beautiful, funny, sad & true

Just got home from a gig in Whitefish, Montana.  First time I’ve ever been there, and I have to start by saying that it’s a supremely beautiful little town.  It was my first gig with ModeratelyFamousBanjoPlayer, and despite the fact that it was very loose and unrehearsed (I’d never even met the drummer before, let alone played with him before), AND despite the fact that Southwest Airlines’ baggage handlers banged up my accordion enough that it needs to be repaired now, AND despite the fact that the stage was a truck trailer which bounced around so much that my acoustic guitar fell off it and got a nice big war wound on it, AND despite the fact that we got up at 5:30 a.m. (Mountain Time, which felt like 4:30 Pacific Time!) this morning to drive back to the airport at Spokane, AND despite the fact that I got stung by a bee (how random is that?) at the rental car place in Spokane. . .it was a triumphant show.

No pictures to speak of, unfortunately, because we were on such a tight schedule the entire time, and we were always either in the car, at the gig, or in the hotel room.  Okay, well, here’s what I mean.  This is Mount St. Helens from the airplane. . .

. . .and here’s ModeratelyFamousBanjoPlayer in his solo set.

After he was done, we all ate dinner (of delicious fish tacos!) and then set up the rest of the equipment for the full-band evening show.  I have to give extra-special thanks to SoundGuyToby, who came through with an accordion for me after I found that mine had been damaged by Southwest Airlines’ rough handling during the flight over.  He absolutely saved the gig for me.  The show would have been accordion-free without Toby.

Oh yeah, and the guitar.  The stage was a truck trailer, which bounced around like crazy while we were playing.  My acoustic guitar was sitting next to the edge of the stage, and and one point it tipped right off and landed directly on the metal bar that connects to the hitch.  So it has a huge wound on it, right on the front corner, in one of the most visible places it could possibly have a wound.  I hope to gawd that it can be fixed.  I’ll never be able to sell it for anything close to what I paid for it now.  SUCKS.  It still plays fine, though, and that’s what counts, but that just sucks.  Combine that with the accordion repair and this one gig is really gonna set me back.

I also need to mention the people we met.  They were sweet, accommodating, friendly, drunken, and a metric ton of fun.  After the show, we got a lot of handshakes and “Oh MAN you guys were great.  Thanks so much for coming all the way out here!  We had a blast. . .”, etc.  We also got invited to quite a few parties afterwards (“There are bikes enough for everyone!”) which we had to respectfully decline, unfortunately.  It seems like a great town, especially if you’re an outdoorsy person.

We got to our hotel rooms around 10:30 p.m., then I took a shower and spent the next four hours watching a TV show I’d never seen before called Ice Road Truckers.  You’d think it would be the most boring show in the world, and maybe it was just my mental and physical state at the time, but I was riveted to that crazy show.  It was surprisingly suspenseful.

Oh yeah.  In the four hours during which I actually slept, I had a horrible dream in which three different friends (each of whom I know in real life) told me either to fuck off or “Y’know what?  Go fuck yourself,” and gave me some very specific reasons why they thought I should do that.  One even went so far as to add, “God, it feels so good to say that!”   It wasn’t the best dream I’ve ever had.

So I napped in the car, and then we flew home.  A very nice couple from Spokane sat next to me on the plane, and the guy was actually from Whitefish, so that was a nice coincidence.  They even gave me a copy of Rolling Stone magazine (“Would you like this?  It’s a good one. . .”) just before we landed.  It’s one of the issues with Barack Obama on the cover.

So that was pretty cool.

I’m just glad to be home.  Usually when I’m traveling, I’m much more ‘in the moment’ than I was this weekend, but it was busy enough, and with all the instrument issues it was stressful enough, that I was emotionally done last night.  I wasn’t bummed out or anything, I just wanted to be home so that I could take care of these things that need to be taken care of, and now I can do just that.

I’m going to start with myself.  First a nap, then a shower, then I’m going to a dinner party with a couple of friends.  I’ll worry about the accordion tomorrow.

On my way home from a three-day trip to my dad’s house at the coast this weekend, I drove back through Astoria because the other beach highway, across the river in Washington, is normally much faster, but this time was beleaguered by a series of construction projects, which added about an hour to the trip over.  I love Astoria anyway, so it doesn’t take much for me to want to drive through it.

I drove over the bridge this time, which I rarely do, because A) it goes to a part of Washington that I rarely visit, so driving over it is unnecessary, and B) it’s frickin’ HUGE, and kinda makes me nervous if the weather is anything less than perfect.  Next time I go over it, I want to mount my little camera onto my car’s dashboard or windshield somehow, in order to make a video of the river crossing.  It takes about five or six minutes (at freeway speed!) to drive across the bridge, and when you go up the span and start pulling into Astoria, you are rewarded with a beautiful and unusual view of the town as you go around the curves.  It’s really stunning, but you can’t really drive a stick-shift car around a bunch of curves, pay attention to traffic, and operate a camera all at the same time.

This time, the Astoria Column was finally open, after being closed for renovation for the last two years.  Climbing the steps to the top can really make you dizzy if you’re not careful.  I got up there, took a quick picture for Facebook. . .

. . .and enjoyed the beautiful scenery (but the pictures weren’t very exciting this time), then climbed back down to find something to eat.  Spent a while at a grocery store, but the deli was ridiculously expensive for what you got, so I headed down the road to a pizza place.  On the way, I heard barking coming from the river, so after I got my pizza, I turned back and headed for the marina.  I drove my car onto the pier (which is allowed, by the way; there were many others out there too) and found a group of sea lions sunning themselves on one of the smaller piers.  Most seemed to be asleep, but some were fighting and knocking each other off the pier, and others were awake and enjoying the warmth of the beautiful sunshine.

The weather was perfect, and it was so nice to just walk or drive to the different ends of the huge cement pier and enjoy the views of the town and the river from out there.

Got home and spent the next two or three hours working on Iron Horse songs.  I had to go through our old tapes to find things I can use as part of a retrospective we’re going to make, and I also was looking for our old studio tapes, which are divided up into individual tracks (guitar, drums, vocals, etc.) to use as sound effects for one of the songs we’re recording.  It’ll be hilarious and cool if it all works out, which I have every reason to believe that it will.

In other news, I have two rehearsals (three, if you count the one that happened yesterday morning) and three gigs this week, as well as meeting up with three or four friends (on different days), AND another day trip to the beach on Friday to see some friends from California.  So I’ll try to keep up on BFS&T, but don’t be too surprised if it’s another few-day stretch before I’m back here again.

It’s been another of THOSE weeks, hence the silence around these parts.

Engagement party, lots of ‘party’ parties, movie night or two, tons of recording, it’s just been a blur.  Last night was a friend’s birthday party, which was followed by a ‘party’ party, and tonight is two friends’ wedding (You may remember the bachelor party from a couple weeks ago. . .?), which is to be followed by – what else – a huge party.  The vast majority of people who will be there are also professional musicians, so I’m anticipating a ‘jam’ of acoustic instruments of all kinds.  I’ll be bringing my accordion, for sure, and my camera as well.

I don’t usually talk about this, but the weather here in Portland has been stunningly beautiful lately.  One day it was so lovely that I ditched rescheduled a rehearsal and hit the road in the afternoon so that I could go for a hike instead.  I ended up at Beacon Rock, which is along the Washington side of the Columbia river, about an hour’s drive from here.

It’s 850 feet high, and you get to the top by way of a steep trail that was engineered by one of the people who built the Historic Columbia River Highway.  The trail is about a mile and a half long, and it’s a surprisingly difficult walk.

Nothing like a bunch of tasteless graffiti (“dick juice”) to bring you back to reality.  Anyway, here’s what the view from the top was like, on that particular day.  This one is looking downriver, toward Portland. . .

. . .and this one is looking upriver, uh, away from Portland.

There’s a plaque at the bottom of the rock which tells an Anglicized version of the rock’s history.

It was a lovely day, and a lovely random trip.

And now it’s time to get ready for the wedding.  I have to leave in an hour and a half, and I still need to shower and all that.  Today is equally beautiful, and the ceremony is being held out in the forest.  It promises to be a really great night.

I got up three hours earlier than I normally do today, for no particular reason.  I was going to say that I got up early today, but I do realize that nine o’clock isn’t exactly early, by most peoples’ standards.  I have nothing in particular to do (until later, anyway) so I’ve been dinking around online.  I took one of those Facebook quizzes that said, “Where should you live in Washington State?” and the answer was not at all a surprise.

Since I’ve been up there so much recently, I know some of the neighborhoods that I’d like to live in, so I went to the Seattle page on Craigslist and looked at apartments in those neighborhoods.  I started to daydream a bit, and even went so far as to look at musician and job ads as well.  I imagined what my life would be like if I had a cool live/work loft in Ballard, or an upper-story apartment with a view of Lake Union and the Space Needle in Eastlake, or a funky cool place behind GasWorks Park in Wallingford.  I decided I needed some coffee, and my daydreams must have been a good bit deeper than I realized, because as soon I walked outside, I was somewhat surprised to find myself on my usual street, in my usual neighborhood.

I called one of my Seattle friends to tell her about this odd feeling.  Coincidentally enough, she’s going to be moving down here to Portland pretty soon, so I imagine she’s feeling the same, albeit in a much more tangible and genuine way.

For the record, there aren’t too many cities in Washington in which I’d want to live.  There aren’t too many cities in Washington, PERIOD, come to think of it.  The only ones of any real size are Seattle, Olympia, Spokane, and Tacoma.  I’m not going to count Vancouver, because it’s really more a suburb of Portland than it is its own entity, despite the fact that it was founded and settled long before Portland was (or even before Vancouver, B.C. was).  Be that as it may, I could happily live in Seattle, or maybe the state capitol of Olympia, or one of the pretty little towns on the coast, or maybe even my adopted home-away-from-home of Port Townsend (if I was already married and I/we had a self-sustaining career) but that’s about it.

I need the pace and opportunities that only a city can provide.  I have a good thing going here in Portland, and I’m certainly not in a hurry to leave any time soon, but I have to admit that there are times when I feel like living in a bigger place would be a good idea, whether it be Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, or even New York. The problem is that Portland’s almost too awesome.  The secret’s getting out, and there’s so much art and music and culture happening that it keeps attracting more and more people here, all trying to eke out an existence in this relative oasis, and the resulting glut makes it more difficult for all of us who are attempting to make a living at a creative career.

For the time being, however, I’m happy and relatively successful here, living the kind of life I want to live.  But I do still daydream, and I still have lots of my life ahead to make changes, big and small.

Saturday morning, after a train wreck of a gig in Renton with my friend BT, and having stayed up until four o’clock in the morning the night before, I got up and nine o’clock and drove up to my brother’s house.  I got to see Niece #2 for the first time, and she’s almost five months old.  She was very quiet and smiley, and she instantly grabbed both my thumb and pinky finger in her tiny hands, which seemed to surprise everyone.  “She never does that with us,” they said.

It was great to see them.  The last couple of times I’ve been up in Seattle, they had been in Portland, so our paths hadn’t crossed.  We do talk on the phone regularly, but it’s not the same, especially when a new baby is involved.  We went for brunch at a delicious Mexican restaurant called Azul, then went back to the house and just kinda hung out for a while.  They were packing for a trip, so I just stayed downstairs and played with Niece 1 and Niece 2 while Nephew was upstairs sleeping.

We all went our separate ways around 1:30, and since I had no agenda for the rest of the day, I decided to take a rest from driving and go sit in a park for a while.  Naturally I had to drive for quite a while to get to the park, but the plan was set.  I headed down to GasWorks Park, in the Fremont district.  That’s the short version of the story.  The long version is that there were two or three large festivals in Seattle that day, and traffic was nightmarish.  I also took a wrong turn and ended up going across the short bridge to Eastlake (I think. . .?) and hung out in a tiny little park along Lake Union for a while, exploring and walking through the neighborhood a bit before driving back across the bridge to Wallingford, which is a neighborhood that I could quite easily see myself living in.  By the time I got to GasWorks Park, I was ready to relax.  There was some sort of folk arts festival happening, so I was glad to have gotten there early enough to check it all out.

Naturally, I had my camera with me, and I was very glad I did.  There were lots of colorful costumes, great gypsy klezmer music, naked people (some painted, others not), belly dancers. . .

(Can I just take a minute here to say that the naked dancing guy had a surprisingly gigantic scrotum?  I rarely feel the need to mention things like that (mostly cause I don’t see many scrota!), but I mean, jeez.  You’d find it worth mentioning too, if you’d seen it.  I’m just saying.  The security guy finally made him wear pants, which he grudgingly put on, but kept pulling them down as low as they would go, showing fully half of his ass and barely concealing him in the front.  Yeesh.  Anyway. . .I don’t want to devote too much time to scrota; I feel that I’ve done enough already.  Moving on.)

. . .and, of course, the gas works itself.  This is one of the weirdest parks anywhere, and it’s in one of the most beautiful settings in all of Seattle.   It’s slightly sinister, utterly fascinating, and endlessly photogenic.

I seem to remember signs posted around the park that said things like, ‘Wash Your Hands After Touching Grass’ and ‘Do Not Lie On Grass; Please Use Blankets’ and things like that, but I couldn’t find any of those this time.   The city must have cleaned the place up a bit more since the last time I was there.  It’s been a few years.

Anyway,  the day was lovely, and I was glad to have had the extra time to spend in such a leisurely way.  I love Seattle, and every time I go, I toy with the idea of moving there.   Here’s the view from the park.  If you click on it, you’ll see that it’s full-size so that you can really get a sense of it.  It’d be amazing after dark too.

I don’t know that I’ll actually move there.  I have good things going for me here (not to mention extremely cheap rent), but I do love it, and I always come back and look at apartments on ListByCraig in various neighborhoods, trying to decide which area would suit me.

Le Sigh.  Je t’aime, EmeraldCity.

Friday afternoon, I drove up to Seattle (actually, it was Renton, which is the suburb most famous for being the resting place of Jimi Hendrix) to play a gig with my friend BT.   It was at a venue I was not familiar with, so when I drove into the parking lot, I was surprised to find that it was a small ‘British-style’ pub that was located next to the Department of Licensing in a strip mall.  Veeeery rock and roll.

I left my bass in the car and walked inside to check the place out and say hi to BT.  He was there, naturally, getting the PA system all set up.  The drummer was also there, and it was my first time meeting him, since he was a fill-in guy that night as well.  In fact, it was BT’s first time playing a gig with him, which can be very telling about someone’s personality.

Usually during set-up, especially between new people, there’s a lot of conversation and chit-chat about all kinds of things, but this time there was a noticeable lack of conversation, with BT over on one side of the stage, turned away and working on something, and Drummer sort of sitting behind his kit, adjusting his cymbals and whatnot.  It was weird.  I broke the ice by asking the drummer about his drum kit, which was a beautiful, custom-made kit that was much too large for such a small place.  He had about a million different cymbals, too, which were sprawled out everywhere and left precious little room for BT and me.   I moved my monitor and microphone as far forward as I could, in order that I wouldn’t have two cymbals a foot from my head.

Finally it was time to start, and it turned out that the drummer didn’t have a good ‘feel’ at all.  I’m a competent enough bass player and musician that I can lock in with anybody, and I could not lock in with this guy.  His timing wasn’t solid, and he put in lots of unnecessary flourishes throughout every song.  Yeesh.

When we took a break, Drummer went to talk with a couple of his friends, and BT and I went outside to enjoy the cool breeze.  He told me that the first thing out of Drummer’s mouth when he arrived was, “You set everything up wrong.  It needs to be further over.”  He told me that he’d talked with Drummer about how much gear to bring, and Drummer assured him that he’d keep it small.  Drummer also brought this weird headphone mixer and effect thingy and tried to plug it in, and got angry with BT for not knowing how to use it.  This all went down right before I showed up, which explains the air of tension onstage.

Rule One of being a for-hire musician; never bite the hand that feeds you.  You don’t walk in and insult the person who hired you, and you certainly don’t want to be snippy with them if they don’t know how to use your personal equipment.  If you do decide to do those things, however, you’d better be a good enough player that your musicianship alone will hopefully redeem your behavior, because if you’re not, you won’t be called again, and worse yet, you will earn yourself a bad reputation around town.

Drummers are particularly prone to this sort of bravado.  This guy also grew up in Los Angeles, and he had what I like to call the L.A. Self-Promotion Syndrome.  Everyone I’ve ever met from L.A. has a particular way of talking about him- or herself.  They always seem to be trying to put themselves ahead of others, or to drop a name in just the right way; you get the idea.  It’s very peculiar and specific.  So you can imagine what a bravado-prone drummer, who’s also from L.A., is like.   Ugh.

We slogged through about four hours’ worth of songs, and I think three songs sounded good in that whole span of time.  We just had to laugh, but after a while, BT’s laugh reminded me of a sheet pulled over broken glass (a very memorable image from a very un-memorable Ayn Rand book).  There were three or four times we actually had to stop a song because it sounded so bad.  We got through the night, though, and at two-thirty in the morning, we finally got everything packed up and out of there.  Drummer gave me his business card and went on his way.  BT actually had a gig scheduled with him for the next day.  I don’t envy BT.  I crashed in his extra bedroom, in my sleeping bag on the floor, for about four hours, and then woke up at nine to meet my brother and his family for breakfast.  That’s a story for the next entry.

The thing that made this particular gig bearable, though, was a guy in the audience.  He requested songs like “Cocaine” and walked in front of the stage drunkenly appreciating us when we played his requests.  Then he started requesting songs by Sublime, which none of us knew.  “I’m from Long Beach,” he said, about fourteen times.  “I usually listen to gangsta rap, but after I saw Sublime, it made me realize that you guys [meaning musicians in general] can really play.”

“Well thanks, man,” BT said diplomatically.  “We’d sure play some Sublime if we knew any.  I’ll try and learn some for you by next time.”

“I’m from Long Beach,” the guy repeated, with significance.

“That’s cool,” Drummer said.  “I’m from L.A. too.”

“Yeah, man, so you know.  Sublime, man.  That’s where they’re from too.  You guys sure you don’t know any Sublime?”

This conversation happened three different times.  And for the record, why is someone who ‘normally listens to gangsta rap’ hanging out in an English-style bar, anyway?  Hilarious.

I’m really glad none of our friends were there to see that show.  The bar owner guy said, “Hey, guys, sorry there aren’t more people here for you.  Usually Friday nights are pretty crazy around here.   I don’t know what’s going on.”

“That’s okay,” I said, laughing and casting a glance over toward BT.  “Tonight that’s probably a good thing, at least as far as we’re concerned.”

Every once in a while you have gigs that just don’t work out.  It’s totally normal.  I look back on that show as being fun, though, if only for reasons other than it was supposed to have.  It certainly wasn’t stressful or anything.  We just laughed our way through train wreck after train wreck, which has its own special form of appeal.

So.  Yeah.  The trip to Port Townsend.  Finally.  Sorry it took a while to get around to this.  PT trips always end up being big stories.

Good times, as per usual.  Our IrishBand show was on Friday night, and we spent the entire rest of the weekend partying, and eating, and walking, and talking.  PT is small enough (and pretty enough) that you can just walk everywhere in the downtown area.   Singer and I arrived in town first, and we walked from place to place, and I had my camera ready for a few of them.

it seemed that everywhere we went we met someone Singer knew, who was brimming over with interesting stories.  We met his first grade teacher, and a couple of other friends, and his uncle (Ex-step-uncle?  Not biological, anyway. . .isn’t this interesting?), who wore an ascot and drunkenly talked our ears off in a comic way.  He was quite the character.

We met up with some of our friends from Portland (who also moved from PT), walked downtown to buy a huge bottle of beer each, and then walked to the pier to sit and relax for a while.  The sitting and relaxing (and, of course, the picture-taking) was already in progress, when an unhappy-looking guy walked up, took his shirt off, and stood at the end of the pier, staring down into the water.  We called out to him, “You okay, dude?”

He didn’t look at us, but instead hopped over the rail and dove into Puget Sound.  We called to him a few more times, and told him there was a ladder on the other side of the pier, but he didn’t respond to us in any way.  It was pretty freaky.  He sat there treading water for a long time. . .

. . .and then swam back over to the dock and climbed out, walked clear around where we were sitting, and never once acknowledged our presence.  Luckily everything turned out to be okay, but I think we were all fearing the worst, or at least preparing ourselves to dive in after him.  Situation averted, we finished our beers and walked back up to get food.  Before long, it was time for IrishBand to play our show, which was pretty awesome, and the venue was packed with people.  Finally rolled into Violinist’s parents’ house at around three in the morning.

The next morning Violinist’s parents fixed us a glorious breakfast of the heartiest French toast you can imagine, with a delicious array of toppings (I chose the homemade berry sauce) and veggie sausage on the side.  Suddenly it was time for the Rhody Festival parade, so we drove into town in time for that.  I had my camera, but all parades look the same, so I didn’t feel the need to capture this one for posterity.  It was fun, though, and we met up with another of Singer’s friends (a former recording studio owner, which was interesting), and went to lunch with him after the parade was over.

Y’know what?  I’m gonna change the plan for this entry, because really, the whole rest of Saturday was spent eating and drinking.  Singer had to go to his ten-year high school reunion, so Drummer and I got dropped off at a party with some people we barely knew.  One of them was very drunk already (this was around 3:00 in the afternoon), and he wanted to watch the soccer game.  He stood in front of the TV, yelling horrible things like, “I knew you were gonna miss that, you f**king queer!”  and “Jewbag!  What the f**k was that?!“  A couple of people tried to stop the flow of insults, but you can’t reason with people who are that drunk and belligerent, so I decided that I needed to make myself scarce for a while.  I walked out of the house and down the hill (I could still hear the strings of obscenities from three long blocks away) into town and over to the beach, where I sat quietly on the rocks for a long while, before walking the length of the beach to a small rocky point to collect some mussel and oyster shells, which were everywhere.  I must have been gone for about an hour or so, when I got a phone call from Violinist saying, “Hey, noticed you weren’t around.  Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.  I just needed to be away from the verbal abuse.  I also wanted some quiet anyway.  I’m down on the beach.”

“Really?  You walked clear over there?  By the fort?”

“No, the marina.  I’m sitting on a log as we speak.  I’ll be back before too long, but I’m kind of enjoying being here by myself for a while.”

“Oh, really?  Cause we were gonna walk down there after the game is over.”

So I walked around on the beach for another half hour or so, then headed back, clear around the marina and the condos, and then up the hill to the party house.  The soccer game was just about over, so we all started looking for the next distraction.  It came in the form of a cooler that someone had ingeniously attached wheels, handlebars, and an electric motor to (you’d have to see it to believe it) to create a miniature electric scooter, so we each took a couple of turns riding it around the block.  My pictures didn’t come out, but I think Violinist may have some.  It was pretty dang funny.  When the batteries started to lose their charge, we put the scooter away to charge it up again, and then all walked down to the park near the beach.  ObnoxiousDrunk was up to his usual antics, so the rest of us were pretty much trying to keep as much distance between him and ourselves as we could.

Drummer and I walked down to the beach for a little while, and I told him about the multitude of shells that were down there, so he wanted to grab a few for his lady friend, and also get a temporary reprieve from ObnoxiousDrunk.  This post is getting long, so I’ll just say that there was Thai food involved, and more walking, and lots more drinking, and then around midnight we walked back down the hill to see a punk band (who will remain nameless) play.

They were pretty good (unlike my pictures from the show!), but the general concensus was that eight or ten years ago, everybody thought that they were the coolest band anywhere.  These days, however, their lifestyle of excess is starting to take its toll on the band members, and apparently it’s really starting to show.  Luckily, we had snuck into the show for free, by way of a side door near the bar in the front of the buildng.  Don’t tell the band.

Did I mention that after the show, it was around one-thirty in the morning?  Naturally, that meant we had to go back to the party house to continue the festivities before heading back to Violinist’s house at around three.  Apparently our car got egged on the way back, but I don’t even remember it, quite honestly, because my body was already beginning to shut itself down.  We got to Violinist’s house and I just kinda collapsed on my bed.  I started to check my text messages and voice mails, but I ended up falling asleep right away and snoring really loudly.  So loudly, in fact, that Singer walked by the room I was in and poked his head in the door to check on me.  He laughed and ran downstairs, telling the other guys, “C’mere, you have to see this!”

This was all unknown to me, obviously, until the next morning when I woke up to find that I had some messages saying things like, “Ha ha” and “We’re watching you!”  Apparently I’d fallen asleep with my glasses on, and they’d fallen halfway off my face, and my phone was sitting on my chest.  Hilarious.  No pictures of that, thank gawd.   It was as if my body was determined to stop me from doing absolutely any other movement that day.   And no wonder, too; it was a crazy day.

In the morning we woke up to another amazing breakfast and conversation with Violinist’s parents, then after a few hours said our goodbyes and headed to a friend’s house, where there was yet another barbecue and party happening.  We were all still stuffed from our enormous breakfast, so we gave the food a miss, but a couple of the guys did have a drink.  I gorged myself on cup after cup of water, which my poor little body was so thirsty for.  We hung out there for an hour or two, and then slowly made our way out of town.  Drummer was really impatient to get back home, and sat fuming silently in Violinist’s car while the rest of us ran a few more errands.  Manager needed to buy some parts for his motorcycle, and then had to make a few small repairs on it.  Then we needed to stop for gas, and made another stop at a hardware store.  Drummer practically had steam coming out of his ears by the time we left Port Townsend, and Singer and I (in Singer’s car) could only imagine how frustrated Violinist must have been with him on the four-hour drive back to Portland.

So there you go; another crazy trip to PT under our metaphorical belts.

The rest of this week has been a blur of activity as well, which is why it took me so long to write this entry in the first place.

Spent the day doing laundry and packing for another trip with IrishBand to the beautiful seaport town of Port Townsend, Washington.  I’ll be there all weekend, and The Plan is to come back with a bunch of stories and pictures.  Here are some links to the entries from our previous trips:

IrishBand Goes to Port Townsend

A Great Weekend in PT

No Strings to Hold Me Down

Those should tie you over until I get back and have time to share the New Adventures of IrishBand.

In other news, we had a fun and slightly drunken gig tonight, and then I came home and had a nice long phone conversation with BoringFish.  Afterwards, I gave myself a haircut; my first time ever doing that.  And now, it’s almost 3:00 a.m., and time to go to bed.  Singer is picking me up at 9:30, which is the earliest I’ve had to get up in the last two months.  Yikes!  Wish me luck.

Off to sleep (perchance to dream) and then bright and early to PT.  See you when I get back!