Really quick before I start actually working

I just want to say that the light outside looks incredible. It's been raining all morning, but we're on a break at the moment and the sky is this intense blue with white-white puffy cumulus clouds over the golf course, and the rain has turned the grass a healthy green. I love the fresh clean radiance that rain brings. It's energizing. It almost seems worth working to sit next to this big window and witness it all.

Last night was lovely as well. Molly and I played through the old folk songs we haven't touched in ages, made soup, watched the Good Life, and then Hajera and I popped in on the 5th String holiday party. I didn't bring my banjo because it's heavy and it was raining outside, but I slipped my picks in my pocket, drank a few glasses of wine, borrowed a tuner and sat on a stool with a banjo on my lap. Everyone was there. I mean, not Everyone, but still.

All my favorite 5th String kids (some of whom are probably in their 50s and 60s...) and Jimbo Trout (who was a total sweetheart to me even after I bungled my attempt at a Cripple Creek solo) and a bunch of other people I've seen play around town. They played mostly songs I didn't know, so I tuned a ukulele and tried to find someone playing chords that I could copy. Once we started playing everything in G (as in, once there were only banjos and guitar left) I could almost figure out what the guitar chords were and got better at recognizing the banjo chords even when people were picking them (and kept moving their fingers and not using the whole chord).

These people are all amazing musicians. It was so cool to be playing with them, even if by "playing" I mean bobbing my head and smiling. The other banjo boy kept smiling at me sympathetically when the piss drunk old Japanese man almost fell on top of me trying to play the bass or when he stuck his ear about six inches from my ukulele (then a snazzy Martin on sale for a mere $1600 - really why should you bring your own banjo, when you can play their $6000 one?) and exclaimed that I was doing a great job and should insist on playing a ukulele solo. There was a funny German woman whose tattooed, leather covered and metal studded daughter spent the party passed out on the floor of the guitar room. She also had this incredible fur lined pointy leather hat that looked like it could have come from the set of Genghis Khan. If she'd've been conscious longer, I would have complimented her on it. The guitar/ukulele boy with the curly brown hair accompanied me home on BART. That whole scene is a big barrel o' sweetness.

Anyway, a good time was had by all.