I'm A Lover, I'm A Sinner, I Play My Music In The Sun
For some reason I completely forgot to bring a camera with me to the annual Artopia/Georgetown Music Festival on Saturday - not even my trusty low-rez phone camera. So, no pictures of the event, although it was fun, and a good excuse to get down into a neighborhood I enjoy, but seldom visit. The bands were ones I'd never heard of before, but that's sort of the point, since they're apparently all considered "up and coming", and probably not familiar to more than a handful of people who are much more connected to the new music scene than myself. And the art was interesting to some degree, particularly a couple of installation pieces.
I don't spend nearly enough time wandering through either of these particular communities; I have a hard enough time just staying on top of what's happening locally in theatre, so it's a pleasant diversion to spend a bit of time visiting some other artistic realm - and the combination of these two previously separate events provided an excellent opportunity to do so.
Horrible picture, I know, which does not come anywhere close to expressing the sheer, giddy joy of sitting around with a bunch of your friends watching puppet karaoke at midnight - and of course, the song selected was, as referred to above, highly appropriate.
In The Summertime When the Weather Is Fine You Can Reach Right Up And Touch The Sky
Summer officially begins today, and in Seattle that means the commencement of the annual Fremont Fair & Solstice Parade. I missed out on the parade (the only rule: no signage or printed words) due to a work teleconference, and got there just as crowds were heading away from the parade route, but did hit the fair itself, which is an annual fundraiser for Solid Ground (nee Fremont Public Association), a social services agency for which I worked back in the early/mid-'90's.
I Think About The Implications Of Diving In Too Deep
I just finished putting 100 1 1/2-inch stainless steel screws into the marquee for the theatre I built last spring. The plywood facing is starting to warp just a bit, which is creating just enough of a gab between it and the plastic tracks so that the letters are falling through the gap between them. So, I ended up putting in a bunch more screws into the tracks, on roughly 2-inch centers, in order to push it flat against the plywood.
It sounds like overkill, I know, but I initially tried adding screws on 4-inch centers and found places where the letters would still slide out of position, so overkill it had to be.
Is there some rule that says crows will always wake you up at the earliest possible time of the day? Like, when the first glimmering of sunrise appears, say around 5:00 a.m.? I mean, it's not exactly like they have to get that early of a start on the day, right? The dumpsters are still going to be plenty full of last evening's fast food cast-aways, and not even the cats are out-and-about at that hour, so what's the deal?
Would it help if I hung a big "Do Not Disturb" sign on my front door?
On State Street, That Great Street, I Just Want To Say
So, looks like I'm headed to Chicago the first week of August for the Job's bi-annual national convention.
Never been there before (well, not counting a brief, hectic change-of-planes at O'Hare about 30 years ago), and I'm guessing it's miserably hot-and-humid that time of year, so I probably won't mind spending my daylight hours in an air-conditioned hotel ballroom for most of the time I'm there.
On the down side though, the Cubs are out-of-town the entire week, so no chance (probably my only) of ever seeing a game at Wrigley Field.
I must be a really weird shopper. Here's what I picked up on my rounds today:
- A 1957 edition of Willy Ley's "Rockets, Missiles & Space Travel"
- A 1973 Random House Book Club first edition of Buzz Aldrin's "Return To Earth"
- "Complete Guitar Course: The Definitive, Full-Color Picture Guide To Playing Guitar"
- Two used tuxedo shirts
- A 1963 King-Seeley Thermos Brand "Orbit" lunchbox (I've had this on layaway for several months; I bought the matching thermos bottle on E-Bay a couple of months ago).
My, how time flies and all. I thought it had only been a couple of days since my last post, but here it is a full week gone by instead.
So, let's see, what's new? Well, we spent yesterday afternoon at the theatre hashing out our next season, which is always an interesting process: basically, we lock ourselves in a room and don't come out again until everyone agrees on the shows we're going to produce. This is very different than how most companies select their seasons, I expect, but then again, we've been a consensus-driven collective for so long, we've got the process down cold. This year, there wasn't a great deal of controversy, so we managed to get in and get out in under 2 1/2 hours.
Official announcement will be forthcoming, but it's shaping up to be an interesting and eclectic slate of shows.
The only other item of note is that, apparently the warm dry weather followed me up from Arizona last weekend, because it's become increasingly, not to mention unseasonably hot up here, with temps expected to hit the mid-80's for most of this week, and stick around through the weekend at least. This is about a month earlier than the norm (we joke about it, but it's been pretty reliable in that our summer "officially" starts right around the 4th of July). I haven't heard any complaints so far, and considering what a miserable winter we had, I wouldn't expect any, but we can be a fickle lot up here, and four or five days of hot weather is enough to send SOME people into a curmudgeonly state.
Oh, one other thing. I've started on a first draft of a play. It's an idea I've had kicking around in my head for several years, but only literally came up with a suitable framing device for the piece a couple of days ago. So, I'm going to try to crank out something reasonably coherent in the next several weeks, then see what I can do with regards to getting it read and making some revisions. Not going to jinx things by revealing too much here, but will say it's based on one of my favorite subjects, and leave it at that for now.
