NP: Incubus, A Crow Left of the Murder (MP3)

It never ceases to amuse me when the temperature in Chicago first breaks, oh, say about 35 degrees for two days in a row after the particularly brutal part of winter. There's this slightly cautious, slightly careless optimism that the worst is over, which is typically squashed by another frigid week and snow during baseball season sometime in April.

And speaking of baseball, Greg Maddux! I have this weird suspicion that analysts are seriously talking about the Cubs as contender in 2004 based on what is pretty clearly the best starting rotation in baseball. I know ESPN News was spending an awful lot of time on it yesterday afternoon, as it was on all the little screens at ESPN Zone while the US-Netherlands game was on the huge screen. I just don't know for sure what they were saying. Obviously, there's always a certain hopefulness up until the team starts actually playing, but given how close they came last year, and now this, who knows? Could it actually be next year? I'm guessing Hank, who's been at this much longer than I have, says "no," but he may also feel a greater degree of hopeful redemption at bringing Maddux back after the Trib's financially cynical decision to let him go in the first place.

I'm noticing some patterns lately, because, you know, I never do that. On the heels of the seven-week stretch of paying music gigs is the notion that I need to do at least one thing to uncover new income strategies every day. So far, this week is proving to be a good model, as I even got some good ideas from a friend watching the soccer game yesterday. Today brought investigation of a couple of part-time options. Tomorrow, at the very least, will involve following up on yesterday's conversation, and seeing where the broadcasting situation lives. Which, in turn, informs some musical choices.

So it's not surprising that I get burned out periodically. I may have gotten the swift kick in the ass I needed on this, though, and on a lot of things. I feel like I'm finding the motivation, and probably the inspiration, to get some shit together. Case in point, in a weird way, is working "The Breakup Song" and "I Ran" into the acoustic set. Both of them required either changing keys or reworking melodies in order to me to be able to sing them, and I had been avoiding it for quite a while. Now it's done, and I've got two more good eighties tunes in the book. Of course, booking some solo gigs might help.

Yesterday was odd for a weekday, as I was barely home. One of my roommate's cats hasn't been eating, and since the last time she borrowed my car to bring him to the vet, she got in an accident, the easy alternative is to drive her there myself. Then the soccer game, renewing my license (peculiar shadows in the new pic make me look like I have a mullet, joy), a rehearsal with Abi and then a percussion gig with Pat finally got me home around 2am. So I'm dragging a bit right now, but apparently not as much as Howard Dean this week. I'm still not sold on Kerry, so it looks like Edwards is my man of the moment. Hopefully I won't do for him what I did for Bill Bradley and Wesley Clark, in that "kiss of death" sort of way.