Musical Memories

It has been a busy few days getting ready for the holidays. Friday Deb Parsley and I played Santa’s helpers and hauled a pick up truck full of toys out to the Beaver Dam for the Christmas Party that is occurring on Monday. The photo below is before we loaded them up to haul over to the school.

After we finished I went and caught up with Dorothy and Andy and my neighbor Jan and we went and played some Pickleball. Our friend Tom Johnson also came by and joined us. It was a beautiful day for it.

Then I came home and started working on getting ready for our neighbor hood toast of the trees event. I co-hosted with Scott and Jill Mills who live down the street from me. I made a couple of different things to have at the party.

One was Grinch Jell-O shots. They were lime jello with Vodka and then strawberry jello layer on top of the lime jello. The rims of the shot glasses were rimmed with red and green sanding sugar. After they set, then I put a little cinnamon candy heart on the top of them (because we all know even the grinch had a heart).

I also made two cream cheese Christmas trees one was topped with a basil pesto and the other was topped with finely chopped sweet and hot jalapeños. I put different colors of sliced peppers to represent decorations. I am certainly no Martha Stewart, but I thought they looked pretty.

Jennifer got the two plates these are on many many years ago at Pier 1 imports, she liked to use them for stuff like this.

Then I also took a tray of Jennifer’s favorite thing to bring to these type of parties. Chinese BBQ pork with Chinese mustard and sesame seeds.

Jill and Scott had some tasty margaritas and Fireball whiskey cake bites and other goodies. So all in all in was a nice layout. The stroll was a lot of fun we went to four different houses and toasted the trees at each house and ate and imbibed different cocktails. It was nice way to meet people from the neighborhood. Jennifer would have really enjoyed the event.

The last few days, I have been playing a lot of music while I am doing stuff around the house. It is interesting the memories that certain songs will bring out.

When Jennifer and I finally got a little change in our pocket when we lived in Lafayette (the first time) we bought a stereo system. It had everything a turn table, a double cassette player and a 5 CD disc player and large box speakers. It was Hi-fidelity and everything.

At the time there was a drug store in Lafayette called Pharm-more and they sold music at a pretty good price so we started building a collection of music. We both had quite a few cassette tapes already, but we started building a CD collection. Then Pharm-more was going out of business and they were clearing out stuff and we picked up a whole bunch of CD’s at bargain basement prices. It was almost like we joined the old Columbia record club.

We later upgraded the CD player to a 300 CD player and believe it or not we had that baby filled. It damn near took a day to load and unload it (which we had to do a couple of times when we moved). It was like having a big juke box. It finally gave up the gig when we lived in San Antonio (one of the belts broke). Of course now with Apple and Satellite radio and other sources you pretty much have anything at your finger tips.

When we moved this last time we sold a lot of the CD’s to the second hand book store after I saved them digitally, but that is a whole other story for another day.

Anyway the last couple of days, I have had a lot of memories of the good old days and special memories that certain songs by certain artists bring up. Some of them cause me to tear up, because I get the pictures in my head of Jennifer singing along and or dancing around to them. Good memories but painful ones at the same time.

Well enough for today, I better get moving, there is some Bocce balls calling my name.