my niecy with the pipes

She didn't win, but I think she should have. She did a truly incredible job on this song.

out and around

Our festival was a smash. It was great!

I went out to boooze bay to see my neecy compete in the Teen Idol singing competition. She placed second, but I do firmly believe, all bias aside, that she was the better singer. The audience knew it, too. I listened to her practice "At Last" by Etta James and it made me cry. That's really something. I came back home with a flu-ey kind of ick.

Our jam spot had a fire, but we're back up and running at the local Legion hall for now, starting tonight. I hadn't even had a chance to piss the neighbors off with the drums, yet. I'm devastated. laff.

Smart Half will be going back to school with me! I'm totally excited about it.

Scootypuff blew out another CV boot. Time to park it for a while and bus it around til I can have these replaced. Three boots are bad, and at least one actual CV joint. This in addition to the front end just being trashed. I was thinking of busing it for most of the winter anyway.

Holy crap its tomorrow

the blues festival that is. It's goin to be AWESOME!

hehe woot!

Got one back

Lizard prince sent me an unedited sound file from Saturday. It was three songs long with some conversation. One of them was pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. One of my favorite songs of all time, "Diane", originally done by Husker Du and then covered in about five different ways by one of my favorite bands of all time, Therapy?. It was just me singing and playing Puddin. I got a great sound, even, out of my dinky little 15w amp, too.

It's always exciting to hear a recording of myself. I'm an egomaniac that way. Part of it is that I still can't believe I can play an instrument, so it's cool to hear myself doing it.

So I guess in a couple of days I'll have the edited one and I will upload it to the Butcher page.

tuneage

Saturday the lizard prince and I sat down at his hidey hole (which happens to be catty-corner from the house the Smart Half and I were trying to buy when we moved here) and I thrashed out about 10 songs on the geetar. Some are mine. Some Cracker, New Model Army, Jesse Colin Young, Dwight Yoakum, Therapy? It was mostly just to get some stuff recorded finally. By thrashed out I mean I just sat down and got as far as I could through some of these and then kept going even after losing it. There may be a couple that are worth sharing. If that's the case, I'll put it on ye old Butcher page. It felt pretty good, though. He didn't realize I knew as many songs as I do. Well, when I'm stuck in the back of the stage playing blues bass for three years, I guess it's hard to tell I can play anything else.

mommy can I go out and kill

I don't care what anyone says. Glenn Danzing had one hell of a voice for a punk band. I think Lee Ving did, too.

(The Misfits)


(Lee Ving)

Thank you, pb!

Paul has quit maintaining OrBlogs

Thank you for running such a great resource for as long as you did!

GPA

Did I mention that coming into the fall term at school I have a 3.43 GPA? Those three numbers and a dot just make me smile from one ear to the other.

It's the small things, you know.

breadfan

I love jamming this guitar intro on my bass. Djeef and I used to play it a lot together. Metallica's version. It's only been in the last few years that I was able to find a taped copy of the original Budgie song. And here it is. Rad.

Gutted

The place where we hold our jams was in a fire early this morning. One side is a restaurant and one side is the bar. The restaurant caught fire in the kitchen. The entire building didn't burn down, but the restaurant is closed now, as is the bar. I guess the ceiling in the bathroom and poker area of the bar collapsed. All of the blues society's equipment was safe, and so were the bartenders who were working at the end of their shifts. All the bartenders there are so super cool, I'm really happy none of them were hurt. I could deal with busted and burned equipment, but would be absolutely bummed if one of them had gotten hurt. But I'm bummed anyway, as now we have no jam place and the world is poorer for the loss of that place. Great owners at the bar. I don't know the restaurant owners, but they had a bustling little place going there with pretty good food and a friendly wait staff, who are now out their jobs, as well.

yay

the Fo is fine. Whew. Came this --> <-- close to a very expensive repair. I added TWO GALLONS of coolant to it (8 quarts. Capacity is 9.6 quarts). Started it. Got it warmed up. Turned it off. Went looking for leaks. Found the culprit at the block inlet pipe. No other fluids in places they shouldn't be. (ie no coolant in the oil. No oil in the coolant. No coolant burning in the cylinders. No exhaust coming out the radiator fill up hole. Etc). Everything smelled right.

I have an irrational fear of blown head gaskets and warped heads. Have dealt with both just one too many times in other cars. The Fo was running extremely poorly, very hot, with a lot of pinging, and getting hot in less than a mile's worth of driving. All of these are symptoms of stuff getting into where it isn't.

I had reminded the Smart Half when we got it to check everything on it once a week, just because of the problems these had. This is HIS vehicle. He did not. I should have just let it go to fucked up so he could have the joy of dealing with it, but then I got smart myself and realized it wouldn't be him dealing with, but me. As usual.

He admitted to not checking a single thing on it in four months. I could have slapped him.

a little disappointed

The '92 4runners had a recall for head gasket problems. Ours had been fixed before we bought it. I've talked to other owners of 4runners who said Toyota was great about dealing with this problem, multiple times. Having the repair blow out as well and then having that fixed, as well.

Which is good, because the (previously repaired) head gasket in ours blew out a couple of days ago.

I've been a Toyota fan for a long time. Been driving them regularly since '88. They could pretty much do no wrong in my eyes. Let's hope they live up to it.

But, in general, the Fo has been kind of a disappointment to me. It just feels wrong.

how not to keep your books

One of my friends worked at a local nightclub that's run by a complete moron. We knew this prior to the weekend, but she got laid off and went to go apply for unemployment yesterday. And found out there's no record of her working for this guy. Even though she isn't an under-the-table employee. He's been taking out her FICA, SS, etc every week, and pocketing it.

Fucking slimebag.

I've never liked the dude much. He just gave me the heebie-jeebies, and he's done some things to other employees that I thought was pretty despicable. They run a jam down there once a week but I rarely went and when I did I only grudgingly handed any money over to the place.

Well, apparently he has managed to get away with it- other employees who went to file for unemployment and didn't get it didn't pursue it any further than a shrug and an "oh well", but this friend of mine, she's a pitbull... She's calling BOLI on Monday.

I've run into some pretty shady business practices in KF. I know it's not confined to KF, but man it's just more prevalent here I guess.

another great jam

yeah we have these all the time! hahaha! I thought it was great. I got to jam with the guy who runs the sound at the Ragland. He's pretty damn talented. And got to play "Fisherman's Blues", which I'm always up for playing. Who can resist a Waterboys song!?

red zone

Front page story in today's Herald & News is the Red Zone. The Red Zone 330,000 acres (approximately) of (mostly dead) forest between Bly and Paisley.

Save the Trees, Kill a Forest doesn't seem to have been working very well.

the pants

This is the first pair we made. I picked the fabric. I love batik style prints and so any of these that have them I probably picked the material for.

Yesterday we picked up a sewing machine at Goodwill for $20. It is in the shop getting a tuneup currently. Once we dig Nat's machine out of storage, the Goodwill one will be mine.

I'm looking around online for places to buy hemp and bamboo fabric. I am going to do some printing on unbleached cotton for some of our pants. Man that bamboo and hemp stuff is expensive ($17 a yard!!! and that's cheap!!). That's what I would like to make some of the pants from, though.

The first pair I'll be making myself are for my Smart Half, out of flannel, long legs. I will probably be starting those Sunday night.

pay me for the notes

I knew it would happen eventually. If I kept going to the jams, kept expanding the group of people I know who play, avoided getting a rep as someone hard to work with...I really am not hard to work with when it comes to music. I make frowny faces while playing some songs and grumble about some others, but I'm pretty easy going, actually. I show up early and get set up, don't get falling-down drunk very often, and don't fight with the patrons. What more could a band ask for?!

I've been asked to play bass in one of the bands around here that is working. Not my favorite music, but then not all the music I hate, either. The guys seem jolly enough.

Finally. I'll be starting in early September (my first gig with them will be during the weekend of Sept 5/6). This is how I'll be paying for school this semester, too.

One of the things they liked about me was that I played pretty much whatever they threw at me at the jam one night. How I do that is my little secret, but the only people that regularly stump me are the guys who want to play jazz-type jams.

Pillory me if you so desire, but I don't get much jazz. I like the early jazz, but more modern stuff that came after, hmm.. the 50s I guess, makes my brain asplode.

@!#$!%#

a short run of the posters for the festival came in yesterday.

I hate them. I hate the logo. I hate the design. I hate that there's black script written over black areas of the print. I hate the numerous punctuation errors strewn all over it. I hate that it looks like someone threw a bunch of clip art at a piece of paper.

Of course it's irrational of me to be this hostile to a piece of graphic design work. But, it looks like crap.

I called in the errors to our prez. No one proofed it before it went to print.

more about pants

Screamin Natalie and I eyeballed the fishermen's pants today, went out and picked a fine little fabric and some pattern-making stuff, and 5 hours later we had another pair without taking mine apart.

Well, ok, they aren't pants, they're shorts. But anyway, now another pair is wandering around the locale.

And I didn't sew very much, because I don't know how to use a sewing machine (but I can hone your cylinders for you...), but I helped make the pattern, pinned it on the fabric, and made efforts to cut in a straight line. Also I ironed. I threaded the needle (correctly, even, and more than once) and figured some other stuff out on the machine. That's plenty sewing enough for me. I can sew by hand pretty well, but never was able to master a machine. Well I may have, had anyone taught me, which nobody did and it never mattered much to me one way or the other. Screamin Natalie is determined to show me how to sew, though. I showed her my attempt at crochet from a couple of years ago- the 2-yard long rope of red yarn. She laughed. Yeah but I can still hand-pack wheel bearings like nobody's bidness.

I have pics of the pants we made. They'll be here eventually. Got a lot of puppy pics since she's caring for a dog that was abandoned, pregnant, at her neighbors house. These little guys are cute as hell. Part brindle coat pit bull (not sure which type- the kind with the pointy head instead of the blockhead) and part Rhodesian Ridgeback. They're all colored like their mom but have their dad's eyes. Which always look at us humans as if we were some tall, hairless idiots.

We probably are. If we were smart, maybe we'd lick our own asses from time to time.

the number 42

It was pretty sweet yesterday to get our power bill and see that the total we owe for the last billing cycle was $42.00.

That was for 429 Kwh over 31 days.

Haven't used the dryer much. It makes the house hot, and then we have to use the AC. So by hanging out our laundry and then dropping it on the fluff setting for 10 minutes in the evening, I killed off close to $60 off our bill. By keeping the dryer off its heat settings, the house has been cooler, so we don't have to use the AC much.

Other things may have finally added up- all of our lights are the new style bulbs now and I revert to my mother and go around making sure they are off if we aren't using them. Always have kind of done that but not so vigilant as lately about it. One computer has not been used much so it's been off about a month. I have been playing more acoustic. Really i have no idea how much two hours of playing either through a 25 watt amp or a 100 watt amp costs, and I didn't switch to save electricity, it's just that the acoustic is always ready to go. The electric always involves dinking around with a cord, or the inputs have loosened up or some other bullshit.