Time Keeps on Slipping (Slipping, Slipping)...

... into the future. Only it really slips into the past, doesn't it? We move forward through time, therefore time moves in a future-to-past direction relative to us. Right? That's something that's always bothered me about that song. But the slipping part, yes, I can get behind that. Or am I in front of it?

Anyway, it looks like maybe having a car means no longer having time to stop and tell folks what your up to. Or maybe it's the fault of Twitter. Or it could just be the beautiful spring weather we've been getting in the valley limiting our time indoors. As a matter of fact, I'm outside this very minute, sitting in the sun and watching Buster hesitantly explore our backyard as I type. I can't actually see the computer screen very well out here, so advance apologies for any typos.

There've been quite a few trips into Halifax and back in Bert, many of them around The Lodge happenings. Two weekends ago was our official CD release show, although it wasn't heavily advertised as such and we'd already sold the CD at two other shows, so it just felt like a regular old show. But it was a really good one. Lots of people showed up who'd never seen the band before and we gave them some of our best stuff. The record's been continuing to gather mostly good reviews, although a lot of people cite "obvious" influences I've never heard of, or else relate everything to the various bands we were in in the '90's, none of which we really sound like. Here's a couple of interviews from when Vish Khanna made the album his weekly pick on CBC 3.

That same weekend we heard a Pema Chödrön lecture, attended a stellar Dog Day/The Got to Get Got/The Memories Attack gig, and went to the now annual craft fair at Halifax's North Street church. Lots of arty artisans, mostly kids, sell their wares in a giant room. It's overwhelming but really fun. There was one guy selling mix tapes he had made — actual tapes; not CDs pretending retro-self-consciously to be tapes. I had to buy one, as Bert's stereo comprises just a radio and a tape deck. He (the tape guy) had so many great-looking mixes it was hard to select just one, but I eventually did and handed over my five dollars. We listened to it as we drove back to Wolfville, and it was so great that when we got home and it wasn't over yet we decided to keep on driving in order to hear the rest of it. The song selection was a perfect balance of the somewhat familiar and the totally obscure. Each song emerged naturally and organically from the previous, but took your head in a slightly different direction. And the kid had written a photocopied booklet of really great liner notes, informative but personal and emotional, and I began realizing that, as it takes just as much time to make even a copy of a tape as it does to listen to one, never mind the work of picking out the songs and sequencing them and getting all the levels just right and then buying cassettes (where can you even get them anymore?) and writing, designing, photocopying, cutting, collating, folding, and stapling a 12-page booklet with drawings, well there's just no way in hell he was making any money from selling these things for five bucks apiece. Why didn't I buy one of each of them? There's no contact information anywhere on the tape, so I don't know how I'm going to track this guy down. But I will.

There've also been trips to buy ice cream, trips to buy books, and trips to nice areas for walking around. Here's a picture Ali took of me last weekend on the dyke that runs along the Gaspereau river. We got back to Bert just as the giant raindrops began splatting down on his roof and our heads.

What else? Johanna came out to visit us last Friday night and we all went to see Star Trek. It was quite a fun romp, I have to say. Corny as hell, but I guess it's pretty hard to set up science fiction scenarios for the exploring without coming across heavy-handed in the explanation of their details. My only complaint was that we had to wait until the end credits to hear any of the original music. Couldn't they have updated some of that awesomely cheeseball fight music instead of writing a whole new score?

Tonight we're going to drive to Berwick for dinner with our friends Cliff and Angie and Angie's mom. There's a drive-in somewhere in that direction, where it'd be nice to take in a stupid movie or two, but that might have to wait for another weekend. Tomorrow night The Lodge play an all-ages show in Dartmouth, and Monday looks like a good day for some more Bert-assisted exploring. Hope everyone else's "May Two-Four" is as nice as ours is shaping up to be.