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Had a pretty lazy Labor Day. In the evening, Mary Beth did her lawn bath and I hung out in the front yard reading and drinking one of the last of my Mexicokes (will I ever be able to get more again?). That's about it for that day.

I did remember something I forgot to mention when talking about The Lamplighter show on Saturday. Between the acts, some guy came up and talked to me. Asked me which band I was there to see so I mentioned both of them (how I love Drop Ceiling and also how I had been in a band a long time ago with one of the guys in Revenge Bodies). He said he'd just come 'cuz he saw it was a punk band playing. He asked if I made music and I mentioned how I mostly just set up experimental music shows and he was like "are you Memphis concrete?" (pronounced without the accent as most people who don't hear it from me naturally would!). Anyway, fun to see that it's just kind of something random people at least have heard of. Also, ran into Matt Jones before the show and he was just gushing about how good The Terminator live score was so that was nice! Okay, that's all I've got and I'll shut up now.

Mary Beth and I went to another class at the Metal Museum. This one was for making spoon rings. They provided the cut off handle of a baby spoon and then we bent it til it was made into a ring. There was a machine to help with it and Mary Beth used it, but since there was one I figured I'd just do it the hard way they also showed of hammering it while it's in a vice so other people could have a chance to use the machine if they wanted. There were a variety of tools to use but it was a little bit of a pain to get it just the right size, the slightest thing would make it either too big or too small. I dinged mine up a whole lot, and in the end got some help to finish the last touches. It was fun, though easily the hardest of these that we've done! Coming home we swung by TFM and picked up a few things.

Then at night I went to a show at The Lamplighter. There was kind of this deconstructed Drop Ceiling performance. First, Peter did a duet with Spence (I found out Peter wasn't at that last Drop Ceiling show because he just got back from Germany). And it ended up with Schaeffer doing a duet with Logan. And then in the middle all four were playing together for a little bit. So it was this continual shifting configuration. It was really good as those dudes always are. Then the other group was Revenge Bodies (not to be confused with Jacques and his Revenge Body)! They're from Little Rock and this is Dave's current band, Dave who currently lives in Little Rock but was in Memphis for a good while back and I was in a punk band with him and Jason Ledet called Culture Rubs You the Wrong Way in the late 90s. So I hadn't seen him in forever. I knew Revenge Bodies was punk and I was expecting something maybe on the hardcore side, and while I guess there is something of that element, they mostly reminded me of Fugazi and they were really good. So that was awesome to see him again and dig his band so much. They did a Dead Kennedys cover and that was fun (Dave was also warming up before they played with "Down on the Street"). He plays bass in this band (he played guitar when I played with him so I was expecting that). He also does a cool thing now and again where he hits a chord on the bass and it's a little dissonant and heavy and cool-sounding. Anyway, that was a fun show!

After work I went quickly to a different Kroger than I went to the night before, just for a few things I wasn't able to get at the one (and managed to get at the other, so success). In the evening Mary Beth and I went on another walk. Similar length. This time, on one of the streets we walk on, we crossed the street to a side we don't usually walk on. This is the one where all of the Ori offspring live (see...this one cat we call Lori (think she's a stray, but hangs around a few houses, she seems to be good friends with this cat that has a house named Tori who she hangs out with over there a lot, even more now) had some kittens a ways back so we named them Nori, Rori, and Jori...hence the Oris...they ended up all being taken in by another nearby house). Well they were all out on the porch and we're usually across the street when we see them and we stopped and looked and admired them, but they saw us looking and they all jumped down and started approaching us...VERY friendly! Well, we had to extricate ourselves before we got too entangled. We also think we saw Io (who lives a few blocks over) inside a window for the first time. The joys of walking again...seeing cats! Also, the weather was just insanely nice. It almost felt cold outside (for August anyway)! Mary Beth wanted to enjoy it and sit out on the deck at night so we did and Peanut joined us and was very cuddly and friendly. So we had a nice "fall" night hangout.

Had what feels like a major breakthrough yesterday. Mary Beth and I went for a walk in the late afternoon after work. The first one since she tore her calf muscle. We cut it a little bit short as she didn't want to push it too hard, but we walked the majority of our normal route. Also, the weather has been weirdly lovely for August the past several days so it was nice to take advantage of that.

Mary Beth and I did our Superlo grocery run on an off day yesterday as we have something else to do tonight! We also threw in a Target run while we were at it. So yeah, mundane shopping! I also finally finished mixing The Memphis Concrète Electroacoustic Chamber Ensemble recording from the festival. I had recorded all the audio at the festival off the board. Now for something like this, with mic'd acoustic instruments, that's not the best way to do it of course (but a cheap and easy fire-and-forget way to get most of the festival recorded in a way that does work for most of the artists). So on that recording, the instruments that are quieter in the room are louder in the mix and vice versa. So I mixed it with the audio from the video camera. Now that gets all the room sounds with all the pros and cons of it. I took a while fiddling with the eq and such. The flute was the hardest instrument to bring out. It was the second loudest in the board recording but the violin was consistently louder. And it was the instrument physically farthest away in the room from the camera (along with not being as loud as the closer ones) so at times it was a little harder to hear (often it came through fine, but still). So I did a bit to boost the highs but that also brought up the general noise and made it sound a bit hot if I did it too much, so I spent some time trying to strike the balance there. In the middle of it I got to where I was thinking it wasn't sounding good. But after I finished and stepped away and uploaded it and listened again, I thought it sounded good. But I'm not one to be able to tell! Last night I had that Sunday not-able-to-fall-asleep thing so time to wake up, damnit.

Mary Beth and I had a double feature last night. First we went up to the Brooks for this candlelight Fleetwood Mac string quartet thing. It's all run by some corporate thing that's pretty annoying, but the actual music was fun. It was musicians we recognize from the symphony. It was good but I can't believe they didn't do "Dreams"! (At least they did "Rhiannon".) Funny crowd at that one, I mean, what you'd expect. We got there and went downstairs to wait for them to start letting people in because they have this weird sectioned seating they're very anal about (Mary Beth had been to one before) and she knew it'd be a pain to get a seat where she could see if she didn't get at the front of the line. Upstairs they had a bar and people were milling about getting drinks and stuff. We're there downstairs waiting for them to open up for a little while. Just before they finally do a couple comes down to start waiting too and the woman starts off edging down the stairs like she's poising herself to get ahead of us. Then the woman at the door tells Mary Beth she can come up first and that woman behind us starts throwing a little hissy fit saying "we were here thirty minutes before they were" and the guy with her was quietly trying to be like "why are you doing this?" and the woman at the door just ignored her and gestured to Mary Beth. But then it was mildly awkward (only mildly, really, 'cuz we were just laughing at her) because the woman checking us in kept acting like they were about ready but then would look in the room and wait longer so we were just standing there with the obnoxious lady right behind us (at least she didn't keep up with it after her initial outburst). Anyway, of course being second in line for something like this makes absolutely no difference in where you can sit and she wasn't even in the same section as us (of course they had the super expensive front row section) so being behind us made no difference to her. It's just funny when people are like that.

Anyway, after that we went down to the Print Shop to see Drop Ceiling and Rob Magill. This time it was in the small room that's kind of like a separate event space (but air conditioned as compared to the big warehouse space they usually use...this is the same room we saw if...else do that long droning installation kind of thing a few years ago). Rob Magill played solo first and he started with guitar (and vocals) and then went to saxophone. Then it was a big Drop Ceiling lineup. They had Jenny, Art, Logan, Rob Magill, Schaeffer (of course), Bennett, Berto (the only one I didn't really know before), Spence, and Laura. They played a nice long and good set, pretty psyched out and stuff. I picked up a bit of merch: Jeonghyeon Joo / Rob Magill: An evening with Jeonghyeon Joo & Rob Magill in Ojai, Eugene Chadbourne / Rob Magill / Daniel Masiel Trio: To Granny, Rob Magill / Jehf Jones: Scaling the Heat, and Rob Magill: Let the World Cry Vol. 2. Stayed up late last night and now waiting for the plumber to show up.

Not a whole lot to report now. Just a regular ol' weekday. Move along.

Not a whole lot. While I was reading in bed after work, I was just really tired and ended up taking a long nap. There you have all the excitement!

I went to the first meetup of the Memphis Chroma Collective, this video synth meetup group that Graham started. The coolest thing about the meetup was that it was held on Mud Island in the old museum where some people are now trying to make it into a big goofy interactive media exhibit thing. We set up on the second floor of the steamboat model exhibit. Then we went on a mission to get some tables that were at the other end of the building so I got to walk around that old beautiful brutalist place a little bit. It was fun. I brought my one modular case that's in commission (still stuck with replacing the power supply in the other) and used some of the cv to interact with Graham's modular video gear. There was a good group there in addition: Corbin, Karl, Will, and some others. This guy I'd just met John had some s/h type sounds coming from a DX-21 hooked up to an Arduino with light sensors that were really cool. Mary Beth and I were supposed to have met my dad for dinner but he messaged me saying he wasn't feeling up to it. So we ate dinner at home and went out a little later to Tonica for some drinks and a few tapas and it was a good.

I went back to Home Depot and found some straight brackets though they were a little bigger than I'd hoped for but then I hoped they would be close enough to work for what I'm trying to do. Well, they didn't. The holes were just slightly too big and the machine screws I have slipped through them. I tried using a washer as well so they wouldn't slip through, but then that made it too thick for the screw to really fit in the ultimate hole. In theory I guess this could work if I had different screws, but then I'm also concerned anyway about the amount of space to the sides and that them being just a little too big they'll come up against the side of the case (or one of them will, anyway). So I dunno. I was pretty frustrated and took a break from it and made a flyer for this one last show that's been pending. That's about it.