And now we race for the north! Again! But this is familial, driving up to Pleasantville, NY to do Thanksgiving with Kristen’s family. With all the doom and gloom spread about driving this day, I’m kind of resigned to spending an unsavoury amount of time moving slower than I’d like, but so far so good.
Kristen’s mix of music is swinging from We’re About 9 to Pearl Jam to the Stray Birds to Alice In Chains and aurally at least, the trip is promising. We’re crossing the Maryland line and the skies are grey and heavy. They have promised rain and threatened snow, but have yet to deliver anything but a rolling low pall of sullen cloud cover.
Last time we came up this way we narrowly avoided a herd of turkeys (pack? Confusion? A butterball of turkeys?) along the side of the road. Today that would actually be pretty useful, but then we’d have to choose whether to hit one and pick it out of the grill or to keep it in the back till we get to New York, listening to it gobble along to Rage Against the Machine and Heather’s solo disc and Pesky J. Nixon.
There’s something to that.
Still, it’s good to be away from my worldy problems. At the shop I’ve been stalled on a couple of repair projects for want of parts. A guitar jack that was an unusual shape that’s taken months to receive from China. I finally put the guitar back together and promptly shorted it out. Pulled it back apart again and taped it up and rewired it and put it back together again and got it up and running… this is an instrument who’s tuners were originally so cheap that they pulled apart in my hands as I was restringing it. Replacing the tuners was just the beginning of that journey and then Dave gave away the part that’s been so difficult to replace… and speaking of tuners….
Oh man, so I don’t think you can read this, but we got the most discouraging news while we were in Putnam, CT. The LED sign reads “White Christmas… has been canceled.” Sigh. I don’t entirely remember which bathroom it was or if I was having any digestive difficulties there, but the sentiment of this message was still welcome. Thursday finds us in Boston, MA for a show at Bentley University. Our friend and fellow musician Laura Grill has a stunning apartment with her girlfriend and a LOT of cats. Well… three. And some fun painting on the walls down the street on what otherwise looks like a pretty industrial building. It was like we were having a second attack of Eric Carle!
Then there’s the Hohner acoustic guitar. It’s been there so long I have NO memory of where it came from or why IT was missing IT’S tuners, but apparently 1970’s Hohners had a pretty specific shape of headstock and the first set of tuners I’d ordered totally failed to fit. The second set was really hard to track down and the distributer I DID find them at then canceled my order because they didn’t carry them anymore. I finally tracked down something that was the right form factor, got THOSE in the shop and installed them – but as I was stringing it up one of the tuners bound up and died.
Staying with Laura was a lot of fun, at least partially because she has all these wonderful cats. This one’s the grumpy one This one was the really sweet one. Or at least she liked ME. Which is sort of my requirement for a qualitative value of “sweetness”
Sigh. Replacement on its way but the unending saga of the Hohner is … unending.
And then I got home to a computer that wouldn’t connect to the internet, power issues at my command station, connectivity issues, drive issues and to top it all off I dropped my hairbrush in the toilet.
Definitely glad to be getting AWAY from it all, though I’m the sort of person who is going to be bugged by all of the unfinished projects the whole time I’m away.
Note to self : once I run the world, Dr. Teeth and Electric Mayhem WILL cover that “Lift the Crowd Up” song by that Chris Cornell and Rage project. It would fucking RULE.
Driving home, Sunday in New York and central Pennsylvania was one of the foggiest drives we ever done done.This went on for HOURS. Home again, doing time at the shop. Nothing but restringing dulcimers, tuning mandolins, and trying to identify strange growths inside customers’ guitars. You know how it is. Our first show back in Maryland was at the Austin Grill in Silver Spring. Heather gave our new-found-very-inebriated-friend Kenny a birthday song he’s not like to forget, assuming he can remember it. Juels Bland opening for ilyAIMY at Teavolve in Baltimore, MD.
