6/19/17

i'm thankful that this week's band practice was really fun. i'm thankful that though i miss the presence of our lead singer, their absence this summer has made it possible for us to do a lot of improvisational jamming, which is my favorite thing to do and a bit harder to do with a singer. i'm thankful that the parents of our guitar player were visiting from utah and came by our practice for a while. i'm thankful that i went out of my way to tell them how respected she is at work, which made her cry happy tears. i'm thankful how happy and proud her parents were to watch her playing and singing with us. i'm thankful that after they left, we played musical chairs with our instruments. i'm thankful to have enjoyed playing both keyboard and lead guitar. i'm thankful for how different guitar feels to me after playing bass for so long. i'm thankful that our drummer played bass and i'm thankful for how she kept shaking out her hands after a few seconds and saying how tired they felt, which made me feel good because i'm always watching her drumming and it's so intensely physical that i can't even imagine how she can continue to do it as the rest of us pick and flick away with her hands . i'm thankful that we are practicing on thursday this week because she has a weightlifting competition in louisville next weekend. i'm thankful that playing with the band makes me want to play music at home, which is something i haven't done much of for a long time. i'm thankful for my latest evening solo jam, which our keyboardist compared accurately (in spirit) to castlevania music. i'm thankful that i could roughly harmonize distorted guitars basically forever.

i'm thankful that saturday we went out to our favorite restaurant for dinner. i'm thankful for the smoked trout dip with crudite and root vegetable chips; i'm thankful for the salmon tacos, which pointed at a strange overlap between smoked salmon and chorizo; i'm thankful for the fried frogs legs, which were both impossibly crispy and incredibly juicy. i'm thankful that though we were going to get ceviche it took too long for them to make it so we didn't get it, which was probably a good thing (i'm thankful for the verb "acidulate"). i'm thankful for the fancy ice cream sandwich we had for dessert; i'm thankful that though my allegiance will always be to the basic cheap ice cream sandwich with the wafer the melts against your tongue, this ice cream sandwich, which had a hard, dense toothsome wafer around cheesecake semifreddo, was really fucking good and one of the best desserts i've ever eaten. i'm thankful for the quattros leches cake we got, which was also great, though paled a bit in comparison. i'm thankful to have captured d's dessert choosing algorithm for posterity.

i'm thankful that yesterday we went on a long walk, which turned out to be a much longer walk than we had anticipated (i'm thankful for how d noted that there could be a history of our relationship that just focuses on unintentionally long walks we have taken, usually because of a mistake or miscalculation i have made). i'm thankful that near the kroger, we passed by the first apartment i lived in here, which was in a building with yellow siding across the street from a halfway house. i'm thankful that the apartment was a pretty terrible apartment but that i loved it and that i spent so much time with d there. i'm thankful as we continued our walk, with the goal of me getting to see the house we're going to live in next year, which i hadn't seen in person yet because i waived my participation in that research and decision making process, we realized that the house was in a very different spot than either of us had imagined it was, requiring us to walk a long way on the shoulder of a busy road to get there. i'm thankful that though this made me slightly stressed at first, i'm sure the house will be a great place to live and even if there are problems, they will probably be problems like an unintentionally long walk is a problem, which is, while sometimes tiring or frustrating, not really a problem and still overall a positive experience. i'm thankful that on our way back, we took a wooded trail instead of the busy road and i'm thankful for the shade of the canopy above us. i'm thankful for the sensation of returning home after a long walk.