The Mandelbear's Musings

The small backpack is much more maneuverable than the rolly -- easier to get around with and easier to find a place for. On the other hand it gets hot, heavy, and uncomfortable after a while. The rolly is better for evening filking, since my guitar gig-bag can be backpacked and the rolly works as a music stand (though it's too low to be a good one). For concerts, the rolly holds my recording gear and can be turned into an impromptu mic stand with a simple clamp.

A rollycrate full of preordered CDs is large and clumsy. You have to be careful going over irregular surfaces; I've had it capsize several times on sidewalks. Possibly not a major consideration, since I will be doing pre-orders differently, if at all, in the future. It does hold a lot, though: all our food fit into one.

I need a smaller shoulder bag. Jammed full of a wallet, two checkbooks, a stack of $5's for making change, a big pile of receipts, business cards, tools, phone, camera, Nokia 770, earbuds, keys, ... it's heavy, bulky, and often a literal pain in the neck and shoulder. On the other hand, I need a lot of that stuff, much of it every day and most of the rest at least a couple of times a week. Once the OpenMoko phone becomes useable I'll be able to drop the Nokia, but it's not there yet.

I'm probably going to end up with multiple bags: one little one with the stuff I absolutely have to have whenever I leave the house, and one (or more!) that I can either clip on or drop it into when I need the rest.

Having two computers along was a win: the Mac for wireless and recording, and the Linux Thinkpad for the direct connection in the room. Should have brought an extra ethernet card for the Thinkpad, though; then I could have used it as a router in the room.

Before I proceed to yesterday's events, I'd like to go back to Friday afternoon, when I went up to the front desk to ask somebody why my room Wi-Fi didn't work in the lobby. It turned out that they're on different networks, and for some unguessable reason (probably having a lot to do with greed trumping good customer relations) you have to pay separately for them. Foo.

The amusing thing, though, was the Russian desk clerk's name: Alexander Savitzky. (OK, I don't know how it's transliterated; I'm sure it would be the same in Cyrilics, though ours came through Polish and so would have been transliterated back in my great-grandparents' time, if not earlier.) In case you don't know, that's also my nephew's name. (Waves to asavitzk.)

OK: back to Sunday. Caught Kathy Mar's concert -- unfortunately very thinly attended. The whole con was very thinly attended, in fact, but that's another matter. Missed most of the two-shots getting ready for the Callie and Steve Hour. We ran through "Staying Home Tonight" in the dealer's room for Joe Bethancourt, who had to leave to catch a plane at 3:00. Caught the very tail end of Lorien Patton's set -- must hear more of her -- and proceeded to set up my mics in the back of the room.

The concert went pretty well, I think. (Some people have said it went very well, but there were at least one major trainwreck and a couple of minor ones. It was basically the Callie (cflute) and Steve show, with tibicina on vocals for Callie's material, and me on guitar for some of it.

Dinner was Chinese, this time across the street in P.F. Chang's with the Ronnie and Arthur Rubin. Tasty, if more upscale/pretentious than authentic. I'd originally planned to follow the flower_cat down to dinner, but ended up in a long conversation, mostly about home recording and CD production.

The dead dog started decomposing shortly before midnight, since many people had to catch flights at ridiculous hours in the morning. Still, it was a nice little circle. I need to keep better track of my singing, but it included "Daddy's World" (when the Y.D. dropped in for a hug), "Demon Lover" (after a sequence of love songs took a slightly weird twist), and a couple of others.

As it turns out, ConChord is shaping up to be a very small con, with nothing scheduled before 6pm on Friday. Just as well; that let us spend Friday recovering from the drive down, meeting old friends, handing out pre-order packages, and not getting very much done.

The original plan had been for the flower_cat to connect with tibicina and cflute in the morning for a trip to Penzey's spices in Torrence, but they didn't arrive until noonish. The theme of this weekend appears to be real-time scheduling.

We'd originally thought of holding a CC&S release party, but between a late start and the fact that there was a "New Stuff Listening Party" on the schedule kicking off the con at 6pm, we sensibly decided to bag it. In past years the listening party was normally held at the reception, which was cheese and veggies on the poolside patio. But since the acoustics were so terrible two years ago, they decided to put the listening in the concert hall on the second floor, and let people drift between them. I have no idea how many people were there to hear my album.

The con was kicked off properly by a concert by Joe Bethancourt. The schedule is very much a work in progress; more so than at most cons I've been to. The short concerts on Sunday are especially flexible, so after cflute mentioned that 11:30 Sunday morning was a bad time for a concert, and signed herself up for a slot at 3pm, I talked to Rod O'Riley (who's doing the schedule) and moved mine. It'll probably end up at 3:30, so we'll do a combined sound check.

So far I've distributed somewhere between 15 and 20 pre-order packages, and sold 50 to the two dealers. The main feedback so far has been a comment from R.O'R that there didn't appear to be the usual 2 seconds of silence between the songs.

If that's the only problem I'm not going to worry about it too much. Next time I'm going to schedule at least a week to live with the actual master and make sure it's exactly the way it's supposed to be.

Dumb bear!

Just about to pull out of the driveway on our way to ConChord when it became apparent that the battery was stone cold dead. Luckily it happened before the start of the trip rather than somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

AAA battery service guys have battery and alternator testers these days. Alternator appears to be fine; battery's hosed. He has a replacement battery, and is installing it now.

Our Ford dealer (called while AAA was on the way) couldn't see the car until Monday, and I couldn't reach their rental department. So we win: a new battery is a hell of a lot cheaper than a weekend, 800-mile rental.

I'm gonna comp him an album.

Apparently research has shown that grumpy people do better in places like nursing homes than those with sweeter dispositions. So I can expect to live a long and grumpy life.

Here's one of my favorite patter songs from Gilbert and Sullivan: "Whene'er I spoke" from Princess Ida.