So today was about packing and jamming!I managed to pack a whole crap load of stuff and clean out most of my desk and such.
We had a quick bite at the newly replaced Incendios in g-town where Darren & I ended up with ridiculously large & free beers.
Then there was Jam time where Darren & I had more foolishly large beer.
We rocked out so hard that the Zoom H4n Actually froze 30min into the session. That is how much we rocked out! tomorrow more packing and treks to Richmond :) Fun!
Is there musical instruments in the vicinity? - Check!
Is he drinking beer? – Check!
Is he in some grubby poorly lit room? – Check!
Is there some sort of surly gesture going on? – Check!
Is the photo grainy and poorly exposed? – Check!
Yup Rockstar!
Unfortunately we didn’t hit cypress today for snowboarding glory due to the only chair lift (besides the bunny hill lift but it is the bunny hill so the run and lift don’t count) being closed. So maybe Wednesday when the mountain is open again? we will see.
So Darren & I went to see Art Brut Rock out at the Biltmore! It was fun. These photos are not nearly as awesome as the ones that I took at Richards On Richards a few years back but they are OK. The Show on the other hand Royally kicked ass. It helped that I was 2 feet away from the band. Despite the group of drunken, barely of age, hipsters girls wearing large framed 80′s spectacles with the lens pop’ed out that were bound and determined to bounce me out of their way.
It was here that he started telling us that we should form a band. I wanted to yell back that after the Richards On Richards Show in March 2006 we did. this was the Show that made Darren & I start our musical exploits that resulted in My Friend Lisa
I heart these Cuff links. I want Cuff links that say my band name :)
I was so bloody close to the guy! I sorta wished at the time that i Had brought a 24mm lens. I am glad looking at these that i stuck with the 50-1.2
This week has been all about the moving for this jerk. For those not in the know (which I know is most of you because it is summer and I am to busy to blog anymore) we are shrinking our space in a effort to not spend preposterous amounts of money. We are hoping that by January sometime we can be on the hunt to buy a home somewhere. If all goes according to plan we should be able to keep our water street office and have a separate home somewhere else that is completely devoid of all work related things and contains nothing but life type stuff! That is the plan and step one is to give up the second suite that we have here and suck it up and live in the single space again for a while!
So I have been moving us slowly back into the left side, and when I say ‘I’ I really mean Reka the Intern and Darren the Tiger because I managed to pull a reasonably important muscle in my back lifting the very first thing. So props to Reka for making 70,000 hand cart trips to the recycling room and Darren for hauling all my wife’s lead. (when I say lead I really mean lead! She has like 700 lbs of lead type for a printing press) you both rock!!
I have large boxes of Computer parts (most of it/them work even) for free/sale so if you wanna come rummage you are more then welcome to! Come quick though because goodwill is about to receive a multitude of computer craziness!
In other news saw the Weakerthans and Iron & Wine last Friday! Wicked show for them both! I bootlegged it with the Zoom but I haven’t gotten around to listening to it.
Tonight is jam #2 for My Friend Lisa at the new jam space. The Tiger & I have been making noise on a fairly regular basis but this is the second time that the band we be together here. I am going to attempt an off the floor recording of a line in mix of the evenings adventures so we will see how that all goes. The Lrbaggs will rock out for the first time in a loud capacity as well!
We spent the Sunday/Monday on Galiano Island for a wedding last weekend as well. What a genius place to hang in the wilderness. If I ever get rich/eccentric and feel the need to record a solo album with nothing but my mac book in a cabin in some secluded location I am going to do it on Galiano island! Man I Love that place!
I need to collect a case of free Rock Star now so ya!
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!!
