NP: EXO, The Safety Primer Justice (CD)

Okay, the first volley is from the good news. Last night's gig with the britpop cover band went remarkably well. Despite a couple of clams (the Blur song is only two minutes long -- why can't we nail it to the wall?) and some persistent gremlins in the gear, we rocked it out. The bar patrons loved it, the bar management, as well as that of the bar across the street, loved it, to the tune that this band may be working a lot in the very near future, including a St. Patrick's Day gig at an Irish bar, which is maybe a bigger booking than New Year's Eve.

The bad news is that we still appear to be called The Curtains, or maybe just Curtains. I don't know. I'm continue to lobby for Diver, but we didn't quite reach resolution on that issue. Hopefully we'll put it to rest on Tuesday at Vaughan's. If nothing else, the other cover band might take that name if we don't use it. The other gig-related bad news was just having to schlep gear in sleet and freezing rain at the end of the night, which certainly tested my resolve on not leaving the drums in the car overnight anymore. I passed the test. And big thanks to Eric for helping load up the car, as well as to quite a number of friends who came out. Maybe I'm just finally hanging out with a crowd who's inclined toward live music.

Other good news or bad news is imminent. I was a little, I don't know, disoriented by Thursday's interviews. With a very senior slate of meetings, I expected it to be more intense than it was, but maybe because I felt like I had done my homework and came in with a purpose and a vision for the position (pretty much exactly the approach I had been trying to psych myself up for), I was just in a position to meet the intensity on it's own terms and neutralize it. In retrospect, the fact that they identified me as at least as qualified for a more advanced position as the people they had already talked to has to work in my favor, and not feeling at all beaten down by the process could be as good an indicator of success as I'm going to get.

Whatever. It's now pretty much out of my hands, thank you e-mails notwithstanding. Monday will bring the news, but it should be for either door number one or door number two, not door number two or a dead end. In the meantime, the newfound popularity of window treatments gives me an improved fallback position, or a nice little discretionary income stream, depending on what happens. This continues to look like a promising year, or a year that finally closes the loop on promises made previously.