It is spring time again. There is always so much to get done in the spring, this year is a bit different though because I have gotten all the spring stuff done and I am working on summer projects. Self employment sure does have some nice perks, but there is a cost… being a bit on the poor side has been rough but the family has been very accepting of this since I have been home a whole lot more. It defiantly feels good to see the light of day every day, I know that sounds stupid but the Egg has no windows, you could not tell if there was a blizzard going on outside or if it was 80 and sunny.
So far this spring we have gone on several hikes and even squeezed in a trip to NYC. I have recently rediscovered the joy of hanging out by a fire. We have had more backyard fires this spring then all of the other springs put together and I love it! I rather quickly burned through all of the wood that came from the studio renovation and now the area where we keep our fallen branches is more empty then it has been since we bought the house, I might have to buy some firewood this year. Now that I can focus so much more on home stuff I have even built a pick-nick table in the back yard and it came out perfect (with the help of some great friends)!
Family in NYC <3
Tending the fire
speaking of friends… I have been spending so much more time with my best little buddy Noah. I pick him up from after shool early every day and I usually have a treat for him like an Arizona ice tea or some ice cream cones. Noah likes to watch TV after school so lately I have been enjoying his episodes of Finies and Pherb along with some Walking Dead and some other shows and movies. I try to discourage TV watching, I do feel that TV is a major waste of time accept maybe when it draws the family together for a while. We have been having game night just about every week which Noah looks forward to, he asks me every Wednesday when I pick him up “Is there game night tonight!?!”. Every day after school, Noah and I talk about computers and games and his performance in school and I have been making him dinner almost every day… feels good to be a bigger part of his life, I hope the business doesn’t take that away from me again.
Yess!!
And my other best live-in friend Patience. Even though we get to spend almost every weekend together now, I am seeing her about the same amount because her work schedule has gotten quite a bit more full and a whole lot less flexible. I certainly miss those frequent drives out to the middle of nowhere to take pictures or to just see something new. Patience has been supportive 100% of my employment change and we have been spending most nights sitting closely on the sofa listing to tunes and shooting the breeze (when she is not reading that is) <3… Yesterday she planted flowers in the garden and they look awesome, it was also perfect timing because it is raining like crazy outside.
Patience is adding flowers to the herb garden.
It has also been a joy spending so much time with my old friends Adam, Garry and Jason a bunch more this year as well… Garry swings through randomly to play some music and catch me up on how his new life has been working out, I am very happy for him. His new wife and job are both working out amazingly and he just got back from a trip to Ireland! so jealous!!! Adam has recently become single and our friend Jason has moved in with him so its always fun time at the Adam man cave haha, It has been a lot of fun hanging out with those two so far this spring.
Adam, Jason and I
Spring is great but I can’t wait for summer! Weekend camp outs and lots of grilling is what I would like to see. Also, Ashley is coming to visit at the end of July, I am really excited and nervous about it but I can not wait to see her! I would also love to take the family on a road trip this summer, I will try my best to make that happen.
It has been a great spring, here is to an amazing summer!
Like the new theme? I’m not attached to it, but I thought it was time for a change.
Yup… over 6 months since my last real blog. Lets face it, I’m not a good blogger haha. I haven’t been extremely busy at work, but I have been keeping pretty busy with spring and summertime shit. Patience has lost patience with me (hehe) so I am publishing this before I’ve thoroughly sifted through its contents but I feel it is mostly complete. It is worth mentioning that this post is not necessarily in chronological order
I usually include details about my relationship with Patience (which is going very well) and with lots of work things (meh)… but this time I am going to focus more on the events that I remembered to record video on. A majority of time spent writing this particular installation of my blog was editing and uploading videos, which has made Patience borderline furious. I feel that the span of time for which this blog (journal) covers is a bit on the large side, but I have been quite busy. One of the biggest downsides to the long span of time this entry covers is that I am very likely to miss details large and small, and I will make an effort to add them to my comments as they pop up in my head. I would also like to add that I have posted my road trip on a separate blog because I felt it deserved a place all of its own.
This March I got my hands on and iPad2… I was never much of an Apple fan, but lately I have been spending a lot of time reading tech blogs about Apples doo-dads, it is a good way to fill time and I have been reading more now then ever. Patience would prefer that I read something a bit more intellectual.
So Patience was throwing the idea around of getting Noah a pet for Christmas or his birthday. You know, a small pet like a rodent or a small lizard. I was not very open to the idea because I thought Noah would be to lazy to take care of it. We did not get him one for either Christmas or his birthday. We had a bit of an argument about it after his birthday so I gave in and Patience came home with a fuzzy little rodent named “Bear” he is adorable!! and Noah has done an excellent job taking care of him. So check him out in this little clip.
In Late Winter Patience and I went to COSM… what a sweet ass place. Our journey to the event was also a great part of the night. It was just over an hour to get there and when we arrived in town, we found a Sonic drive in restaurant!!! We were a little behind scheduled but we decided to stop for a bite anyway, what a great time <3. The people at COSM were super nice and the vibe was very spiritual and inviting. Alex shares his home with his followers and fans of his artwork and writings. We went to go see what its all about, well… I did anyway, Pay has been there a few times before. After a sort of open mic night/church service for the spiritually open but not glued to any specific religion people (I know, it’s imposable to explain), everyone migrates over to a huge open room full of people playing all sorts of African drums and dancing around… sounds totally crazy, and it is, but it is also very cool. They also had the gift shop open which was full of books and jewelry Patience wanted to take home with her. I promised myself I would learn more about this world… this out of world… this state of being and I feel that this experience was very helpful in teaching me what it means to be a spiritual person. This video doesn’t show much, but you can defiantly hear how intense it gets in there.
The Visit to COSM was very eye opening to me. Alex gray is really into a concept called the greater consciousness. Much of his artwork is about this “religion” for lack of a better term… A very brief sum up of this is that basically we (all humans) are part of a collective conciseness and that when we die, we sort of dissolve back into. I actually like a lot of the concepts behind this and things like speaking in tongues or people who claim to be mind readers or exorcists. I actually shared a lot of my understanding of this concept with Garry during our road trip and he was very open and non-judgmental about it… very cool stuff.
I’ve put together a list of things I would like to get done at some point in the future. One of the items on the list was to work on the plumbing in the house. I haven’t sweated copper pipe in many years so I was pretty nervous about cutting into our existing plumbing. I shut off the main water valve, drained the system and started cutting pipe. Surprisingly I did not run into any real problem and when I was done with the progress I made, the system held pressure with no leaks on the very first try! I actually got a pretty good start on the project but I had to put it to a halt because of the upcoming summer weather, I certainly don’t want to be down in the basement when I can be out in the sunshine!
One of the very rare things that happens is a visit from Noah’s Gramma. And at the same time Becky and Kaden… Noah likes to show off his guitar skills although, since I recorded this video, Noah has switched focus to skateboarding which is okay with me for now.
Ben Morgan brought his band into my studio to record a 3 song EP. We spent to days laughing and having a great time… oh yeah and we made a pretty kick ass recording.
More family fun with Noah and Kaden… these are some cute kids I’ll tell you!
This Memorial Day we went over to Dave’s house for his holiday gathering. The food and family were good. Dave was bummed that we couldn’t stay for a few games of beer pong though haha.
One of our first real spring events was this get together at our friends Louis and Shelly’s apartment. We did hang out outside for a while but it got cold so we went in and played video games. It was nice to get some fresh air and to see so many people.
Patience helped the Big Brothers Big Sisters out with there Bowl-A-Thon, she got pledges and also helped out at the event for a couple of days. We all went as a family on the first day, it was a fun day… we got some free pizza too! This is a little video I edited together.
I’ve been ripping my way through many projects this summer. Most notably are the side yard trees and the painting of my shed. I did the trees with Adam and Jason. The big tree fell on the neighbors car! No worries though, the car had been sitting for several months and the tree didn’t do any damage to the car. The tree cutting was also the beginning of an epic 4th of July weekend. We had an unexpected awesome party that friday with many of our best friends in attendance. Many many beers lost there life that day haha. On that Saturday we all went over to Jason’s house for a small but fun party before heading over to Lee’s Park for some awesome fireworks. Adam and Jason helped Leo set them off, what a great show. y only complaint that night was the intense amount of mosquitoes on the camp ground. It was also really nice to see Leo again, I only see him like once every 2 years or so. Monday was actually the 4th so Patience had the day off. Patience was hell bent on getting some hiking in so we stopped in the Adirondacks for some scenic mountain climbing, but after not being able to find the mountain we were looking for, we just took the first one we could find. On our way to the trail head, we passed camp Wakpominee which is where I went for my week long summer camp with the Boy Scouts when I was about 12 or 13. The hike was quiet and beautiful, I really enjoyed the time with the family and enjoying the outdoors all at the same time, what could be better? Halfway up we found an old rusty car which became our favored topic while we hiked through the forest… How did they get it up there? that was what we all wanted to know. I took a whole bunch of cool videos of this hike but in interest of getting this long awaited blog published, I will not include After returning from our hike we headed north for some hillbilly fun in a town with only one street light and pretty much nothing (and I mean nothing) to do. Scroon Lake… yah, not much to say about that town. We were so bored there, we had to bail
After 4th of July weekend, Patience and Noah went away on there trip to California. I had a very hard time parting with them at the airport. Once the initial sadness and loneliness wore off though, I put my body into high gear and spent every day working on projects around the house and preparing for the upcoming Saratoga County Fair. Every day that Pay and Noah was away, we used our iPods to Facetime… The video chat was a great way for us to stay close so I could focus on keeping things rolling here at the home front. While they were away, I was more productive then I have been in the last 5 years. The big project was clearing up the enormous pile of brush that was left behind when my friends helped me cut down the trees next to the house.
When my dearest loves returned from California Noah had taken an immediate interest in skateboarding. He saved money that Patience dad gave him for the trip and used it to buy himself a skateboard, imagine being a kid in Cali with a little money burning a hole in your pocket but you can’t spend it because you want to save it for that certain something… that’s what Noah did, I was pretty impressed. Since getting his Target brand board he has replaced the bearings and wheels and has vastly improved his skills, I am proud of him and happy he is taking such an interest in a more physical activity then video games or Netflix.
Once the family was back in town my focus needed to switch full time to the Saratoga County Fair. This years fair came with a bit of a twist… Jeff Townsend has suddenly taken the helm as the General Manager of the fair! This worked out great cause Jeff could tell me exactly what he wanted me to get done on the grounds and how to go about doing so. I spent a lot of time working on the 70 Volt system used on the grounds as the main paging system. Everything went smooth accept for dealing with the guys from Titan Audio, I had the hardest time straightening out the logistics of setup and strike… I really like these guys but I think I may look for alternative solutions for the beer tent and grandstand. Working closely with Jeff this year was defiantly awesome… I still wonder why he is so good to me, I’m thinking someday that I might write a tribute to him, he is the reason I have my job at the Egg and my little audio company… I hope he understands how much I appreciate everything he has done for me.
On to a less serious note… I painted the shed!! it took me 4 long days of baking out in the sun to prime, calk, seal and paint this bad boy, but it was totally worth it… Shedward looks great! I have a bunch of outdoor things I would like to get to this summer, I have made it one of my life goals to make my home as great as it can be for my family and I.
I’ve decided that since my trip out to Colorado and back was such an amazing part of my life that I would give it its own post!
On may 19th (the day after my 34th birthday) I departed on a journey of epic proportions. After a short plain ride with a layover somewhere in Minnesota I arrived in Denver just in time for a ridiculous blizzard that made it so I could not see any mountains for days. First thing we did after a few dumb jokes in the car was to hit the pawn shop… Logical first step haha. We were going to go to the Coors factory that day but while we were are Wal-Mart stocking up on a bunch of shit we did not need, we were informed by Tiffany that there was a huge storm at the house and that we should make our way up there before it gets worse. She was not joking, by the time we got halfway to there house of high elevation the storm was almost a total whiteout, dropping enormous chunks of snow.
I stayed at Josh and Tiffany’s house with Garry for 4 nights in there cool loft condo. We drank a ton of beer and played a ton of Dominion and when were not doing that we were exploring mountains in Josh’s truck or exploring deep into abandoned gold mines… There was really never a dull moment. A most excellent highlight to our visit to the Coors factory in Golden Colorado. The right there was a bit rough cause Marnie was crying a bunch on the way there and I was the only other person in the car besides Tiff (she was driving), so I did a Chinese fire drill to the back seat to keep Marnie company until Tiff and I met up with Garry and Josh at the factory. Tiff decided to stay in the truck with the baby while the boys went into the largest brewery in the world and learned a shitload about brewing beer and then got to sample the goods. The beer was served from a tap made of ice and it was like nothing I’ve ever tasted, this is defiantly not the same as the stuff you get out of a can or bottle… MMMMMMM. We each got 3 free drinks and made our way back to the condo (oh and stopped for some Coors on our way haha!), what a great time. At the end of our stay with Josh and Tiff we went to a Volkswagen show that Garry was showing his truck at.
We kept our eyes pealed for signs like this.
We drove by many things and saw most of them, I was very focused on taking in everything… We passed through some big cities like Saint louis and Indianapolis, but neither of us had enough interest in them to even stop at one, the road was what we craved…
Bright and early on Monday, we made our departure for Albuquerque. Once we made our way out of the mountains we drove along side of them for at least couple hundred miles. What a breathtaking view! As far as the eye can see was mountain after mountain. The most interesting was pikes peak. It is so huge and so tall and covered with snow, it looked like a crazy cloud from the distance. We had a nasty head wind the whole day, it slowed us down, made the truck run hot and reduced our gas mileage for sure. Everything seemed the same for many miles until somewhere after the New Mexico border suddenly we pass through a valley that opens up into a vast, red, flat and amazing landscape. I believe this was the point I made the connection between America the Beautiful and the fact that America is Beautiful… yah, you know what I mean. This flat openness went on for hundreds of miles. Little windmills that draw water from the ground were everywhere, but there were very few signs of civilization. I think we drove almost 600 miles on the first day and arrived in Albuquerque in plenty of time to grab a KOA kamp site and play some Dominion before crashing out.
On our second day of driving we headed east along old rout 66. It became our goal to stop and visit every piece of old 66 we could find on our travels and we did. Rout 66 was a big part of what we did on the trip so check out historic66.com.
Before getting to see any cool old pieces of rt. 66 we stopped at this place called Tinker Town… it is this nutty little tourist attraction that some guy built out of old bottles and other random trash. He spent like 30 years building this place and died a few years back. Part of the video shows a circus scene he had created, this was just a tiny portion of the things this guy made. While were at Tinkertown, the woman behind the counter overheard our conversation which hinted where we are from. The woman asked us where we were from and when we told her, she said she grew up in Schenectady… what a small world!! I laughed out loud when she asked me if there was still a beautiful scenic drive with farms and fields between Schenectady and Albany. Obviously this woman is pretty old… she was 14 when she left Schenectady and has not returned since… I don’t blame her.
We stopped at a mini mart that was run by Indians (the ones from India lol), was a very strange little shop, we just stopped for snacks and a piss break. Everything there was terribly over priced. As we got further from Albuquerque the roads became more and more lonely. We headed East through the pan handle of Texas, yup… it’s huge there. We found some really neat pieces of Rt. 66, some were so run down that you could only see the skeletons of the old buildings that once hustled and bustled like that town from the movie Cars. It was hundreds of miles of barren dessert and the occasional wind farm before we ran into a huge city in Texas called Amarillo. It was a surprisingly big city considering it is in the middle of nothingness. Shortly after leaving Amarillo we stopped at the largest cross in the country in groom TX. They say everything is bigger in Texas… point taken. Garry felt a special connection to this location so I did not mind taking the time out to take a close look.
On our second night we stayed right off old rout 66 at another KOA. We got there before dark so we had plenty of time to cook up an excellent dinner and talk about some deep stuff. It was nice to hear Garry talk about some of the things that really mattered. Garry is 100% dedicated to his faith and I well… I’m 100% committed to not having a particular faith. We differ in just about every way two people could in this way but I have to say, Garry is very respectful of other faiths (or lack there of)… I have a lot of respect for that. I could go on for hours about what we talked about but it was a very man to man kind of night I suppose. Not that anyone who might read this would particularly care, but I want to be able to look back on this and remember. The KOAs we stayed at all have free Wi-Fi so just about every night I Facetimed Patience… this defiantly helped keep me from getting homesick so I could focus on the awesomeness that was this road-trip!
The next morning we got a nice early start and made our way to the Rt. 66 Museum in Oklahoma . It was a very informative and enlightening little place. I bought some trinkets and Garry and I hit the road again. We made a bunch of old 66 stops and crashed at a KOA, this was pretty much how each day would go until we arrived at Rt. 50.
Just a few miles before meeting up with Rt. 50 we stopped at Meramec Cavern. What a beautiful place! This cave contains some incredably old formations, they claim that the largest is over 75 million years old… now that’s old. This cave has lots of great history to it but what I thought was most interesting was that it was used as a hiding place for Jesse James… they had some of the artifacts that were found in the cave that Jesse himself left in there. there are some pics in the montage at the bottom of the blog, also the video has a tiny glimpse of some of the formations.
Oh man, Rt. 50. This is dubbed the loneliest road in America, and that aint a lie. Before getting super lonely, Rt. 50 passes through St. Louis. I got to grab a glimpse of the giant arch thing on our way through. This is where the scenery starts to get a little less interesting haha… basically Rt. 50 is farmland, at least from the point we picked it up it was. It went on forever. Rt. 50 cuts clear across the country so we only saw a small section of it. One thing that kept passing through my head during this part of the trip was “what if we break down here?”… and as luck would have it, it started pouring like a bastard while were on this road. We tried like hell to find something interesting to look at on Rt. 50… we used a book and the internet but allas, it lives up to its loneliness.
We did eventually break off of Rt 50 but not until the end of the trip, we took 71 till we hit 70 and passed through Pittsburg. We hit this cool city at night so we did not get to see a whole lot of it, but what we did see was beautiful. The driving was stressful here but we were nearing the end of our time on the road and needed to keep gaining ground. The final night we camped at a KOA that was loaded with people for the holiday weekend but we lucked out and found a site.
Our final day of driving was just as great as all the others, I actually found the final stretch of I88 very interesting… it was beautiful and so close to home.
I put together a bunch of video and pictures with some borrowed footage from Garry’s trip video to make this 3 min look at my trip. Make sure you turn up the volume, the soundtrack is worth hearing. If you have a bunch of free time check out the slide show… it has over 150 pictures, but it covers just about everything that happened throughout the trip.
This slideshow will take some time to get through, it includes every picture I took on my phone, iPod and iPad. there are just under 200 pics.
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I’m certain that I have left out a bunch of details, but this is a great place for me to keep my best memories of this trip.
So its been over 2 months since my last blog. I have no really good excuses, it just takes so long to put these videos together and upload them, maybe someday we will have some faster internets . I have been thinking more about the direction of my blog. I have been using it mostly as a journal of my life events, which is cool… But I feel like there is no place in this kind of journal for thoughts of a deeper nature. I may throw a little “Deep Thoughts” section into my blog… we will see.
In less then two weeks it will be 6 months since I quit World of Warcraft. I am very happy and proud of this. I’m also so happy that it was so very easy to quit! I actually feel like I will never have room in my life for that game or anything like it ever again. The time spent playing that game was during the absolute worst part of my life (no exaggeration) and acts as a reminder of that time that I am trying my very best to put behind me.
This has been a nice and slow winter as usual. I haven’t done anything special with all my free time, but I have still been pretty productive overall… accept for the stupid Facebook games. I feel I defiantly waste to much time on them, they are dumb as shit.
Patience has been working full time for several months now and has already been promoted to full time! On top of that, she gets snow days off and is still paid for them. I’m happy for Patience that she found a job that suits her. I miss having her around during the week but I know she appreciates the time she gets to herself there.
All through December the Egg had stuff going on accept the week of Christmas. I told my bosses that I did not want to do the Mendelssohn club event… I actually told them that I refused to do it, but they guilted me into it. I can’t believe that shit! Anyway, I need to focus on positive stuff haha… We had Rufus back again, pretty easy day but long. Dweezel came back around as well, that show was a ton of work because they were still carrying some production, but we had to do all the patching… ugh. The Zucchini Brothers were fun as usual, and great way to finish off the Christmas season of work!
Christmas eve… well, the video speaks for itself
Christmas was tough for me this year. We spent over $1000 easily… even with the extra cash from the Tony DeSare gig, I still had to charge some stuff… well, the entire guitar. It was worth it though, the family loves it! . I did a pretty good job of getting all of my shopping and wrapping done for the most part… well… not so much with the wrapping. Patience did not help much with the wrapping this year… I’ll be speaking to her about that sometime around next thanksgiving I’m sure lol. Noah got the game he wanted and on top of that, he got an iPod touch. He was super excited because he was totally convinced he was not getting one. Here is a little video we did to remember Christmas of 2010, not to exciting… but gives a great memory. This was filmed before opening presents…
For Christmas this year we stayed home till early afternoon then headed over to Davie Joes house for some family time and food. Unfortunately just as the turkey was coming out of the fryer… we had to leave to head to my Grandmothers house. Pretty much the same shit happens every year there… nothing haha. The next day we visited with both of our family’s again… I grabbed this video of Becky singing with Caden… so cute.
On the Monday after New Years, we went for a sweet ass wintertime drive. The music, food and company were all perfect!…. Just when we thought it couldn’t get any better, we decided on a whim that we are going to pull over at this enormous abandoned factory complex that we have driven by once before. Patience was super excited to bust out her camera and I was a nervous fuddy duddy about trespassing, but we still went all the way in this place. It is hard to explain so check out these videos and then I’ll tell you more about it.
So yah, that place is huuuuge!! there is an enormous above ground tunnel that runs out of the factory, over the train tracks and road and up the side of a mountain, it is truly awe inspiring. While inside I found one of those really big computer disks, it was like 9 inches or something. That makes me think the factory was active till the late 80s. This pic is supposed to be a wider shot, but word press is retarded so it is not. Ether way, it still gives you a good idea of the size of this place, you can see about half of the complex in this picture.
Patience was super nice to me and very excited that I was willing to help her take her pictures in this amazing place. This is something I would most likely have refused to do… I can’t explain why. Anyway I am grateful to be able to partner up with Patience and help her with one of her passions, it has been very rewarding.
So I have an adorable black kitty named Katie… she is bonkers for the laser pointer! check this out…
About 2 weeks after Christmas, the Polmateers had there family gathering at Garrys house. I stopped by the night before to drink some beers with my bestset buds and to do some New Kids carnage hahaha!! (see video). Noah came with me to the party on Saturday because patience was pretty tied up with a baby shower and Noah would have been totally bored with her. He loves my friends, he talks about them all the time, so I think he had a pretty good day… He added a little something of his own to the end of this video. I spent a ton of time editing this… mostly at work though haha…
I got a cool app in for my iPod called 8mm… here is a little clip I took of Noah with it…
Recently I finally responded to the email I got from John (Kev Mo’s FOH Engineer) to tell him I did not want to take the tour because I did not want to leave my family… I hope he understands, he has not sent any kind of reply… I guess I shouldn’t worry about it so much.
The iPhone 4 for Verizon is coming out soon. I thought I would be more excited, but there is no way I will be buying a data plan so still no iPhone 4 me. It is no biggie… I’ve been closely following the progress of all theses new gizmos and do-dads and I will prolly just get an iPad when the new one comes out. I don’t really even need one, but would be a fun toy.
In an effort to step up my activity level, I started playing drums again. I’m not sure if it is because Bill (my supervisor) has been talking about it so much, but I’m happy to be playing again. I like playing because I think it makes Patience happy to be doing musical things again. It is a major drag that I can’t leave the drums set up tho because my studio is to small. Another thing I have done was to make a list of Awesome Ideas I have come up with. Nothing super excellent, but I like having a list of goals handy that I can add to or modify. Take a look!
- Remove Dining room wall and convert it to a medieval wonder. (sounds more lofty then it is)
- Organize attic.
- Build a Cloths warmer. (This is already done)
- Make a setup in the living room for a sweet desktop computer setup.
- Hook up the hot water upstairs so we can use the big bat tub. (this one is for Pay)
- Finish up the sound treatment in the control room of the studio.
- Put a switch on the speaker in the kitchen.
- Make a Call of Duty video with Noah.
- Hook up the ice maker in the fridge.
- Refinance the house.
- Do some research on the out of state job market.
There are tons of other things I need to get done, but this is just a start on a list I intend on finishing in 2011.
I’ve been seeing more of my friend Ryan lately… I like this, he just comes over and hangs out for hours, no plans… no agenda. I like this. He recently went away to “Yoga Camp”. This has turned out to be a major bummer for me because he was my A2 at work and I have still not found a replacement. I need to write to my boss and get serious about finding someone… ugh.
Two weekends ago the Egg had a few concerts and a dance performance. It was a tough weekend because we have been so slow and that came on Was a long day, but totally easy.and hit pretty hard… Thankfully the two concerts on Sat and Sun were not nearly as hard as we thought they would be. Tuesday was Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt acoustic Duo… Amazing!!
This Past weekend was another busy one at work. We had the Chinese Community Center doing there annual Chinese New Year seh-ra-brration (see what I did there, I’m so witty) on Saturday followed by John Scofield on Sunday.
It was brutally cold for about week or so. We are finally just starting to get to some better weather now. It was so cold, I had to start my furnace… for the sake of my family’s comfort, the Kerosene heater was just not able to keep up with the bitterness of the cold outside. We left the heater on for several days in a row. I did put it out once… the house went from 78 to 58 in 10 min… unbelievable.
So I’ve decided I might want to get a bit deeper then just “on the surface” sort of journal writing but it is not an easy way for me to write. Patience has thought of me as unable to be much deeper then skin deep. In the past year and a half, I have spent most of my effort bettering myself husband, father and friend. One of the things I have done to help me grow with this is to explore things beyond the surface. I’ve even had some recent experiences that made me change the way I think of my… well being is probably the closest thing I can call it. Mostly the separation of my body from the soul and things like that… I’m not ready to share the deepest details but at lest I’m ready to share that there are details lol.
Another thing I have been spending a lot of time doing is reflecting on my past and focusing on the future… up until recently I was spending way to much time on focusing on the past and ignoring the future. On a less deep level… I’ve been thinking on the future of my career and possibility of moving the family somewhere far away, just to mix it up… I mean, people do that shit all the time, why can’t we? We’ve been here our entire lives, we are like the Amish… but without Jesus and with lots and lots of technology… hmm…. well, we are nothing like the Amish… HAHA! I think most people will get the point though. Patience has given me permission to pick up the family and go. I think the only reality this holds is if I find a great job somewhere… I suppose its possible.
focusing on the future… Still unsure of things that are not real important, but very sure of the ones that are
Patience has been very good to me lately… I am grateful for Patience, she has been an amazing friend to me <3
I’ve been more interested in learning about the tree of life. I don’t think I could ever read a book about it so I may just have to read the wikki about it or something. Patience spends a majority of her reading and focus time involving the tree of life… even her tarot. I could never go as deep as Patience does, but I think I owe it to her to at least know the basics.
Today Patience went outside with Noah and Zoe, it was very cute…
I’ve been working on this blog for over two weeks, I think its time for me to finally let it go for a while. I have really enjoyed having something to work on, on a regular basses. I hope that I will really appreciate having a record of where I was in my head during the events of my life. Because I feel like I can not connect my emotions with the events of my past, I am hopping that keeping a record like this will keep me more connected with my time spend on this planet. Maybe I will post sooner this time, prolly not tho haha.
I think I’m going to let my videos do most of the talking for this post, since I’m so far behind.
I had a lot of things happen at work, tons of shows and plenty of drama to go with it. I was super busy and had to spend to much time in the building so I’m not going to talk much about work stuff, at least not Egg work stuff.
This first video is a few little clips of a drive we went on just a couple days after my last blog. This is one of my favorite pass times in the world… Driving out to some new place we have never been and just keep driving. We would go all day sometimes. And once we were good and lost we would ask our GPS for directions home
This is the last long trip we took before Patience started her new job at Big Brothers Big Sisters. She was hired to be an office manager. The place was a dump when she got there so once she got comfortable with her daily duties, she started cleaning up the place. She had been working very hard at that job (and doing some facebooking, naughty naughty… lol just kidding). I think they may offer her a promotion pretty soon, which will be fun for her to have such a major accomplishment so early in her return to work. Today she even made some phone calls from home, I would hire her to work for me haha.
We got another solid day of shed ass kicking in. Put on the shingles and did the doors and electric the next day. Adam Polmateer (one of my longest and best friends) Did a shitload of the work, he is a very efficient craftsman, even when we’re drinking beers all day long haha! Garry Polmateer (Adams brother and also one of my longest and best friends) came over after we did the roof to do the electric and to talk to me a little about his divorce. I hate when people get divorced, but he is pretty excited about it so I’m happy for him. The video is mostly me and Adam, with a little bit of Mary… Garry is the last picture at the very end.
So we are some total dorks here at the Pechette Manor lol… we play D&D about once a month on average. We played around the same time we finished the shed, here is a short clip of our set-up for the game.
Patience and Tommy Gmache and Mike Beezembinder and myeslf all went to see Mumford & Sons at Terminal 5 in NYC. I threw this video together summing up the trip pretty well. We had a fuckin’ blast!
On November 19th we had the Playing For Change Band. The show was huge for the small room, but I managed to get everything up and running in time for the FOH guy (John) to spend some time with the monitors before we did the sound-check with the band… Anyway, the only reason I bring this up is because he also happens to be the FOH guy for Keb Mo’. He remembered me from the last few times Keb was here. We had a great day dealing with the madness of the PFCB show with very few hang ups. during the strike he straight up asked me if I would go on tour with him and Keb Mo’ in the spring as the monitor engineer… I was pretty shocked actually, I’ve been offered tours before, but never anything like this… ugh, I couldn’t believe it, he asked me right in front off the entire crew, Kyle and RobBob Edminson. I have no idea if I will be going on that tour, the thought of being away from Noah and Patience for 8 weeks makes me all sorts of unhappy, so we’ll see about all that.
It seems my career is getting a bit much to handle fairly quickly. I have RNEZ on the verge of a record contract with Universal Records. I am in the middle of recording a 2-disk contra dance instructional CD/DVD/Book. All the work at The Egg. I’ve been asked to go on a national tour with a very highly respected performer, and I had an almost perfect show with Tony at the Wood. This is all incredibly awesome, but also getting a bit hard to decide which path to take… ugh Mostly the tour thing tho haha.
The Day before thanksgiving I met Patience Niece for the first time Abree Anderson. They came over to sell us this amazing new sofa for pretty cheep, it has 3 recliners and a little cup holder thing!! I love it. It is in the video of Caden I write about later in the blog.
Thanksgiving morning Patience and I joined about 15 of our high school friends in a private Turkey Trot 5k run. We had a great time seeing everyone. I took two videos that day… one shortly after the race and another when we got to Jason’s house after the race.
The day after Thanksgiving Patience was enlisted to baby sit for her sister. Caden came over for the day. He was very well behaved and spent most of his time eating haha… I think he ate a bit to much, hope he didn’t puke on Becky lol. You can see the new sofa pretty well in this video.
After Thanksgiving I had a nice lazy half day and then went straight into sound company mode I had spent several days out in the shed here and there preparing my gear for the 3 day show at the Wood Theater in Glens Falls. A fellow co-worker enlisted me to cover the gig because “You are the only one I can trust to go in and do it justice” wow!! this is a huge complement. Dave Harris is highly respected by his co workers and is considered SAVIs best engineer! psew… now that I have properly inflated my ego… I put a bunch of work into preparing for the show, I knew I could not forget anything, yet I needed the entire show to fit in my minivan. Amazingly I got everything I needed in the van, but I could not see out of the passengers side very well. The gig went great and the client was very happy, I heard the clients dad say “I think this is the best he has ever sounded in here” to the light guy. The light guy and I ended up talking a bunch, we know a lot of the same people. His name is Chris Fitzgerold… he has worked at the Egg a few times when Fritz was there. He was a cool guy, he also happens to own a bakery in Fort Edward that makes buttered finger rolls haha. Anyway, he was real cool and I am going to give his info to Beez for possible stage hand calls. The fellow I was providing sound for is actually a well known Jazz singer/pianist called Tony DeSare. He was very very talented and made my job very easy.
This was an exceptionally difficult show to mix only because the mix position is outside the range of most of the system so you can never really get a good feel for what the audience is hearing.
I’ve spent the last couple days unpacking from that show and resorting my gear and such. I also had to go to work today to wait for some cables to arrive… i got a bunch of shit done, but now I have to go to Parkway tomorrow and pick up a bunch of shit we need for Sundays show.
Its been quite a while hasn’t it? Well, out of the last 20 days or so, I’ve had only 1 of them off. Between work at the Egg and Session times (oh and trow in building a shed) I haven’t even had time to make a couple of phone calls I’ve been needing to make. Where to begin?…
I try not to mention names in this blog, but I have just got to let this one out!! I will start with that…
The week after my last blog was actually really lame, we did 3 days of GTC corporate BS and then two days of Mark Morris Dance hell on wheels!! The GTC event went fine I suppose, I can’t actually remember anything specific about it, so it must have just been your standard Corporate stupidity but Mark Morris Dance… oh haha that is a different story!! The show actually went very smooth and easy for me, including the setup. But for the rest of the crew, we almost had a lynch mob on our hands. I don’t want to get into great detail about this, but basically the Lighting Director of the dance company was just about the most demanding rude pre-Madana douchebag I have ever worked with. Stephenie, (my Co-worker) was not a happy camper, and for a good reason… This guy had no social skills, I mean NONE. He did not know how to speak to people and was so hell bent on getting everything (I mean everything) he wanted, he would stop at nothing. He made every single person in the place hate him and at the end of the second night, we all talked tons of shit about him and consolidated our stories about his behavior… we all agree that Mark Morris Dance will not be coming back to the Egg and they can thank Mr. Light-douche for that. Not just because of his unfriendly, rude and obnoxious behavior but because we are in a huge budget crunch and he would not give us any help by maybe scaling back a little so we could save some money on rental and labor. I think he mistook job security for something else… all I know, is he has got it all wrong. okay okay, enough bashing, this is a happy place!!! haha
The dance show certainly sucked real bad, but it was followed by a kick ass weekend!! Starting with an awesome performance by Regina Carter and her amazing band!! This show was in the Swyer theater and was not all that well attended, but wow what a great show. Not only did I have the pleasure of mixing this show, but I had some great conversation with Regina’s husband (the drummer) who after talking a bunch told me that had taken Regina to Storm King Sculpture park about the same time that Patience and I had gone. I have nothing but good things to say about this show! I got lots of complements on the sound of the show, but I can never tell if people are just saying that stuff to be nice or if they really thought it was good, ether way… it feels good to be appreciated by the musicians.
The day after Regina played we had a show called Sol y Canto. I actually expected this show to not go nearly as well as it did. The band was all very cool. The show consisted of two parts, a short segment at the beginning performed by the string-quartet, then the rest of the group played together with the string quartet. I have a lot of experience working with string quartets so I knew exactly what to do with these guys! They were really excited about the sound and had told peter! I love when bands do that!! The best part of the day was that it was done before 8.
One of the coolest highlights of my week was meeting Richard Dreyfuss. He came in for a corporate event to accept an award for his strong background in history. Here is a little video I took of Chris at work sometime during the day.
The big surprise of the day was that Mike was not there and Chris was going to be my PSM… well Chris was pretty tied up taking care of some BS the client wanted in the lobby, so it was left to me to run the stage for the day. I’ve always been pretty comfortable with this, but I was not prepared for it mentally. The day went pretty well I think.
I took a short clip of Richard speaking, I did not mention his name on the you tube link so I don’t get in trouble or anything haha.
I was supposed to have the next day off, but the projector guys were coming in that day so I was asked to come in and… well, I don’t know exactly why they wanted me there, they only needed me one of the 4 times they came haha.
The next two days were shows in the Swyer, I did not mix either of them. The first was a very loud 4 piece band and the following was a solo acoustic act. Both were good shows and they went fine.
The next day (Saturday) was prolly the best day in a long time. We had NY Yankee and Jazz guitar virtuoso, Bernie Williams. This show was a lot of work for me, that’s an under statement… this is the kind of show where I am repaid for all the slaking I get to do at dance and corporate events! Anyway, everything went smoothly with set up even with a new helper at the monitor desk. I got showered with complements from all of my audio enthusiast co-workers during sound check. My job is easy when I have an awesome band like Bernie’s to work with. After the sound check I was told by Bernie’s Saxophone player that he was using the CD I recorded of the last time they were at the egg, to teach people the songs when a fill in player is needed. This is an amazing complement to me, but what makes it even better is that this guy is the sax player for Billy Joel!! That really rounded out the night for me haha. During the sound check the amount of 250hz coming off the stage from the bass was making me nuts… I broke the rules (yet again) for the sake of the audience and changed a setting on the bass players amp when nobody was around. One day I might get caught, but I don’t care. The change I made on the bass amp paid off which made my night just about perfect.
The next night was three guitar pickers with plenty of mando, banjo and fiddle mixed in. I got to mix this show and even though I was not to happy at sound check, I am content with the results overall during the performance.
Okay and the fun part of my last few weeks… Building my shed. But why speak about it, a video tells more then 1000 works me thinks!!
we obviously did not get it all done, but we got a great start!
The rest of the week was quiet at the egg, but I had a session or was building a shed every day the Egg was dark.
Wednesday was a fun night of movie and music at work. I got to meet and work with the Quarrymen. I truly felt honored that I could work with these guys. They were not really very good, but I did the best I could to accentuate there strong points and bury there weak ones. One thing that I found worked well was adding a quick delay to the vocals. I did this since they were doing mostly Elvis songs and songs like Elvis. And this sound was used commonly during that time period. I actually got a compliment from an audience member about the sound of the vocals. Audience member compliments are very rare, usually the only time I hear from them is when there was a problem with the sound. Noah and Patience both came to the show. I think Noah had a good time and I was really glad to have them there, I was feeling like I was not seeing Noah enough.
On Friday night Noah had a sleepover with his friend Micheal. Patience and I didn’t really do anything special that night, she had a baby shower to prepare for the next day and we were to tired and broke to do anything “out”.
Since the Quarrymen show we have had only one day of work and that was on Saturday evening. We hosted a 3 hour long show called “Indie Fest”. I was dreading this show since I found out it was a showcase of local bands. I guess I’ve gotten snobby about local music and I was actually pleasantly surprised at how good some of these groups were. Most of the bands were very loud in the room, but they were pretty good so it didn’t sound to bad.
I actually got to go visit my wife’s family on Sunday, it was a nice slow-paced day. It was good to see Becky’s (Patience’ sister) baby.
On Monday (yesterday) Adam came over for another round of “Lets build this shed!” we had a great time and got a ton of work done. Here are the highlights.
Today Patience and I went for an awesome and long drive down to Woodstock. I was going to work on the shed, but when Patience said “lets just go for a ride” I couldn’t resist. I took a bunch of wrong turns that lead us trough some beautiful scenery. We had an amazing time just looking at all the trees and when we finally arrived in Woodstock, we had a very good lunch at the pizza place down town and headed home.
After we got back I had a session in the studio with the folkies, those sessions are going smoothly, but it is taking a lot longer then I originally anticipated.
Here are a couple of random videos I took with some of my precious free time!
This video reminds me, I’ve gotten a full membership at the gym. I feel I’ve been very good about going whenever I have the time. I’m excited to get back into shape again. I’m focusing on speed so I can run away from people instead of fight them (not like I’ve ever been in a fight in my life lol)
There are defiantly going to be additions and edits to this post, but I’ve been working on it for two days and I’m ready to do something else so here it is!
A lot has happened since the last time I blogged. Most of which you can read about on Patience’ blog haha…
It all starts with the iPod saga. A couple of months ago I decided that I wanted a better iPod and I did not want to wait till the new one came out. Long story short, my order got so fucked up that I didn’t get the one I ordered on the internet until after I read about the 4′th generation iPod and that it was scheduled to come out Sept. 7th. So I booked down stairs and told Patience and Mary (A most awesome friend who was visiting us)… “I’m going to the Apple store, I’ll be right back!” (I was up in my studio killing time). When I returned home, I was the proud owner of a 32GB 4th generation iPod touch loaded with an ultra high resolution display (best in the market at the moment), two cameras (yup 2!) and loads of updated hardware! This is the future… hell, its the now of pocket computing! Needless to say, I’m a huge fan of this devise and I use it every single day. Anyway, I ended up getting the 3G iPod I ordered the day after I took the new one home. So… I gave the 3G 32GB iPod to Patience and sold my old 8GB to my sister in law to give to her son for his birthday. Here is a nice little sample video I made with it.
I was home with the wife while she was babysitting her nephew, so we decided to head to the park for some reading, wood climbing and some dirt. This is the exact description i used on you tube for this video.
The other day while Noah was at school, Patience and I decided to take a loooooooong drive up to Crane Mountain for a hike. We got lost on the way there cause the directions were wrong, but we managed to use the GPS to find it. The hard part is, there is no “Crane Mountain” in the Garmen, so we had to zoom out on the map and hope for the best. We enjoyed the ride and the hike, even though it started raining just as we arrived at the mountain top.
Here is a vid we took when we finally found the road that the trail head was on.
And another we took when we got as high as we were going to go in the rain.
I printed a bunch of lyrics out for the family band this week. Noah has been totally kicking ass on the guitar and I want to keep the momentum up so I’ve been learning more bass lines to show Patience and have been encouraging Noah every chance I get.
I still haven’t built the shed yet… they had to special order some of the wood so I’m waiting on that. Sucks real back because now my schedule is going to get very busy again and I won’t have the time to work on it. Go figure.
So Work has been going fine I guess. I’ve gotten tons and tons of stuff done. The console repairs are almost complete. On top of all the work I’ve been getting done on site, I managed to put together a comprehensive microphone order to replace our current (outlawed) wireless mics. I got a great price on this equipment lined up with SAVI, but the repairs on the consoles are going to be so much money that I think they are not going to buy the microphones. This will be a problem for us in the future, but I guess I have to let us take a spill or two to the face before they realize that it was not going to work to not have this equipment on site.
We did a beauty pageant about a week ago. This event is total bullshit. I was going to post a link to a great article Kyle (a co-worker) found, But I decided I don’t want to say any names on my blog if I’m not going to say nice things about something. Anyway, here is a little video I took of that event.
The next day we did a cool “old-time” concert with Guy Davis and The Carolina Chocolate drops. It was a very cool show and the audience loved it! I got to mix the show and it was a total pleasure. During sound check I got very nervous that it was going to be a very bad sounding show because the players had there monitors up way to loud and the microphones were sounding very hollow. Between sound check and show time, I turned all of the monitors master volumes from 3 o’clock to noon. This is a risky change to make without permission of the artists, but I am willing to take chances like that for the sake of the audience. To compensate for this, I tweaked the sound of the banjo in the monitors so that I could make it nice and loud in the monitors, which made the banjo player happy. I feel overall that this show sounded satisfactory. Peter said “sounded good (of course)”… that is pretty much all I need to accomplish in this job.
Sometime last week I had to go in to paint the main stage and then go to the volunteer orientation. Peter and Bill want us to believe that we are there to be introduced to the ushers and to treat us to a dinner… but I have come to a recent realization that they just want to put on paper somewhere that the house crew has gone through the fire emergency procedure training. Oh well, at least they pay us for it haha.
Last night we had a Beatles tribute band called Britishmania. This is the 3rd Beatles tribute band we have had at the Egg. The promoter was being very very cheep and managed to talk my supervisor into letting them cut the monitor engineer. I had no problem with this at the time, but I was also under the impression that they had an engineer to mix the show. I hate doing monitors from FOH in that room… I’m just to far away, and it detracts me from focusing on the house mix. Sound check was very long and sometimes challenging, but they were all very nice so I just played along and did the real sound check during the show lol… again, a risky move but it is something I do for the sake of the audience. I will do anything and everything I can to make a show sound proper. So after sound check I snuck a small piece of plexy glass in front of the snare drum. This made a huge difference! I was able to put the snare in the system which made it blend in the mix much much better.
So During the dinner break of the day we did the Beatles thing, a cute little bushy tailed squirrel ran up to my feet as we were walking back into the Egg from the parking garage.
Went to Jah Fest on Saturday instead of Big Day Out. That was a great move! Our friend Stephenie told us about it last week and invited us to go and we did!! We got there a bit late and we claimed the very last available camp site on the grounds, big disadvantage to that is we got blocked in by a huge truck and we could not leave the next day until that truck moved. When we arrived we had to stomp down a bunch of bushes so we would have a place to put up our tent… there were a few prickers around and I think I missed some because our air mattress did not make it through the night . before the demise of our air mattress, we cooked up some burgers and dogs on the charcoal grill, and drank tons of beer! Then we wandered over to the stage where they had a huge bon fire to light the dance area.
WARNING SOUND GEEK MOMENT!!…
The PA actually sounded excellent! Its was very small, only one self powered box per side (I didn’t even look to see what kind). They had great subs, only two boxes… couldn’t tell you what was in them, looked like double or quad 15″ drivers. They were placed center stage instead of being split up, this is the correct way to set up sub woofers in a PA system. I was so content with the sound that I hardly noticed anything else about the system accept for the fact that the equipment was properly racked in heavy duty road cases which makes me think they actually hire a professional audio company for the event. I don’t even know what board they were using (man, i must be loosing my touch!).
Okay so that’s out of the way… at the fire during the bands performances the audience was drumming up there own performances. We saw a few different kinds of fire dancers and they were all very good. We also saw a thin tall girl that could twirl a huge hula hoop around her waist while she danced around like she was on acid or something (not at Jah Fest!?) haha.
while hanging out at the fire I ran into a rigger that I’ve worked with a few times at the Egg. His name is Tommy. I was surprised to see someone I know at this event, but I am not surprised that it was him lol. He was very cool, he had a lot to share about his family heritage, pretty much the topic of the night, but he kept me and Pay and Stephenie stocked with beers… good ones too!
After quite a while of hanging out by the stage and fire, we got real tired and crashed out at around 2am but neither off us fell asleep before the damn air mattress went flat so we just got up instead of trying to keep sleeping… we got up at like 4:40 am. yikes, that is so unlike us!! It wasn’t bad tho, there were a ton of people still hanging around who haven’t gone to bed, including Stephenie haha, we could hear her voice half way across the ground and we tracked her down hanging out with a few folks who wanted some beers, so we got them some lol, ,we’re so accommodating after hanging with them for a while we went back to the fire where we saw a hand full of really really really… really drunk people who were still up fucking around by the empty stage. We defiantly would have left at this point, but we were still blocked in by the asshole truck that blocked in half the grounds… people are such douchebags!! ugh! So we crashed out in the van till he moved and then we left Stephenie with her boyfriend Sam and made our way home… to get some sleep zzzzzzz.
Jah Fest was very fun and super laid back, I think that Pay is going to want to go every year… cool with me
On Monday I did all that shit with SAVI that I said I was going to do… it went well and smooth and all that jazz, and on top of that I fixed the Dbx drive rack system that we use for our monitor rig… some asshole road guy messed up all the shortcuts on the interface and we could only access about 4 of the 12 mixes available on that system.
Today I recorded a couple of teachers who use the material we record in their classroom to help very young children learn Spanish. That is two educational projects at the same time for me!! what have I become… I’m such an old nerd now haha.
I’ve been pretty bored now when I have free time, I don’t want to play WoW anymore still, but I do miss having something that was such a convenient time killer… the real test will be at work when I have to do corporates.
this blog is looking more like a journal to me… hope that’s not breaking any weird internet blog freak rules or anything ha ha, not that they will ever find this thing.
. I have been thinking more about the direction of my blog. I have been using it mostly as a journal of my life events, which is cool… But I feel like there is no place in this kind of journal for thoughts of a deeper nature. I may throw a little “Deep Thoughts” section into my blog… we will see.
. before the demise of our air mattress, we cooked up some burgers and dogs on the charcoal grill, and drank tons of beer! Then we wandered over to the stage where they had a huge bon fire to light the dance area.
