I’m really freaking tired, so I’m going to keep this short. Saturday was our last day at the NAMM show and we saw a lot of cool stuff. Kristen wrote a blog entry about it all for the House of Musical Traditions website and I think I don’t have the energy to reiterate it too much here. I’m go with pictures and captions and leave it at that.
It was an amazing trip, and I sort of wish we could’ve stayed through Sunday as well simply for the sake of having a little more time to myself to really explore, but we spent ALL of Sunday working our way back across the country, losing a whole day to the miles and the unfortunateness of time zones.
Monday morning was back to the shop. I was jet-lagged and foul-tempered, unfortunately not really noticing the latter till I found myself wanting to snap at people. I was pretty controlled, but wasn’t as helpful as I could’ve / should’ve been and ended up spending a lot of the day simply filing paperwork. It was something that needed to be done and didn’t involve people.
The flight back was BEAUTIFUL, flying over the mountains of the Midwest. This is betwixt California and Salt Lake City. Snowy Salt Lake City.
Despite this, I sold three guitars and missed lunch.
And then THIS morning rolled around. With an 11am gig in the vicinity of Pittsburgh had to wake up at 5.30am to make sure I got everything done and was able to make it in time. It’s been an excellent day, but like I said – I’m exhausted and ready to curl up on the floor. (thunk)
Later the same day:
I slept really, really well last night. Absolute unconsciousness, dreamless sleep. Rowan on one side of me, Heather on the other. A Lovely, warm ilyAIMY sandwich. Even the fact that I had the floor didn’t stop me from dropping off swiftly and sleeping deliciously soundly through to 11 this morning.
Yesterday, as I wrote – I got up at 5.30am, alarmed that the sun was too close to the horizon in entirely the wrong part of the sky. I loaded up and drove alone to Westmoreland County Community College, which is always a relaxed show. They’ve got a PA set up, and once you’ve found the place, it really is simply plug and play.
I feel like we didn’t draw much attention, but we sold a couple of CDs and kept the tiny lunch crew amused through to their next class, which was our job.
From there we drove to California, PA. SO strange that 72 hours ago I was in the bright sunshine of the theoretically “real” California, and now I’m in the remaining snows of Pennsylvania, the deep Cthulu mists of slowly evaporating snow drifts.
I took a much-needed nap while Heather worked her little heart out on the summer’s bookings. She’s doing a really great job – a lot of really cool things look like they’re shaping up for us, and I’m getting really excited about the upcoming year. Sometimes I get really, really discouraged – but I’m almost overly eager for the spring to arrive this year.
The Wood Street show was awesome. We were joined by Rowan who was suffering sever enough cabin fever that he decided to drive the four hours out for the show. The people of California even danced for us and let us get a couple of slow tunes in on a bar gig – an almost unheard of luxury.
Today’s been mostly slowly gathering our world and making our way to Pittsburgh via lots of little shopping trips. New headphones, some notebooks, a belated new mileage book for the new year. The little neccessities like lunch. Still need to pick up some new shampoo and perhaps some dinner, but we’re now almost to an open mic in Lawrenceville. It’ll be a nice relaxing non-night after so much driving and playing yesterday.
If only there was a left turn arrow here, the world would be a better place.
