Well, as we practiced Thursday night and watched inch after inch of snow fall on Ohio we all had the feeling that our shows in Baltimore were cursed. After the last one got cancelled due to our unfortunate transmission event, and now this! The next morning we woke to find clear roads and hopped into Don and hit the road. Clear roads all the way there, bad pizza, bad rest stops and travel plazas and one huge accident that stopped us in traffic for an hour but The Evil Queens made it. The Ottobar is a cool place, Neil from the Mishaps talks a mile a minute, saw the guy from Monitor records, one band from DC that was cool and nice guys (Thomas Lunch), one band that was inoffensive but I think took off right after they played, one band that had fancy clothes, lots of underage fans and talked a lot of smack with fancy haircuts and some of the tightest pants I've ever seen on a human. The Mishaps were awesome and hilarious and rocked the house. Turnout was a little sparse, but it was cold and snowy there too. Probably had something to do with it. One of the guys from Meatjack ran sound, we talked about Totimoshi. Charlie and Naomi from Octopus, old musical heroes of ours were there. Very cool exceptionally nice people. We stayed in Charlie's recording studio and listened to lots of unreleased/unfinished Octopus, Landspeedrecord, Tao Chemical songs. The guy is so prolific it makes me sick. He writes more songs than anyone ever. Naomi said the old joke was that Charlie would shit a song after breakfast. Probably very true. He also was in possession of an unreleased, unmixed recording of a certain amazing band we all love that rhymes with The Schmeezus Schmizard. Apparently recorded with no distortion on anything. How he hasn't taken the time to mix it down and listen is beyond me. But I guess he's busy writing a thousand damn songs! Anyway, a good time was had. Driving was uneventful and now we hunker down and work on more new material in Charlie's shadow. Where we all live. Jacob