February 8, 2025

Man excuse my language but these last couple weeks have been a real shit show in Fenwick world. BUT… one can’t fully recognize/appreciate the “beautiful” without the “terrible”, right? Well we definitely have been experiencing the terrible lately, but there has definitely been a lot of “beautiful” sprinkled in between (pics & video below!)

First, you may already know from the Future Sphere Discord that Sarah was in a car accident last week. I got a call at 5:30 AM from Sarah who was on her way to work, telling me she was just in the wreck. I rushed down to her to find her crying in the front seat with the front air bag deployed. I feel beyond lucky to still have her alive. That’s the “beautiful”. She is alive and well and still by my side in this crazy thing called life. This week we were able to get her a new car to replace the old one, and she is super excited to deck it all out in her pink seat covers and other accessories. Maybe she can do a future journal post showing it off later.

Amongst all that craziness I was able to get bass guitar recorded in episode 5 on the Agree songs-in-progress page here. Bass guitar isn’t always the sexiest instrument to play or listen to lol… but it is the FOUNDATION of every song, the lowest notes that give each piece of music the POWER and UMPH (spelling?) they deserve.

I remember when I was first learning to play guitar and song-write, I had a mentor who played in a band and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I wanted to know all about what he did. I was around 14 years old at the time and I had no idea what a bass guitar actually played. I was asking him to explain it all to me. He put a Jimmy Eat World song into his boombox which had some knobs which allowed him to affect the bass, treble, and mid range tones in the song. He of course cranked the bass knob on his boombox all the way DOWN and said, “this is what this song would sound like without any bass guitar.” Something so simple blew my mind at the time when I realized how important one instrument was to the whole band. It isn’t necessarily an instrument that you notice is there until it’s absent. You can feel it more than you can consciously/audibly hear it. I forgot about that story until just now haha, it’s fun reminiscing on how I got started :)

ANYWAY, moving on to the more “beautiful” parts of the last couple weeks. Sarah and I have been trying to come up with better date-night ideas this year because after being married for 13 years it’s easy to get stuck in boring routines of “just going out to eat” for date night. We want to go back to the days when we would actually “court each other”, instead of just eating together which is what we normally do anyway right? Everyone has to eat dinner, so that’s not a date! Lol!

So last week we still went out to eat but we planned an activity to go to the local grocery store and pick out a couple of cheap items we wouldn’t normally buy for ourselves. I bought myself a Donkey Kong Mario Kart car to use on our kids’ Mario Kart Hot Wheels track Santa brought them for Christmas, and Sarah bought some playing cards for us to play “War” and “Speed” with back at home later that night. We also picked out some valentines heart candies to do some “taste tests” later too. With all the candy heart brands out there, Sarah has been wanting to know which one is her favorite since there are so many. Anyway, simple activity for after dinner, but it was a lot of fun and we both decided that the Sweetheart brand of heart candies are our fave :)

LAST night’s date night though was one for our history book! Sarah banished me to the upstairs while I finished work on my laptop for the day and SHE prepped for the cutest date night idea. We both grew up on the movie “Parent Trap” and so she moved the downstairs guest bedroom mattress into our family room in front of the TV where we could have a slumber party and re-watch the movie which we realized we hadn’t ever watched together in the 13 years we’ve been married! We also thought it was hilarious that we both had so much of the dialogue from the film still memorized lol!

But the fun didn’t stop there, she prepared an incredible meal to eat in bed with Oreos and peanut butter for dessert which the twins eat together in the film. THE HIGHLIGHT though of the evening was Sarah’s plan to pause the film once it got to the iconic handshake they do in the movie and LEARN it together. It only took us about a half hour or so, but it took us longer than it probably should have to figure it out because we kept making it more complicated than it actually was haha! We kept wondering why they were able to do the handshake so much faster in the film until we realized we were adding too many steps! When we finally got it down, we filmed it (footage below).

In summary, even amidst such a “terrible” crazy event like a car accident, things sure have been “beautiful” too lately. We’re excited that bass is done on “Agree” because that means guitars and SARAH’S VOCALS are next!

Stay tuned, Futuresssssssssss….

/nathan

“Fenwick & the Futures”