Well, It's Public Knowledge Now

I guess I can let the cat out of the bag, for anyone who hasn't heard yet. We're moving to Wolfville! I got a job at Acadia University, being their one-man graphic design department. I start August 18, which means I have less than three weeks to figure out where I'm going to live and move my stuff there, and one of those weeks will be spent in Montreal, seeing Radiohead and visiting my grandparents, so there's a certain amount of hecticity involved in this big life change. But it's also super exciting.

I interviewed for the job early last week, on another week-long vacation. Little did I know going down there that I was the only person being considered. My friend and old coworker, Hannah, has until now been the designer, and she recommended me as a replacement. She's leaving to become an RCMP officer. I owe her big time for that one. We took the shuttle bus down the night before and stayed overnight at her apartment (and met her stinky blind cat). Then I met my boss-to-be first thing in the morning and found out that the job was a near certainty.

We spent the rest of the day wandering around Wolfville, imagining it as our home. Felt pretty good. Especially when we checked out Acadia's botanical gardens. They're quite spectacular. We saw a ring-necked pheasant, which we took to be a good omen.

Official word came via email Wednesday, while we were in PEI visiting our friends Jennifer and Tom at their cottage. You may remember that we stayed with them around this time last year. This year was every bit as pleasant and relaxing.




MacKenzie is growing into quite a clever and charming girl, and Lennox remains a clever and charming cat.




(This last photo was actually taken the day after we got back. No one photographed the photographer in PEI.)

Anyway, I accepted and then wasn't able to give notice to my boss until Monday of this week, meaning that my two weeks includes a week of vacation time. I guess it would have anyway, come to think of it. I sweated and fretted about it all throughout the night before, and then wasn't able to get him alone until 3:00 in the afternoon. I thought I might explode from nervous anticipation. But he was incredibly nice about the whole thing. Today it was announced to all my coworkers, most of whom will be sorry to see me go.

It'll be hard to leave all our great friends behind. But it is only an hour outside of Halifax, and Alison's working on getting her driver's license. We may even have to get a car. Alison's going to keep working at her government job here a couple of days a week, and I know I'll want to come in somewhat frequently for band rehearsals and shows and softball games and the like. I am, though, quite looking forward to having more time alone, without a lot of other people's projects hovering around and tempting me not to work on my own.

- Andrew

?=0?

We recently had an uninvited visitor in our house. We never saw him, but he left us a present in one of our cooking pots. It was the size of an olive pit. We didn't know what to do and decided to hope that it had just been our imagination. Then the next day he left us two presents in the same place. We called our landlady, and she immediately sent over her maintenance guy, Bernie, who put steel wool in all the holes between the basement and the main floor and set a bunch of traps in the basement, loaded with peanut butter.

I guess our guest liked peanut butter, because two days later we found another present in our kitchen — this time from Bernie. It was a message written on the back of his business card: "1 down ? to go." He came back to check the traps another two days later and no more had been set off. A third two days' wait brought the same happy story. We hope that's the end of the episode. Pretty easy to deal with, I must say. There are perks to renting.

- Andrew

Deerhoof

So good. SO so good.

- Andrew

Summer Shenanigans

Oh, dang, I'm already not keeping this up like I thought I would. Still busy, still having a good time. We just got in from a staff barbecue at my coworker's fabulous new house in Tantallon. It was fun and there was lots of good food, but then a three-out-of-tune-acoustic-guitar jam broke out and it got pretty painful at the end. Lots of earnest and loud Red Hot Chili Peppers and U2. I very seriously considered whether it would be worth the price of a new guitar to grab one of them and smash it on the floor in front of everyone. If not for the fact that everyone I work with would have hated me after that, I totally would have gone for it.

I've been going to the Public Gardens for lunch a lot, trying to get some quiet nature and sanity to break up my hectic day. Sometimes I bring Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, which I highly recommend if you're in the mood for some life advice/wisdom that manages to be profound, uncompromising, and uplifting. I was in there one day, sitting by the duck pond, reading and very much enjoying a Tony Millionaire's Sock Monkey comic that my mom kindly sent me in the mail a propos of nothing, when who should wander by but my sister's old friend and fellow Blogger, Jen, visiting from England! I probably wouldn't have recognized her and was caught completely off guard, so I was not the world's greatest conversationalist. Nice to see her and her family, though.

Another face from the past I got to see recently was Ken Shorley>, playing a Jazz Festival show with Sanctuary, who are always great. Ken added some percussion to what is usually a very arhythmic and drone-y experience, making for a mind-blowing, semi-hallucinatory set of improvised psychedelic ambience. We got to chat with — gush over, really — him a little afterward and meet his wife Heidi. He was playing another show the next night with his band Talambra, but I ended up being too busy to go. However, there's a trip to Wolfville, where they live, planned soon, so maybe we'll get to see them again then.

As of tonight I'm officially on vacation for a week. On Wednesday we go to PEI to stay at Jenny and Tom's cottage for a few days, but before that there's an Al Tuck matinee show to play, a Deerhoof show to attend (I know! Deerhoof in Halifax! How the heck did THAT ever happen?), a website to design, a softball game to play, and a secret other out-of-town excursion for as yet undisclosable purposes.

And on that suspenseful note, I bid you... mmgoodnight!

- Andrew

Happy Birthday, Jeff!

- Andrew

Gimme That Keyboard...

It's gotten to the point that so many things have happened since the last time I posted on here that I've been dreading doing this. And every day it only gets worse. Feels like when I was back in school, working on a philosophy paper, and every new article I read would only complicate the issue further, while the deadline got closer. Well, I'm not going to let it cripple me like it sometimes would in those days. But don't expect an A+ report.

Alison had a birthday almost a month ago. We had a great time with a bunch of friends hanging out at Point Pleasant Park by the mouth of the Northwest Arm in the evening. Barbecued some grub, drank some beers, played some frisbee, listened to the radio, and talked until the sun went down. There was even a cake. All right, Alison did make it herself, but I helped with the frosting.


I gave Ali a bike for her birthday, and we've been riding around all over the place together. That day we rode over to our friends Joan and Jason's to help them move out of their apartment. They left for Charlottetown that afternoon. Hope that's working out well for them. I'll be playing a show there with The Lodge next month.

Last month we played the much discussed and little attended show on the wharf in Lower Prospect. There were probably fewer than forty people there, but everyone had a real good time. The locals had picked 120 pounds of mussels the day before, and there were barbecued hots and hams to go with them. Bloodsport played a really great set in the psychedelic fog and we played an all right one. Charles and his family took off into the fog on a boat during the opening set and there was some question whether we'd have a guitarist, but they got back just as Bloodsport were finishing. Didn't make much coin, but we each got a gift certificate for a 2-hour kayak outing.

There's been quite a lot of music recording going on too. The Lodge are finishing up our first set of songs, which will probably be released as some sort of EP. I think we'll put some vocals on tomorrow night. The last session for Al Tuck's next record happened a few weeks ago, to the delight of everyone involved. We'd recorded some of those songs probably twenty times, in as many different styles. On Canada Day we played a set at an outdoor afternoon show with him. The weather was perfect and we got to play under a big tree, so it hardly even mattered that my bass had broken and I had to borrow a fretless one, which I've never played before. Meanwhile, I've been collaborating at home on a couple of tracks with Buck 65, via email. He sent me some stuff he'd been working on that was so far just rhythm and a bit of melody, and I got to flesh it out harmonically with some chord changes and modal tricks. Pretty fun stuff. And finally, I'll be going into the CBC studios in a week to lay down some wacky keyboard sounds on Erin Costelo's next album, which so far sounds really great. Oh, and I'll also be playing a show with her as part of the Atlantic Jazz Festival the following Sunday.

Alison got into the Viewpoint Gallery, I think you knew that. She put a couple of pieces up for sale on the weekend and tonight we went there to see the opening of another member's month-long show. I looked around and am happy to report that Ali's pieces are better than most of the other stuff in there, with a few notable exceptions. Maybe I'm a little biased. But I do know my Photoshop, and I can tell you that some of the photographers in there don't entirely know what they're doing yet. Or else they just don't like things to look natural. I blame Scott Kelby.

Life hasn't been all work, either. In case you were getting worried that we're turning into Jack Nicholson in The Shining. There's been plenty of fun summer parties, softball, and concerts. The Sadies played at the Marquee and blew everyone's minds with their reliable high energy and rock prowess. After a very very long set, they left the stage, only to return about two minutes later and say, "Thanks very much. We'd like to play ten more songs for you." Which they did. Deerhoof will be playing the same venue in a few weeks, a show I've been looking forward to for months now. Should be a really fun night, especially as it'll mark the beginning of a week-long vacation for me. Then I return to work for a week before taking off for another week, this time to Montreal to see Radiohead. I love the summer.

And now we've become quite addicted to Battlestar Galactica. The new one. Charles recommended it, as had other people, and so we finally broke down and rented the first season to see what all the fuss is about. Turns out it's pretty darn good. I probably don't have to tell you this because we're probably the last people on earth who haven't seen it. Or maybe we're not and I do. It's a "reimagining" of the original series. In this one, the Cylons were created by humans and then turned against them. A truce was reached and they went off on their own for forty years and evolved themselves and their culture. Now they look like humans and are ready to kick real humans' collective butt. Some of them don't know that they're not human. Their ships don't have pilots, but are themselves a different kind of Cylon — part mechanical and part biological. Oh, and they believe in God. The humans have a more ancient Greek, polytheistic religion. Starbuck and Boomer are women! The president of the colonies is a woman who was the Education Minister and therefore the highest ranking member of government when the Cylons wiped out most of humanity! The story is told in a documentary, militaristic style, and shot like The Office — especially the fights in space!! It's cool, I tells ya.

OK, that should be enough to get me back on the webhorse. See you back at the e-ranch.

- Andrew