News for October 2010

Sorry Saint Francis.

Saturday night Jodi turned on the heat.  Like most Minnesotans, seeing how long you can go without kicking on the furnace is always a fun game.  My friend Matt usually made it to November.  Of course if you visited him in October you had to keep your coat on for most of the visit, but thats beside the point.  He made it to November.
Sunday morning I had to check what size filter our furnace has so I went to the basement and opened up the doo hicky where the filter lives and as I was doing it I could hear a high pitched whine and noticed something smelled hot.  Then I realized that although Jodi had turned on the heat the previous night I had never actually heard the furnace kick in.  So I opened up another doo hicky and exposed what I later learned is an induction motor.  I touched it.  Yes, it was way stinking hot and no it was not motoring.  I’m no HVAC specialist but something told me this was bad.  I turned off the power to the furnace.  Like any Man worth his weight in Fleet Farm Assorted Nuts and I knew what the first step was.  I squirted it with WD-40 and turned the power back on.  No luck.
Now things got more interesting.  I decided to take the motor off.  This would’ve been easier if I hadn’t gotten WD40 all over my hands (still not sure how that happened).  First I removed the nuts that mount the motor to the furnace and then the screws that attach it to the exhaust pipe thing which blows all the bad Carbon Monoxide and what not straight to the chimney and up and out into the ozone.  It’s important to know that the fan blades attached to this motor have a direct line to the outside world.  Why?  Because as I pulled the motor off of the furnace and spun it around the first thing I saw was a wing.

Yeah, I kind of thought I was going to puke too.

Apparently this bird had flown down and made itself a little home in the blower.  And thats why the blower couldn’t spin.  I won’t go into the details of how I got it out but I will tell you that it was an unfortunate day to have chicken for lunch.

Posted: October 18th, 2010
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living the dream

You know the dream where you show up at school only to realize you’ve forgotten to get dressed?  I’m not sure if anybody actually has that dream, or if it’s just one of those dreams people can relate too because of it’s general sucky nature.
My wife (the Reverend) has the clergy version.  She dreams she shows up as a guest preacher only to realize she can’t get her sermon to print and the whole congregation is waiting for her to get the service started.
It’s the one thing you need and it’s the only thing you don’t have.
As a working musician I shlep around a lot of gear.  Sometimes guitars are in stands in the basement, sometimes an amp is at a friends house, most of the time stuff is in its case on a shelf.  I try to keep an organized work space.  Try.

This morning I got back from the bus stop and had 10 minutes to get ready for two preschool music classes.  I was contemplating bringing the banjo along today because I like the kids to experience different instruments, plus we’ve been singing ‘I’ve been working on the railroad’ which has the line ‘strummin’ on the old banjo.’  So I got it out and tuned it and plucked it a bit to see if I could pull it off.  Then I looked at my watch and realized I was running a bit late.  I grabbed my guitar case, put my banjo in it’s case loaded them up on my xtracycle and took off.
My first music class is for 6 super young kids so I just brought the guitar in.  It sounds funny, but I’ve found that banjos can be a bit intimidating for the under 3 crowd.  We sat down in our circle, sang our welcome song and then one of the kids helped me unbuckle the guitar case and open it up.
It was empty.  The one thing I needed was the only thing I didn’t have.  The guitar was at home.  In a stand.  In my basement.
And me?  I was living the dream.

Posted: October 12th, 2010
Categories: music
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Ephemera

I’m working on the next album right now and one of the songs you’ll get to hear on there is Ephemera – which I’ve played a handful of times in the last year as I stubbornly cling to my old fashioned ways of pencil and paper, and yes, blogs.
I was posting some bikes on craig’s list today and in looking up some old schwinn info I came across this.
http://cardiffbikeshop.com/ephemera/default.htm
Ephemera. Get ready for a new album. And no Dave, it won’t be ready by Christmas.

Posted: October 8th, 2010
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