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It'll be nice when this mother's day sh*t is over.

Band Practice

Rehersal with the flute band went for four hours today. 4.25 hours, actually. That's a long time to be pressing a scab to a string. And I had an important realization: I like Tammy's bass a lot more than I like my bass. I thought it was 3/4 size, but it's actually the same, but the neck is narrower, so it feels smaller and is easier to play. But maybe it is smaller than a fretless would normally be. Anyway, it has a great sound and is very comfortable. My bass is theoretically considered to be better than hers. Maybe she'll trade. OTOH, my grandma gave me my bass as a graduation present, from highschool. Everything becomes sentimental when it's a gift from a dead person. I have a copy of the book Lonesome Dove, which I have zero desire to read, but don't want to get rid of because my mom lent it to me. Anyway, maybe I could trade something else to Tammy for her bass, like a semi-functional church organ. Or we could just trade while I'm at school with an option to trade back later? Perhaps I should discuss this with her instead of rambling on about it in my blog.

My other band, Tennis Roberts may or may not have a gig tomorrow night, but I have no idea because Mitch has not called or emailed. I guess I'll find out tomorrow morning when we're hanging installations in the castro for the IDEA Ensemble as a part of the thingamajigs festival. It's a very musical weekend. Anyway, if it turns out that TR will be playing tomorrow night, I'll be playing Tammy's bass! Isn't that exciting? It would be nice if I knew, cuz we could make an email list and tell folks, and maybe somebody could make little quarter-size flyers about the band with contact info, so that if anybody wanted to book us or something, they could do that. It's the sort of thing you want to know ahead of time. *cough*cough*

Bass is the Place

I cut off the tip of one my fingers on my left hand while making dinner last night. It's not that terrible, but it sure smarted. My theory is that as long as I don't play a fretless bass, it won't affect my sound one bit. Because only fretless basses have any sort of real tone anyway.

Working on

airwaves #4 I need more tape music in my life. But what this really needs in it is a Long String instrument and a balloon.

Listening to

Change of Direction by Ellen Fullman (Unofficial Web Site) and Baloon Music by Judy Dunaway. I am in awe.

Getting Rid of Books

I have a lot of books. Christi's dad built us a great bookshelf to hold all of our books, but we filled it up and had to get several Billy bookcases from Ikea. This is partly because we live down the street from an almost-free bookseller. Christi used to walk past the bookseller every day after work and come home with an armload of books. After she quit working for Nolo, the influx of books slowed, but did not stop. Christi's parents live in Portland, and every time we isit, we go to Powells Books (http://www.powells.com), the world's largest bookstore and buy even more books. We could open a library of books on orchestration and leftist political tracts. Whenever we go to Powells, Christi makes a bee-line for the music section and I head over to the Chomsky shelf. We rendezvous later in science fiction. But we don't have as many sci-fi books as you might expect. Probably because our arms are already full of other books.

Anyway. I really like books, although I do not read nearly as often as I used to. I even went through a period of no reading at all. The boom years were really a culturally dark time. I read again now, but not nearly as quickly as I get new books. Fortunately, Chrsti reads extremely quickly and has read almost everything in the house, which now has more books than my grade school's library, although less science fiction.

Since I will shortly be moving a long distance away, I'm making a stack of books to be sold. It is a very small stack so far. I look at a book and I either have read it through, have started it, was assigned it for school, but never read it, or just never read it. So either I started or finished it and I liked it, or I feel guilty for not finishing it or not reading it and want to keep it until I do finish it. There are very few books that I don't like. Really. So the stack of books to sell includes science fictions that are too auful to even be campy (although I kind of liked hem anyway, in a campy sort of way) and right-wing political tracts. All of the rest of our books are either nice, have the potential of being nice, once I get around to reading them or must belong to Christi. I know I didn't buy Monica's Story, so it must be hers.