Heats back on

New unit has been installed. Gas turned on. Ahhh...No more space heaters. Nice and warm.

Baby, its cold inside...

...our house that is. But that is a two part title to a two part story.

First, I am proud to announce to the internet that I'm gonna be a daddy! We got our first ultrasound today. It was an incredibly surreal moment. Any of you that have had children know how crazy the feeling is to see your child on the screen for the very first time. We are so excited! Our due date is August 2nd tentatively. The baby will be the one who decides if they want to show up on that very day or not. So pumped!


So the second part of my story starts the other night when we got back from watching our nephews all week in St. Louis (Parenting Class #1 for me). We got in, dumped our bags in the living room, and headed to bed, exhausted, tired from a long week. Suddenly Melissa says, "do you smell that." Me, "no." Melissa, "Its smells like natural gas." Well to keep this from being a really long story, it was. Every time our heat kicked on we smelled a lot of natural gas. So I call the gas company, and after ten minutes of confirming all of my personal account info with the guy he tells me in an awkward voice, "I am now going to give you instructions on what to do next. Leave your house immediately!" You couldn't have told me that at the start of our conversation? Anyways. We go outside, in the rain, and wait for the gas company to arrive. Two guys show up and shut the gas off to our heater and say, "you definitely don't want what that's pumping into your house." So the heater is getting replaced this week thanks to our incredibly helpful landlord, but we have been without heat for three days now. Fortunately its not as cold outside this week as it was a couple weeks ago, but its still pretty dang cold inside.

5 Years ago

I can't believe its already been 5 years since I said farewell to a dear friend, Aaron Marrs. Aaron was an incredibly passionate person. I can remember instantly loving the guy when my first band came to Nashville to record in January of 2003, and we used Aaron's bedroom as our studio. Who would have known he would be departing this Earth just two short years later.
In September of that year we were back in Nashville for a show and we stayed at Aarons again for a few days. During that stay we became a great friends, no suprise, Aaron was a great friend to everyone that knew him. I stayed in his room with him, and we stayed up every night talking. I remember my brother coming upstairs to wake us up one morning and he informed us that Johnny Cash had died. I look back on that and think how odd it is to talk about death with someone who would soon understand what the amazing experience of crossing from this Earth into Heaven is like. It was also during that stay that he read me some of the book that he was reading about the dangerous job of being an Alaskan crab fisher. He was so fascinated about the idea of going there and seeing it for himself.
Some time went by, and Aaron made a couple trips out to California for various reasons, and came to stay with me in Bakersfield. One time while he was there I picked him up in LA and we made a brief spontaneous trip into Mexico, but that is a whole other story. It was during that trip that Aaron told me of his plans to go to Alaska and make a documentary about crab fishing. I actually almost joined in myself. I had nothing else really going on at the time, and thought it sounded exciting.
He went and loved it. He returned home for a short time, but saw an oppourtunity to pay off some debt that had accumulated from filming by returning and working as a crewman on a boat named The Big Valley. I remember talking to him right before he left, and we talked about me coming to visit him when he got back. That was our last conversation. Aaron's boat went down weeks later in the bering sea and he was never found.
During his short 27 years on this Earth he affected many peoples lives. In fact, Aaron and I had never grown beards before and we started our first beards together. Haha! As funny as it is I still think of him when my beard gets really bushy.
He is greatly missed by many, but we all look forward to seeing him again when we leave this Earth.

Love you man, Hold Fast.

Happy New Year!

Its been so long that I haven't posted anything that I'm not going to apologize. I'm just going to consider this post my first post on my new blog. So there.

I hope everyone is having a good 2010 so far. I know I'm not that old, but I seems weird that I will have graduated high school 10 years ago this summer. Those 10 years seem to have flown by, and at the same time seem so far away.

I'm really curious to see what the next 10 years will bring. Will I still be traveling in a band? If not, what will my job be? Or will the world be gone in 2012 anyways. I know one thing is for sure. I will be only a few years from 40 and that is scary.

Life is short and long all at the same time. My great-grandma is an inspiration. She is 98 years old. She lives alone on a couple acres, and still rakes all of her leaves, and maintains a nice garden. If her eyesight were a little better she would still be push mowing the entire property in 3.5 hours like she was doing just a couple years ago! I hope I have her genes.

Happy New Year Everyone!