Making Excuses

The last post I did was about my eye surgery. What a pain in the ass! Lying on one side for a week doesn't sound too bad, but when you can't do anything else for 24 hours seven days a week, it gets real old. Then there is the bubble.

For eight weeks I had a bubble right in the middle of my vision. This was due to the gas that they put in there. You can't see a damned thing with a bubble right in the middle of everything! All that is finally done. Now I just have to get new glasses since the surgery messed up my prescription.

We haven't done much with Bijou JuJu the last couple of months. Mostly due to my vision. I know that's a cop out. I play in the dark sometimes so why not with bubble vision. I had a good friend that was a professional musician and he was blind. How about Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, and several others? Yeah, it's just an excuse.

Yesterday I met a young woman who is also a musician. We talked a bit about music and playing out and she corrected my thinking about how little opportunity there is in the general area where I live. I guess the problem is that I am too much of a hermit.

I have been thinking lately that I have to make up my mind if I am going to do this thing or not. I have always wanted to play my music for folks, but figured I had to be responsible while my kids were growing up and now I'm too old. Many people have told us that we should play our music and they don't seem concerned about our age. Do they know something I don't?

I know for anyone reading this post that it doesn't make much sense, but then, does it.

The problem is being stuck in a mind set that tells you you can't do something. Our society seems to run on that type of thinking. The herd mentality stops many people from realizing their dreams. it is total crap of course. There are many out there who ignored the herd and went out and did what everyone else said they couldn't do. Those are the people we admire.

I guess I need to stop making excuses.

Not Getting Things Done

We haven't gotten much done lately. It isn't that we are lazy, well, not the only reason. It's a pretty good reason!

I went to the eye Doctor to find out why I was having some vision problems in my left eye. I was told about a year ago that I have the starting of a cataract in my left eye and I figured that was what was going on. When we leave here to move to Michigan, we lose our vision insurance so I wanted to get it taken care of.

What I has was a partially detached retina. I won't bore you with the gruesome details. What that means though is that it will take about three weeks for me to get vision back in my left eye. It also means that, for a week after surgery, I have to lay on my right side just about twenty-four hours a day.

That makes it a bit hard to write songs or even play. Yesterday, the first real day I was able to be up, I got some tracks done on a song I wrote, but that has been about it. Today is the first time I have tried typing and you would not believe how long it has taken me to write this! How can only having one eye make me unable to use a keyboard?

Anyway, Bijou JuJu is still alive and we will hopefully get up and running again soon. See you then, with both eyes!

NPR Tiny Desk Contest

NPR has something they call the Tiny Desk Contest. The point to the whole thing is to highlight talent. If you want to see some of the entrants, you can go here. The songs have to be original. It has been interesting and humbling to see some of the other entries. They look so professional!

We worked on ours for, what seemed like, forever. The one we finally sent in looks very amateurish. That and we both look like we would rather have a tooth pulled or that we really have to go to the bathroom. In reality, even though it was a song we wrote, we were just trying to remember all the words and chords.

Okay, stop your damned laughing! We tried. Next year we will do much better!

The thing is, at least we tried. In years past, we simply did not put ourselves out there. The only gigs we played where where other heard about us and invited us. Now we're being a bit more proactive about things.

What the Hell is a Bijou JuJu

What better day to start a new blog. This is the crappiest day. Oh yeah, this blog is not G or maybe even PG. I probably won't go as far as X.

Anyway!

What is a Bijou JuJu? Well we are a couple, married longer than we've been apart. We are also a Duo.

Isn't she cute!

We've been playing music together for longer than that! We play Folk/Americana/rocky old time shit. In all our years, we never really tried to play in bars or festivals or the like. We played in churches, a party or three, and the occasional bon fire.

Since I retired, we seem to have had several people tell us we should share our music with a larger audience. We decided, "What the hell; we might as well give it a shot." That's one of the things we want to do.

We also like to travel. We are hoping that we might get to do a little music that allows us to see a bit of the country. That's the dream.

Do you think we're crazy?

We're both in our sixties. A bit late to try becoming rock stars; right? Well, we aren't quite that crazy. Like I said, we'd like to do a bit of playing in various venues, but we don't expect to play concerts where we are the main billing.

This blog will be about our adventures and struggles. It's more of a diary than anything else.

Oh yeah, remember I said it was a crappy day?

That's my driveway.

The snow was pure slush and about a foot deep. The day has been snow, then freezing rain, then snow, then rain, then snow... You get the idea. Each shovel full must have weighed at least twenty pounds! It took three times as long to clear our drive.

Well, that's it for the first post. Hope you stop back by. Follow us and you will either see us fail miserably alone and forlorn, or getting to do the things we want to do. Either way, it ought to be interesting.