Welcoming New Year
With Champagne and Theraflu
Bye Twenty Twenty.
Not just bye bye, 2020, but good frigging riddance. What a year.
Just because the rest of the year had already been so very much fun, Christmas Day for us turned out to be one of our strangest yet, as evidenced from this, my Facebook post for the day:
Well, 2020 has certainly been a year for the record books, and Christmas Day is no exception.
First, Christmas Eve and Day are thus far our coldest of the year, as Christmas Eve went from a high of 48 down to 19 degrees, with a high today of 24, and down to a low of 14 tomorrow morning.
Then, I awoke this morning to the realization that we had no running water. Yikes! Our utility's after hours service told me that they had a mains leak, and were working to restore it ASAP, which they did a couple of hours later.
Then, later this morning, as Marek and I were texting Christmas greetings to friends and family, we both lost service, and when I checked my router, it showed that our mobile broadband was disconnected.
Oh comfort and joy.
So evidently there was a suspicious explosion originating From an RV parked in front of the ATT building in downtown Nashville, which not only took out wireless phone and internet service over a wide area, but also their local 911 service, and planes flying in and out of BNA had to be grounded.
And, as one commenter noted, with nearly all businesses closed until Monday, no 911 service, and plenty of time to open the safe(s) of their choosing, it will be interesting to see who the real target was, when the dust settles.
So now, over five hours later, our phones are still dead in the water, and we're literally sitting beside the closed McDonald's in Sparta using their wifi, which is the only reason I have any idea what is going on.
Joy to the World!!!
I hope everyone is having a more restful and joyous experience than we are at the moment!
This too shall pass.
Merry Christmas, everyone, and blessings for us all to have a FAR better year in 2021.
The irony of course is that I'm not much of a Facebook fan, and I had planned on making a long Hive post that day, but after we lost all internet connections, including both cell phones, our home phone, and both internet routers (all with AT&T), we were dead in the water so to speak, and the only place we could get a connection was literally sitting in the parking lot of the closed McDonald's in Sparta.
Ridiculous, I know. But we were entirely without communications for nearly three full days.
Welcome 2021 and PLEASE prove to be a FAR BETTER YEAR FOR US ALL!!!
As for Theraflu versus natural medicine, we were using both, as Marek came home from the road half sick, and I developed symptoms a couple of days later. He of course apologized for "giving" me Covid, but honestly I think we caught it independently, as there had really not been enough incubation time for him to have been the one I caught it from.
In any case, we immediately started taking spiced honey, elderberry, and other antivirals, and it did keep our symptoms fairly mild, with our primary symptom being one of exhaustion, and sleeping far more than normal. But, frankly, my sleep patterns have been crap of late, and I haven't had nearly enough sleep in recent weeks, so in a way Covid has been a way for my body to simply force me to sleep and recover.
We've also been drinking a LOT of hydrogen enriched water, as one of our presents to each other this Christmas was a small hydrogen generator, and that has helped immeasurably, if for no other reason than we both LOVE the water, and are therefore drinking far more water than before we started using it. I've already noticed a number of health benefits from doing so.
In any case, while driving home from Cookeville a few days ago, this song came on from my thumb drive, and seemed to perfectly sum up the way I was feeling, so I decided to share it here.
Please enjoy, and if you like the music, please purchase it from the band's website here.
Untamed – Lunatic soul – from the album, "Under the Fragmented Sky"
Lyrics (by Mariusz Duda):
So it's done
You’ve won the fight
War is over
You can stop
Don't mind them
They don't deserve
They’ll keep snarling
Nursing hate
Welcome back
You're wide awake
Nightmare's over
No more pain
You took the strain
Got through the night
There's a way to make it right
And it's going to be the best story of your life
Maybe you don't want to believe
That you have your chance now
Inner dreads remain unchained
Maybe you have just gotten used
To your constant waiting
For another tidal wave
But your war is finally done
And you have to deal with that
So it's done
You've won the fight
War is over
You can stop
You took the strain
Got through the night
There’s a way to make it right
And it’s going to be the best story of your life
And it's going to be the best story of your life
And it’s going to be the best story of your life
And it's going to be the best story of your life
I've written before about, and have shared music from Lunatic Soul, one of my favorite artists, which is a solo project from the lead man of Poland's first rate progressive band Riverside, Mariusz Duda.
Based in my husband's home town of Warsaw, Poland, Duda is a musical force to be reckoned with, as he is the lead man, driving force, lyricist, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist behind Riverside, and Lunatic Soul, who have both been high on my list of favorite artists for the past twelve years and counting.
He also regularly comes up with, and performs my favorite bass lines in contemporary music, as well as peppering his music with lovely little Baroque themes, which are a big part of why I love his music so much, and of what drew me to love progressive rock in the first place when I was a kid.
Whereas Riverside is typically cast more as progressive metal, Lunatic Soul is something more along the lines of art rock, although both projects are increasingly hard to classify objectively, as Duda's musical influences are wide ranging and increasingly sophisticated.
He himself calls his music melancholic rock, which I think fits better than the other classifications used, although this song, like the last I shared in a post, is considerably more upbeat than that phrase might suggest.
As a poet and lyricist myself, I understand how difficult it is to successfully craft a song that encompasses universal themes, and yet Duda succeeds repeatedly, despite writing lyrics in his second language . . . which is no mean feat.
Add to that the fact that he is my current favorite bassist, and solidly in my top three favorite vocalists, which speaks very well for his musicianship overall.
As the daughter of two musicians, with a jazz pianist father, and a classical pianist mother; it is unsurprising that much of my life is colored and largely defined by the music with which I have been surrounded.
When I met my now-husband, Marek, in 2006, as the child of a jazz musician father himself, he was deeply missing the music store he had owned and operated in Brooklyn, NY, for nine years, so it is equally unsurprising that we began bonding, initially, over music.
Music is, after all, the universal language. Whether a toddler humming softly to herself, a musician paddling out into Puget Sound to play flute to the local orcas, a rock band or a symphony orchestra, music gives us so very much, and helps to make even the hardest times more bearable.
Thank you all for hanging in with me. I love you more than you know. ;-)
Be blessed, be well and happy, and stay safe out there!
And welcome to the New Year 2021 -
And it's going to be the best story of our lives!
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!!!