beautiful, funny, sad & true

I’m spending the weekend in the beautiful town of Port Townsend, Washington, which is right across Puget Sound from Seattle, right on the tip of the peninsula.  IrishBand is going up there to play a show tonight.  The other two guys in the band actually grew up in PT, so ‘homecoming’ shows like this are always fun, and unexpected things are sure to happen.

Here’s the entry from our last visit, which you can enjoy in the meantime.

See you when I get back!

OneYearAgo

Okay, kids, the Blogger’s Choice Awards are coming up, and the voting ends on the fifteenth of October, which also happens to be the same day that I was born, all those years ago. 

All you do is click (or copy and paste) the link, sign up, and then you can either nominate your favorite sites or take the plunge and vote yourself.  If BFS&T happens to be one of your favorites, please feel free to spread The Love. 

http://www.bloggerschoiceawards.com/

I’m not saying you have to vote for me, but I will say that nominations* make great (and free!) birthday presents.  That is all.

*I should clarify that a bit. . .nominations EXCEPT ‘Worst Blog of All Time.’  That just wouldn’t be nice.   Or true.  :)  What?  I have to to some self-promotion around here.

Saturday I got up early to drive to tiny little Welches, Oregon to see my friend Andrea play and to hang out with my recording friend Jim.  (He and I produced Andrea’s CD.)  Since she’s living in Europe now, we’ll take any chances we can get to hang out with her.  Jim and I talked over breakfast, and she arrived while we were finishing up.  Huge hugs all around.

She played her set and sounded awesome.  There were a few songs that were new to me.  One in particular (which I don’t remember the name of, but I do remember that it was in E minor!) was especially stellar.  At the end of her set, I stood up and clapped, and then motioned with my arms for everyone else to stand up and join me, and we all gave her a nice, big ovation.  It was a great way to welcome her home and send her off again, all at the same time.

Tonight she and I got together for dinner at Queen of Sheba, one of the better Ethiopian restaurants in town.  Portland is known for, among other things, being a very ‘white’ town (to put it kindly), but for some reason we have a plethora of Ethiopian restaurants here.  In fact, another new one just opened up recently, and it’s not even very far from where I live.  Must. . .investigate. . .

After we were done with dinner, she asked if we could drive down to EliteHippieCollege.  She had just finished reading a book called ‘Blue Like Jazz’, the author of which had gone to that college, and had written movingly about a park with a little bridge.  She wanted to find it.  I said, “Let’s go.”

We drove all over and found nothing until we went around to the back side of the campus, and sure enough, we came to a large, forested area, replete with two bridges.  We parked the car and walked across one of them, and found a slightly overgrown path to walk down along the pond at the bottom of the ravine.  We ended up here:

The picture quality isn’t the greatest because it was starting to get dark, which meant that my poor little camera was trying to compensate, and it was hard for me to hold it still while the shutter was open.  (Have I mentioned how much I want a better camera?  And a tripod?)  But the place was beautiful, the conversation was great, and the mosquitoes weren’t too bloodthirsty.

It really started to get dark quickly, so we headed back up the forested path.  We stopped under the bridge to take more pictures, and here’s the best one:

It was just. . .an excellent evening.  I don’t want to trivialize it any further by reducing it to mere language.

OneYearAgo

Today I could barely focus on work because I had so much recording stuff to think about.  I kept thinking about how two of the bands I’m in are about to start recording new albums, and in both of those projects I’m doing the lion’s share of the production, recording and mixing.

My eyes popped open at 4:30 this morning, and I had a bunch of ideas about what to do with IrishBand’s recording, and how to go about it, and where to do it, and which songs we should do, et cetera.  I also e-mailed Breanna a bunch of times to figure out when we can go in and start on the basic guitar and vocal tracks, and what the process might be like.

I like not knowing what the process is going to be like, truth be told.  I like to sit with a song and let God (or whatever) tell me what to play.  Production is spiritual for me, and it drives me crazy when people sit there and tell me what to play, because I always think, “Shut your piehole. . .I’m trying to listen to GOD here.”

SHORT GEEK-OUT #1:  Last week I bought, with a great deal of help from IrishBand, a Digi 002 recording interface, but it has a slight design flaw with its power supply, which Digidesign is aware of.  If you own one of these units, and you have a problem with it, relax. . .all you have to do is call Digidesign and they’ll send you the replacement part (for free!) along with a little instruction booklet on how to install it correctly.  That’s what I did tonight, and then I spent the next hour opening up old sessions and listening to them.  Good times.

SHORT GEEK-OUT #2:  I use a program called SiteMeter here on BFS&T to tell me where all y’all are coming from, and their site was down this weekend because they were migrating to a newer version of their software.  Well, after all their and our (meaning the collective group of users around the world) hard work, they released a ponderous, worthless program which they must have received an endless stream of complaints about, because later that day they had already changed back to the original version.  God bless ’em.  I can’t imagine Apple doing that.  Thanks, SiteMeter!  I love the original!

Here ends the geek-out.  We now return you to your witty, insightful blog, already in progress.

OneYearAgo

If you’ll notice, I just updated my blogroll, with some new links for you to peruse and enjoy.  There are some new ones mixed in with the familiar ones.  I have a new friend, Carolina, who’s seizin’ the day down in Texas and wishing the best for her family, who live in Houston and have a very large hurricane heading their way.

Speaking of large hurricanes, when Katrina hit New Orleans three years ago, my cat Katrina (Petrovisky-Mouskewicz) was still alive, and she would perk her little head up and look at the TV every time she heard one of the newscasters say her name.  After a while, though, the novelty wore off and she just took it all in stride.  And no, I don’t have a cat named Ike.

I recently started using the blog reader in GangstaMail, and I found that I hate it, despite its convenience.  Part of what I like about reading blogs is seeing the layouts and the pretty colors and all that.  I don’t mind having to click around, y’know?  So now, the links are back on my blog, where they should’ve always been.