Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I am a tired, sweaty, achy guitarist with serious nail wear. We lost some audience to the lateness of our set (we were the last act on that stage), but the folks present were smiling and seemed inclined to move to the music. (And to try to make eye contact with the band.)

Before our set, I got to listen to Karin playing in Fynesound, and also to Some Assembly, whom I'd been looking forward to hearing again (though I didn't get to spend as much time talking to Mary Corletta-Flora as I'd hoped). I also caught part of the Pyrates Royale show while eating breakfast/lunch at the hospitality tent.

I got to hug people I don't see often enough (including at least two that I've got no excuse for not seeing more of, since we're in touch via LiveJournal and don't live that far apart ... I need to rearrange my life so that it makes more sense in the context of my priorities). There were people I wanted to see at the festival and didn't get to, but I'm glad for the ones I did see. After our set, anusara worked on putting my body back together -- I still hurt, but she did help a lot. Maybe that's why the ceilidh afterwards wasn't as difficult and draining as I'd expected. (The ceilidh is fun when enough people show up; it's just that it makes for a very long day, what with effectively being a long performance after a very intense performance on a day that starts with a long drive. The other thing that helped this time was that enough other musicians showed up to play that it was more of the ceilidh it was supposed to be and less of an "extended Homespun Ceilidh Band Concert with some guests joining in". This continues a trend-in-the-right-direction that I noticed last year.) At the last minute when loading the car in the morning, I decided to bring my electric bass to play at the ceilidh (as I did last year), which meant that I surprised Allon, our soundman, with it (as I did last year). Whoops. Yeah, giving him a heads-up would've been good. Given how nice it feels to play it, I should really play bass more often (even though none of the bands I'm currently in use me on bass).

If I'm going to have both a guitar and a bass hanging from my body at the same time and try to switch between them in the middle of a piece, I need to use a non-stretchy strap for the bass. Wow did that not move the way I needed it to.

I played through an acrylic nail. (For anyone coming in late: I do not use a pick. I have acrylic on my thumb, middle finger, and ring finger nails because those take the most wear from strumming. I've got naturally thick, strong nails, and used to get away with simply using my bare nails to play guitar, but once I started: playing Scottish music; playing Scottish music against two fiddles, two bodhrans, etc.; playing a lot more gigs than I used to way back when; and playing unamplified enough of the time to matter ... I started wearing them down as fast as I grow them.) I got my nails done on Thursday, specifically to have them in pristine condition for (the start of) this weekend. Since rehearsal was Wednesday, I had three completely unabraded, smooth, shiny, solid acrylic-covered nails on my strumming hand. In one day of playing, I've exposed a tiny sliver of the natural nail under the acrylic at the end of my thumbnail. One day. No wonder my pick guard looks the way it does.

I also did serious damage to my unprotected pinkie nail (took off nearly an eighth of an inch by abrasion and put a lengthwise crack in it about an eighth of an inch long that it'll have to be trimmed past), but I had some extra length to spare on that one, so it's okay. And I more or less expected it because the end had gotten pretty thin already.

The weather was absofuckinglutely gorgeous. It got too warm for part of the drive down (I rolled up the windows and turned on the air conditioner for the last twenty minutes of the drive), but at the event site it was "mostly pleasantly warm and only occasionally a trifle too warm" in the sun, and just enough cooler in the shade (until late in the day). There wasn't a whole lot of dust, nor mud that I noticed, and breezes were mostly subtle. It was close to perfect festival weather. Though curiously there did seem to be a microclimate involving a high pressure system and a stalled warm front roughly the same size as (and in the exact location of) the Pub Stage, because I wound up perspiring heavily during our performance. I mean, it's not as though my sweat could've been caused by leaping around like a madman or anything ... ;-)

Oh! And I saw a Thing while I was driving to Southern Maryland! I was tempted to pull over and post here by email from my cell phone when I saw it. It was an orange Thing. It was nifty. It wasn't as pretty as a swallowtail flutterby (yes, I know that etymology is completely bogus but it amuses me at least as much as the more likely ones and it's fun to say), but it was enough to make me smile and exclaim.

One bit of glitchiness: because of the way cables were run and what I was plugged into, I had a shorter "leash" than usual. I discovered this when I moved over next to Becky to try to tempt her to silly but flashy antics during Foxhunters Reel, and could only get about a quarter of the way around when I tried to spin. Later I made some flamboyant move and accidentally tore the microphone right off the 12-string because I reached the end of the slack in the cable, flinging the power module off in some direction in the process. I heard it hit the stage, heard the battery cover and battery bounce away, and thought, "It's a good thing the remaining tunes all use the 6-string." (All parts later recovered and working.)

I had some pretty damned severe muscle pain today (some built up over the past couple of weeks, some as a result of all that bouncing around with my guitar). But unless it actually stops me from doing things, I count pain in a separate column from the rest of the good day / bad day tally. This time the pain was bad enough that it could've limited my participation with the rest of the band at the ceilidh (it was severe enough to induce nausea and only a couple of notches away from tears for a while). Fortunately, between painkillers and anusara's help, it was brought under control. (Though the drugs did mean I didn't get to take advantage of beer that I like being available.)

So all in all a painful day but an otherwise good day. Yeah, enough "well I also wanted..." to dwell on if I feel like it, but also plenty of "hey that was cool" to distract me from dwelling on what didn't happen. We had a good gig. I got hugs. I saw a Thing. The weather was great. There were fewer tailgaters and other assholes on the road than usual (not a total absence, alas, but refreshingly few). And I got to play my bass.

"The first U.S. warehouse clubs opened in the late '70s, pioneered in San Diego by Price Club founder Sol Price. In a 1989 interview with the obscure Weekly Home Furnishings Newspaper, he was asked how it felt to be the father of the membership warehouse industry. He replied: 'I should have used a contraceptive.'" -- "Thinking inside the box" in the Toronto Star, 2003-11-05, by Susan Sampson, Food Editor/Writer.

(From the Quotation of the Day mailing list, 2003-11-11. Submitted to that list by Ted Coady.)