I finally cleared all of the leftover garbage from…
I finally cleared all of the leftover garbage from my old place yesterday. The landlady, being the tightfisted miser that she is, charged me rent up until that day, on top of holding a few thousand back for utilities, even though utilities are never much more than a thousand. In any case, I waited for the garbage truck, tossed the stuff in, got on my bicycle and rode back over the bridge to my new home.
A pretty nice place is taking shape inside of the Lofty Sky Palace, as I’ve decided to call my latest abode. It’s still a mess, but no messier than my old place when it really needed cleaning. As the temperature took another rainy, drizzly plunge today, I spent all day unpacking the last of the boxes, making multiple trips down to the garbage room on B1 to throw away the mushy wet cardboard. With the exception of singing garbage trucks, riverside Karaoke and the occasional whining dog, it’s pretty quiet. White noise from the highway is always around, but it was at my old place as well.
In other news, the doctor at Adventist Hospital gave me some medicine for my knee, though he predicted he’d still have to do an arthroscopic exam. When I winced, he said, “Don’t worry, we’ll let you watch it on TV after you come out of the initial sedation!” Wonderful.
Last night the Muddy Basin Ramblers had a gig at a company party for a local law firm. Well, perhaps “local” isn’t the right word, as the crowd was half full of foreign faces. I saw quite a few people I knew there, including Peter Balfry and The Taipei Kid (who, I might add, was neither insanely drunk nor drunkenly insane). The party was held at the top of the Death Star Mall at Lawry’s steakhouse. Those of you in the states may scoff, but Lawry’s is a big deal here, and if our dinners hadn’t been on the house, we’d have ended up paying NT$1800 for each one. The best part of the meal, IMHO, was the dessert. I would have had two meals, but, oddly enough, they were out of everything but steak. The place was so full of carved wood and chandeliers I felt like I was on the Titanic, and at the beginning I was a little worried that we’d have a tough time entertaining such a staid, high-brow crowd.
David obviously didn’t have any such concerns, and even though Tim and Dana weren’t there, we still managed to do a fair bit of house-rocking. By the end of our set, which was supposed to be just 30 minutes but ended up at over an hour, the crowd seemed to be really into it. Many people commented on the “historic” meeting between myself and Robin Winkler, the firm’s head, though I’m sure that two ex-American ROC citizens have been in the same room before last night.
It may have been the wine, the music, the company or some combination of the three, but I felt better last night than I have in a long time, and I stayed up late last night after Sandman and Jojo dropped me off, just savoring the mood. All this month, true to the band’s name, I’ve felt like I’ve been slogging through elbow-deep basin mud, and I really needed…something. February is a brutal month in Taiwan. Though it’s the shortest month, the constant rain, cold and lack of sunlight make it feel more like the longest. Add that to all of the other shit I’ve been struggling to deal with, and you’ve got one long-ass month.
