One of the advantages of your body being on Eastern Standard Time is that you never sleep in on the west coast.  This can be good and bad.  It's odd waking up at 5am without an alarm--it's nice because you're already off to a good start by 7:30am.

Later in the morning Lisa, the first violinist, called and we started discussing the changes I had made to the music for the performance this Saturday.  We have a pretty limited time to play the showcase so I've cut little bits and pieces from the songs to make them a little bit shorter.  I suspect most people wouldn't even notice.  Apparently, there were some discrepancies between the first violin music and the part in the score.  This is what happens when you have an extremely limited music notating ability and are sort of teaching yourself as you go...sometimes things don't turn out how they sound in your head.  After figuring out what needed to be changed on the part over the phone (which is probably funny for bystanders to watch Lisa and I sing violin parts to each other over the phone..."oh oh C, G quarter note, Bb quarter note C tied to C whole note...daaaah daah deeh daaaaaaaah, ok got it".  With the beauty of technology, I edited the part on Jump's laptop, made a PDF of it and emailed it to Lisa.  Voila, a brand new violin part edited and delivered to someone miles and miles away without ever leaving my seat.  Sometimes technology is grand.

This is what it looks like:



Yes, I am left handed--like our President-elect Mr. Obama (actually McCain is lefty as well.  Go figure, two lefties running for President.  Yes, we are taking over, you have been warned).

Then it was off to our first rehearsal with Ryan, the LA drummer.  He's a cool laid back guy, just like you'd expect from someone from California.  We ran through the songs over and over and over.  Having 8 people all playing together requires a lot of precision on everyone's part.  After the rehearsal we rented a car...freedom!!!  It was sort of like getting to take your parents' car out for the first time.  We can go wherever and do whatever we want!  We took that new found freedom and went straight to Albertson's to buy eggs and cheese.  Exciting.

We went back to our guest quarters, made some dinner and then proceeded to have karaoke time where we would bring up song lyrics on the laptop and pass the acoustic guitar around seeing who could figure out songs and remember the lyrics.  I made it completely through all 6 verses of Don McLean's "American Pie" with only some...slight...prompting time to time from Brian on the laptop.  That was pretty good though, it had probably been 10 years since I had played that song as an early teen.  I do think that is one of the most poetic pop songs ever written.  It's by far one of the most lyrically amazing songs written and covers an amazing breadth of topics.  With that said, we couldn't get too deep so next up was some AC/DC where we belted out our best renditions of "Back In Black."  Even though I am a fan of a lot of new music, there is something to be said for an appreciation of the old stuff too.

I took a break and made some phone calls and walked around the quiet neighborhood where we're staying.  It's been beautiful here, 70's and 80's during the day, 60's at night.  It's hard to believe it's November.  I'm used to it being in the low 40's/high 30's back home.

Anyway, when I came back in at 10:30pm the guys were already on their beds passed out!  I guess it was 1:30am to our bodies.  I went up and talked with Mike and Mel about the next few days and more details about the conference, the difference in time is starting to get to my body now too so I'm heading to bed at 11:30pm.  We're planning on tomorrow night being a late night anyway.  Rock.

Goodnight.