Write while I can....

Blogger has been down all morning. I was well prepared, had my morning all planned around a 10:30 hole for a doctor appointment, but life, as they say, got in the way. At around 9 o'clock I figured out I wasn't going to have time to post anything, so I decided to hop in the car and do my errands. That brought me back here at 10:15, just in time to empty the car and rush back out to meet the doctor. I got there right on time....only to wait a half-hour for him to see me! Oh, he apologized, and later on I heard something about his being at a nursing home, so God knows what unexpected professional duties this rheumatologist was performing to make him so late. But it's still galling to break your butt to keep up your end of the bargain only to have the butt-breaking not reciprocated. In the end, he only spent ten minutes with me anyway, just long enough for me to tell him the pain in my elbows is gone thanks to the medicine he gave me, and to ask for more of it. Won't be seeing him for another three months.

Blogger was still down when I got back from the doctor, so I had lunch. While I ate, I decided to play a show I had recorded a few weeks ago and never got around to watching, a Frank Sinatra special on Turner Classic Movies. It was one of those "Man And His Music" specials he did back in the 1960s, and what a show it was. He had Antonio Carlos Jobim and Ella Fitzgerald with him in this 1967 production and they were worth the price of the Comcast subscription. Jobim and his bossa nova were the hottest things on the musical horizon at that moment, and Sinatra did four numbers with Jobim accompanying him on the guitar, just lovely. (These were obviously companion pieces to the album and and Jobim had just put out, but there was no overt plugging.)

And Ella! What a treasure, and how lucky I was to share the planet with such a creature for just a few years. She and Sinatra do a version of "The Lady Is A Tramp" that just about burns the house down. We do have our own musical thrills now, yes, but we will never again see the particular combination of energy and talent preserved on that show. I plan to put it on a DVD, so if anybody would like me to copy it and send it to you, just say the word and it's yours.

We are being blessed with unseasonably gorgeous weather these days--I hate to rub it in on you poor souls who are suffering one rainy day after another. We, too, had a record-setting May for rain, but we are having an exceedingly pleasant respite at the moment. The humidity is low and the temperatures are in the 70s. This can't last forever, and there is heavy landscaping work outside with my name on it. It's time for me to go and dirty my hands.