Wow! It's been

Have I been busy? Not really. I just got over a cold and I've been looking for a band.

To recap, last week I had a cold or the flu or some other virus. It's the second time this season. Yes, it sucked. But I'm over it now.

AMA practiced on Monday. I thought it would be the last one until the Macadam's performance on 4 December (9pm - be there!), but we're all able to get together on 1 and 2 December. So we'll be practicing those evenings. I've had to learn four songs I didn't know before, so there will be new (to me) material being played that evening. This will be AMA's farewell or, as Dave puts it, our DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) performance. An end of an era. Dave wants to find another guitarist. I'd be happy to play with him if we can find one. However, I'm definitely going to record with Dave and I'm not letting the moss grow on me in the meantime.

Today, I'm talking with the Owen Brothers. They're a couple of brothers who moved up from Ashland to try to take the Oregon Rock'n'Roll world by storm. They need a bass player. I have a bass. We'll see how it goes...

And speaking of having a bass, I found a used Godin Freeway5 Active on Craigslist. I bought it. It came with both a hard and soft case, which made the price really good. I can now give Zig his bass back. Last pieces of gear I need are a good guitar amp head (the Egnater Rebel 30 looks really nice) and a 4x12 cab. I'll probably have Jay buy one for me in Kalamazoo for the April gig with Shiver and then I'll ship it home.

I've quit the jazz guitar lessons. They were fighting for time with my songwriting and actually playing. I didn't have time to practice another style, which I probably would never use. The good news is that I've got a lot of music theory under my belt, and it's given me a lot of good information on chord substitution and voice leading that comes in handy even in the pop/rock world. To replace these lessons, I've started taking some voice training. I do have time to sing in the car on the way to and from work. So the week after I get back from Virginia (the family is going there to visit my son who works and lives there - yes, I'm looking forward to it, too), I have practice Tuesday and Wednesday, a voice lesson Thursday, and a performance with AMA on Friday. Then, nothing definite until April.

Finally, I'm learning the Google Web Toolkit and the Google App Toolkit. I've had an idea that would make me fabulously wealthy and I still have enough programming chops to code it. So I'm giving it a shot. We'll see if I can figure it out. I had basic GWT and AT apps running yesterday, but when I tried to combine them, things broke. It was late at night, so I went to bed. I'm back to it after this.

So, that's about it for what's going on with me. I keep on keepin' on. We'll see what happens...