Rock on

My 4 days this past weekend spent as a bachelor while Stacey went out of town (with the kids) to see her sister went by pretty fast. Glad they're back home, though...house did feel pretty empty.

Finished off last week helping Eli move a dresser on Friday (not exactly the kind of excitement I was looking for on Friday...but the all-day rain event hosed up the camping trip some of us had been planning for weeks). At least I got to enjoy a beautiful Saturday outdoors - first by driving around and hooking up with E and others at Delano Park, then by spending another cool evening up at Jack's playing guitar under the stars out on his deck with Eric, J-mo, Jack, Jeremy H., Micaela, Wendy, Michelle, and Jared's crew of friends.

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Church Sunday was pretty fun. We managed to pull off Dave Matthews' "Space Between" and Lifehouse's "You and Me." The band members put a lot of grunt work went into getting ready for Sunday, so it felt great to see it all come together.

Picked Stacey up at the airport at about 5:00 on Sunday afternoon. Though the kids still behaved pretty much, they - Stacey included - were more worn out this time around so the trip wasn't quite the cakewalk the trip up to Minnesota had been. Stacey was pretty much the walking dead for the rest of the evening and fell asleep fast.

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So far, this week is shaping up to be even busier than last week. I spent a good chunk of Monday finishing up 3 separate chord charts for songs for church (joyful, but sometimes tedious work). Last night we spent a few hours at the church recording a demo that we're going to send out to possible venues for us to play... We've got another rehearsal tonight, and yet another on Thursday. Whee!! I love to play, but wow...it's a bit stressful when all your evenings get booked up. But it'll be worth it as all these opportunities for us to play out are lining up...

Our not-so-old Dell 5160 laptop fried last week (the LCD panel went dark). I debated trying to get the thing repaired, but found a good coupon for a new laptop online. Besides, that thing never did seem to truly be all that good (too many malfunctions, it seemed). The new one that I'm currently typing on is faster, more equipped to run some of the software I'd like to put on it, has a much better wireless range, and is much lighter than the old one. Not an expense I really wanted right now, but having a functioning laptop PC goes a long way to taking care of kids AND getting everything else I need to get done done.

Peace...

Fireworks

I've been watching a storm come in... Beautiful light show. Somehow managed to actually capture a couple of lightning strikes with our slow-as-heck Sony digital camera...

Cool, huh?

House to myself

Man it's quiet. No kids. No wife. 4 days of peace and quiet. Not that I don't love my wife and kids, but this morning has proven that I can get more done in 3 hours without kids running around than I can in a whole day having to take care of them...

- Got up at 4:00 a.m. and took them to the airport (got them there by 5:30)...
- Went to Wal-mart at 6:00 a.m.
- Ate a REAL breakfast at 7:00 (if Burger King counts as 'real').
- Got my driver's license renewed.
- Been working on church-related stuff ever since.

Wow. It's only 9:30. I'm exhausted from little sleep, but I'm good to go.

Sad thing is that I keep going downstairs to check on kids that aren't even here. Heh.

Learning to ride

First time ever riding a motorcycle. Hey, it's never to late to learn, right?

Just never had much opportunity growing up to learn this sort of stuff. I kind ride the heck out of a mountain bike, but this truly felt 100% different. Still, I can imagine getting the hang of it soon...just need to get comfortable with the 'feel' of a bike that ways 500+ pounds with controls in very different places than what I'm used to.

At least I'm about to check-off one big thing on my list of things to do before I die. Heh.

Hail pic

Hail is fun. This hailstone melted a bit...started out as golf ball size (it's next to a chapstik in the photo). Still need to get a roofer to come out and see if I've got any real roof damage from the storm...

Weathering storms and the art of guitar upgrades

I think all the weather guys did a good job of forecasting all the severe weather Friday night. Luckily, most of the tornadoes around here that popped up on radar didn't cause much damage. I read somewhere that every county in north Alabama was under a tornado warning at some point during the evening/night.

The worst weather we received here was hail. Golf ball sized hail that left 2 or 3 'dings' on the roof of the Expedition. I won't complain...they're nearly invisible (and you'd have to be 7-feet tall to see them anyway). The direction the wind was blowing the hail also meant that the house itself deflected most of the hail that could've dinged up the hood, so the hood wasn't damaged at all.

All in all, the hailstorm/tornado warning was a pretty nervous event. When your house is being pelted with thousands of golf ball size pieces of ice simultaneously, the noise is nearly deafening. Throw in a couple of nervous/crying kids and...wow...I was almost longing for the classice 'freight train' sound they talk about... Heh...not really. I'm glad hail was all we had and that damage was minimal. I know some of my friends' vehicles received more damage than ours, but even then, I think we lucked out.

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After the storms passed, I went "chasing" with Eric. He's got a HAM radio setup in his jeep, and he listens to a network of guys who report storm activity and he contributes when he can, too. Being night time (and, thus, dark), we decided not to venture out during the peak of the activity, and instead drove out after most everything had passed. Though Eric had heard reports of tree damage and powerline damage, we only saw a lot of flooding and some spectacular (even blinding) lightning strikes. As Eric put it, one strike was like staring into a 'welding torch.' Took a couple of minutes it seemed for the 'after-image' to disappear from our vision. Ventured home and finally crawled into bed around 2:00 a.m.

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Saturday was a gloomy, cold day, but perfect for a band rehearsal at J-mo's house. Brought back lots of memories of the early days of the band. What's really cool, though, is that our talent and our dynamic control has improved so much, that it wasn't nearly the deafening experience it used to be. (Either that, or we really have killed our hearing over the years).

Headed up to Ruby Tuesday's afterwards...got our orders in before 2 busloads of large groups ordered, so that was cool...

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After church Sunday, I headed up to Spooner's house. Spent all afternoon working on my old Epiphone electric guitar. Well, he did pretty much all of the work while I stood there feeling like an observer. I won't complain. If I'd done it, it would've taken much, much longer. Now it sounds better, plays better, all that... I was fearing that the "glory days" of that guitar were long gone (playing "Higher" by Creed with Ben Gallaway, Jon Nickerson, Donovan Harris...and others in front of a large crowd at MountainTop back in the day...at the time, doing a song that heavy blew the doors off the church...good memories...). In any case, the weather outside was beautiful. Nothing like working in a garage when it's 70+ degrees, crystal clear outside, and you're listening to Dave Matthews Band...

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Anyway, it's Monday. My throat is sore (I hate pollen), and I didn't sleep well. But after a weekend like this that turned out pretty good, I don't really feel like complaining...

Deja Vu

Wow...thought this made for a neat comparison to the weather event I just blogged about...

Pretty creepy how similar the forecasts are...

However, I think now (as of 10:30 a.m.) the "high" risk area extends to cover all of northern Mississippi, too.

But that doesn't make me feel better...heh.

Weather nerd goodness

I have a love/hate relationship with severe weather.

Love = there's just something awe-inspiring about big storms...tornadoes...high winds...fascinating reminder to me of how powerful nature is...how awesome God is...all that. I'd love to see a tornado from a distance one day. Just to see one... Over the years, my big childhood fear of storms has turned to fascination.

Hate = storms do bad things...to people/property. I never want that to happen. To anyone. To me. I never want to see a tornado up close. Though they fascinate me, storms still are frightening things. Apparently, one did a lot of damage to my yard growing up (blowing trees down, blowing my small kiddie pool away). I don't remember it, but my parents tell me I was pretty scared of storms after that. Guess that's where this anxiety comes from.

Oh, well...

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Today is one of those days to watch. The Storm Prediction Center - the guys who understand how all the ingredients come together to create foul weather - has placed all of north Alabama under a "high risk" for severe weather, meaning there's a good chance of numerous tornadoes and even some powerful/violent ones that stay on the ground a long time.

Many of my friends are like, "So what? Welcome to Alabama." Then I get kinda shrugged off as if I was a Yankee wondering what kind of tree grits grow on.

Heh. The reality is I've lived in Alabama now since 1995. I've seen some wicked storms. I've had massive trees blown down in my own yard in Birmingham. I've seen rotating wall clouds 3 times. I've seen a funnel cloud once. I've seen hail as big as softballs start falling with zero warning (no rain, no lightning, no wind, just massive hail). A tornado knocked a tree down onto a friends' car just moments after he vacated it. I've seen a lightning storm so intense that it reminded me of camera flashes at a football game (and even then there was no rain, no wind...just lightning). Lightning struck 3 separate trees on the church property where me and the rest of the staff were huddled in the church lobby staring out the window in awe. Lightning set fire to the apartments 200 yards from my home.

And I'm not a storm chaser. This is stuff I've seen looking out my own back window or out the window from my desk at work - in Alabama. So...weather nerd or not...I've learned to take this stuff pretty seriously.

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The scariest night, though, was April 8, 1998. Weather sirens started sounding just as we were letting youth go home after a Wednesday program at church. Rumors were flying everywhere that a HUGE storm had already wreaked havoc in North B'ham somewhere. All night long, it was one storm after another. A tornado was spotted spinning over the Summit (just a mile from our apartment). Damage reports everywhere.

Turns out a massive F5 had touched down in northwest suburbs of the city (Pleasant Grove). Storm was powerful enough to turn cinder block into powder and literally dig up the ground 1-3 feet deep like some massive bulldozer. Forests were leveled. 33 (?) people lost their lives.

That day was also a day posted as "high risk" by the SPC going into it. I hope they're wrong this time around. Before those storms struck, everything about the air...the sky...just felt 'wrong.' Air was real hot and thick...not good for April. As the day progressed, everything got really hazy and the clouds in the sky took on this sickish green/brown tone. "Instability," a word used by meteorologists every time this happens, suddenly seemed in our face.

I haven't been through a day like that in a while...where the NOAA weather radio sounds every 5 minutes...and storms are much more than the radar-indicated false alarms that happen so often. Now that I've got 2 kids, my fascination with storms has reverted a bit back to fear. I don't want anything to happen to them.

Guess all we can do is wait and see...

Whee!!

Fret not

After an attack of conscience (and the realization we may have a lot of medical bills still forthcoming), I decided NOT to blow a good chunk of our tax refund on a guitar. I had been looking at either a Gibson SG standard or an ESP EC-1000 to replace my existing Epiphone Les Paul so I could have a good dual-humbucker guitar for the heavy stuff onstage. But plopping down $1000 (give or take $200) right now just doesn't seem intelligent at all.

I loved the Epiphone when I got it, but since then (1999), I've come to the realization that you get what you pay for. Though I loved the guitar in the beginning, I'm now more experienced and better acquainted with better-grade instruments, so I just can't continue tolerating the Epiphone's crappy tone, bad action on the neck, bad intonation, and - above all - the fact that it simply will NOT stay in tune. I don't think my band can tolerate it, either.

So I've been shopping. Came so close numerous times to just clicking the "Add to Cart" button, especially for the ESP, believe it or not. Beautiful guitar, very high reviews, Les Paul-like design...good value...

But in the end, I've decided to "Frankenstein" my existing Les Paul. Overall, the body is well made, the frets are good, and the paint job (red, quilted maple top) is still beautiful and undamaged.

Yesterday, I ordered a pair of Seymour Duncan humbuckers...going to put a JB in the bridge and a '59 in the neck. If that's Greek to you, this is the setup recommended by all kinds of guitarists who have upgraded their guitars (some guitars far more expensive than mine)... it's also the setup on one of the ESP's I liked so much. Hopefully, this will fix the lousy tone problem...

Also ordered a set of black Gibson (made by Grover) tuning keys so I can hopefully fix that little "stay in tune" problem. Jack's got these tuners on his Gibson Les Paul, and he swears they've made all the difference in the world. (Heck, the Grovers work great on my Taylor).

Now that I'm on a guitar "re-animation" streak, I even found use for the Univox electric and the busted Guild acoustic (oh, so sad) in the garage. I'm taking the perfectly good Grover tuners off the broken neck of the Guild and putting them on the Univox, whose tuners feel like 'toys' (guitar had more 'tune' issues than the Epiphone). Sure, I could've put these Grovers on the Epiphone and saved even more, but I'm trying to restore the color of the hardware on the Epi to the original black.

I've already worked on the intonation of both guitars, but being an amateur in doing such a thing, I'm going to head up to Jack's sometime and trade off some help... I'll help him get an old PC back up and running, and he'll help me with all things guitar-related.

In the end, I'm spending under $200 to revitalize a guitar. Being an Epiphone, it'll never have the high-end resale value of the real Gibsons...but...it will hopefully once again be something I love playing once again. And if that's the case, why would I want to sell it, anyway?