¡New Apartment!

In case you haven't gotten the memo, I am fully moved into my new apartment. It is about 10 minutes from my old place, still in Logan Square. The address is:
2700 N Monticello Ave Apt 1
Chicago, IL
60647

It's a beautiful house, with central air, front and back porches, a back yard, dishwasher, washer and dryer, the works! We've got Will, my Arkansasian fellow composer from Butler, his buddy Ryan from Arkansas, Ryan's old roommate Adam (I know, confusing, we're working on it) from Alaska, and Ryan's friend Dan from Michigan. So it's 5 guys, but we've got the first floor and the basement. We've already had a few barbecues, which have been beautiful. We have 5 couches, so plenty of space for guests to sleep over. We have way too many dishes and pots and pans, but I know they'll come in handy when we have 100 people over for dinner.
So other than having friends visit and helping unload all of Will's junk, it's been back to the grind. Rehearsing with our band, recording some tracks soon and then getting gigs around town. The calypso band is playing next weekend, hopefully we'll squeeze some rehearsals in before then. And I've got my gorgeous keyboard in my room so I've been playing and writing more. Recently I've been on a big lullaby kick, so maybe next post I'll have a link for a site where I can put my pieces.
I finished Flight by Sherman Alexie, which really took some surprising turns, and it just blew me away. I always love writers who can both break your heart and make you chuckle in the span of a couple pages.
After that I jumped into Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth. As I've come to expect, it's super dense, and most of the book is introspective, like an internal dialogue in the narrator's head. This one is about an old sex-crazed puppeteer, his mistress, his wife, his family, his old friends, basically everyone involved in his life as everything just starts falling apart. Dark, extremely sexual and graphic, and surprisingly replete with humor.
I just started Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, something Dad has been suggesting ever since I studied in Barcelona. So far, it is somewhat reminiscent of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls, except written more from a journalist's viewpoint.
So that's what I've got going for me. Tomorrow I head to Wisconsin to hang with Uncle Charlie and Aunt Jeannie, seeing the sights in Madison and catching a baseball game in Milwaukee. It's gonna be a blast.
Unfortunately this post hasn't had any pictures, so I will leave you with a couple goodies from a little while back. First, the view from the roof of our rehearsal space:



Second, the sweetest little kid on the planet: