As you can tell, I am feeling very old and settled these days. I am not at all sure that's OK with me. However, I have to admit that there's something to be said for being a little less busy, for having time to stop and watch the birds in the trees, and for spending entire weekends being nauseatingly cute and cuddly with my husband. We are still newlyweds, after all! If I ever get sick of him, I can always go back on the road. Although, I have to say, this getting old thing kind of puts a damper on ambition. I get so tired so quickly, it takes constant effort just to maintain weight, let alone lose it, and any injuries or illnesses I pick up seem to take forever to go away. And here I waited to start my music career until I was 25. What the hell was I thinking??? Whomever said that youth was wasted on the young knew what he was talking about. I still want to be a rock star, but all the gigs start way past my bedtime!

Another sign that I am getting older is that my younger sister has a baby! He will be eight months old next week, and he has turned from, let's face it, kind of a blob, into a fascinating miniature human! Besides being the cutest little boy in history, he has little noises that he makes (apparently for no reason), including what seems to be an audition piece for an eventual bid to play a monster in a science ficition movie. I have many, many photos of Ollie, but they all disappoint; still photographs cannot do justice to his movements and expressions. Derik and I attempted some video footage while we were in Virginia last weekend, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Right after Ollie was born on December 11th, Derik has been dying to get him his first drum kit. His first attempt was during a Christmas shopping excursion to Target, where he spotted a child's drum kit and said, "We have to get that for Ollie!" I pointed out that the package said "5 and up" and that Ollie was only a few weeks old, which he countered with the idea that we go ahead and buy the kit and then keep it in our basement until he got old enough. I vetoed the plan and thought that was the end of it, forgetting the way nothing stands in Derik's way when he's on a mission. Just before we went to visit Lee, Tom, Mom, and Ollie in Virginia last weekend, Derik found and purchased a child's drum kit on Ebay. It's all plastic and cloth, in primary colors, and consists of a bass drum, two toms that attach on either side, a cymbal, a triangle, and two big, yellow, plastic drum sticks. I wasn't sure how it would go over and warned Derik that Ollie was still very young. "I'm not sure he's gotten much beyond grabbing stuff," I said. However, I was worried for nothing; the drum kit was a hit! Ollie's face lit up when he saw it, and his first drum lesson went reasonably well. He often held the drum sticks upside down, and the lesson pretty much came to an end once he discovered how well they fit into his mouth. In the meantime, though, he managed to make a few solid hits and a few not-so-solid hits, with Derik sitting on the other side of the kit with his grown-up drum sticks, demonstrating. I think my favorite part of the lesson was when Ollie first managed to hit one of the drums (or was it the cymbal?) with a drum stick, and Derik grabbed the camera, crying, "Oh, no! I've missed his first notes!" We took a few videos of Ollie's first drum lesson, my favorite of which is here.

Another thing we did in Floyd last weekend was look at old family pictures. That is a running theme in the Goober Diaries lately, isn't it? Memommie left behind several photo albums, and Mom told Lee and me that we could each have one. It was very difficult to choose. I narrowed it down to two, and one was full of pictures from Tall Timbers, that long ago and far away oasis of my youth, and contained many wonderful pictures of my sister, me, and our cousins as little kids and all the way up through high school. However, the one I eventually chose was a much older one that contained pictures of my mom when she was a young woman. I particularly love this picture of her in a green minidress with go-go boots on. This photo album contains the first pictures of my cousin Jim as a baby, pictures of Chris and Craig dressed up and stepping out on the town, pictures of my parents' wedding, and pictures of a Thanksgiving dinner at my paternal grandparents' house at which my mother's family was also present, something I didn't even know had ever happened. But my favorite thing about this tantalizing glimpse into the past is that I'm in it. On the very last page, my mother is visibly pregnant.

While we're on the subject of getting older and getting all domestic, I have been having some adventures in cooking. Friday was Derik's 35th birthday, and I made him an angel food cake from scratch. It was my first attempt, and it came out wonderfully! I was so proud of myself. I made an orange glaze for it (because it contained a bit of Derik's favorite drink in the world, Grand Marnier), though my success made me overconfident when I attempted a dish to serve with the cake called "Grand Oranges." The idea was to cook the oranges briefly in a sauce of orange juice, sugar, Grand Marnier, and vanilla extract, then take the oranges out, reduce the sauce, chill, and serve. Not too hard, right? Except that, like I said, I got a little overconfident and burned the crap out of the sauce. I mean, I left it unattended for just a moment, and the next thing I knew, Derik was yelling, "What's burning in the kitchen?" The smell was so nasty, and it took a day and a half to get it out of the house. The pot still hasn't entirely been salvaged; I've been alternately scrubbing it and soaking it for three days now. Most of the burned, black, crispy sugar/alcohol/fruit mix is gone now, but it is still clinging to the edges. I hope I don't have to forfeit the pan; it was just a little mistake! Derik says every married couple has to have a story like that, and we now call it "our Nick and Jessica moment."

Derik's birthday ended up being a lot of fun. I was supposed to throw him a party last year, but we ended up going out of town for my grandmother's funeral the weekend we had decided to have it, so we were definitely going to have a party this year, but we made the mistake of making that contingent on the new house being finished. (Yeah, go ahead and laugh at us; we thought we'd be able to knock everything out in three months.) I was kind of bummed that Derik would have two lame birthdays in a row, but then I realized that he'd asked for dinner at James Joyce Pub (our local) instead and that I could easily just invite all our friends to meet us there; in fact, my friend Kara had done just that for her fiance back in May. So I sent out an Evite, all sneaky-like, and made it a surprise party. I baked the aforementioned angel food cake with orange glaze (and the Grand Oranges that weren't, but that's best forgotten). The one thing that somehow did not make it onto my list of things to do was calling the restaurant to inform them that 35 people were going to descend upon the patio at 7:00 p.m. It occurred to me only on the day itself, at which point I called the restaurant, only to have the manager inform me that they already had two large groups coming at 7:00 and that there simply wouldn't be room for us. "Can you come at 5:00?" she asked. "What about 9:00?" So, feeling like the biggest fool on the planet, I e-mailed everyone who'd said they were coming to let them know that the party was now at 9:00, not 7:00. The funny thing is, that turned out to be a better idea anyway because Derik was taking his time getting showered and getting around, wasn't hungry yet, and wanted to go later. I had thought we'd go at 8:00 and then watch him be surprised as all his friends arrived, but it was much more fun to arrive at 9:10, walk out to the patio, and have a huge group of our friends burst into applause for the birthday boy. He totally didn't suspect a thing (even when I brought the cake to the restaurant with us), and he was very surprised and thrilled. He told me later that he felt very loved, which is exactly the way I wanted him to feel. We had a great time hanging out with our friends, and he got a couple of gift cards, which led to another great time shopping on Sunday (during tax free weekend, as luck would have it) for clothes, shoes, and drum equipment. I got a pair of sandals on sale, a pack of guitar strings, and a new student planner for 06/07, so it was a good shopping day for me, too. We've been on such a tight budget since we bought the house that it was nice to go out and spend money on things we'd been needing.

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned my own playing much in this entry, and I will admit that it's been on the back burner for a while. There's just been so much else to contemplate and to enjoy. However, I do have a gig on Friday, August 18th in Atlanta, and I am looking forward to playing with a band again. I'm a little nervous because it's literally my first gig in a year (I did not mean to take quite that much time off), but I think it will be fun. Derik, Dolph, and Matthew are all really good, and they support me as much as I could wish so that I can just concentrate on having a great time onstage. For those of you who're local, the details are on the gigs page, but here's the skinny: it's at Club 29 on Lawrenceville Hwy. in Decatur (take the Lawrenceville Hwy. exit off 285, go inside the perimeter, and you'll see it on the right across from the Home Depot), Three Quarter Ale will open the show at 9:00 p.m., Juliana Finch and her band will follow, and my band will go on around 11:00. I know that's late for a Friday night, but let's drag our old bones out anyway and see if we've got one more kick ass rock and roll show in us. Headlining the show is a musician named Kyra, whom I only know through the internet, but I'm looking forward to hearing what the band sounds like live.

All right, I've got to go now; Derik is playing with his new Vectron UFO outside and says he's freaking out the neighbor's cat and dog and that I've gotta come see. It's not his birthday anymore, but I'm always up for a little UFO action. I mean, who isn't?

What’s in my stereo at home:

What’s in my car:

What's playing at work:

What I'm reading: