Sometimes you feel like Anutt

Drove down to beautiful downtown Anutt, Mo to the home of Mike & Lois (and Ben & Abigail) Hilgers for a visit. Played gutiars, ate... played with kids, ate some more, played some more.... Mike's been working on his classical guitar. Sounds pretty darned good to me. We're never happy with what we can do, because -- well, we know where our mistakes and limitations are. But those listening to us aren't always so aware and so it sounds great to them -- and so it sounded great to me. And isn't that what matters?

Abigail is a bit of a little cherub-faced doll which can be pretty difficult to resist. And it's always fun to watch Ben try to sort out and prioritize all the thoughts that come into his brain. It's even more fun to try to figure out what they are and put words in to his mouth. Mike is particularly adept at this.

I won't go into any particular details of the visit, because to an outsider it'd just be boring. But most people know that just hanging with friends for a while is cool without having to have anything in particular going on.

Got home and whipped out my Christmas guitar book to see if I can get through any of it any better this year. Looks like I can -- as long as it's all open chords I'm getting relatively adept. And I learned 2 new open chords last night... Am7 and Dm7.

Got the hole in Vicki's car fixed a couple of weeks ago. Rust spot over the back right fender. Then the master cylinder went out so we got that fixed. Nothing like a non-rusty car that stops.

Finished testing Mom's new computer (that's Mom Fort Wayne, not Mom Lonedell) -- ordered a copy of XP for it and also bought Trend Micro's Internet Security suite for it. Slapped MSN 8 and Messenger 6.1 and AIM on it. I think that Wordpad is plenty of word processor for her purposes, so we won't bother with Office or anything like that.

Brian & Jess will be coming out for Brian's birthday this weekend. Haven't seen Jess in a while. She's such a sweetie. Don't know how much of her we'll see over the holidays.

Speaking of those... Need to get the house ready (clean and repaired) for the holidays anyway. The dining room chandalier needs to be repaired and there's a patch on the wall in the living room I need to fix from a piece of furniture dinging it. Gotta clean out the bird-bath and put the stock tank heater in it for the winter, clean off the deck.... get wood for winter fires....

The drums keep pounding the rhythm to the brain.....

Half of what I say is meaningless

...But I say it just to reach you, Julia

First, held Garage Sale Part II -- same lousy weather as Part I, and even less business. Oh well. Pack it up and wait until Spring.

Saturday night we went to a barn party for Vicki's work... had deep fried turkey and George Dickel Whiskey. Al Jolly played music along with some people Vicki works with. The guy on the slide guitar is really good.

Connie and I attempted to dance. We're really lousy so we make good partners -- good to amuse people, anyway. Oh well, we just said everyone would just figure we were drunk.... which wouldn't be horribly far from the truth but it's not the reason why we can't dance. Vicki and Sam are both good dancers so Connie and I figure hey, it's a good thing that they can actually have fun with someone who knows how and we'll just stumble through every now and then ourselves just so we can say we tried.

Sam and I never got around to playing guitars.... we're not stage performers... more like living-room and campfire players. But there was plenty of company and plenty to do so we never actually got them out.

Sunday we drove out to Lonedell. Stopped in Washington to visit Dad in the hospital. He's being a surpisingly good patient. Even surprised himself, I think. Anyway, sounds like the blood clot's gone and if he is diabetic it's just borderline. He went home Monday. Anyway we continued on to Lonedell and met Aunt Julie and our... now I can never figure this stuff out.... son of a cousin is a.... first cousin once removed? Second cousin? Anyway, the baby, Logan. Cute baby. Victor (cousin) wasn't there -- he was bringing his sister (obviously another cousin) Stephanie back from Florida. Aunt Julie's still a pretty lady and seems to enjoy the baby (her grandchild -- getting all this?)

Jef, Joel & Dawn, and Tom & BJ were there. Another couple from Mom & Dad's church came to relieve Aunt Julie of looking after Mom (she had to go back and close on her house) and we had good food, etc.

Took dad's John Wayne movies back with us to drop them off for him at the hospital and did that, drove the rest of the two hours home. And crashed into bed immediately... zzzzzzzzz!

I have a Toshiba laptop on a trial basis to get working for Mom (Vicki's mom, that is) to replace her MSN companion. I'm checking out how it runs Windows XP. It's just a PII, but it does have 160MB of memory. Seems to run OK -- if I'm happy with it I'll have to go buy a copy of it. Otherwise I think it'll have to be Windows ME. I'm just a little concerned about compatibility issues in a year or two. Probably shouldn't be, though.

Unfortunately right now I can't test her MSN stuff on it because MSN's signup server is out and -- well apparently your passport/password isn't really your dialup authentication and it needs to go out to the passport signup server to get your REAL dialup userid... sigh. It's been down about a day.

Well, that's all for this morning.