Nebulous Mooch

For about two years now, my husband has been doing these South Indian rhythm exercises called Konnakol. They involve some unusual clapping and repeating of various syllables. This post is named after a few Konnakol syllables.

He loves to tell me about how much Konnakol exercises have helped him develop his sense of time. He’s not talking about time of day. He doesn’t wear a watch and is never late so I guess he does have a good sense of that too, but for this purpose we are referring to musical time. This is a really important sense for a bass player to have and apparently he used to worry about his quite a bit…but then came Konnakol.

The other day at dinner, my husband told me that Konnakol has also helped him in other aspects of thought–I’m not sure what that means–and he thinks I would benefit from learning it. Konnakol hasn’t helped his thinking process very much because he knows that I can’t even clap and sing at the same time. How could I possibly learn some complicated rhythm exercise.

I think he wants us to start having Konnakol conversations like these guys.

One of my favorite pairs of jeans tore recently. I hate buying jeans and want to hang on to pairs that fit properly as long as possible. Last week, I decided that I could just patch up my torn pairs of jeans. Because of the location of the hole I had to sew the patch on by hand and it took a long time. I did a pretty darn good job though. I only stuck myself with the needle 10 thousand times. That’s better than the 10 million times I stuck myself with the needle the last time I tried to sew something by hand.

When I wore them the next day my husband laughed and laughed and said that I shouldn’t wear them outside. Later that evening some people were coming to our house to have a very serious discussion, and he told me that I should change before they arrived.

Change before they arrive, I thought. What’s wrong with him? Then he showed me this picture.

I swear it wasn’t that noticeable in the mirror, but it didn’t have a big red arrow pointing at it either. He won. I changed and now I have the misfortunate nickname, Vagina Patch.

Note: Apparently, misfortunate isn’t a word, who knew? Well my husband did and made it a point to correct old Vagina Patch as soon as he got home from his gig. I meant to say unfortunate, but I’m leaving misfortunate in the post because I’m hoping to start a trend.

My husband ate the worst salad in the world in the Madrid airport. It most have been pretty bad, because it seems to have left more of an impression on him than the salad with a German cockroach in it that he ate in the Canary Islands. He brought the napkin from the Madrid airport restaurant home with him because he thought the name of it was so funny. The napkin sits on our dining table and every time we eat he picks it up and asks me if I’ve written a post about it yet.

My husband tends to have lots of ideas about posts for this blog. Usually if I stall long enough he forgets about them, but this napkin thing just won’t go away. So here’s the napkin.

He says that if he had noticed the name of the resturant before he bought the salad he would’ve gone somewhere else.

The reason I was reluctant to post this is because before I moved to the UK that would’ve meant anything to me. My husband says that I’m in the minority and that most people know what that means. So if anyone else out there is completely unaware of how the English pronounce certain words here’s an explanation. Ars which I think should have an e on the end so it is spelled arse is how the English pronounce the word ass. (I’m pretty sure that’s a run on sentence, but I so don’t care.)

Here’s the final song from Patrick Sings His Innermost Feelings. It was inspired by D’Angelo’s Chicken Grease. If you don’t know the song here’s a good live version of it.

My husband has also decided that he’s going to start spelling his name like this PatriQ and wearing a pick in his hair in honor of Questlove…

Questlove

…because they have so much in common.

Anyway, this is the song. It was inspired by D’Angelo, chicken, and Simon and Garfunkel.

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Here’s an oldie but a goody that my husband recorded for his upcoming album, Patrick Sings his Innermost Feelings. He originally recorded it when my stepson was 8. It’s a song about a boy and a dog. It’s so sad that it brought a tear to my eye…twice.

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Here’s the latest addition to Patrick Sings His Innermost Feelings. It’s called Crazy Sound and it is wild. He suspects that the mix is terrible because his monitor speakers recently broke. For that he would like to apologize in advance.

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My husband has decided to write a sad song for his album Patrick Sings His Innermost Feelings. He took advantage of the low voice his recent cold gave him when recording the vocals. It’s called People are Sad. Anyway, we hope you like it. Don’t let it make you feel too sad.

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The other morning I walked into the living room to find my husband doing some strange new exercise. When I asked him what he was doing he said that it was his version of yoga.

“If you want to do some yoga I’ll teach you,” I told him. I taught him how to do the sun salutation. “How was that?” I asked when we were done.

“I didn’t like it,” he said.

“Really? Why not?”

“It was too hard. I just want to do the kinda of yoga where you just lay around.”

My husband is quite upset by the implication that he isn’t handy.

My Husband: I was always the handiest of the Bettison boys. My brothers are all mechanical, but I’m handy. Remember that time I fixed something around the house and you were surprised?

Me: No, what did you fix?

My Husband: I don’t remember, but you were impressed.

Me: Like when you fixed the mirror and now it hands two inches from the wall and we have to keep a box wedged between it and the wall at the bottom so it doesn’t hang on a crazy angle.

My Husband: You are so mean.

Though my husband isn’t very handy, he certainly does come up with some interesting projects around the house. The latest one involved purchasing a large square piece of plywood. After doing a bunch of measuring he determined that the piece of wood he needed would easily fit into our car.

We went to B&Q so my husband could buy this piece of wood that he needed right that instant. When he got the board cut I thought it looked big, but I didn’t say anything. I stood in the parking lot watching him try to wedge it into the car and I kept my mouth shut. Sometimes I’m good at restraining myself.

I waited in the parking lot patiently with the board while he went inside to buy rope to tie it to the roof of the car. But, when he started tying the doors closed as he tied the board to the roof, I had to speak up. “How are we going to get into the car?” I asked. “What are we the Dukes of Hazzard?” While I loved watching the Duke boys outrun Boss Hog just as much as anyone else as a kid, my legs were sore from interval training and I wasn’t going to climb into a car window in a busy parking lot.

We tied the board onto the car by wrapping the rope around and around and around until we could tie the ends together. We didn’t have any scissors, of course. Then I prayed the whole way home that the board wouldn’t fly off and cause a major accident. We made it home in one piece. It’s a good thing we made that trip too, because today my husband told me that he doesn’t think he’ll use the board after all.

Our flat is too small to have a stray board laying around. We’ll have to tie it to our roof again and take it too the dump.