September 13th, 2014.

We’re driving north towards Cleveland – and it’s been  LONG time since we’ve been up this way. Heather had momentarily forgotten we’d EVER been to Cleveland – and you KNOW it’s been a long time if SHE forgets.

Autumnal Columbus is waving farewell for the night – we spent the day doing office work with a brief break to walk down to Da Levee for lunch – and though I Love Short North with a passion, I’m glad we could walk because navigating that stretch in a car has gotten increasingly stressful over the years. It’s the price of progress, to be sure, but by comparison I-71 with its endless construction and cornfields is relatively peaceful.

These three bar gigs, all right in a row, have definitely taken their toll, and our decision to crash in college dorms in Oberlin with Kristen’s steel band connections is heftily influenced by the fact that we’ve done these three three-hour gigs right in a row than our unwillingness to drive to comfortable bedding. However, the pay check for these three days will pretty much cover gas for the entire 45 days, and so we play for the pay sometimes!

Office work today has consisted of catching up with Teavolve booking, petting the cat, doing some website updates, pushing the cat off the lap, updating House of Musical Traditions’ website, pushing the cat off the laptop, video editing, saying a sad “no” to offers of hot-tubbing, and petting the cat.Columbus really is a marvelous city. One of our favourite aspects of it (though it can be a little frustrating) is the extent to which they are LOCAL proud. All the companies support one another, the festivals book local bands (sigh), the bands t-shirts are made locally, the meadery is next door to a distillery that makes vodkas and whiskeys in their walls of barrels, they both sell one another’s products, one does tours the other does Livemusic. Both of their alcohols are available at the local bars and in the choicest morsels at La Chocoholique down the street. It’s especially captured the imagination of Heather and there are moments when I could really imagine Living here. There’s great art, great music, a good gaming scene and some of my favourite people are here too…

We got to chatting with a city employee in Short North (our favourite part of Columbus – a very diverse stretch of High Street that’s been up and coming since we’ve been coming through, and judging by the rents, population, and quality of the shops is now up and come)  that we found scraping stickers off a bike rack outside an antiques shop and he said that it all started about a decade ago when a couple of dozen local business owners got together and campaigned the city for some special allowances / support (in exchange for an uptick of taxes of course) to make this section of town more business and arts friendly. I hope to do a bit more reading on the subject as I’m able but I kind of wish I was connected enough with Baltimore to understand why we don’t have quite that level of business / arts integration and local pride. We have our little patchworks, but nothing quite like this… and I truly wish we could have some level of Charm self-adoration…

Tomorrow we’ll visit Kristen’s alma mater, Oberlin, and maybe poke Lake Eerie if we’re feeling inspired. Our friends Jason and Alissa had hoped to be able to take us to the Columbus science center, something they’ve raved about during our last couple of trips here, but we discovered its closed and so our Sunday’s pretty much completely wide-open. It’s officially slated as a day off, so we won’t be playing anywhere, and we’ll try to avoid our computers as much as possible.

Gotta keep ourselves sane!