Taken away and returned

....it was all on track, along came the problems. Some were large, some were minor. They all seemed to suggest that my time of moving ahead was over. I am a Christian in a band full of atheists. We "get" each other musically and personally but it's still an uncomfortable divide at times. My own personal life has been a struggle in recent months as well, but I was (I thought) in a place where I would be able to finally reach some of the artistic and personal goals that I had been reaching for over a period of decades.

The first big one came when out of the blue, the wife of our bass player died in a car accident. He is our main songwriter and this terrible event has really affected him and his two sons. Our first big public gig was (twice) postponed because of Covid. We all got it at pretty much the same time, but the week before this our support band had to pull out because of Covid. We desperately tried to learn 10 new songs to add to our setlist. All in vain, when we had to then postpone.

Things were looking up when we finally did get to perform on June 11th. Our bass player coped with his grief by, in part, writing some great new songs and we did some of them at that gig. It was a bittersweet night for him as he performed a song that he had written for his wife but never got the chance to do it in public before she died.

We geared up for the next gig, battling colds and influenza...then I had a nasty looking mole removed and it came back as Melanoma. It looks like this has not spread but I will be having further surgery next week to excise more skin around it and will need to be monitored every 3 - 6 months to see if there is any spread.

Around the same week as my diagnosis, my recycling supplier announced that he was no longer going to supply me with any stuff, as he would need it all for the work that he was going to be doing. The end of "Smash That Computer"? I had only a few things left to sell and still needed more money to buy the quality drum monitor that would make my hybrid electronic kit better suited to small venue use. Where would that money come from?

Well, this week he contacted me and said that he had a big load of RAM that I could take and test. He has been too busy to do the projects that he anticipated he would need the RAM for, so I have another lot to work with! Taken away, but now returned.....hence this Blog entry.