Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Drive to gig was painful when my left knee locked. Took a wrong turn and arrived a little closer to official start time than planned. Gig went okay despite severe right elbow/shoulder pain and another (shorter) knee episode. Played bass recorder on a couple of tunes, not just guitars. When to bandmates' house afterwards for brief chat that wound up being a couple of hours. Leaving there, I got t the end of their street and was staring at the underside of a smoking car (with a crunched-up but still upright vehicle in front of it. Police were there; fire and ambulance showed up as I was determining my best way to get to the other side without actually traversing that particular block of US1. Came home, met new neighbour (just moved in around the corner) while unloading van, watched police zoom by to answer a domestic in the next block, found out what happened the night I came home to find police tape all the way across Fulton Ave. but if I say it then some of my friends will start being afraid of my neighbourhood again. Feh. Greeted by very hungry cat, who is complaining that I'm not in bed now that she's been fed. Need to sleep, and to prepare for next gig (Annapolis this time); got to make sure I have the number of microphone cables I think I have.

Snack, then crash, then prepare. Oh look, a plan! Cute little shiny plan; wonder whether it bounces ... oh bother, I'm that tired; whoops. Okay, stop visualizing plan as cat toy, pull fingers from keyboard, implement plan by obeying cat. Right. G'night!

"You can take a pine tree and you can bend it, but you can never make an oak tree out of it." -- Karen Ljungquist

Yes, I should be asleep already. I had to write this first.

I just heard "Rock The Boat"[1] on the radio, a song I've known for a Very Long Time, a song I remember hearing on the PA at the swimming pool as a child -- most of you probably know it, right?

[...]
Our love is like a ship on the ocean
We've been sailing with a cargo full of love and devotion
So I'd like to know where, you got the notion
Said I'd like to know where, you got the notion
To rock the boat
  don't rock the boat baby
Rock the boat
  don't tip the boat over
[...]

Sit down sit down sit down sit down
Sit down, you're rocking the boat[2]

Wow, musical theatre (which I discovered awfully late) trumps stuff that's been in my brain since I was a pre-teen. Okay, the fact that I performed it probably has something to do with it as well, but it's the images that keep dancing through my brain, not the memory of what my fingers were doing at the time[3].

[1] by The Hues Corporation, which I had to look up just now using Google. The name of the band had never sank in. Come to think of it, there are a bunch of songs from around then that I don't know the band names for. Hmm....
[2] from Guys and Dolls.
[3] Contrast to what happened with my first experience with musical theatre: for a couple of years after playing in Little Shop of Horrors, I couldn't hear the words "Feed me" without muscle memory kicking in and making me want to grab a real or imagined bass guitar to play the BOOMP BOOMP troo woooooo diddy BOOMP BOOMP troo woooooo diddy riff from that song. But that was the show where I started learning to read bass clef four weeks before opening night (that's when I got recruited), so there was all sorts of wonkiness in my learning circuits that autumn.

Exhausted. Too tired to feel frustrated over car stuff.

As y'all can tell from the timestamps on previous entries, I did not get to sleep at a reasonable time this morning. Woke up in the afternoon still tired, and ran around getting reading for today's performance. Thrir Venstri Foetr doesn't play amplified all that often, but experience has taught us that this particular hall does work better with microphones, so we brought some. Since we also knew the church's mixer would have most of its channels already in use, I took my mixer.

Afterwards, figuring Bowie is at least as close to Annapolis as Bowie is, I went to my mother's house to return her van and pick up the Honda so I can get that inspected and registered ... and the Honda wouldn't start. No electricity at all from the battery -- not a low battery, or a "pretty much dead" battery, but a battery you couldn't even tell was connected. Whoops. And no jumper cables. So now the plan is for me to buy cables tomorrow and run down to Bowie, jump the Honda and drive it straight to the garage that'll do the inspection, and ask the garage to figure out whether the problem is the battery or something else.

In other news, I got a chair.

I've more to say about all of this, but I'm too tired. I'm going to go to bed and succeed or fail at this sleeping thing now.