Category: Daily Life

Last night we auditioned our rhythm guitarist’s brother to take over on bass. I’ve known him since we were both teenagers because he played rhythm guitar and sang in a band with my mom back then.

Long story short, it looks like he’s going to work out great. He’ll to have to hustle to learn all the tunes in just a few weeks, but he’s willing to put in the effort.

If you’re in the Kansas City area and I haven’t already invited you to the "Sleep is for the Weak" book signing with my friends, editor Rita Arens of Surrender, Dorothy and contributor Kelli Oliver George of Rancid Raves, it’s tomorrow (Thursday, September 4th) from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble store on the Plaza. Here’s the Facebook fan page with other cities’ signings listed. Help support your local bloggers!

I’m going to keep this short because I’m heading into work early today
and will no doubt be there late. My company puts on an annual two-day
creative symposium where the office shuts down and everyone goes to an
auditorium to hear interesting speakers and presenters discuss
creativity. This year’s symposium begins tomorrow, which means I have
to finish my week’s work today.

Have a lovely Wednesday (can you believe it’s Wednesday?). Talk amongst yourselves.

We started our current band in late November of 2007. We are now on our third lead guitarist and I just learned that we need to immediately begin a search for our fourth bass player. This despite the fact that we finally have four sets ready and gigs booked.

In the immortal words of Roseanne Roseannadanna, "It’s always something."

All bands are creative endeavors, even if the members are "just" playing other bands’ music. That means there are four or five creative temperaments struggling to get along, form a consensus, communicate effectively, and put in the necessary amount of work to make everything sound and look good.

The process can (and will) break down at any point. As I’ve mentioned before, band photos seem to hold a special power to curse a band into losing a member or breaking up. Recording can have the same effect; I’ve had band members freak out at the prospect of recording the demo in a studio. Oftentimes a band member will quit right as gigs are being booked or right after the band plays its first gig.

Let’s not forget the expense. As the lead vocalist, I own the PA system (speakers, amps, mixing board, power conditioner, effects units, microphones, and all the cables necessary to hook everything up). As of last weekend, I am now the proud owner of stage lights as well. I sprang for professional photos a while back, not to mention printing and mailing supplies for our promo packets and some awesome Moo cards that now have outdated photos on them. At this point, I’d have to play at least a dozen $100 a night gigs just to recoup my investment from the past year, much less turn a profit.

Fortunately, that’s not the point of the whole process. I love finding fun songs and finding out how they sound when I sing them. I enjoy performing in front of an audience backed by a loud, energetic band. Most of all, I value the friendships I’ve made with people I’ve played with, even when things haven’t worked out musically or business-wise.

So, we’ll find another bass player – probably a really good one who’s been holding out for a band that already has gigs lined up. I’ll edit our new Facebook fan page when the time comes and replace one guy’s photo and bio with another. We’ll continue sending our demo to local clubs and gathering new bookings.

It’s frustrating, but it’s always better to have band members who want to be there. See you at the clubs!

Here’s a funny story about an unexpected functional change in my Pampered Chef Chillzanne platter brought about last week. As it happens, the tray was too large to fit into my current freezer anyway, so no harm, no foul.

It reminded me of another incident that happened years ago. We had company coming over and I didn’t really have time to wash dishes, so I put my large cutting board, a painted holiday tray and some other miscellaneous housewares in the oven to get them out of the way. I’m sure you see where this is going.

A day or so later, my husband decided to turn on the oven and cook something. It was probably the first time he’d ever turned on the oven since I’d known him. Naturally, he didn’t look first and was only alerted to his mistake by acrid smoke pouring from the oven vents.

He called me at work to confess and I got really miffed about the whole thing. My friends who overheard the conversation were actually surprised that I was so angry because I’m usually pretty mellow. Truth is, I was just as mad at myself as I was at my husband. It was my own laziness that started the chain of events.

I don’t think I ever cut corners on house cleaning in that particular way again.

So let’s hear your memorable stories of destroyed, damaged, lost or stolen housewares. I know you have some.

Yesterday we took our first step toward reclaiming the guest room from the encroaching music gear and junk that has overwhelmed it for the last several years. We met with a contractor and explained what we’d like to do to make it into a TV room/guest room with shelves in the closet to serve as a pantry.

While we were at it, we asked for a bid to fix the piece of sheetrock that fell from our garage ceiling early this summer when the central air unit decided it didn’t want to drain properly.

Of course, any time you walk around your house thinking of stuff you might want to improve, it could keep going on forever. We stopped there because it would be nice to still have some money in our savings account when we’re finished.

Unlike our usual "why don’t you call your buddy" protocol for home improvements, this time we called a guy my husband knows who actually runs his construction firm like a business. That means we can expect a quote in about two weeks and if we’re lucky, they’ll do the work sometime this fall.

In the meantime, I get to pick out paint colors, flooring, switchplate and outlet covers, and a new ceiling fan.

I wanted to get the same brand of fan that we have in our living room. We’ve lived in our house almost 14 years and that fan was there when we moved in. It has run 24/7/365 ever since we walked in the door and we’ve never even oiled it. It’s the Terminator of ceiling fans.

Unfortunately, when I looked up the brand name "Bahama," I only saw it in the context of parts and repairs. A little more research revealed that it had been a store brand of the long-departed Payless Cashways chain. I guess that means I’ll be looking elsewhere for another quality fan.

I can’t wait to swap the purple carpet for hardwood floors, cheap paneling for smooth, painted walls and the glittery popcorn ceiling for a look that belongs in this century. Now I’m just hoping it’s affordable…

We were supposed to have band practice yesterday, but it all fell through because one guy’s kid made it into the finals of a football tournament and another guy had to work and couldn’t come if we moved practice later. I don’t remember having problems like that when I was in bands 20 years ago. Skipped practices back then were more likely to be hangover-related.

With the day freed up, I tried to think of something fun that my husband and I could do together. We go out for a lot of dinners and movies, but sometimes that gets a little old. My initial thoughts all involved places that close at 5:00 p.m.: the Kansas City Zoo, Powell Gardens (after a short road trip) or the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Those all sounded like reasonable options at 10:00 a.m. when I was doing the brainstorming, but they didn’t hold up to the reality of my husband sleeping into the afternoon. By the time I finally woke him up at 2:00 p.m., I had a new plan: a trip to Parkville, MO for Stone Canyon Pizza and Parkville Mini Golf.

It was almost four by the time we finally got to Parkville. Don’t even ask me what took so long. However, we had just as good a time as I thought we would. I’m a great mini golf companion because I completely suck at it and my opponent is certain to win by a large margin. The same holds true for bowling, ping-pong and any other sport-like game. I have no patience and no sense of trajectory, so there’s no chance of my getting a good score at any of them.

Fortunately, Parkville Mini Golf is lovely even if you’re losing. It’s built on a hillside and winds up and down through the 18 holes with lots of flowers, plants and comfy benches. That’s well worth the $6 admission price.

After my husband beat me by something like 30 strokes, we started walking back to the car but got drawn in by The Sweet Guy and compelled to buy tiramisu-flavored gelato. Really it was just coffee-flavored, but we managed to polish off our portions with no trouble at all.

Once we got home, we watched umpteen episodes of "My Life on the D-List" while I brushed a kitten’s worth of fur out of the cats’ coats before turning off the TV so I could clean out the cat box and do some laundry. Ah, the romantic glory of a sixteen-year relationship.

With a three-day weekend coming up, I’m hoping we can come up with an equally fun activity on one of those days. Any ideas?

I almost hate to say this, but I feel like I’m relatively caught up on things at work, at home and with my various volunteer and social obligations. I’ve been making a special point of fighting my natural tendency to procrastinate and it seems to be paying off. As long as I don’t get sick or take another long vacation, I should be golden.

I managed to make it to both yoga classes at work this week and I think I can feel a difference already. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to go on Saturday, too. If I can get back into that schedule, maybe I won’t have to work so hard to drop the extra clothing size that I’ve been fighting with for the last couple of months.

Speaking of exercise, I’m very tempted to try the One Hundred Pushups 6-week program. The trouble is that I can only do one or two traditional pushups and I refuse to do the girly ones. I keep taking the pre-test over and over hoping that I’ll be able to manage a few more as my starting number. Maybe I should just swallow my pride and do the modified ones so I can get some exercise benefit rather than none.

Last night my husband and I went out to dinner and to a movie (Pineapple Express). We’ve been trying to go to a movie per week since we discovered that our favorite theater only charges $5 per ticket Monday – Thursday. I just scattered the leftover popcorn in the yard for the birds a few minutes ago.

Tonight we’re going to see Kathy Griffin perform. I could probably have saved money and just watched the 5-6 episodes of her show that the TiVo has been saving for me, but I actually like her standup act better than the reality show. The show is at an outdoor theater where we’ve been soaked to the skin by rain more than once, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the clear weather in the forecast holds.

That’s all for me right now. Have a great weekend!

I’ve been going to the same hair stylist for a couple of years now. She was doing a pretty good job with my blue highlights, but I wasn’t at all fond of the way she cut my hair. Worse still, she went from an expensive salon to a more expensive salon that’s a lot further away. It was time to move on.

Last Friday I got my hair cut and colored at a salon quite close to home. The decor of the place was really cool – the owners have a rockabilly band and the salon is decorated to look like a retro garage. My hair stylist was nice and gave me one of the better haircuts I’ve had lately, but I’m not loving the color.

I mentioned on the phone and in person that my usual color was a dark brown with blue highlights. Once the blue gets rinsed over the brown, my hair ends up looking blue-black. This stylist decided to jump right to black for the main color, which meant that the highlights are, well, invisible. You can see some purple-y blue if I’m outside in the sun, but my hair is pretty much just black now.

She offered a free re-do, but I really don’t have the patience to sit through more hair processing on a different day. My grey roots will be peeking through again in 4-5 weeks and I’ll deal with it then.

And I may move on to another salon then, too. Last night I got a hair colorist recommendation from our waitress at dinner. Her hair was layered pink, blonde and brown and she highly recommended a salon just down the street. She even mentioned that the color held extraordinarily well, which is a big consideration for unusual colors, which ordinarily wash out noticeably with each shampoo.

I’ve had almost every hair color you can think of, so it’s really not that big of a deal for me to walk around with black for a while. Maybe I’ll even entertain the idea of choosing a new color the next time around.

The nice thing about hair is that nothing about it is permanent. Cut too short? I’ll grow. Don’t like the color? Change it next time. If only all the decisions I make were so reversible.

My favorite thing about this week is that I have three unscheduled evenings. That almost never happens.

One of them was last night, which gave me the opportunity to go out to dinner with my husband and watch a few episodes of "Burn Notice" that the TiVo had waiting for me. I still have large caches of other shows stored up, but I never seem to have time to watch TV anymore. Then there are the the huge stacks of books I have sitting around…

I am also happy to report that I got a lot of work done yesterday at the office and I intend to do the same again today. I even made it to yoga class for the first time in weeks.

Even my most onerous daily task – giving Xena antibiotic pills for an upper respiratory infection – has been going pretty well so far (knock on wood). I can tell they’re helping because she’s sneezing less and spending more time getting into stuff.

I think a lot of this positive attitude I have comes from finally getting a decent amount of sleep over the weekend. It really helps when I shut the cats out of the bedroom. Velcro is very sweet to want to cuddle with me all night long, but it’s not at all relaxing to have her constantly moving from my chest to my shoulder as I go from lying on my back to my side.

Tonight’s plan is to put together promotional packets for the cover band. I went to Staples last night and got laser-printable glossy paper stock, business cards, labels, padded envelopes and see-through folders. Now I just need to lay out bio sheets, a set list and the cards and get them sent out to local clubs along with our demo CD. The group photos I have don’t include our lead guitarist, but we’ll worry about getting new ones taken later on.

So that’s about all that’s going on in my life. How’s your week looking?

What better way to end the week’s blog posts than with lots of little odds and ends?

I’ll start with some actual news: my band finally has a gig booked. It’s not until September 26th and we’ll almost certainly end up playing somewhere else before then, but it’s still nice to pass that milestone. I’ll provide more details for the local folks when we get closer to the date.

Here are a couple of fun blogs I’ve run across in the past week or so:

• It’s Lovely! I’ll Take It! – Photos from real estate listings that really don’t make you want to buy the property.
• Cake Wrecks – Ever watch "Ace of Cakes" on Food Network? This is the absolute opposite of that.

Another online time-waster: you can go to FaceYourManga.com and make an avatar that may or may not resemble you. I thought mine was relatively good considering the limited options. My bangs are choppier than that, but all in all, not too bad.

Speaking of my hair, I have an appointment tomorrow with a salon not far from me called Chop Tops. I found them initially when they asked to be my MySpace friend. I make sure to let them know the pertinent details about my weird color ahead of time, so I hope they’re ready. I may bring my own jar of Manic Panic Midnight Blue just in case…

Have a great weekend everyone!

If you were at BlogHer, you probably went home with at least one box of merci chocolates from the National Thank You Day booth. If you haven’t yet nominated someone, the deadline is tomorrow, Friday, August 15th.

• Enter to win a chance to give your nominee a custom thank you prize valued up to $20,000
• All eligible nominations will receive an introductory offer to try merci Finest Assortment European Chocolates
• 100
  First Prize winners will be selected to win a 14-oz. box of merci and a
  copy of Peggy Post’s book "Excuse Me, But I Was Next…"

There must be someone in your life who deserves thanks. Think about it and enter them today. I’m going to do the same.