beautiful, funny, sad & true

I have to hand it to Tossed In for coming up with the best opening line of a blog that I’ve read in quite a while.

“Considering it was Hitler’s birthday, today was so-so.”

Cracked me up. And silly me for missing such a special occasion. How should someone celebrate that, anyway? What do you get for someone who’s responsible for the deaths of eleven million people? I ask you.

Anyway.

The mixing with Andrea went great, and we’re really satisfied with the results. Special kudos once again to DrummerAdam, who completely ruled on those songs, and every time I listen to them, I’m reminded of that fact.

Saturday I was awakened by a strange knocking sound. I got up and walked into the studio, to find a robin sitting in the tree outside the window, staring in at me.

I also couldn’t help but notice how much snow had fallen overnight, so I walked out front to find this tranquil scene:

I must’ve been quite a sight, in my long-sleeved T-shirt, pajama pants, and Doc Martens with no socks. Well, sometimes looking ridiculous is a small price to pay for the sake of Great Art.

I was the first one awake, since I’d slept (or should I say NOT slept?) in my sleeping bag on the floor in the drum room, so I dinked around online for a while, until everyone else woke up. Once they did, Andrea and I went for a walk through the golf course, to take pictures and just get some fresh air for a while, after being cooped up inside all the day before.

We both took about a million pictures, and good thing we did, too, because all the snow had melted by mid-afternoon.

After we were done with mixing, I drove the hour back to Portland, showered, changed my clothes, and then went on a really great date. We were lucky enough to get two rainbows; one in its actual form, in the sky – “Hey, that’s a good omen!” she said – and the other in sushi form; a rainbow roll. It was a wonderful evening – “Let’s do that a whole bunch more times,” I said – and here’s to a ‘whole bunch more’ weekends just like this one.

I just now found out I was in Ohio a couple of weeks ago.

Not in person, unfortunately, but certainly in spirit. That’s where Dori’s bachelorette party was, and Alyssa thought it would be fun to make a ‘miniature me’ so that I could be there too. These pictures Dori sent me just instantly put a huge smile on my face.

How I miss that conspiratorial smile! Portland just ain’t the same without you.

Can I just say how touching and awesome that is? Because it is. THANK YOU!

OneYearAgo

The night of plays. . .was awesome. Definitely one of the most fun and interesting things I’ve ever been a part of. No pics of the actual play yet, but here’s one of the cast-and-crew ‘after’ party.

The night was so much fun that words actually fail me. I made a new Seattle friend at that party. We’re there in the back left corner (I’m the short one dressed all in black), and I think you can tell by our posture that we’d rather be talking to each other than to the person we were talking with right then.

I washed my car for the first time in ages on Saturday, then today it rained AND I parked under a tree, so it’s already covered with crap again. But even that looks much better than it did before. Hopefully the rainstorms will come again tonight and wash it again for me.

I have a couple more days of down time to enjoy, and a play reading night, and then I’m busy with mixing and gigs and helping friends move and more gigs, and a trip to Yakima for a wedding, and all kinds of other stuff, every day and night for the next two weeks.

I need to learn how to end my blog entries. I’ve learned how to name them, now I just need to learn how to end them, and tie everything together in a nice way. I feel like some of them have been abrupt or left you hanging.

Not this one, though. This one has a neat, tidy little ending, if I do say so myself.

OneYearAgo

At rehearsal today, the director told us about this series of videos where a guy took each cartoon strip of Garfield and turned it into a live-action video, and then they have a remixed song or a little video after it too.

Well, I was intrigued, so I came home and found a few. I started watching them and found that they are completely strange and mesmerizing. They’re some of the weirdest things I’ve seen in a long time, but they’re done as a tribute to Jim Davis, out of love. See for yourself:

See what I mean? They’re crazy, but you can tell that the filmmaker isn’t making fun of the strip. This seems to be a bit of an obsession, but then isn’t that where all the best things come from? I’ve said it many times before; the worst crime of all is to be boring.

Check out the web site for all the videos you can handle, and then some.

On the drive back from my dad’s house yesterday morning, I took the opportunity–and the big detour–to go down to the shoreline near the mouth of the Columbia river to take some more pictures of the scene I stumbled onto last year.

The thing about the Columbia River is that it’s freakin’ huge.

The other thing about it is that the weather at its mouth is notoriously crappy. It was pretty sunny and bright when I first got there, but the winter storms were moving in quickly, so I ran around all over, trying to capture what I like so much about this remote place, before the weather took a turn for the worse. And it did, too. Just when I had gotten back into my car and decided I’d better high-tail it out of there, the rain and hail started.

But wow. The light changes so often that you could take millions of pictures, and each would be very different from all of the others. Not to mention the fact that the river level changes constantly. Because of all the recent rainstorms, it was much higher this time than the last time I was there. I’d like to camp (meaning, sleep in my car) there sometime during the summer, and wake up to take pictures as the sun rises. I want to be able to capture the spirit of this ghost town before the area gets developed and destroyed forever, but I have to say that it seems pretty unlikely to happen for a while, for the simple fact that it’s just so incredibly remote. There’s only one road in, and it’s an impossibly windy, steep eleven-mile dead end (this section is about six miles in) that narrows to only one lane just beyond the area these pictures were taken, with no shoulder or guard rail, and a steep incline that drops down into the thick forest and on down to the river. It’s not a place to be taken lightly.

I’m definitely going back again, when I have more time to devote to shooting pictures and climbing around a lot more. I also desperately need to get myself a tripod.