If you don't know Jorma, you don't know Jack

358 days

284.0 pounds

Because it was so frenzied around here yesterday, I didn't get to recount all the wonderful things I ate yesterday! And in spite of the fact that it says Sunday above, today is Monday.

For starters, after my anticipated coffee, we had pancakes, just the two of us. I made one batch, with soy milk, as has been my habit the past few years, but I just made six of them. Pretty big, but only three each. Theory: less place to spread butter. And with Robin's eagle eye on me, it was even harder to do that.

Lunch was, basically, skipped. I probably ate a banana at some point.

I had to get over to the show at 3:00pm so I walked Oliver even earlier than I'd originally planned. Spent a bit of time with an old Feat friend who is dying slowly from pancreatic cancer. He's already beyond the time he was given. I don't know how people with that fate can carry on, but he's living every day, as well as he can. Seeing him in that kind of pain did a number on my appetite, I suppose.

The music was hot...

But nothing was as hot as the temperature inside the lobby of the Westbury Music Fair. It's air conditioned, but when they finally threw open the doors at 6:00pm, the place just sucked in the heat and humidity from outside.

The venue has a cooking staff that prepares food according to the requests of the artists playing there. I'm not sure about Hot Tuna, but at least two members of the Little Feat party are vegans, so one tray on the table was prepared especially for them. When I finally got hungry around 7:15pm or so, I went backstage and poured a few ladles full of some green stuff and some tabuli (?) into a bowl. It was incredible. I had a slice of watermelon, a very small one, and went back to work. Oh yeah...I even had a single piece of bread. Really delicious bread. Bread so good I feared I'd pay heavily for it.

Knowing I was going to sweat like a dog, I brought my special towel with me and a change of shirt for after setup. I have this one black shirt I always wear at these shows. I've been wearing it for years. A woman came up to the booth to tell me that I should be wearing one of the shirts hanging on the wall, that if I was, we'd sell more of them. "I'm a display person, I know what I'm talking about," she said.

Robin calls it my "Tony Soprano" shirt. I'm big and barrel-chested like Tony. The elbows have been worn through several times and repaired by seamstresses at various dry cleaning establishments. My friends basically expect to see me in that shirt...what's it, a decade or longer that I'm doing this? Anyway, I don't have many superstitions (or what they now call "obsessive-compulsive disorders"), but wearing that shirt is certainly one of them. And at my gross weight, I couldn't fit into one of those tour shirts anyway, even the XXLs. When I lose all this weight, I'll have to go find a new one.

But I say that as I sit here almost comfortably inside a brand new one. When I got home near midnight last night, I rushed through getting yesterday's blog posted and took a shower. I knew I probably schvitzed off a gallon or so of liquid. Of course I also drank at least four 16-ounce bottles of water and they brought us some weird "butter pretzels" at the booth. The looked like little window screens magnified. I probably had about three handfuls of those suckers.

I can't imagine a world without these guys...

...but for those of you who may not know, Hot Tuna is a group that spun off from an old group known late in its career as the Jefferson Starship. Before that, they were the Jefferson Airplane. In the 1960's, where I come from (where I may still be at times), the late 1960's, you were either an Airplane fan or a Dead Head. I was more an Airplane fan. Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen played bass and lead guitars respectively. When the band finally disintegrated for the fifth or sixth time, Hot Tuna was born with those two in front.

Jorma was one of my guitar idols as a kid (I've played both as an amateur and a professional at various times in my life—another long digression you won't read about anytime soon). Some guy walked up to the table last night wearing an old Hot Tuna shirt that said, "If you don't know Jorma, you don't know Jack." I thought it was a great sentiment, not to mention a fabulous shirt.

And, if all that wasn't enough fun, the Yankees won.

And somehow, I remain motivated

It took a little longer to wake up this morning...about a half hour longer. But I got up, did my stretches, did the whole routine and it's 9:15am as I write. As you can tell from the number up top (again, if you're one of the zillions of people hot reading this and not doing the math), yesterday was very good. Not only did I enjoy my food tremendously, but 2.5 more pounds are gone. That's 9.5. If I can sustain the effort, next Monday should have a wonderful number.

I'm going up for breakfast (1/2 Ezekiel muffin with almond butter, grapefruit juice and coffee). Lunch was all fruit and yogurt after I went out and mowed, edged and blew. It's still super hot though not quite so humid today, but it was enough of each to make my shorts and T-shirt wet enough to wash a car with. Honeydew, canteloupe, grapes and watermelon, some peach yogurt and a little Cool Whip and I was quite full.

I came up and made myself an awful—though small—snack a little later. A bunch of blue corn tortilla chips on a plate with some shredded cheese went into the microwave. It wasn't that good, but it fulfilled a temporary crunch crave.

Robin's folks are coming to dinner. Her mom's birthday is tomorrow, so the celebrating begins tonight. This time, I'm going to really try and watch and not listen. It'll be helpful if they wear sweaters because the A/C will be ON.

But as it turned out...

...they didn't come. And we had to figure out what to do with the Porterhouse Steak we were making for her mom. If she ever read this, she'd flip: we cooked it, ate some of it and gave the rest to Oliver!