Progress at last.

The Internet is now installed and is fast compared to what we’re used to. And the studio should be built in the next couple of weeks, after Dawn’s created the base for it to sit on. The house is still a total mess and what isn’t in a heap is in boxes.

A blocked drain from the wet room pushed sewer water into the back porch which was unblocked by a sweary couple of blokes from a local company, for which we were very grateful. It’s such a vile thing, as you’ll know if you’ve gone through it. Could anything else go wrong?

We’ve got ants all over the kitchen too, but they seem harmless enough and we’ve not got the bandwidth to deal with them just now.

I wonder if organised people find moving simple and straightforward or do we just have especially complicated lives that are difficult to reassemble once they’ve been taken apart? Tell me we’re not alone!

We might get around to doing some work on DJTees soon. We’ve got plenty of ideas and some good things in mind, including a design of Tony Levin with the Chapman Stick who’s a bit of a hero of mine and someone I saw in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall with King Crimson.

We’ll also be working on designs of Terry Kath, a magnificent, dramatic player and albums by Jean Luc Ponty and Ultimate Spinach, which no one is likely to want but gives me great pleasure, as they’re two of my favourites. And who was Ultimate Spinach’s guitarist, quizzers? That’s right, Jeff Baxter, of course.

The strange thing about moving is after six years at the old house, since we’ve moved, I don’t think we’ve paid the house, or the locals we saw every day, a second thought. Almost as if it didn’t happen. Life is all about the future, right now. And that was one of the reasons to move, of course and I must say it’s an enjoyable frame of mind because it doesn’t feel like being stuck in a middle-aged rut’

A great development has been a new pair of shoes I’ve just got. It might seem mundane but I find it hard to get my legbrace in most shoes because my ankle doesn’t really work and having only one functional hand means I have to rely on Dawn to tie my shoes even if I can get them on over the plastic splint. Well the new ones zip around the foot and open up completely so I just put my foot in and zip up. Once you've got the laces right once, they don’t need doing again. It's very liberating to be able to put your shoes on independently, you don’t realise just how much normally, it's just a regular thing but when you’re disabled it makes so much difference not to have to rely on someone else.

That’s the news from Cripple Creek for this week.

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