check it out, though. From a distance, the drums seemed fine, but I had brought my own.

HMQ played a fun set. Harv had problems after his piano slipped off its stand and hit the ground; some of the keys were stuck up or down. Frankly, I couldn't tell audibly. One of our newer songs he could not start due to the key issue, and before we could agree on what to do, Rice fired up the opening riff, and we were off. As bands do. Beautiful. Bigfoot Chester and the Beautiful Delilahs followed us, and we were out at a decent time; the bar closes at midnight. Michelle and I even got Thai food in Manor on the way up. Seems like an odd place, and it was dead for sure, but the food was quite tasty.

The next early evening, the Hickoids kicked it for the first show of the year at the Lonesome Rose in San Antonio. Lonesome Rose has a nice house kit for use that sounds great. I did use my own snare stand and swapped out the drum stool for my own, due to my backward slippage in the first few numbers. We had a sloppy but okay set. It's always wondrous to me the things I forget when we haven't played for awhile. It's never any trickier numbers; it's the ones that I should know without thinking about anything. Still, we did fine overall. We followed the Beaumonts, so it was one of those "homecoming" shows for us. Great crowd, fun time.

Still in recovery mode, so I'm going to leave it at that for now. I'll talk about some movin' pictures next time, maybe....