1. Today was the busiest day of the year at our house. We had a new heating and cooling system installed. Four guys worked on that. An electrician chipped in his efforts. Later, a fifth guy came to help cut out a couple of vents in the basement. To top it all off, Brock came by and showed us why our drier wasn't working. I'd made a simple error. The drier is back in operation again!
My concern, going into this day, was how Gibbs, Copper, and Luna would respond to so many people working, making noise, going in and out of the Vizio room, and so on.
Gibbs was a champ. Once he and the HVAC guys got acquainted, he was calm and accepting of all the activity.
Likewise (thank goodness), Copper and Luna simply found places in the Vizio room where they felt secure -- no different than their daily routine in that room -- and showed no signs of being upset.
2. The house cleared out around 4:00 or so after about seven hours of everyone's work getting done. Debbie and I hustled over to the The Depot to debrief a bit and talk about other details in our funny little life together.
Until today, I had never ordered a gin martini at The Depot. The woman working the bar was a little bit tentative about mixing me one, but I figured I'll go for it. See what happens. Love the one you're with. So I ordered a Dry Fly gin martini. I enjoyed it. I also thought it could be oh so slightly improved. I asked the bartender if I could have a small taste of the Dry Fly gin straight. She poured me about a half a shot. I shared it with Debbie. Yes, I thought, I would like my second martini to have more gin, less vermouth. The bartender and I talked about it -- she told me about the recipe she'd used and we agreed it called for too much vermouth.
The second martini was more to my liking.
By the way, she prepared both martinis James Bond style: shaken not stirred.
This was my first ever shaken martini.
It worked.
Maybe in the future sometime I'll ask for a stirred martini at The Depot -- or, maybe, since variety is the spice of life, I'll drink stirred martinis elsewhere and let The Depot be my home for a shaken martini.
It's all good.
3. After a couple martinis and eating the superb chicken noodles Debbie made for dinner, it was the perfect time to bring Luna and Copper into the bedroom, put my ear buds in, and spend three hours in the supine position and listen to Hard Rain and Slow Trains for an hour and then two hours of Deadish.
Because Dan has been tied up with his trip to the Bob Dylan Center's opening in Tulsa, for the third straight week he played a rebroadcast of a show from March 12, 2020.
He and Jeff were co-hosts then. When this show broadcast, the severity of the pandemic was unknown, and Dan and Jeff were eagerly anticipating Bob Dylan playing live shows in Bend and Eugene in June of 2020. Those shows never happened. (Great new, though! Dylan will perform in Eugene soon -- June 5th and in Bend on June 27th.)
This March 12, 2020 episode's title is "Dylan on Stage in Oregon".
Dan and Jeff played Bob Dylan live at the EMU Ballroom from a show in 1999. They also played live Eugene performances of The Pixies, Gillian Welch, and Old Crow Medicine Show. I really enjoyed when they turned their attention to one of Dylan's opening acts, Hot Club of Cowtown and additional tracks of some tried and true Western Swing from decades ago.
For me, much of the enjoyment I derive from listening to Hard Rain/Slow Trains is learning more and more what an expansive artist Bob Dylan is -- more expansive than I could ever say in this single paragraph -- but I'll say this: Dylan's love of all kinds of music inspires me to be more receptive myself to all kinds of musical styles. I first began to realize this back when I listened to Dylan's Theme Time Radio and Hard Rain/Slow Trains has further deepened my experience with the depth and breadth of music to enjoy.
From 9-11, Jeff presented another superb show on Deadish.
Tonight it was wall to wall Grateful Dead as Jeff played about an hour's worth of music from two Grateful Dead shows performed on May 19th.
He focused the first hour on a show from 1966 at the Avalon Ballroom. From my limited point of view, this is an early Grateful Dead show. The tunes Jeff played from this show were mostly bluesy ones. The songs were relatively short and energetic. I could hear as clearly as I ever have just how indebted the Grateful Dead are to the blues, even as they explored other styles of expression as the group evolved.
I experienced the second hour of Deadish as a kind of Grateful Dead symphony. Starting with "Terrapin Station" and the band moved through adventurous versions of "Playing in the Band", "Uncle John's Band", and into Drums as prelude to a gorgeous and tantalizingly lengthy opening to "The Wheel". Like a symphony that travels roads far away from its beginning only to return to them again, in this set of songs the Grateful Dead played a beautiful "China Doll" only to segue back into "Playing in the Band" with touches of "Terrapin Station". This series of songs from the second set were remarkably tight forays into improvisation and exploration and made for a supremely satisfying hour of the Grateful Dead simply putting on a transcendent performance.
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