concrete makes your skin feel funny

Life Update:

Leaves in New Haven just starting to turn. Not really crunchy yet.

I got a postcard from Meg and Gavin a couple days ago, detailing their recent adventures complete with illustrations of bridge games and harbor seals and cars not going off cliffs. I think they're getting home tomorrow, though, so I suspect stories will be forthcoming...

Work's gotten more exciting--I spent the last three weeks driving up the CT coastline talking to people at marinas and yacht dealerships and bait & tackle shops. I'm in love with tackle shop owners. They are old and crusty and love to talk and offer me free sodas. Plus bait is fun to look at and poke the rubbery fake fish and laugh at the fly lures

Last week I saw an old Chinese junk (traditional sailboat) by the side of the road, which was incredible because (a) it was really really old and falling apart [wabi-sabi, supremely], (b) it had eyes painted on it, (c) what the hell was it doing in West Mystic, CT? I stopped and talked to a guy there and he told me all about the boat he's restoring, an oystering sailboat from 1884, and showed me some huge clams and oysters and we saved some tiny shrimp [clear, inch-long, flipping themselves all over frantically] that were out of water by mistake and talked about insects and he showed me a really cool seagull skull that he was keeping on his dashboard.

This week I'm more in the office doing paper-computer-xerox-work-zzzzzzz. But this weekend, outreach at the Hammonassett Festival, which is half environmental fair, half NE Indian pow-wow. Looking forward to it.

Last weekend I was up at Lake George for a work weekend--closing up the cottage for the winter and doing various repairs.
Low points: freezing fully clothed in my sleeping bag at night; overloading the wheelbarrow with gravel and then being unable to lift my arms above shoulder height for three days; listening to my cousin's war stories from Balad.
High points: impossibly clear bright air; singalong with a family friend (including "Henry David Thoreau" to the tune of "Johnny B. Goode"); fresh-squeezed orange juice; getting to know a cousin for the first time; not being the most off-key singer in the room during aforementioned singalong because aforementioned cousin was there; wading out into the lake and seeing the bottom clearly through water undisturbed by boats; LEARNING HOW TO MORTAR A STONE WALL!!

love

KWATHUMPPP!

...is the sound my head makes, exhaustedly hitting the desk, glancing off the keyboard, causing it to type something akin to vcxujm bi;g.

amazing weekend, with some very pleasant, unexpected visits.

I'll tell you all about it after I sleep for twenty-one days or something.

potential update

baltimore(201)
chilling out with my brother & co. making some music, mixing more, listening more than that. looking for jobs. restarted (again) deus ex. reading (finished everything is illuminated 2 nights ago). watching the wire. chilling.
~A

Hey everyone. Was working up at the farmhouse this past weekend, and the downstairs bathroom is now functional, clean and repainted. The exterior of the house is now repainted as well... The place is even more beautiful and you all need to come back up

OH MY GOD! (from xkcd)

that is all

How do you afford your rock and roll life style

Hey everybody. So my trip was a lot of fun, and it involved trying to fix a 35 year old motorcycle, a sweet brewhouse in Columbia, SC, and some plans for me to move to Chapel Hill in some months to a year. Re: the latter, we should all start a commune in Chapel Hill. I'm totally totally serious. But more on that later.

The primary point of this post is that my band, Maxwell's Demon, complete with new songs and new philosophies on live shows, is going to begin a sort of mini-tour soon. The idea is to get serious, a sort of "go big or go home" attitude, to get some recognition and raise some money for new equipment. We'll kick off with a show in New York City at Don Hill's in the village on Saturday August 25th. We've got the headlining spot, so if you're in the big apple come and show your love.
We're looking to set up shows in Baltimore, DC, Philly, New Haven, Middletown (represent) and Boston--we're already hard at work on it, but if y'all know of any sweet clubs, radio stations or cats who would dig a house-show, hit me up. (I'm very excited about all of this).

In other music news, Dugan is setting me up with this singer-songwriter guy who wants a blues lead player. This will hopefully lead to some fruitful local gigs, plus I'll get to play more blues (!) Also, Dav-Abrav just sent me an mp3 of a song he wrote that samples the guitar lines from an old song by my band ("purple", for those of you geeky enough to be fans of my band) and it sounds way more awesome than the original song! If he's OK with it, maybe I can post the mp3.

Anyway, that's all for now. At the risk of sounding like meg, much much much love!

And... I'm alive.

1200 miles, one volvo radiator, more than one hundred coffees, a few spent .22 caliber rounds, several bottles of sunscreen, twenty episodes of battlestar galactica and one detour to Baltimore later, I've returned from about three weeks in the carolinas and a week upstate before that.
For virtually all of that I was without internet access, and for about a third of it I was without cellphone coverage. So, in case you were wondering, I'm still alive.
And if you sent me an email, I probably didnt get it.