July 2010 Archives

I was walking from my spot near the stage over to one of the vendor tables, when there walking by himself was Jeff Coffin.

I said hi, oh my god you rock, and asked if he had time for a quick picture. He said yes.

Then I looked and realized that Sam was holding my camera. "Oh crap I don't have my camera!"

Jeff looked at me and said, "Don't you have a phone? Everyone has a camera on their phone." Busted, I took my humble Blackberry out of my pocket and said, "I have a Blackberry, it doesn't have a camera."

He took his Blackberry out of his pocket, held it up next to mine, it was the same kind, and said, "Mine doesn't have a camera either." Then we just laughed.

A couple standing nearby took the picture for me. I said thanks to Jeff and shook his hand. After he walked away, I wondered how there wasn't a crowd at that moment right there, but there wasn't.

Just me and one of the coolest dudes ever to suck on a reed. And a really kind couple with a camera at the ready, or there would have been no photographic evidence of such.

Awesomeness.

Over the course of 26 hours, I drove 1000 miles. By myself. Tried and failed multiple times to give away a free concert ticket. Lost the cover to my Blackberry. Got heatstroke. Ice melting all over me made it look like I wet my pants as I walked around. Had my camera snatched off my arm in the crowd.

Met Jeff Coffin.

The scales balance.

As they should.

It's a great thing that I have to look at my calendar to see when the last time I had to fly to work was. A couple of years ago, I thought the only thing that could make my already awesome job more awesome, would be if I could teach from home. Thanks to online training, I now get to teach from home more often than not.

Which means that on the days I work, I launch some software about 30 minutes before class starts, plug in a headset and microphone, and have a seat, usually at my table on the screened-in porch. When class is done, I close a browser window, take off my headset, and that's that.

There is no traffic either way, I don't have to worry about what I'm going to wear, and there is never a concern that the place I'm teaching at won't have coffee. Or half and half. Or a perfect view of a busy bird bath.

This also means that my wallet is lighter by three pieces of plastic - my Hertz President's Circle card, my Hilton VIP card, and my Delta Platinum Medallion card. I think that makes me officially not a road warrior anymore.

Twenty years seems like a good place to stop. So I totally got it when Dave Matthews announced the band was taking next summer off after touring for 20 years. My first thought when I saw the tweet was, "Well shit. They are probably beat." I certainly wasn't thinking, "Oh, woe is me." More like, "Let's get five shows in then this summer."

And let's make the last two shows in my home town, right before my birthday, at one of the greatest ball parks in the country. Please and thank you.

I don't give a rat's ass what the setlist is. As I said previously, DMB could play nothing but covers on broken instruments, and I'd stay for the whole show and be happy for the chance. It was a tweet, so I ran out of characters, but I could have added any number of other qualifiers. Fortunately there is a whole group of folks on Twitter that support and encourage my habit.

Obviously I haven't figured out how to get my tweets back here since the upgrade. Granted, it hasn't been my primary focus of late.

See, Sheaness has a boyfriend. I was laughing out loud to myself last night thinking about what the graph of Jalepeno's mileage B.B (before boyfriend) and since would look like. A near-vertical spike that has sustained itself at the top of the paper for a month.

Really, I couldn't be happier with her choice. He's setting a pretty high bar for future boyfriends, I have to say.