Hey ho, back to the show I go :D

Yay, really looking forward to tonight. Frogg and I have a 7pm-8pm SL time show for Spunky Burrito (gotta love that name hehe). The last show we played was 3pm on Saturday, so this has been quite a treat getting the time off to relax. Frogg even got to change his strings, so be prepared for a very crisp sound! Can't wait to get back in there.... tickling the ivories!

I had a great holiday, and spent most of my time cooking in the kitchen. If you happened to run into me in SecondLife, I was most likely AFK, busy with something involving the oven. I made rum balls (fantastic), curried walnuts (too good to stop eating) and some sour cream peach pies (very good but filling).

Tired...

Been working myself too hard lately. Most of my day is taken up with my job, which moves extremely slowly, and nothing much happens. Then, I get home and everything cranks up to 80MPH. Only 3-4 hours to do things, and 8 hours of stuff needs to get done. If there's a show, I just forget about doing anything RL-related because there won't be enough time. When there isn't a show, I try my best to do something relaxing but it always turns into people asking questions or trying to set up gigs. The people I know in RL don't suffer from the lack of time (I always make time for them) but lately I haven't been making time for myself. I'm working on it though, and my friends are being supportive :) I'll keep you posted, but at the moment I'm not really feeling like blogging.

Christmas is coming!

I can always tell when the winter sets in because I have to get a little more diligent on the exercise bike. Or stop eating the wonderful treats that I make and other people from work bring in to the office. Can't have that though! When else do you get to sample treats? :D

Been doing a lot of shows lately, and it'll be nice to have today and tomorrow night off playing. Tonight I am home (yay) to just kick back and do whatever. Tomorrow night I get to have dinner with my Dad, who I haven't been able to see for some time due to a trip he was taking and all the shows I've been doing in the evenings.

I get to play at Kain Scalia's art show on the 21st! I'm really looking forward to it :) I do love to play solo once in a while, a couple of times a month at least. Be sure to come if you can, I saw a sneak preview and I have to tell you, Kain is an excellent artist with a really wide range of subjects! And it provides a wonderful backdrop for some light music :)

It must be Thursday...

I could never get the hang of Thursdays! Luckily that also means I'm hosting the Hitchhiker's Guide radio series again tonight at 8pm :) Starting tonight, we begin the latest episodes, recorded in 2004 and 2005, many years after the original Primary and Secondary phases, recorded back in 1978-1980.

A little story behind the episodes tonight. When they were aired on BBC 4 in 2004, I got to hear them about 10am my time, live from the Tuesday evenings in the UK. I "taped" them off the radio, with a little program that captures Realmedia streams. The quality wasn't stellar, but it did the trick and I would listen to them that night on my commute home from Tuesday's work. Well, today was fast approaching, and I couldn't find my recordings anywhere. So, about a week ago, I went on to Amazon, and bought the net two Phases: Tertiary and Quandary. They arrived earlier this week, like on Tuesday. "Oh great," I thought, "now I just gotta find time to rip them to the hard drive so I can air them on Thursday. But oh... oh wait... Hmm, the fifth Phase, the Quintissential one, was not for sale in the USA yet (having just been released in the UK)." So, I decided to also look for a bit torrent version of it, in case it doesn't get released in time for my airing. As luck would have it, I found a torrent that contained all five Phases, in excellent quality! So, saves me the trouble of ripping for tonight's show, and I'm ahead of the game for when the fifth Phase comes around. I plan to buy that one too (they're excellent for the car), but for now I'm back in business!

Hope to see you all at the show.

PS: Some folks in Europe and on the east coast can't make the 8PM show on a Thursday night, so I may start the whole series over, in tandem, at some point at an earlier time, on a weekend day. Say, 1PM or something? Any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated!

Another boring work day

Getting kind of sick of my schedule, even if I have enough to do these days. I've been putting together binders containing rate comparisons and other statistical data for the electric/water utility I work for. Fun fun... 16 binders with 41 pages and tabs each. Still, gives me something to do, and I like the repetitiveness of it sometimes as it makes the day go by faster.

Rather be in SL though ;) Tonight Frogg and I are playing at the Blarney Stone. I always enjoy playing there... A very nice crowd is present and Sitearm and all the folks at the Blarney Stone just do a wonderful job with events... Very on top of things, and it makes it a joy to perform there because of it.

Everything is Illuminated

Just watched this great movie for the second time, Everything is Illuminated with Elijah Wood... I went out and bought the soundtrack, which is pretty cool! Here's one of my favorite songs from it, and it goes out to Rosa and all the other purple people out there :)

Start Wearing Purple

I'm pretty slow on the uptake with new music. I tend to find out about it accidentally, like the song above. Last night I was at a friend's house and he was playing me some Los Lonely Boys, which sounded pretty cool too... Going to have to look them up and hear some of their stuff. My friend likes to buy the DVD concerts of bands, but I could never get into that. I like to listen to music while I'm on the PC, but having something visual makes me want to pay attention to it, and my PC time suffers. God knows I can't have that! hehe

Tonight's the night!

Spider Robinson is a wonderful writer... He writes very poignant essays, and all sorts of science fiction. However, what he is best known for is his Callahan's series. Here's a short description, which I edited down from Wikipedia ;)

"Callahan's Place is a bar with strongly community-minded and empathic clientele.

The bar is run by Mike Callahan. The regulars are welcoming and willing to listen to any visitor's problems, no matter how strange, but do not snoop if a visitor is unwilling to share. Strange and unusual events and visitors turn up with frequency in the stories. Regulars at Callahan's include a talking dog, several extraterrestrials and time-travelers, a vampire, a couple of Irish mythological beings, and an obscenity-spewing parrot. The stories make heavy use of puns."

Well, tonight, Frogg and I are playing as Jake Stonebender and Fast Eddie Costigan (respectively) at the new virtual Place in Secondlife. I couldn't be more excited! If you haven't read the Callahan's series (especially The Callahan Chronicals) you are really missing out. I strongly suggest you follow the link and pick up a copy, because you won't be disappointed! Never have I wanted to be part of a group as there is in the Callahan's books.

To make the evening special, I splurged on a very old 21 year bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey. I normally buy the cheaper 16 or 10 year versions, but I needed a good excuse to buy it, and a book about an Irish type bar is just the one I need.

Anyway, we play at 6:00 PM SL time, for two hours. I won't be looking like the cat tonight, as I have created a Fast Eddie avatar based on what I could glean of a description from the books. Frogg should be going as Jake, who is not a frog but looks remarkably like Frogg in real life.