As many of you know, the last month has been quite a challenge for me health wise. The short history started on October 11th with a fever (that I figured was the flu coming on) and pain in my left knee, which had been reconstructed about 2 and ½ years ago. On Wednesday, October 16th I saw my knee surgeon and he told me to meet him at the hospital that afternoon as he was going in there immediately to clean out whatever bacteria had found its way into my system. It turns out it was a staph infection and I was in the hospital for a couple days until they could put together a battle plan.

Here we are 4 weeks later, and I am on the mend, but it is incredibly time consuming. I am on a couple antibiotics, the main one being vancomycin, which has to be administered through an IV, which we are doing at home, 3 times a day for 90 minutes at a time, 8 hours apart. This is wreaking havoc with our sleep patterns at home as you may guess. Another piece of situation is recovering from the knee surgery, which means rehab exercises, ice treatments, and pain management. Needless to say, guitar playing, and even concentrating for any reasonable amount of time are not happening much either.

The docs say this path will continue for 4 more weeks and be followed by many months of oral antibiotics. Obviously, this is nothing to mess with and I will follow their orders as much as possible (give or take a little wine at times!).

The good news is there is no reason to not expect a clean bill of health in the near future, as long as I can live with this change in lifestyle, which is pretty much a no brainer (which I have been accused of having at times…).

I want to thank everybody who sent in well wishes recently and I really appreciate all the nice things folks had to say about how their musical lives had improved thanks to TG. I plan to back into lesson creation mode as soon as possible but I trust most members have plenty to choose from and plenty to keep busy with.

I did manage to get into the studio to shoot the News this morning, with even less of a plan than usual, which will be evident as you watch. I had thoughts about scrapping the whole thing, but I figured we are all part of a very special family here and life goes on, warts and all. 

I started with a couple improvs, followed somewhere along the line with some ragtime clips, including hints of Alice’s Restaurant, Keep On Truckin’, and even a stab at The Entertainer (which could have used some brushing up on, if I had thought anything through.

I also meant to get to some advice about using a metronome, which ran off the rails quickly and probably should be added to the warts’ category. I will try to get to a more comprehensive take on that thread someday…maybe.

So, thanks for the support and understanding, and I wish everybody the best as we head into the Holiday Season.

Neil