Sometimes you may wonder what we do for work.
We just redesigned the answer to that question. ShooFlyDesign is our business name, and we just finished a pretty major overhaul of the site. We worked on it on and off for most of the past … oh, year I guess. The site’s a lot easier to update now, so it shouldn’t sit around for months and months with no activity. We hope.
Anyway, if you’re wondering some of what we’ve been up to (it’s been mostly me lately, I guess, but hey), check it out. Note the swanky new fly Lisa drew using her budding computer illustration skillz.
This is a hell of a question to ask, isn't it?
I got this while trying to open a rich text file sent to me by a client in Appleworks. Wow.
Pardon me while I barf out what's happened over the past week.
The show last week with Tres Femmes went very well. There were over 100 people, which wasn't a sold out show, but was a good, healthy crowd that made things fun. We played the best we'd played so far, after a day of refamiliarizing ourselves with each other's music.
Passed a very nice weekend with Lisa, then before I knew it, I was back in Green Bay to record the Tres Femmes album. All the tracks should, at this point, be finished. This is the fastest album I've ever heard of -- it might be released within a month. Phew! It should be very good; the songs are all good, and everyone was playing well up to when I left. The music should have good energy.
Drove back to Chicago yesterday afternoon, the last 10 or 15 miles of which took about an hour. Then I played with Ari and Hyosub, the first jazz show I've had in a long time. It, too, went well. The Charleston is a neighborhood bar, the kind of place that used to be everywhere in Chicago, and is becoming more and more rare as neighborhoods genetrify. The owner told me to play quieter after a few songs (this is typical, but she was pretty nice about it), but other than that there were no snags or weird things to speak of. We had fun, and I hope we play more.
And then this morning I got up with Lisa, drove her to work, and went to Columbia College downtown to do another recording session. This time it was for a recording class, so it was all students setting up the mics and whatnot. The players were very good (two of them have websites), although the recording experience was not as good as we would have hoped. Equipment was acting up, and not working in various annoying ways.
Still, it was fun, and made me forget the parking ticket the Chitown Chickenhawk 4 Wheeler Parking Patrol shat onto my car while I spent two minutes asking for directions to the building where the recording was happening. The smug look on that guy's face as he sat there writing it as I walked back out to my car haunted me through the afternoon. It's a good thing I don't carry a bazooka in my trunk. Although the image of that four wheeler sailing into Lake Michigan does bring a grin to my face.
Even tempers prevailed, and I'm sure we all appreciate that.
By the way, I hope you have heard that she will soon be a degreed librarian. Okay, maybe not tomorrow. But in the grande scheme of things, very soon.
Dateline: GREEN BAY, Wisconsin
Today is the first day of Tres Femmes madness. This morning at 7 AM I went with the girls to WLUK in Green Bay for our TV appearance. The name of their morning show is Good Day Wisconsin, and we played a couple songs, and waved at the camera several times. It was pretty fun, and we'll soon have videotapes of the show to show our parents and loved ones. Yes, I've now been on TV for something other than being a bundled up ski bunny playing in the World's Largest Band On Skis. Yes, I'm serious. But that's a story for another time, when I'm using a computer with a fully functional space bar. Arg!