Espain

Guess what? I have no jet lag. It's a minor miracle, considering the fact that last time I came back from Spain I suffered for a couple of weeks after. I feel so normal, in fact, that Spain now seems like some weird dream I had. 

It was a good trip - I ate mountains of cheese and olives and bread, enjoyed good company (surprisingly we ended up having many friends at this event), and generally had a swell time. 

The event itself was not like anything we had done before - it was a competition of four different swing bands, in which one was voted the winner by the audience at the end of the weekend. We had to "battle" each band each night by playing songs back and forth on stage. At one point we had pulled out one of our "killer dillers", and the other band, which in my opinion was a bit of a wedding band, not knowing how to top us, decided to play Bruno Mars' "Uptown Funk". Which of course got the crowd going, as any modern funk song will over rinky-tinky 1930s swing music. They basically brought a gun to a knife fight. My bandleader picked me to follow it, which at first had me kind of freaked out, but then I thought, "no, fuck that. We're the best at what we do, we don't have to pander, and we live and breathe this music." So I strode out there in my eighty-year-old dress and killed it.

The other band won the audience pick. But our band won all the musicianship awards which were voted by other musicians. In your FACE, crappy wedding band.

Hopefully this trip has put us on the European scene a bit - one friend there said he'd try to get us to play a big event in Budapest next year, and we made good friends with this Swedish band who felt the same way we did about the importance of playing authentic swing. My bandleader said he would not do this event again. But we both really enjoyed being in Madrid, and I'm glad I went. 

As usual the boys both looked taller, skinnier, and seemed more sophisticated when I got home. Nothing came of the potential bullying incident - I messaged his teacher about it, and she said she'd look into it, but I haven't heard anything since, and Bobby said the kids don't play the "name game" anymore and he says he plays with some of those boys. It's also anti-bullying month at school. Was this just some minor incident? Perhaps!

Today I saw a financial advisor. Learned a lot of good things and have a plan goin forward to handle what will hopefully be a new level of income in my life. Mainly, I have a lot of work ahead of me - I have to get my act together and do proper bookkeeping, payroll (for myself, anyway), change my LLC to an S corp, etc etc. New tax person, a whole new system. Pretty much everything I've been doing for two decades has to change. The word "daunting" comes to mind.

The good news is, he gave me the green light to renovate my kitchen. Or, you know, just hand the money over to Trump in April. I could do that. Not.