Eric's House Of Ego

A wonderful school is in danger of closing. Everything is explained here. Help them out if you can! Spread the word if you can't!
https://www.gofundme.com/f/saving-dreamflight

Lawrence Dean, Cat Greenberg, Ju Honisch & Katy Droege-Macdonald, Harmony Heifers, Harold Groot, Rhodri James, Nancy Louise Freeman, Capplor, Bardz At Large, Suzette Haden-Elgin & Randy Farran, Clam Chowder, Dandelion Wine, Foot Pound Force, Bryan Baker

Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.

filkcast.com

And I kinda stuck to it as well.

( my FHoF speech )

As we generally do, we are taking January off from FilkCast. But we don't want to leave you without music for those 5 weeks. So we are leaving it up to you.
Give us your favorite filk song. Yes, just one, if you give us more than one ('cause choosing one can be hard, I know, oh, and Hope Eyrie is already on the list) Lizzie will dig into her massive collection of dice and roll for it!
We will take all of the songs mentioned and make all music shows out of them. If we don't have a song mentioned, we will do our best to go find it!
Help us play FilkCast the home game!

This was the second time I have had the good luck for this amazing event to happen near enough that I could witness it.

I have lived an interesting life. I have seen (and done) a lot of amazing things.

I almost walked right past the Mona Lisa. This was before the various problems over the years, and it was presented like it was just another work.
I spent hours with the paintings of Claude Monet, always my favorite.
I have spent hours staring at A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
I have seen Niagara Falls (and will again in two weeks) and been on the Maid Of The Mist.
I have taken the Cass Scenic Railway to the top of Bald Knob in West Virginia.
I have stood at the foot of Mont Blanc.
I have climbed the stairs to the top of the Duomo in Florence.
I have seen the David, and walked towards it past the Prisoners & Slaves.
I have seen the moon rise over a very still Adriatic Sea, casting a reflection in the water as far as I could see.
I have walked on the Acropolis.
As an aside, that week I stayed in a hotel in the red light district of Athens.
I have stood on the stage of the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus.
I took a train through Yugoslavia in 1975, well before it opened to the world. Everything was grey, and the guards were terrifying.
I took a train through valleys of Switzerland.
I have seen a couple dozen cathedrals all over England and Europe.
I went on a boat trip on Loch Ness. Nessie ignored us.
I have been on the Autobahn and saw a car pass us so fast I couldn't make out what it was.
I have taken a train over the 9000+ ft tall mountains just west of Denver.
I have scrambled up the sides of mountains in West Virginia.
I have driven along the Eastern Continental Divide many times.
I lived for a summer in Rae-Edzo on the Great Slave Lake in the NW Territories. It never quite got dark.

None of that compares to seeing a full eclipse in person. It is rare that I am without something to say, but I really have no words to describe the feeling. It's the greatest thing I have ever seen. And that I was able to share both of these moments with the love of my life makes it even more wonderful.

Actually pretty good. The last couple of months I have had back problems which are almost entirely resolved. I had to sleep semi-sitting up on the recliner for a month or so. Laying down caused a lot of pain.

I am slowly coming back to playing guitar. My hands are doing very well. I don't have my speed up, nor my calluses where I want them yet, but I'm getting there.

My lungs are good, I mean really good. I am not as worried this winter about them. Doesn't mean that I am taking too many chances, but less stress is good.

And of course there is the whole thing with us asking for some help, and our friends taking that as a dare. The response helped us immensely and gave us a piece of mind that we have not had in a couple of years. I can never be able to properly express my thanks.

The Shifting City project keeps, well, shifting. I am still looking for the point of view for the lyrics. I am on story line #4 now. Three of them are connected and the direction I am going seems promising. I have all this music, I need words.

FilkCast is done for the year. We put together a month of just music shows and they are already uploaded and scheduled so we have 5 weeks off. Our intention is to get a lot more done with our music in that time.

My weight is a problem, I am the heaviest I have ever been. I still can't get around well, but now that the holidays are over a lot of the temptation is gone. Back to no soda, no chocolate, no fast food, a lot less sugar and simpler snacky things.

Having the trike at the end of the summer helped a lot, but I need something with a more powerful engine. I can still only do so much of the pedaling myself, and not having pedal assist means that even the slightest inclines become difficult if not impossible. We do have a place nearby where I can go several miles with no real struggle. I want spring to get here so I can get back to that.

The new car is ridiculous. We're slowly digging into what that screen does. It came with a few months of Sirius radio, so Lizzie has been listening to nothing but Christmas music since we got it. We were listening to the pop Xmas channel and became the musical MST3K. We've spent several evenings wandering around town looking at Christmas lights. It's our favorite thing to do this time of year.

It gets amazing gas mileage, we can't wait to take it on the road to see what it gets there. Once again, we would not have had the means to be able to do this if it wasn't for the help from our friends.

Our passports expired in 2019, not too long after we got back from England. We sent off the renewals yesterday. That means that FKO is a definite possibility. We need to see our friends.

We're still not dealing with people well. 14 months of isolation did both of us a lot of damage, physically and mentally. Hopefully there will be a couple of road trips and a couple more cons in 2024.

Speaking of which, who will be in Indianapolis for the eclipse? Talk has gone around about there being filk happening somewhere. There are a lot of filkers in the area, and since Lizzie's family lives there, it's where we're going to see the eclipse.

This ended up a lot longer than I thought. If you got this far, say hi, I need to hear from people. I do feel isolated sometimes. Not as badly as I did, but we really don't go much of anywhere, especially with it being so hard for me to get around. We are heading to Winter SACC in a few hours, see some local friends, play some music. We intend to drop in on the 24 Hour New Years Filk tomorrow.

This year has been hard, but it is ending well. Now to make next year better.

Next week we are playing our first online show in a very long time.
We will be playing in the Festival Of The Living Rooms at 6pm mountain time Saturday Dec 9th.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1344170922891907

We didn't want to do this, but we have no real choice. It's all in the GFM description.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/transmission-died-this-was-the-bridge-too-far

It has been a matter of question for some time as to how my guitar playing was going to go. I was having all kinds of problems with my hands. Trigger finger in my left index finger, so playing anything where I had to bend that back was almost impossible. My right index finger and thumb were in pretty much constant pain. I can’t lift things very well, so just putting on a guitar is difficult/.

I worked out what was bothering my right hand, and took out out of the equation. I have very little pain or stiffness now.

I pinged my doctor about the left hand, ready to go talk to the surgeon who has worked on my hands before. My doctor wanted to see me first. I ended up with a shot, something different than what the surgeon has given me before, and ya know … it worked. Playing a D chord hurt … a lot. I had to snap my index finger back straight, and that sent a surge of pain through my entire body. I had been playing in alternate tunings, playing songs that took one or two fingers to play, and even that hurt. Last week I picked up a guitar and ran through some chords. The real problems, D, Am and Dm were all easy. My hands are weak, but that is just a matter of playing every day.

We have our second show this year next month, and that is a real frustration. Not that we have a show, but that it is only our second. I’m still hoping on getting a place to play locally, but that is still elusive.

My old bouzouki has gotten to where it is probably more effort to fix it up than replace it. It needs a fret job, a new bridge, the neck may need to be trued. I have a Sweetwater credit card and don’t have to pay things off for months to years. I have a lovely Gold Tone bouzouki. I hate the strings, they are brutally heavy, but lighter strings are on the way (The strings I used on the old instrument are too light for this). She is taking a bit of getting used to, but we are coming to terms with each other. Lizzie says her name is Angelique.

We went to Wisconsin this weekend to see Alexander James Adams play. We really shouldn’t have spent the money, but we desperately needed a bit of road time. Traveling is so much of who we are, and we have done so little even as the world has become a little more sane. It was worth every penny. We saw great music in a great place. We saw dear, dear friends who we do not see often enough.

Then today I contact my CPAP provider to see how I was doing on the requirements for the insurance.

We owe a fair amount of money for health related things right now. We have monthly payments going out, which take up all the money we would normally spend for things like travel and cons. Today I was told that I was not in compliance, and insurance would not pay for the CPAP. So we’re another grand in debt. So now I feel like a complete idiot for taking a road trip and for buying an instrument.

I’m hoping on being able to get out of all this medical debt in a year, and the rest in two years. We’ll see how that goes.

The podcast is both wonderful and a strain. It gets hard to pick songs. Our library has grown to ridiculous levels. But people are being more vocal about it. There was a great deal of silence for a very long time, and that makes someone who suffers from impostor syndrome, well, get very worried. Thank you to everyone who has said nice things. We need to hear that.

The trike riding continues. We about to the end of the season for that, but we are going to continue for as long as we can.

I worry about diving back into the depression I was in for much of the last several years. We both need to find ways to find joy. We need to play, we need shows. Cons are out of the question generally, since they cost so much. We are doing the two Iowa cons, and those because they have both been so good to us. We need to finish the re-writing of two albums, and see about getting them recorded, but that is more money than we have, and more than I think we can raise. I have two finished songs for my synth project. I need to get those properly recorded, mixed and released. And it’s so hard. Lizzie’s job can be kind of mind-numbing. It takes so much of her energy. Mine is mind-numbing in a totally different way.

I need to get myself playing guitar (or something like it) every day. I need to do the same with my synths. Getting better sleep because of the CPAP has made me sharper. So I am more inclined to be creative. I need to keep that going.

We need to find a local place to play. The problem is that original music has very few outlets in this town, and even fewer for an acoustic duo.

Life continues to be a struggle, but I am more hopeful than I have been. Although it is likely that some that is the anti-anxiety meds. I turn 65 at the end of the year, so all of my medical stuff is going to change. We’ll see how that goes.

So how are you?

We hit a milestone this morning. 50,000 DLs on FilkCast.

I didn’t expect this to fly. I figured there would be a few episodes, and then gone. I did not expect 215 episodes, 50k DLs, and that does not include SciFi.Radio listens.

We’re coming up on 5 years. The November 8th show will be fun, our celebration of that time.

Thank you everyone for your continuing support.