My step son took this.

For those of us living in sunny (sarcasm) New England, Boston.com has a little story you might be interested in.

How to Build an Ark

It’s been a while since I played my guitar with anything approaching regularity. I worked on the RPM Challenge in February through the first week of April, but there wasn’t a ton of steady guitar playing involved. More like spurts of a few days here and there.

Last night 4/5 of the last band I played in, Break Even, met at Steve the guitar player’s house. There was Steve, Dave the bass player, Jeff the singer/drummer, and Rob the guitar player (aka me). Bob the drummer wasn’t there so Steve’s step-son sat in.

It can best be described as a mild disaster. We were falling apart all over the place, and none of us practiced much so we were all hurting. Dave and Jeff are still in bands so they were doing fine physically, but musically everyone had their rough moments. It’s funny how things come back to you. Songs I haven’t listened to in five years popped back into my head as soon as we started playing. My guitar part, the lyrics I needed to sing, the structures, the changes, everything. It’s also amazing how the mistakes I used to make regularly came back just as easily.

We’ll get together once more on Tuesday and then play at Steve’s cookout on the 11th. If last night is any indicator it will be a total freakin’ blast. I always forget just how much fun it is to just play with other people. It’s so much fun it should probably be illegal.

Do you know what else is really fun? Coming home after band practice to a really wonderful surprise. When we moved into the duplex (chez-plex) we brought a lot of framed pictures with us. The plan was to hang a few in each room and then hang the rest on the wall going up the stairs to the bed rooms. We never got around to the stairs.

Until last night when Jen and the kids hung a ton of pictures, including a few wedding pictures that Jen printed and framed. We are going to get some wedding pictures professionally printed and framed, and we still have one or two more pictures to hang, including a beautiful wedding present, but last night Jen and the kids did a wonderfully incredible job and I was so happy to see it. I love them all and can’t thank them enough. What a great thing to come home to.

Now if the friggin’ rain would stop so we can enjoy our two planned beach trips this weekend. That would make things just perfect.

Tonight some, or possibly all… I don’t know, of my old band Break Even will be getting together to rehearse a few old songs in preparation for playing a party at Steve the guitar player’s house on the 11th.

I changed my strings last night and packed up all of my equipment. I got up early and practiced a little. We have a handful of songs picked out and I needed to relearn them after 4+ years of not playing any of them.

I used to record our shows with my obsolete, ancient, stone age, 8-track and had a ton of MP3 files including just about every song we ever learned. I planned to dig through those files to have a copy of our arrangement of each song I need to learn.

Of course all of those files were on the external hard drive that died on me a couple of months ago.

Uh oh.

Looks like Robbie is going to be winging it a little bit tonight. I brought my little tape recorder with me so I can tape a run through of each song tonight. That way I can practice along with it. Hopefully tonight doesn’t end up being the only practice we get.

Of course we used to pull off shows when we were embarrassingly under-rehearsed in the past, and we got paid for those… so this party will be cake. No problem!

I have been looking through Flickr’s interesting images, or whatever they call it, for a couple of days this week and I have learned one important thing…

I am not very good at this photography thing.

I’ve always wanted to take a photography class. Even as far back as my music school days at U Lowell. I’ve never done it though. Maybe one of these days my beautiful wifey and I could take one together. Or maybe the two of us could sucker some friends into coming along too.

Just a thought. I’ll never do anything about it (probably) but it’s a nice thought to think about while thinking about stuff to think about with thoughts.