Hello

Hey everyone,

Sorry it's been so long since I last posted.

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year's. My Christmas was as wonderful as usual, and my New Year's was as uneventful as usual...so by my estimation everything was perfect.

One of the really nice things about Christmas is how it brings the whole family together for a few weeks, and this year was no exception. The Christmas was made even more special because we had little baby Summer with us. She's an amazing baby. She has the perfect temper and she rarely stops smiling.

While we were all together my dad created a minus track for the song "A Final Dream" from the album Beethoven's Last Night so my sister, Katie, could record a lullaby for her baby. She did an amazing job. I can't think of a more beautiful lullaby.

A Final Dream

In other news I tried to record that song I was working on, Asturias, but I really struggled to get a nice recording. My big problem was my fingernails were a little bit too short. Also, I haven't been playing the song much lately so I was a little bit rusty. Hopefully I'll get a good copy finished during the next few days to share on here. That was a really hard song to learn and I'd like to have it recorded.

In other other news, I had a really strange dream a few nights ago. I think it might have been caused by the combination of watching A Christmas Carol and all the family interrogation regarding why I'm not married yet (happens every year around the holidays).

As usual, the marital prodding started out with kind wishes...things like, "I hope you have someone next year" etc. After everyone got that out of their system we started the problem solving portion of the discussion. This goes something like "Well, if you did X then Y would probably happen." You can substitute X with anything from "be kind" to "never take a girl on a date to a hospital," and Y with anything from "not freak people out" to "get married."

Anyway, after defending my singleness (and not even a few weeks ago watching A Christmas Carol) I had a dream where I was sort of put on trial and I had to defend my dating past. I guess that isn't too similar to the situation in the Dickens' classic, but it had a similar feel because I was dressed like Scrooge, it happened at night, and I was constantly referring to everyone ruining my slumber as "spirit."

Actually, now that I think about it there was a little bit of Defending your Life in my dream. That's an older comedy starring Al Brooks where, after his death, he had to defend a few key moments of his life from a relentless prosecutor and show that he had behaved correctly.

Well, in this dream I sat in a remarkably comfortable nightshirt all Scroogelike and I was visited by a spirit that accused me of pushing everyone away. Then, the spirit paraded a whole bunch of girls from my past and I had to explain why things didn't work out.

Sometimes it was really easy. For some all I had to say was something like "She was really really dumb and I only took her on one date cause I thought it would be fun....I stopped calling cause I didn't want to have really really dumb kids." Other times I could say "She wasn't a very good person." After these simple explanations the Ghost would just nod and then move on.

The difficult part was later in the dream. The more recent girls I've dated from the past few years were brought up and they weren't dismissed as easily. Each time one of their faded and slightly translucent images appeared I felt like I was making up excuses. The conviction I felt with the earlier manifestations disappeared. Eventually I just had to admit that, regarding one girl, the thing that had ruined our relationship was fear; I had ruined everything because I was afraid. When I admitted that the spirit looked pretty disappointed with me (always a bad idea to make the spirit mad).

What was the most frustrating was how poorly I argued my position in the dream. I've never been handled so well...that spirit really knew what he was doing. He made me look like a stammering, romantically challenged idiot.

Well, I better get on with my day. That was my dream. I know it was pretty strange. Please keep your psychoanalysis to yourself :) I'm only sharing it cause I thought it was pretty funny. If dreams really are the unsorted files from our daily memories than I think my unsorted files are about 30 percent movies, 30 percent classic literature, 50 percent guilt, and 10 percent basic addition.

Hope you all have a wonderful day!