So this morning Miranda and I went down to our truck with dreams of a Slickity Jim’s Eggs Benedict dancing around our heads, and possibly looking driving about to look at random craigslist banjo’s. Yuppers I wanna take up many new instruments in the upcoming months, one of which being a banjo. (others things on my list include The accordion, the cello, and perhaps the glockenspiel) We stumble down to the parkade to find that some crack head mother fucker has broken one of the Xterra windows and has robbed us of our ring flash and one of our light kits, as well as a large assortment of things that I shouldn’t have had in the truck over night to begin with. Fuckers!! First thing through my mind was “wow all this deductible money would certainly have bought a really nice banjo, the second thing that went though my mind was Wow all this deductible money means I probably cant really afford to buy a banjo! Fuckers!!!

After making a list of missing items and reporting it all to the police we begrudgingly went off for breakfast. We ran a bunch of errands and I took M to the north shore for some girl time with peeps and drove home really bummed about the amount of money that I would now have to fork over to deal with deductibles and replacing things that are to small to claim (like CB radios and snowboard helmets)
Then I remembered that Long & McQuade rents things like banjos for a very reasonable monthly fee. so off I went to Terminal! I arrived and did my obligatory wander about the store to look at things, and then found the banjo renter man. While Long & McQuade does rent banjos every single one they rent was out. :( ah well I figured that I would check back later. I then wandered up stairs to look at other stuff like Violins and Cello’s when I discovered much to my delight that they rent violins for a mere 15 dollars a month so how could i say know to trying out a violin for a month.

It is not a banjo but it was on my list of things that I want to learn! Wow it is loud. I have a full drum kit in our kitchen but I was never really concerned about annoying the neighbors till now :) It is so much fun though! I have always been intrigued but random fretless stringed instruments, so this is a whole new learning experience for me. Tomorrow Shan and I are going to “practice in public” and that should be awesome for busting out of our fear of performance! Next week I will get our busking license (as well as my damn commercial parking permit) and then we will be set to launch into full scale outdoor performances.

While I had a super sneaky weekend hobnobbing with movie stars, but I am waiting to hear from the powers that be if i can blog about it. So you instead get more photos of random kitchen music gear. My Friend Lisa should have a fully functional website soon which will mean this sorta thing can happen there and not every fraking day here :)

Here we have the guitar triptych! Chester the Gretsch, The Yamaha Electric, followed by Johnathan Livingston the seagull.

I looked down and saw a rats nest of stands and cables.

Guitar cases to firefaces!

The drums in their complete form!

The main ass recording unit! !

I figure with D buying a place with jamspace, the random kitchen jamspace we have now will come to a close so I must take as many photos as possible while its all here!!

Criminalizing Photographers?
Not taken by me… taken by Cabbit

Yuppers read up go here to read about it! At least Translink has responded to the thread which is awesome.  While I do understand why they need to do this, I worry about how this is going to effect things long term. In e-town I was constantly avoiding the transit cops (and security guards in general) because they had a zero tolerance policy when it came to photography. Not to say that i didn’t shoot there all the time!!

Coming to Vancouver and having a city relaxed attitude to photo walking and the like is refreshing but I worry that post Olympics what policy’s are going to stay around for ever and what things that should be public domain are now going to be off limits?

So I bought a new guitar & not just any old guitar! I bought a Gretch 6120 Chet Atkins Special which is pretty much my childhood dream guitar. I always wanted a hollow body like a Gibson or a Gretsch but the 6120 was my favorite out of everything that I can remember. Originally because it was orange, but as I did research in to the guitar (which was quite an ordeal in 1992 it involved guitar magazines and listening to my moms old 8tracks of Mr. Atkins himself.) I discovered the sound was just so perfect in so many ways.  I remember this one time we made a road trip into e-town which happened once or twice a year. Being that we were from the north we headed straight to West Edmonton Mall. In that mall was a Mr. Entertainment near the ice rink.  This was my first real music store adventure (prior t0 that I would buy my strings and picks at the local Radio Shack) I bought a chord book, a book of “alternative rock” song tab (which i still have today) and a set of guitar strings for my Harmony. They had an original Gretsch 6120 in the case and stood and stared at it for 10min before my mom insisted that we leave. I remember looking at that vintage price tag of $10,000+ and as a kid growing up in the middle of nowhere Alberta that pretty much was the same as saying it was $100,000,000, the difficulty was they weren’t made new anymore because Gretsch was basically run into the ground and the original blueprints and prototypes were lost in a fire the year I was born, so there was only vintage to be had.

Lament.

But alas after cat-scanning, x-raying, and doing other fancy stuff to a bunch of the old 6120s lent to Gretsch from people like Randy Bachman they managed to remake the long lost blueprints of some all time legendary guitars. From that we get this glorious reissue!! it is so pretty, and it is a complete dream to play! Open chords sound genius, and I have to say this guitar matched up with the crate (thank you again Tracey you rock) is a marriage made in heaven. I love it. Shan & I ad-hoc jammed it up a bit on Saturday after breakfast and well pure genius!!

Thanks M for taking photos of me :)

Tomorrow we have the next awesome jam of jams in my kitchen so we should get some great cuts I think from that.

Despite the fact that I am a late night kinda guy, I am also one of those dreaded morning people, that everyone is so eager to dislike.  I was mandated to get up early this morning but I was OK with it because as I just said I am a morning person.  Being happy to be awake I took photos to remember the time that the morning and I spent together. Sunrises are swell.

Oh and I mentioned photos today from yesterday. I am working on it.

so some how today started out with beer and 12 hours later ended with it :) Yup had a pretty good buzz on all fracking day it seems I will have photos and swell stuff to show for tomorrow but well i busted my ass off all day today and managed to do it drunk though out most of it :) Started with LaCasita folloed by the frog and ended with lots of free beer at a focus group at Fluevog, crashing now as i gots to be up in the early AM’s

Josh says: I should resume my film scanning someday
Josh says: I scanned maybe 5%
jerk with a camera says: ya
Josh says: I should hire Ronald
jerk with a camera says: you should
Josh says: he drives stick and does not steal
jerk with a camera says: he could do well at the scanning and driving
Josh says: that is more than one can expect of most lackeys these days
Josh says: they mostly drive auto if anything and would steal my negs
jerk with a camera says: i wish i was rich
jerk with a camera says: i would hire him to drive me places
Josh says: roland! take me to the frog!
jerk with a camera says: LOL
jerk with a camera says: yup
Josh says: post haste
jerk with a camera says: dont spare the horses my good man
Josh says: he would take one look at your parking spot and quit
jerk with a camera says: LOL
Josh says: on grounds of abuse
jerk with a camera says: LOL
Josh says: the UN would be involved somehow
Josh says: it would be an international scandal
Josh says: your parking space would be on cnn
Josh says: Anderson cooper would be in there with a yard stick
jerk with a camera says: LOL

The Weekend started early on Friday with the arrival of our friend John Edgar from Toronto. For those not in the know about Edgar read this and check out his blog. Having never been to Vancouver before we drove him about to give him the nickel car tour. We hit up Booster Juice on the North Shore, toured Gastown and came home to finish up some of the pressing work we needed to get done before the weekend. We hit NetChick’s Friday night rock band party for a while but for the most part we played it fairly low key. I have been nearly getting this sick that people are dishing around to each other like a hot potato, so a reasonably relaxed evening hanging out in the jam space was precisely what I was looking for.

On Saturday morning we hooked up with the Tiger and hit up Locus restaurant for breakfast. For those not in the know about Locus it is the sweetest little restaurant on Main Street. They have a wicked breakfast and hardly ever a crazy line up at 9:30am. Edgar hit on the waitress and twitter was aglow with all sorts of thinly veiled references to Darren’s penis. Sounds like a perfect morning right!! Well the only way that it could get even more perfect was if we went and spent an hour at Tom Lee poking at music stuff, and not wanting to mess with perfection that was exactly what we did. We spent over an hour wandering about the different sections of the place. Darren was there to look at some new drumheads and such, while I wanted a new guitar strap.

We inadvertently made fun of/joked with a staff member, while Darren checked out microphones and studio monitors. All in all it was a really good time!
We dropped the tiger off and took John on a small tour of the Deep Cove area. While tooling about on random roads it became apparent the John had never really been 4x4ing so we messaged Josh to meet us under the bridge for redneck style mud’n shenanigans. We cruised around in the ocean for a while and I am sure we basically blew John’s mind. Having to deliver my wife to the opera at a particular time we didn’t really get into anything too serious but we did manage to set a new milestone for deepest water forded, which incidentally is well over waist deep, and I am also happy to report that the doors don’t seem to leak even when submerged. :)

photos by Me Edgar and Josh

While Miranda was at the opera I thought I would try some new strings on my guitar. On the advice of a guy at Long & McQuade I am currently giving a set of Martin light 80/20 Bronze a whirl and I am sort of not really all that impressed, I will play em a bit but I am reasonably sure that I will be changing them back to the D’Addario lights that I normally use before our recording session on Thursday.

Speaking about recording sessions Darren came over with his Macbook and the fireface to set it all up for Thursday. We hooked it all up just in time to test it out when Shan and Josh popped over! :) I would toss up our mp3 from the testing we did before we went to the frog, but I have absolutely zero clue how to work Cubase and I haven’t had time to sit down and take a look at it all. I am sure that it is uber rough sounding as I was half drunk on this cheap American beer

I will dig into it all that later tonight I think, but it looks like with the exception of a couple of cables we should be all set for the first serious My Friend Lisa recording session. We all next hit the Frog for some food

When Josh and Shan arrived they came with tales of preposterously large cardboard boxes in our lobby, we thought that we should do something with them. It was suggested that we take some sort of My Friend Lisa photos in said boxes. In fact josh even had a proof of concept photo from his iPhone. So we simply grabbed the better-looking box on our way up the elevator. It was quite the adventure as the box was the exact size of our elevator door so I went in first to operate the elevator while every one else was in the box in the elevator. We did this all trying to be sneaky but we failed to notice when we hopped in the elevator that it was going down so when the elevator doors open in the basement to allow one of my neighbors on they were affronted with a cardboard box filled with people and nothing more. My neighbor mentioned something to the effect that this was precisely what she was thinking of doing and happily hopped on in the dark cardboard box with everyone else.
We went through such care to take the box in one piece up the elevator and up to my door but what none of us thought about was the fact that my front door is nowhere near the size of an elevator, so we had to dismantle the box in the hallway to get it into the studio anyway :) having reassembled the box we got down to the task at hand.

Thanks to Edgar and Josh for shooting photos that I was in :)

I thought it was truly awesome that with two small exceptions I was able to produce everyone’s ridiculous demands when it came to things to place in the box.

Sunday was a day of Dim Sum and mini road trips to show off the see to sky highway to the guy from Toronto. We all met up at Sun Sui Wah for Dim Sum greatness which despite my irrational hatred of seafood was a delicious time. I am still dreaming about the Mango pancake thingy. Our server who’s name was Ronald wanted to know if any of us worked for / or knew some one that worked for a courier company like UPS or FedEx. None of us did so we asked him why? He replied that he was looking to get a job with a company like that because he was really trying to move up and out of the restaurant industry. I have to give him an A+ for initiative because he was, as Kimli put it, a walking resume. He is a fantastic driver (stick even) as well as being extremely hardworking he has stated that he is very trustworthy.

Look at him as if he isn’t trustworthy really? If I were in need of an employee I would hire him in a heartbeat simply based on his initiative. We all have his phone number and such so lets try and get this guy a courier job shall we.

Next we were off to Squamish for the heck of it. Shan Kimli and Josh piled into the delica and M, John & I fired into the Xterra. And off we went!

We made it home in time to quickly prepare for the little photographer party we were having. It was a blast and we want to thank everyone for braving the quarter inch of snow that fell and coming out. The Box made its second appearance in two days as a photo booth

All in all it was a crazy jam packed weekend!!

…you tend to collect things. For me its camera bags. I have over 10 or so of them hanging about. I didn’t really realize this until I was cleaning out the the storage room today. The stack of unused inserts is pretty impressive. I don’t need all these bags so if some one local wants to buy one of these (other then the green one or the red one) let me know.

Starting top left:Crumpler Messenger w/photo bucket. Crumpler 6million dollar home, Tamrac Cyberpack8 Lowepro Nature Trekker AWII, Crumpler Karachi Outpost, Crumpler Whickey & the Cox, Crumpler Tall-e, Lowepro TLZ AW Crumpler Tall-e, Tamrac 1/2 & 1/2 Camera backpack

So I haven’t had a lot of face time outside of work on my computers this last week so blogging and the like seems to be what takes the hit. One of the main things that has been taking away a lot of my time away from work is My Friend Lisa! I suppose that it is a good thing that I have been cultivating a hobby that doesn’t involve me sitting in front of a computer for a billion hours and/or taking photos of stuff. Mostly because what I do all day at work is sit in front of my computer for billions of hours and/or take photos of stuff, which makes My Friend Lisa a nice change. We set up a nice little jam space in the disused dining room area. It is not disused because we don’t cook but instead because we haven’t gotten a table for the dining area.

Last week was the inaugural jam in this space with Darren rocking out on his new drums and Aaron on bass. We sounded really and truly awful but awful with promise :) Tonight we are headed to Rockspace to really make a bit of noise and the like. In the upcoming couple weeks our goal is to get the website up and running. It is all ready to go on the back end, we just need some important things like… oh i don’t know…. content, which between us all is slowly coming along. We also need to finish the looks part of the site design meaning what we want the website and our stuff to really look like. I was out taking photos this morning to be used for the graphic design part of things, mostly because the idea of using other peoples photos (even if they are creative commons or purchased stock) is sorta making me feel icky :) The other super big thing is to record some really good cuts of our tunes and get them up on our site as well as all the various music websites (Ie: Myspace/LastFM/etc.) We are going to pool together all our equipment and hopefully do this all ourselves, which is turning out to be a really big task but we like challenges :) Between the ZoomH4, Darren’s Fire wire interface, and the smattering of mics we already possess we figure that with a couple of mic rentals/purchases we should be able to do a decent job. The question is do we four track it up, meaning each of us record our individual parts one at a time, which wouldn’t really require a lot of equipment other than what we already have, but would loose some of that played together sound. Or do we instead try and record all of us into our own tracks but while we are all playing at the same time using a combo of firewire inputs and mixers. Which would save that played together sound and would be the ideal recording situation but would require a heck of a lot more equipment then we have going on right now :) We sorta thought that this recording part was going to be easy, but as we are finding it is far more complicated than we originally thought. I guess that is why people do this for a living eh :)