I’m Back!! – v.2.1
I think I’m going to start and post here regularly again. I know I’ve said that on at least 2 occasions but I’ve just been so busy with other stuff, online and off. It appears that there is just not enough hours in the day for me to do everything that I want to so, for obvious reasons, some things have to suffer and be put on the back burner. As I’d had a bit of grief in the past in regards to this blog — grief that I did bring upon myself, mind you! — it was an easy decision to leave the blog writing for a little while at least. Weeks tended to turn into months however and The Speckled Band turned out to very much be an “abandoned blog” for a while there. Now I long suspect that whatever readers I had in the past had also moved on and given this blog a wide berth and for that I apologize. I’m a slacker sometimes who does what he wants to do, generally speaking — some of which I’ll now elaborate on.
Online I’ve been creating a heap of websites for friends and/or for special interests of mine. I had planned to do “100 websites in 100 days” to (a) See if I could do it and (b) Get a lot of sites up very quickly. This didn’t go to plan however — mainly because it’s difficult (well for me anyway) to think of 100 different websites and construct them in such a short time….and the fact that the websites themselves would not exactly be what you would consider as “quality affairs” by any stretch of the imagination. Nonetheless, part way into the exercise I decided to change tack and spend more time on building up the quality of the sites that I was working on rather than increase the quantity. To this end I feel that I’ve been somewhat successful but there’s always room for improvement.
Obviously coding, setting up and writing content takes quite a bit of time and I’d have to say that I’ve found myself being a little “burnt out” at times and having to pull back a bit. In this regard I’ve tended to do a lot more offline activities as well as just chilling out in front of the idiot box. There’s a lot to be said for just sitting back and doing nothing at times like these.
Earlier this year Amy and I caught up with Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer again and we were able to see, first hand, the guitar that we’d made being used on stage during a Posies gig. We’d made the guitar so freaking fast that it wasn’t quite finished when I presented it to Ken way back in December 2000. It was almost done but the top nut needed to be filed and the guitar strung up and tuned etc. (Ken got all of this stuff done in Seattle as far as I know). I’ve talked about the making of the guitar on here before so, if anyone is interested, you can do a search for it in the archives.
Anyhow, the verdict: I simply could not see how all of the sounds that Ken squeezed from that guitar actually came to be — I was simply blown away by the stuff he was doing and I was hugely impressed — and relieved — that the instrument sounded so good, as I really had no idea beforehand what it would sound like. I had employed a few methods and ideas that I hadn’t done before in making an instrument so it was good to know that it all went together well. Ken had told me, via email, that the guitar was his single-most treasured worldly possession — which was great for that ego of mine I must add — but I just had no idea of how it sounded in real life. I also couldn’t believe the energy I saw on the stage that night. It was just fantastic though, at one stage, I thought to myself “how the hell is that guitar staying together?” before realizing that if it did begin to spectacularly unravel on stage and spontaneously combust then we could just assemble a new “team” and make a brand new guitar, no probs….
…Speaking of which we still need to do just that for Jon some time.
After the show we partied with the guys for a while afterwards at a club run by Wally Meanie, which was pretty cool. Late into the night — actually it was the morning really — we said goodnight and went on our way.
It’s probably not the best time to call it quits for this post as there’s a heck of a lot of stuff I haven’t mentioned, however I’ll do so now so as I’ll have something to talk about for the next post (hopefully tomorrow).
Until then….