All the Clouds Turn to Words

I feel like I have to post something in order to keep everyone up to date, but really, I can't think of anything worth telling you about. Life has been all working days and semi-lame movie nights for awhile now. I think the colder weather is making us not want to do much — it's that time of year where every day is cold and rainy with wet leaves everywhere and you just want to stay inside all the time. Plus our apartment's been kind of cold, so there's definitely some hibernation vibes going on.

We did drive into Wolfville last weekend for a walk on the dykes and to pick out a pumpkin. Alison's got some pictures of that around somewhere... I'll see if I can find them. Oh, here we are.




Acadia's been a real good client for me since I left. Well, they're giving me a lot of work, anyway. The paying part they're not so great at. I had to get a little tough with their accounts payable department. Worked, though. But I've been doing lots of jobs for them, including one big recruitment booklet that had been left unfinished the entire time I worked there. We've finally got it just about wrapped up, and I think it's going to be quite a portfolio piece, if I do say so myself. Everyone's really happy with it.

I think they interviewed some designers the other day to fill my vacant spot, so the work from them will probably soon be slowing down. I'll have to diversify the old client base if I'm going to keep some sort of steady income. This week things are less insane than they have been, so I've been able to work on registering my business and developing a logo. It's going to be called "Focus Design," with the tagline "Be understood." Business cards first, and then I'll have to get some kind of website up, which I've never done before. Should be an interesting learning experience.

Wow, this stuff is super boring. I'm sorry, but it's kind of all I've been thinking about lately. The Lodge have a few shows coming up, including possibly one on Hallowe'en, which could be very fun. And we've also been recording a split 7" record with another band called Bloodsport. Two new Lodge songs. There're a few other new ones in the works too. I wish we could work on rehearsing and writing songs all the time, but we're all so busy it seems we barely even have time to email each other about upcoming plans.

I'm supposed to be working on an album's worth of my own stuff, which I would put out through the same guy who put out the Lodge album, but I seem to have zero time and even less inclination to sit down and throw that together. I'm using drums as the convenient stumbling block (Who would play them? How would I record them? Would we have to figure out the drum parts before recording the rest of the song, rather than recording as I write, which I would prefer to do?) but really I probably wouldn't even need real drums on most of the stuff I'd be putting together, and it's really just a matter of setting aside like an hour a day for awhile to work on it slowly until it's done. Most of what I've been listening to lately is pretty ambient, because it's easiest to work to. I saw a great documentary on Kraftwerk and electronic music, and downloaded (no money for music purchases just yet — the wishlist grows daily) the first Popol Vuh album, which I highly recommend. It's pretty and vastly spacious like their other records, but this one is mostly just Moog synthesizer, rather than the elaborate instrumentation they would later get into. I've been entertaining the idea of putting out a record called Green World that would be a prequel to Eno's Another Green World. That would be a nice restricting creative scenario that would allow me to make the kind of ambient-but-songy music I'd like to work on. I guess there's a fair amount of drums on that record, though... Phil Collins, actually!

Hope everyone's ready for a nice Thanksgiving weekend. We got our Tofurkey and sweet potatoes last night. There were no mushrooms left at the grocery store, though, so I'll have to try and find some today. Now that's what I call a concrete, realistic goal.