New Life

Well many things to report. Let's just get it out of the way that my life is starting to come together a bit. The new house is getting comfy and starting to feel like home. My roomate/bandmate/friend is awesome and our new band is taking off. Taking off so much so that I got us a show in little over a month!

We will be playing O'Malley's on 6th Ave, Tacoma March 19th and I will do an hour set, Kyle will do an hour, then our band "Bison Hunter" will finish off for who knows how long. As for now its not a paying gig but they did say that the more people we bring the more they will pay us so I'm hoping that we can actually stir up some fans and rock the joint on a friday night!

The band is a weird one at that. I am on keyboard (a very very old keyboard) and vocals and drum and synthesizer machine that runs through a mixing board and then through a looping station. Kyle is on multiple effects pedals for his vocals and acoustic guitar and also running through looping stations. Together we build the music from scratch and try to create something exciting, funny, interesting and psychedelic. So far we have about 5 songs in 1 week. One song is an original I wrote called "Till the Morning Sun." Another original that Kyle sings is called "Part of the Whole." We then have two songs so far in which we make dance beats and quote Back to the Future and another on The Neverending Story. Our list of covers should include Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now," Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise," the Door's "People Are Strange," Van Morrison's "Baby Please Don't Go," Radioheads "Creep" and Bob Marley's "The Sun is Shining" and probably a few more as we don't actually play the whole songs just use parts of them. Basically like a good welterweight boxer we're trying to come at you from every angle possible.

I guess that moves me onto the job. Last week I spent most of my time in other teachers classrooms getting to know the kids and the problems that they seem to have with all aspects of school. Tomorrow I will continue supporting teachers and pulling kids out for small group help as well as teaching my own two classes each day. I went to target today and dropped about 75$ on school supplies for my room and have been lesson planning all afternoon which effectively wiped out my plans to go skiing. The staff already seems to be appreciating my efforts and I'm hopefully not being looked at like the enemy by the kids. Hopefully if I pull off my plan I can become a mentor for how they can avoid getting in trouble while in the meantime mentoring teachers on why they are pissing these kids off all the time. I know this job is only till the end of May but I feel like I'm part of the school and that is nice.

Yesterday my dad and I spent the afternoon turning the 23.5 pounds of berries I picked this summer into wine. The recipe included all natural organic sugar, Invasive Blackberries, Wild Mountain Black Berries, Salmon Berries, Salal Berries, Red Huckleberries, Regular Huckleberries, Blue Huckleberries, and a few Black Caps. We decided not to add any chemicals to the mix and are hoping that no wild yeast emerges so that we can keep the batch all natural. It was really cool learning how the process works and getting to spend time with my Dad.

So I guess thats it for now. I have a long week ahead and hopefully everything will go smoothly.

Alright Alright!