We've been busy little bees.

Holy cow, it's been over a week since my last real post. I realized it because we did laundry again today and made some really nice sock balls. The excellent and inexpensive, hippy-run, mostly vegan restaurant above and beside the laundromat has closed down because I guess they didn't pay the rent. Sigh. Stupid, disorganized hippies. I asked the laundry guy about it and he said the building owners will be reopening it in about two weeks with all new staff, because those people were "a bunch of gypsies." When I laughed nervously at that, he said they were seriously disgusting pigs. I guess we can say goodbye to the refritos and Grateful Dead every Sunday morning.

Coincidentally, there was also a Joni Mitchell special from a few years ago on TV tonight. It was really good. Sorry I never could get that song from a couple of posts back working. None of our Castpost files were working, so I removed some, and now the YouTube video from that post doesn't work either! The internet's all screwed up, man.

I guess quite a lot has been going on since last we one-way communicated. Alison's whole photography gear deal got changed again, with the guy deciding he does want to hang onto most of his equipment except for one digital camera, so Cuba is now back on. I've taken the week of April 24th off. Also, the same guy has decided to sell his laptop, so Ali will be purchasing a pretty new G4 12" iMac! Very exciting. I'll have this beautiful G3 tower all to myself, muah ah aaaaahhh.

Rehearsals for the Junos have gotten underway, and it's sounding pretty sweet. I'm going to go in on my lunch hour every day this week to keep running through it with Charles and Rich until it's like Happy Birthday to us. It'll be the most practiced minute-and-a-half piece of music ever. Dress rehearsal is Friday. Incidentally, it was Charles's birthday yesterday and we went over for some cake and socializin'. His daughter Ava carried the cake in to him while we all sang the HB song as slowly as humanly possible. It was some cute, I tell ya.

We looked at an apartment today that's right under that of our friends Krista and Keith. It's gorgeous, and we're definitely going to take it unless the landlady decides to jack up the rent, even though it's currently more than twice as much as what we're paying here. We can afford it, and it has a nice back yard with gardens, a sunroom, a gas stove, and washer and dryer. Plus, there's plenty of storage space and it's right under the K's. A short hop from the Common too, for convenient access to softball games in the summer.

Oh yeah, that's another thing. I don't think I already told you this. My friend and softball teammate, Jen, ran into Alison on the street awhile ago, and described this dream she'd recently had wherein she was the coach of a little league softball team. She said she woke up so happy that she realized it was something she really wanted to do. But the thought of coaching a team all by herself was a little daunting, so she immediately thought of getting me to do it with her. When Ali told me about it, I thought it was one of the best ideas I'd heard in a long time, and couldn't believe it hadn't occurred to me before. So now Jen has put the call in to some guy who's in charge of such things, and we're just waiting to hear what can be done. One possible problem is that neither of us has a car. But we do both live really near the Common, so if all the games took place there... I really hope it happens; I'm quite psyched about the possibility.

Anything else? Hmm, I think that's about it. What more do you want out of a week? I spent about four days synthesizing the sound I needed on my keyboard for this Juno performance. There was a lot of random feeling around in the dark, not knowing whether I was getting closer or farther from the guide track Graeme had laid down, and it really had me pulling my hair out until I realized that the key was to make it sound like a rubber band being plucked. After that, I narrowed in on it pretty quickly and got it honed exactly how I wanted it. I'm glad I did, too. It's a very versatile sound, based on one of Kraftwerk's key signature timbres.

Working on it gave me a whole new respect for those guys. They really knew what they were doing -- you'd never just stumble upon this sound, because if you change it a little bit in almost any direction, it becomes completely wrong. Actually, I noticed that you can hear that sound slowly evolve with each consecutive album, starting with Autobahn. They don't quite have it yet on that one -- it still sounds a little cartoony -- but by Trans Europe Express it's very solid and they make significant use of it. I don't know if this is a coincidence or not, but I believe Autobahn is also the last album on which they used flute, converting themselves into a purely electronic band. It's as if they said, "Screw the flute, we've got rubber bands now."

I also had this flash of realization/memory that when I was very young I used to enjoy hooking elastic bands around bureau handles and other things to make "guitars". I could listen to and experiment with that sound all day long. Maybe that early musical experience unconsciously influenced my adolescent love of Kraftwerk! I'm now planning a recording involving actual rubber bands. My dream is to put together a full rubber band band. Maybe the drummer could play balloons.

So, in conclusion: no more hippies or expensive camera gear; Junos, laptop, Cuba, little league, and moving are all a go; Joni Mitchell and rubber bands rule. Have a nice week.

- Andrew