Diary of a RockStar

Out situation doesn’t seem to be improving much over here… Its been a really rough couple of days: dealing with the key being stolen, worrying about money, driving excessive amounts of time through traffic, and almost missing shows… Dispite it all, we’ve all been playing really well. The first two gigs have gone off really well. Our show last night specifically, went really well, we played in Cardiff at the Barfly venue. We reached capacity (I think 200-250 people in the venue), and had a great show… From what I’ve heard, there were a bunch of people from Music Wales there visiting to check us out, which is great news.

Today has been a different story, we seem to have this perpetual black cloud of horribleness following us, first with the car, money, etc etc… but now, we missed our flight to Dublin by literally 2 minutes. Traffic riding up on the highway from Cardiff to Manchester airport was fine, until we saw that there had been a really bad accident on the main highway (which we were on), and decided to get off, and take a slight detour… the detour ended up being a better route, but it was also a longer route, because other people were taking that way.

In the end we were forced to take a later flight (increased our cost by 50 pounds per passenger which is roughly $400). Since we had to take a later flight, unfortunately, we had to cancel our in store show that had been booked for us. I think it would have been really cool to do the in store performance, but we weren’t getting paid for that show, it was just for promo, so at least we’re not loosing out on any money directly coming in.

So, our flight out of Toronto left at 9pm with a 1hr stop over in Montreal. With the time change, flight time, and the stop over, we arrived in London at about 10am (London time). I think I slept about 3hrs on the plane, it only lasted that long because there was a Canadian rugby team sitting in the same section…. they decided it would be fun to not sleep all night and continually kick my chair.

When we landed, we had arranged to pick up our car rental at National/Alamo rentals…. We had thought that it was paid for however, it turned out that we had an unexpected cost of having to pay for insurance ($500 on top of the rental)… With this sudden change of events, I was forced to supply my credit card to cover the cost, which basically ate up my entire personal budget for this trip ($1000 dollars).

This was fine, the guys recognize that I spent all my money, and are helping me pay for stuff, also, we’re splitting up the money we make at our shows so we can eat/sleep/drink.

Our first night in London was spent at a hostel called St. Christopher’s Inn.. very near London and Tower bridge, right in the heart of the London tourist area. We proceeded to enjoy our first night in the city by joining a pub crawl that was arranged by the staff at the hostel. Its a cool way to meet people, get to see some places around the city, and drink a bit. It turns out that during our jaunt around the little part of the city that we were doing, moe was carrying our car keys on his belt loop on a carabina hook.. the kind you buy at a dollar store that mimics the kind that rock climbers use. Well, it turns out that someone decided they didn’t like Moe, and apparently tried to start a fight with him. I didn’t see it, but he said he just walked away and didn’t further the confrontation.

Later that night, Moe realized that his carabina containing his keys and our car keys had gone missing.

Since then, we’ve been in this incredible loop of trying to find money. National/Alamo car rental wont recognize the theft of the key as “theft” and refuse to cover it. We’ve had to order a new set of keys, since they dont keep a spare. This would have been fine, however, its a bank holiday here (good friday), and everything is shut down… So our situation has been worsened. We had to rent another car so that we could, pick up gear, and drive to the first gig of the tour in Brighton (which we barely made because we got lost a few times in London, plus the rediculous traffic). It took us 6 hours to drive the distance that should have taken 2.

We’re now in Cardiff, and things seem to be getting better.. We have the 2nd car here and are driving up to Manchester to catch our flight to Dublin for the weekend. at that point we’re going to drop off the new rental, so we’re only paying for one car rental.

Well, here I am, going off on my next trip to Europe. This will be my 4th trip overseas to perform with Birds of Wales…. The current lineup is very strong, and i’m excited to see how we all gel togeather after being away on a trip like this. Its very exciting. Yet all at the same time, its becoming a normal thing…. Its like i’m getting used to doing one of the coolest things in the world.

Anyway, I hope ya’ll keep checking out my blog, as i’m going to try and update it regularly.. I’m also gonna try and find some time to do a redesign. So keep on checkin’!

I thought i’d gloat a little bit.. I saw that WordPress RC1 has been released, so I thought i’d jump to it and upgrade.

Its nice, fast… however, theres a few plugins that aren’t working correctly on my site…. (not a huge problem, but meh).

I haven’t really given it a 100% look over, but I can definately see the improvements over 2.3…. aside from the visuals.

So, I mentioned in my previous blog that i’ve started a new job… I’ve got a desk, a phone, a computer, I sit next to a window, and I have co-workers… This is the closest thing i’ve been to an “office” or a full on “design job”… Last time I worked for a design firm, it was in the owners basement, and his dog regularly came up to lick me… So this has been a different (but very positive) experience for me.

I’m starting to re-think my home setup now.. Up until this weekend, I had my 20″ iMac with an external 20″ LCD screen.. This was necessary, because previously ALL of my work has been done at home… Now that I have a desk at WORK, i’m left wondering, do I need this kind of setup at home?

I now have a Macbook 2.2ghz with 4gigs of ram, and a 320gb harddrive (wicked laptop, for really cheap).

The next step in the evolution of this thought is: Do I need a desk here now?

Its basically sitting there in the corner, the 20″ monitor has been pretty much unused since the weekend, along with my external harddrive, speakers, etc etc..

So, i’m wondering what i’d do with the extra space in my room now…

This post is pretty much rambling out loud… I just cant figure it out… This “full time job” thing is really fucking with me (in a really great way).