December!!!!

Crap. Shopping, driving, snowy December. Would it kill us to move the holiday season to the summer.... but then I guess what would we do in the winter eh?

Been a busy few weeks past. Gonna play a few original songs with Rhonda at an Amnesty International Open Mic Night on Dec 10 at the Exchange. Gonna play my "old" standard "Stargazing" at the show and if they want me to play longer, one of my new ones "First Time" and maybe the instrumentals "Daizy" or " "Munchie". But we'll take it as it comes.

Develoment in the Johnny Rockstar project is entering the polish stage before we hit some shows. We've all basically got the songs learnt, now we're tightening stuff up. I've got the most ground to cover yet since I'm the newest member by about 5 years or so. We're all starting to get excited about the work and we're developing a good band feel.

The new project with the former Linger members is progressing nicely too. We've got material enough for like 2-1/2 albums, but we'll almost certainly scrap a portion of it, combine many and there will be much more new writing before we're done. Of the dozen or so jams, we've not once left without a recording of some new ideas. We're starting to get backd on posting the ideas to our server space. One of the major difficulties has been getting everyone in the same room. Every member of the band has been at a jam and has written and participated, we're all working. But we have not all been in the same room since Craik in September, and as a result we haven't agreed on the name (we all want to do the final discussion in person).

One of my major frustrations at the moment is more creativity than time. It can be exasperated by the fact that I have alot of outlets at my disposal, they can just be hard to access. Not that I can realistically blame this on family or home ownership. I don't know that I'd be much further ahead if I were single, maybe but likely only 10% further along than I am. The presence of an encouraging family can do wonders to a persons motivation and workload. Some of the projects that I'm in beginning phases of working on and will all come in time include - Learning and using synthesisers (limited by my access to a good sound card), doing more video content for Maent Records and some of the other projects I'm involved in (limited to some extent by hard-disk space and time), at least 2 more ideas for bands (limited by the fact that that's ridiculous, they'll come when some current projects run their course), working on a project with Mark and Rob (likely 15 years in the future the way we coordinate), Developing and constructing a new/custom performance setup - guitar, amp, effects and all the details (limited by time and money). It's good to have goals and ideas - infact I should go and post them in a list on my MySpace page so I can work e'm out.

Other than that, just plugging away at life. Have some hip/back pain right now that I'm hoping is a result of improper exercise and bad posture and not a sign of something worse, gonna tough it out for a bit and maybe go see a doctor in the new year if I don't see some progress. Tylenol + Advil = Good Times.