Last night I’m sitting in my bed working on the .NET project on the laptop, with the iMac blaring Richie Havens, my father was downstairs tinkering around in his office and he walked into my bedroom. “Hey…this is…Lionel Richie…Havens right?”
“Umm, Richie Havens.”
“Exactly.”

After I got over him calling Richie Havens Lionel Richie, I realized what was playing was Freedom which was Richie’s last encore when he opened Woodstock. Havens played for nearly three hours to open the greatest concert ever and he closed his set with Freedom which was a complete improvisation of Motherless Child, an old spiritual. To this day, I hold Freedom as my favorite vocal performance of all time. I challenge you to find something with more emotion than this and bear in mind, Richie was making up the words as he’s going. This is pure love and heart. The band is just kind of following him, providing some back-up percussion and guitars. He walked off the stage, exhausted with the crowd still clapping along to the groove he put down.

Well, I tearfully dropped the kids and Dana off at the airport. I haven’t heard from them, but that’s somewhat expected. All of them have colds and after a 2 hour flight and probable 3 hour drive to her family’s house in shitty Atlanta traffic, they were probably asleep when they walked in. On my way home, I stopped in and fed the lizard (note: I really did feed the my son’s bearded dragon, that’s not a euphemism for anything), picked up my happier-than-a-pig-in-shit-to-see-daddy Golden Retriever, Yogi, and checked on the cats (whom I found each on opposing couches I could tell they were very happy to not have the short people chasing them all day).

I got home ate dinner, made a compilation CD for Jan and Doug (we’ve started making Cheer Up Van CDs – which has turned into a heated competition between those two siblings), worked on the .NET project, and then watched some TV and slept. I took a bike ride over to my house, checked on the lizard (again, no euphemism intended) and headed back to get ready for work.

I’m planning on doing the leaves at my house and cleaning up the yard. In hopes that there’s some decent weather when Van and Viv get home, I’d like them to be able to play out back some. I need to fix the dishwasher and do some dishes that were left behind. Then I’ll hopefully start moving the studio to my new pad and start on that conversion.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 9:16 am and is filed under .net, biking, family, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.