Goin' to See Neil

Tomorrow night! Wilco's opening. Gonna be quite a show. Neil's one of my big heroes. Lately this is one of my favourites. Apparently it's about his car. What a lovable kook.

This version's from the Unplugged album. I prefer the white noise of Crazy Horse, but it's still a great song. The original's from American Stars 'n Bars, a highly underrated album. Worth the price just for a lesson in song sequencing. And "Will to Love" is guaranteed to floor you. Couldn't find it for free internet play, though. Bah. Just take my word for it and spend the 99 cents or whatever.

- Andrew

Happy Birthday, Andrew!

This one goes out to the ladies at work.

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

First Snowfall!

- Andrew

Good Times, Great Friends, No Oland Export

OK, it's really not Hallowe'en anymore. Somehow I keep forgetting to update this thing. Must be having too much fun. There's been a lot of music and socializing around here.

Johanna did come to visit us and we had a great time with her. The seventies version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers was still not in at the video store, so we didn't get to watch it with her. We did get it later and it was very very creepy and made us rethink just how good the Nicole Kidman one was. But the weekend Johanna was here, we went for a hike around Blomidon with her, which was really cool and in some ways a more scenic trail than Cape Split. More variety, I guess. There were some really steep hills and some meadows and a waterfall. And we were only there for an hour! We also got to go down to the beach and see the spectacular red cliffs.











And speaking of spectacular Cliffs, there've been two The Lodge shows since my last post, both well-attended, -received, and -played, if I may say so. One was in Charlottetown at a funny student pickup bar with trivia games and an unraised stage, called Hunter's Alehouse. Alison and I were driven down by the dynamic duo of Johanna and Cliff, and then Johanna did all the driving on the way back. She's been getting lots of good practice in. And while we were there, we got to stay with Joan and Jason in their sweet island pad. As a surprise early birthday present, Joan knitted me a hat with Space Invaders guys all around the edge. Now I'm the coolest nerd ever.

The other show was last week at the infamous Gus' Pub in Halifax, where we got to see lots of our friends and have a really nice time. The Lodge opened for Smothered In Hugs, who put on a terrific show, despite some crappy muffled sound out of the Gussertronic™ PA. Those guys are fantastic. I can't stop listening to their CD. And we kind of kicked a** too. Meg put me and Ali up for that one. Her roommate, Carina, served us some exotic snacks at three in the morning like some kind of awesome Portuguese grandmother.

And then, last night, our friend Dusty came to Wolfville to host an open mic night at legendary local Irish pub, Paddy's. We went over to be entertained by his strummin' and croonin', and then he stayed over at our place.

This Friday we'll witness the unveiling of Acadia's latest musical acquisition, a full set of Javanese gamelan instruments, facilitated by Ken Shorley, exotic music afficianado extraordinaire. And the following weekend is Neil Young and Wilco in Halifax. Can't wait!

In the meantime, here's some more of Ali's awesome photos, from an evening walk we took a couple of weeks ago.




- Andrew

Happy Hallowe'en!

And happy anniversary to us! Number 14, don't y'know.

We didn't have any parties to go to or anything, but I thought we'd put on a little bit of a show for the kids. I found a couple of Elvis masks at The Bargain! Shop [punctuation theirs] and we dressed as a couple of Elvis fans. I also carved an Elvis-o-lantern that I think turned out pretty great.



I can never figure out how to do that sneer.

Alison's got it down OK.


I realized we didn't have any Presley records to play in the background, so we decided to be undiscriminating Elvis fans and listened to Costello all night instead. I'd bought 84 little chocolate bars, so we sat by the door with The Attractions blaring and waited for the miniature tykes... Unfortunately only six kids in total showed up. And one of those was the daughter of my coworker, Sherri, who lives out of town and who'd shown up to see the awesome pumpkin and terrible costume her weirdo friend (i.e. Sherri's friend, i.e. me) had come up with. She was the world's cutest horse (the daughter, not Sherri). I wish we'd gotten a picture of her (daughter again). Princess Leia, Hermione (sp?) (from Harry Potter), Spiderman, kangaroo, and vampire, by the way, in case you were wondering.

I'm starting to wonder whether there actually are any kids in Wolfville. There are plenty of old people and university students, and we see kids at the farmers' market on the weekends, but they could be brought in from surrounding towns. Alison claims to have seen at least five babies being pushed around in strollers by different women, but I say they could all be the same baby being cared for by some kind of communal mothering group. Sounds like the kind of thing they'd come up with around here. The Wolfville Baby, then, could be the hero in this sort of anti-Village-of-the-Damned story. Or maybe it's more like the reverse of that Star Trek episode where they visit a planet whose adults have all been killed off and Kirk has to try to reason with the children that there is value in adult life while they childishly ignore him. "NO blah blah blah!"

Our recently licensed Haligonian friend Johanna's coming this afternoon and staying overnight. She's driving! I'm hoping she'll want to watch the '70's version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with us. We watched the recent remake, The Invasion, last night after the non-existent Wolfville kids failed to overcome their non-existence and show up looking for I have to say some pretty darn good candy which we'll now have to try very hard not to eat for weeks and weeks until there is none left. It was a slightly different take on the story, and very good. Nicole Kidman is a good emoter through feigned non-emotion. And Alison is a perfect horror movie audience: she jumps and shrieks in all the right places, a quality which I have a feeling Johanna shares.

- Andrew