Words, Bucket Drums, and a Dead Fridge

This was kind of a crazy week. On Friday evening my performance troupe had a gig at the First Friday Artwalk. An outdoor gig, with three 15-minute sets of drumming and fire spinning. Now, you should understand that we live in Maine, and it’s December. It was 28 degrees that night. Since there was no way we wanted to be hitting our bare hands on drum skins in the freezing cold, we did some “bucket drumming.” Five of us drummed with wooden drum sticks, flipped-over 5 gallon buckets, and milk crates to perch them on. Sounds cool – and you can wear gloves while doing it.

We’d done some rehearsing, as a group and separately, and it came out sounding pretty great! We even got compliments from a couple of musician friends of our troupe leader. We had our normal rehearsal today – indoors, with our usual hand drums – and that went well. My recent solo practice on the doumbek is paying off. I got a couple of compliments from our music director today, which means a lot since he only doles them out when we really deserve it.

Yesterday our refrigerator decided to die. We got it when we built the house, so it’s 14 years old. Luckily, my parents had given us their old one several years ago; we’ve been keeping it in the basement and using it as needed. We’ll probably still need to get a new one, as the backup fridge is quite a bit smaller (and we have two teenagers). But we’re fine for now. It took a while to make the switch, clean everything up, and all that, so it took up a big chunk of my Saturday.

Despite all that, and the ongoing holiday preparations and home de-cluttering, I’ve still been plugging away at my novel, Patterns in the Void. I’m now at 61,008 words toward a goal of 100K or so. Sometimes I feel great about the story, and other times I feel full of doubt, and not sure how good it is. I keep reminding myself that it’s just a first draft.

I hope your week goes well and that it’s full of creativity!