Drummer's Corner of the World

I keep contemplating my checking account and contemplating Windycon and I've been forced to the realization that it's just not gonna happen this year. *sigh*

I am currently planning to make all three Chicago cons in 2010, starting w/ Capricon in February, so I'll see a bunch of y'all there!

s00j and Betsy will be in Indianapolis tomorrow night for a concert from 8-10 pm at UUI (the Unitarian Universalist Church of Indianapolis) at 615 W. 43rd St. Suggested donation is $10-15. It will rock and you'll be sad if you miss it.

Also, this has once again reminded me that there are an awful lot of good people in this strange community we call the internet. A guy named Dave, who's a friend of friends but who I've never met, was in a tight spot and about to lose his house and land. An auction got created, a bunch of people signal-boosted, and 10 days later, there's video of him getting the first installment of close to $8k that's been raised. In 10 days. I love this chosen community of web-dwellers... we make magic happen through the sheer power of size and volume.

Lastly... OVFF was amazing. Had a lovely time hanging out and visiting, and even have pictures somewhere. Eventually I'll post the pics. Don't hold your breath for anything more coherent in the way of a con rep. :-)

Home... fuzzy (critters happy to see me)... sleepy... kinda out of words.

A man I've never met, but who's special in the lives of friends and friends of friends, is in danger of losing his property, which is a sacred space to his network of friends. There's an amazing fundraising effort and auction going on at save_dave, so please, go take a look and see if you can help out.

vixyish made an eloquent plea here that really brings home the beauty of this kind of community effort, and I'll repeat here the response that I made over there...

We see a lot of these kinds of requests, and they do several things for me. They make me think about how easily it could be me in that position. They make me think about how glad I am that right now, in this moment, I have $10 to toss towards a cause that matters to a friend (in this case, several friends). And they awe me with the power of teh intarweb. Faced with "I must have $7k or risk losing my house" how many of us could hit up "real life" friends and family and come up with that kind of money? 1 person with $7000? 10 people w/ $700 each? 70 people (that's a lot of people) with $100 each (that's a lot of money to most of us)?

But through this kind of signal boosting... through this network of friends of friends of friends... finding 700 or 1000 people willing to put two or three days worth of coffee money towards helping out? That's a hella lot easier.

And that money keeps going around, 'cause the people who benefit from things like this get back on their feet and then they pay it forward. One of the beneficiaries of a similar fund-raising event is donating cool handmade stuff to the auction for Dave as a way of paying forward some of what came her way to fix her car. So that's money that's now helped two different people in crisis. This is a good thing, any way you look at it.

Oh, and another thing... people may think they can't afford to get stuff in the auction, but it's almost Annual Gift-Giving Season. Instead of shopping at big impersonal merchants, people can buy amazing handcrafted jewelry or fiberwear or OMGBrownies. Do a good thing and get the holiday shopping out of the way! (Well, except for the brownies, which would never survive to become a holiday gift at my house! :-) )

55 minutes left at the office. 55 minutes to try to either get stuff done or head off problems that might occur in my absence. 55 minutes 'til I don't have to be back at work 'til Tuesday. W00t!!

I've got a friend coming over after work to pick up a house key, and she'll stay with the furry horde, so they don't have to be boarded, which will make them and my finances much happier. :-) Said friend is also probably moving in, so I'll have a roommate again, which greatly simplifies things like travel and working late.

And my potential passenger from Indy has another ride who fits her schedule better, so now my morning is completely free. I can have a leisurely breakfast, take my time packing, and still be in Clumps in time to get settled into the hotel before I make an airport run at about 6 pm.

It's shaping up to be a much more relaxed weekend than I was anticipating, which makes me very very happy!

Greetings, all!

I've posted this on Facebook, but just realized that I hadn't actually posted it here recently...

The Traveling Fates, comprised of s00j, Ginger Doss (of Velvet Hammer and DreamTrybe fame) and Bekah Kelso (who has an excellent solo CD in addition to her work with the Fates) will grace us with their presence at a house concert at my house on October 9th.

As a group, they are more than just the sum of the individuals, as they draw strength and inspiration from each other to create amazing harmonies. So mark your calendar and come join us! My house is near Frankton, IN, just north of Anderson and about equidistant from the Indy northside or from Muncie. Weather permitting, the concert will be outside. If it's too chilly for that, the concert will be downstairs, and if we have too many people to fit in the room, we can spill over onto the back porch. I have a ton of wood that needs burning, so there will be a bonfire unless it's pouring rain. :-)

$10-$15 suggested donation for these traveling grrlz
House has cats and dogs which will be elsewhere for the show.
Supervised minors welcome.

Directions and parking info will be sent out closer to time, so please RSVP here or to house@reddogs.com so I know who to send directions to! :-)

For the out-of-towners, I don't have extra crash space indoors, but there's plenty of room to pitch a tent if you want to camp for the night!

Greetings, my LJ friends!

When last we left our story, sweetmusic_27 was fiddling in my living room last night. Over the course of the evening, we polished off a bottle and a half of mead, and I kind of collapsed into a happy puddle of goo in the corner of the sofa, mellowed out by mead and music. Once we were truly mellow, we wandered downstairs to sleep, deciding that we'd basically sleep 'til we woke up (or 'til 11 a.m., whichever was later) since Amy's had too much stress and too little sleep lately. I woke up a little after 10 and puttered around checking email and trying to wake up, and Amy surfaced about 10:30. After showers and waffles and bacon and O.J., we climbed into the Trooper and headed for town.

Today was Indy Pagan Pride Day and, for a change, I wasn't running the drum area, so we went and just visited w/ people and wandered through the vendors area 'til time for bardic circle. My friend Cern runs Bardic at IPPD, and it's always a fun circle (I don't like pick, pass or play, but Cern keeps it moving along nicely). This year turned out to be the most instrumentally diverse PPD Bardic we'd ever had... not only did we have Amy and her fiddle, but we had a guy named Scott and his bagpipes. Usually we have a couple of guitars and a bunch of a capella vocalists, so this was a nice change!

Since Amy and I had to head for the airport before Bardic was over, Cern let Amy lead off. She started us off w/ a nice fiddle medley, then played plaintive fiddle for me while I did a spoken word version of cadhla's "Sea Foam". We made it all the way around the circle in time for Amy to do another medley and me to do Dave Carter's "Phantom Doll" before we had to run off to the airport. All in all, a lovely day with friends and music, and a nice relaxing way to send Amy off to Alabama.

Now she's off visiting with family and quadrivium, 'til she returns to Indy on Tuesday.

There's fiddling in my living room.

The cats have hidden, but they also hide from my drums. Not music-lovers, my kittehs.

Amy rode to work with me this morning (leaving house at 7:45 after staying up 'til 2 a.m. *yawn* and she played on teh intarweb while I worked a half-day. min0taur popped down from upstairs for a visit, then we bugged out after lunch and went to Butler Univ. and paid a surprise visit to Sally WINOLJ in the staff lounge at the library (when we finally found her). After we killed enough time to let the rain stop, we headed over to the Indy Zoo, where there were rays, and sharks to pet, and the most entertaining walrus ever (tip: go to zoos during weird off times when there are no crowds... you get to see the staff interacting w/ the animals and it's much more fun). Then meerkats and leeeeeezards, the baby giraffe, a Komodo dragon, and a red panda. Other things too, but those were pretty much the highlights.

We rounded out the evening w/ way too much Italian food at Bravo w/ Barry and Sally and now Amy's practicing and I'm enjoying (and catching up on mail and Twitter and LJ).

Soon, there will be sleeping, since there was precious little of that last night!

sweetmusic_27 is somewhere between Chicago and Indy, and will be hanging out at my house 'til probably Saturday when she heads south.

Yay! Indianapolis isn't gonna know what hit it... :-)

I posted the short version of this on Facebook earlier, so here's the longer version now that I have a minute. :-)

The Pegasus Awards final ballot is out, and Wild Mercy is nominated for the Best Performer Pegasus Award this year! Our favorite fiddler, sweetmusic_27, is also nominated, as are s00j, stevieannie & micktim, and Heather Dale & Ben Deschamps. Huge congratulations to all the Pegasus nominees in all categories!

Best Performer is a really really strong slate again this year, and I'm thrilled to be a part of it. I'm also thrilled that, through the friendships that I've developed over the last six years in the filk community and elsewhere, I consider three of the other nominees (FiddlerAmy, Sooj, and Tim & Annie) to be friends and sometimes fellow musical conspirators. (I haven't had a chance to see Heather Dale perform... one of these days I'll be in the right place to catch one of her concerts!)

Amy is (no offense to any other fiddlers on my list) my favorite fiddler... we've roomed together at cons, she's joined me for my Internet Cafe set at Capricon for the last couple of years, and Wild Mercy pretty much adopted her as the whenever-we're-in-the-same-place fifth member of the band after we heard her during the Celtic jam circle at Conterpoint 2007 (we'd adopt her permanently, but haven't been able to convince her that she and Benet should move to Indy :-). We even managed to kidnap her away to Chicago for a weekend in order to record a bunch of fiddle tracks for Wild Mercy's "Dream of a Far Light" CD, with the help of billroper and daisy_knotwise, and she joined us for "Black Davy's Ride" in last year's Pegasus Nominees Concert at OVFF.

Last year was my first opportunity to meet Tim & Annie, when the Suttons called to see if Wild Mercy would like to be part of the backing band for Tim & Annie's GOH concert at OVFF (where we ended with a huge "Howl at the Moon" jam session, so I was thrilled to see it nominated in the "A Little Bit Rock and Roll" floating category this year). Tim and Annie were visiting the Suttons prior to the con, so we all converged on Bill & Brenda's lovely old house in Danville and laughed and ate and made a bunch of music before heading out for OVFF the next day. It was lots of fun, and Tim & Annie are lovely people as well as outstanding musicians.

And then there's s00j, who I first met at a festival in Kansas a bunch of years ago, where she knocked our collective socks off (not that many people were actually, you know, wearing socks at HPF) at the Thursday night open mic. Somehow we managed to not cross paths much over the next few years... every time she was in or near Indy, I was travelling. Then lo and behold she popped up at the first Conflikt... apparently we were just destined to run into each other in places that weren't near home. :-) I finally got to sing with her at Duckon this summer, when I asked her if she'd join me on "Come Down" in open filk, since it needed multiple voices and multiple drums and I'd been lugging it around in my notebook for years without finding anybody to sing it with me. We had big fun, and I'm really really looking forward to October and November, when she'll be right here in Indy for two shows! First, a Travelling Fates (Sooj, Ginger Doss (of Velvet Hammer and DreamTrybe and the author of the aforementioned "Come Down") and Bekah Kelso) house concert at my house on October 9, then a Sooj solo concert at UUI in Indianapolis on November 3. Mark your calendars if you're within driving distance of Indianapolis... these concerts are going to rock!

And that's just the goodness which is the Best Performer category! The Pegasus ballot is full of great songs and composers and all you filk folk should be sure and vote!

(Disclaimer: The Pegasus Awards are a community-based award for filkers by filkers. If you're a filk participant, either as performer or listener at housefilks or conventions, please vote! If you haven't made it to many (or any) filk events but have a well-loved collection of filk music (probably because you know filkers and we all tend to turn our friends onto as many of our other filky friends as we can!), that's cool too. Go forth... listen... vote (then look at your calendar and plan to get to more real live filk events!). But if I or my bandmates are the only filkers you know, please refrain from voting. This really is a community award, and the votes should come from within the community. But go listen to the sample clips anyway... you may find new musicians to like!)

(Edited because I got distracted the first time and didn't finish a sentence. Oops!)