Jan 26, 2014

Sweet, Sweet Jasmine: 1999 - Jan.21, 2014

Those of you who have followed The Poundry for the last few months are aware that we had been trying to work with our vet and Jasmine to rehabilitate her broken leg since I tripped over her back in June of last year. That's a long damned time!  Seven months translated into dog years, with adjustments for Jasmine's size, becomes something like three years of rehab for our sweet little girl.  Yikes!  Can you imagine that much time with your leg bandaged? That much time hobbling from one pillow to another, waiting for someone to bring you your meals and to carry you outside to use the bathroom?  Jasmine had always been a puppy at heart, and her unbridled playfulness probably complicated her recovery at first, and gave us a false sense of progress that made it that much tougher when things started to get more difficult a month ago.  We lost Jasmine to pneumonia Tuesday afternoon.  That is a loss we will carry with us forever.

Jan 20, 2014

Homework: Working Out Drum Beats Without a Kit

Time, it's one of the two things all of us would like to have more of in order to accomplish the things we fantasize about. The other is of course, money.  In a perfect world we all have plenty of time to do whatever we want and no one needs money to provide the basic necessities of life.  Our coolness causes everything to work out effortlessly.  We are all Ferris Bueller in our own heads.  In my head, throngs of people cheer me on everywhere I go.  There are tamale trees around every corner, and water fountains flow with the sweet nectar we call iced tea.  Not that god awful, bitter leaf juice that sophisticates drink in coffee houses, or that offensively fruity crap that companies try to pass off as a drinkable substitute for real tea.  I am talking about the good stuff; sweet, southern iced tea.  You can't find it north of Virginia, at any point west of North Carolina or south of South Carolina. The good stuff is found here, in this little beverage oasis the rest of you look down upon, though half of you retire here. In a Sheltopian society, Mexican and Indian food mysteriously appear whenever I begin to feel hungry, and there are no bills to pay.  Sounds nice, doesn't it?  That's what allows me the time I need to write all of my drum parts for Confessor and Loincloth in that perfect world where album pre-sales always lift your releases to "platinum" status before you even go into the studio. Sadly, here on Earth things are very different.