friday

walked seth to central st in the perfect and cold morning.

worked on the text for the "animals & objects" show poster.

went to NBC tower to hang show with steve. found mat and scott in the garage. 29th floor. extensive chicago show: grzeca, crosshair, sudyka, daly, alana, judge, mile 44, sampson, david head, herzik, me, sonnenzimmer, steve w and some other screwball folks.

opening 6-10, a bunch of folks came. got to hang a bit with mat & sue & matt.

katie (hideout), judge & sudyka:



around 9:30, i headed up towards mark's studio. got to startbucks at 9:58 for a dopio con panna, then found mark in his garage. overdubbed a little guitar, listened to each track of the album critically, then did vocals for 'snowpants'. more screaming than i've ever done.

home in bed by 3am.

today was thursday

woke around 6:30, had a slow start to the day, since diana walked seth and i tried to get started drawing. di took seth out to the suburbs to visit her dad, whose birthday was yesterday.

i worked on three illustrations for a new book joe meno is putting together. sent those off, then sent off the files for a new shirt for andrew. went out for coffee around 1pm, picked up a bunch of firewood from down our alley. diana brought home tacos when she returned. i made a fire. started on sketches for patagonia shirts. talked to steve w about the show tomorrow night at the NBC tower. talked to mat about how the hell we are going to do all the printing we need to do, since screwball's press is broken. email exchange with may yang, who was pointed out to me last week by geoff when he saw that she mentioned TBM in her blog. she wrote with a couple questions about building a spray-out booth in her basement. hi may.



ichatting with geoff tonight (and his dog rocket sauce, above), i was complaining about not having access to a shop right now etc, etc, and he ordered dinner for di and i, from austin. half an hour later, theres a dude at the door with a big bunch of great mediterranean food. thanks, geoff!

sent of a couple more patagonia files. re-wrote lyrics for chorus of "snowpants", to be recorded late tomorrow night with mark.

sat down to draw the posters for the ispace show. listening to pink floyd's 'the wall' for the first time in probably 15 years.



okay.

wednesday

diana waves hi to the blog from her side of the home office.



woke late, around 8, sore.

walked with di and seth up to coffee, and returned just in time to meet up with alan and aviva and their friend josh. aviva has been making woolen goods out of old army blankets, and wanted to have seth model some dog jackets, which he did very well. she's also making amazing "hunter" style hats - i asked her to make me one. josh is a graphic novelist, and he left one of his books here. he's published by ad house.

i spent several hours trying to catch up on emails - interviews and random crap. i fear i am once again starting to fall apart. i'm not sure when all these things are going to get done. a couple projects just slipped into "late", which i'm trying so hard to avoid.

later, the fedex guy finally came for his thrid attempted delivery, which needed to be signed for in person. i got my new camera. very pleased with that.

spent a while trying to clean off my desk, and unpacked my desktop computer from work, which has been waiting patiently in the basement since mid-september. tried to scan a bunch of prints for the catalog for the ispace show, but couldn't get the drivers needed for the imac. frustrated, i spent several hours with three macs running on my desk, scanning with one, file sharing to the other machine, working on the third. blah.

i ate an avacado squished onto toasted bread. i drank orange juice.

will probably go to bed in a while. will keep working.

the tuesday

woke, ran out, coffee, home depot (can lights, bulbs, pull saw, wire nippers, carpenter's pencils), then to TBM.

brought chuck the electrician some more lights (shallow can) for mounting above my desk area in my office, beneath the existing ductwork. took out some of the other ductwork which i found was tied into nothing. removed the last piece of plywood from the now-nonexistant "attic" in the front of the building.

for lunch, i went over to kaufmann's deli again, and the woman behind the counter asked where my friend (chad) was, from last week. huh, second visit, and i'm a regular. i told them to make me a sandwich, their choice. i ended up with a hot pastrami on seeded rye, with swiss, and spicy mustard. holy amazing. also got a root beer and a cookie.

took out as much trash and recycling as i could, cleaned up, and installed the last of the studs in the business office wall.

ran home, bathed, and headed for mayfair studios.

new favorite thing: dopio con panna at dinner time. makes me active into the wee hours. picked up kip, saw his house, realized it's the exact same floor plan as our house, just tweaked a little here and there.

over to mayfair, where billy was already hanging with mark, getting ready to record. jason arrived, and we watched billy add wonky tweaker guitar parts to a couple of songs. we also got him to 'sing' on 'antars'.



billy finished up, and stephanie arrived, to fix a bunch of my vocal incursions. we convinced her to sing a bunch of stuff i don't think she wanted to sing, such as the lines "cold coffee and warm firm breasts" and "the late morning sun falls around all this meat". she was awesome. we got bad dinner again from the bad dinner place.



stephanie left, jason started playing guitar parts, kip fell asleep, snoring, sitting up. i drove kip home while jason invented a new type of rock music.



when i got back, jason finished and left at 1:30am, and mark and i stayed and tried out some other guitar parts until 3am.

i drove home and climbed into a bed.

monday, part 2

figured some more parts for some songs, then headed to mark's around 5pm. picked up kip on the way, as well as an espresso.

we fixed some vocals, tried some other vocals (no one liked them), and reviewed some of what mark had added.

ate crazy food from the crazy food place. drank a little tiny bit of vodka.

we finished up around 11pm, and i drove home. spent most of the time on the higway next to an SUV which was spewing smoke (burning oil?) from under it's hood. the driver didn't appear to notice, as he was talking on his cell phone.

okay.

monday, part 1

woke at 5am with the cat-on-chest alarm. showered, dressed my wounded hands, and headed to the bank and home depot. waited 5 minutes for home depot to open at 6am. ceiling can lights, doorbell components, lightbulbs, masonry drill bits and more masonry bolts for securing framing baseplates to the floor.

coffee. iced mocha.

to the shop, where i swept, stacked 2x4s which have been pulled out of the old walls, took the potted plants back outside (due to the warmer temperatures expected this week), and started framing in the walls on the south end of the business office. the dumpster was picked up at some point, when i wasn't looking.

my dad and chuck the electrician both arrived mid-morning and got working.

i took off around 12:30 to work on lyrics for dianogah. we're going into mark's again tonight for overdubs.

must shower, again, now.

sunday

overslept a bit, til about 8:30. di was out walking seth.

eric g. called, since we had discussed him coming by to talk about making some bookshelves. i ran out to walgreens (hydrogen peroxide and bandages for my destroyed fingers), and to get an irresponsible sunday frappuccino, then came home to try and start catching up on emails.

eric and clara came by around 10:30 to take some measurements for the bookshelves. clara is 15 months, and totally cute.

when they left, di, seth and i went to warren park, near our old house, for the 'greyhounds only' annual reunion, where we got to visit with hundreds of other retired racers. should have brought a camera. seth was so happy to get to see all the dogs.

from there we stopped by chicago printmakers collaborative (so di could drop off an etching for a small print show), then went to the food whole to do some grocery shopping. hot bar lunch. ate in the car, drove to TBM to show di the work, then home, where i started a fire, di made a pie, and now we sit typing.

the rest of saturday

went over to pick up jason narducy, taking advantage of the fact that we live in the same town. we drove south to reggies, in an area i have never been to, 2100 s state. at the club, nonagon was on stage already, unfortunately. sounded good, though, for the 2.5 songs i heard. saw a bunch of people: most of the EA crowd, bob & carrie, CP, and the bands. quatre tete were also really good. i had one white russian = $8. austerity program was really great, 30% of which can be directly attributed to their sheer volume. they were pro-loud. justin is really the life of this band. "this is my fa-vo-rite part!"

after the show, jason and i stopped to get a couple donuts, then headed back onto the highway, listening to 'the queen is dead'. we stopped at TBM to show jason what i have been doing there, then went over to his new house (also on main street), to see the projects he has ahead of himself. funny to move only four doors away from home.

home, felt like shit, in bed sometime after 3am.