more animals

 

All in all, I am finally starting to feel better. I'm down to just a little bit of an ache in my side, and that's after I accidentally let the painkillers wear off for a half hour. All in all, I'm feeling almost normal now.

Granted, I couldn't say the same thing 3 hours ago, and I'm not going to overdo it and make the pain come back. I'm just happy for right now to be relatively pain-free and seemingly firmly on the road to recovery.

Your results:
You are Magneto

Magneto 43% The Joker 42% Mr. Freeze 40% Lex Luthor 39% Apocalypse 37% Riddler 37% Green Goblin 36% Poison Ivy 34% Dark Phoenix 33% Dr. Doom 32% Mystique 32% Kingpin 29% Juggernaut 24% Venom 21% Catwoman 18% Two-Face 4%

You fear the persecution of those that are different or underprivileged so much that you are willing to fight and hurt others for your cause.

Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test
 

Going in to have a kidney stone removed tomorrow.  I've never had surgery, never been under a general anesthetic before, and so I'm a little nervous about this.  I know, it's outpatient and about as minor as surgery gets, but that doesn't help when it comes to calming my nerves.

The worst part of it will probably be having to get up and go to the hospital at 5:30 AM.  Ugh.  I don't do mornings.

I would describe how they do it, but it disturbs me to think about it.  Anyone who has had it done already knows what they have to do, and anyone who is blissfully ignorant of the procedure should probably stay that way for their own peace of mind.  

And I have band practice tomorrow night!  I doubt I will be very productive, and I will probably just run the board and push buttons while everyone else is recording.  Luckily, they are coming over here, so I don't have to worry about going anywhere tomorrow night (like I really would go anywhere after surgery....)

Here's hoping I'll be up to going back in to work on Thursday.  I only have a couple of days of Sick leave/Vacation left for the whole year after all this Kidney stone business....

OK, I'm off to take a shower with this red gel stuff they gave me (I think it's anti-staph infection stuff), and then off to bed for a few hours before tomorrow's adventure.  I'll post more about it when I'm home tomorrow.

 When I got home and had to deal with one of my sons former friends standing in the driveway, threatening to kick everyone's collective posteriors, telling me to get out of his way, calling me every name in the book, and refusing to leave until I had to call the cops on him, AND THEN had to talk to the cops for a while, somehow I completely forgot to post my thoughts of the weekend on LJ.  Hmmmm.... funny how that happens.

This weekend at White Hart was a wonderful experience.  My band, the Sea Dogs, got to perform for the first  time in a public venue, and we had a great time.  Thank you to all of you guys and gals who came out to see us.  We learned an awful lot this weekend, and I'm looking forward to next weekend with much anticipation.  It will be cool to finally get to play wit the whole band present.  We really missed having John with us for our first gigs.

I have just finished updating the sea dogs website (http://www.seadogsmusic.com) with pictures from this weekend.  Our wonderful webmistress did a great job putting the site together, and it will be really cool to see it grow and grow.

Thanks also to Softpaw for her brilliant idea for having the kids deliver flowers to Esmerelda.  That was a lot of fun, and I think she really enjoyed it, despite the attention she got from the bees.  :)

And, you know, while I'm at it, thank you to the rest of the cast for making this weekend so much fun.  It is just going to keep get better and better from here on out.

OK, I'm starting to sound like I'm accepting an academy award with all the "thank you's" I'm throwing around here.  If I don't get to post again before this weekend, I'll see y'all then.

Well, the house feels pretty quiet after a weekend of being full of guests. Academies went very well, and they were a wholed lot of fun. The Sea Dogs got our chance to play in front of a crowd (OK, so it was a party of our friends, I believe them to be potentially harsher critics than strangers:) ) and the comments we got were very positive. Even though we've only been practicing for three weeks and we had some distinct issues related to nerves, the response was good. Now to see if we can work up a few more songs and get them all recorded in the next three weeks before the faire starts.....

I want to say thank you to everyone who showed up, and a special thanks to rowangolightly and seymoure for the classes they tought this weekend.

I'll think of moreto say later.... for now, I'm to bed.....

I have a Folk Music link today, too. Dan's Irish Pub Tunes 

This website has a whole bunch of traditional Irish drinking songs, most of them with guitar chords.  This is a great website for a pub sing along or a St. Patty's Day party.

Since I didn't post one last night...

One of my favorite websites for finding sea shanties is http://www.contemplator.com .  This website has folk songs from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and each song has a Midi file to let you hear how th tune goes.  Now, the midi tunes, like most midi tunes, are rather annoying and irritating, but at least they will give you the basic melody of the song.

The coolest thing about this website is that they also have an entire section of nothing but Songs of the Sea.  Just about every well known sea shanty has its lyrics listed here, and many of them had lines I had never heard before.  There is also some history on most of these songs and links to other references about the history of the time.  All in all, a very cool website, but if you are just browsing this site for fun, I recommend turning the volume on your computer speakers down (there are literally midi songs playing on every page, even the pages without song lyrics.

Again, of you know of any other good folk song or sea song sites, please give me the link in a comment.  I would greatly appreciate it!

Well,this weekend I got the back yard seeded and treated for fleas and ticks, and then ericcaptdrake came over and helped me fix the fence in our back yard.  The good news is that we have gotten some music put to some lyrics, and a couple of songs are really starting to come together.  

I think I'll end up getting an Irish Bouzouki via mail order or eBay, but it will have to wait until tax returns come in..... **sigh**

Geez, I'm tired.  I'm cutting his post short.  No Folk music link this time, I'll get one out next post, though.  And for those of you involved in White Hart, I'll see you all at my house this weekend! 

My lovely wife and children have been hard at work helping me upgrade my garb (this is a major part of their birthday present to me). My wife made me a great arrangement of feathers for my hat, since my old batch of plumes gave up the ghost in the frigid wind Sunday in Joplin. They also got me a new cross pendant that is really cool, and a new knife to replace the one I lost first thing Saturday morning.

I thought I might get myself my own birthday present of an Irish Bouzouki or an octave mandolin, but there is absolutely nowhere in town that carries either instrument, and I hate to spend a lot of money on an instrument that I haven't been able to pick up and try out. Oh well....

Anyway, if anyone is interested, I'm going to try to start posting links to any good folk/celtic/seafaring music sites that I find on the interweb, and I would love t if anyone else knows of another good website of this type, please put a link in the comments.

So, today I'm posting a link to a site I just recently re-discovered - Roger McGuinn's Folk Den.  I found this site awhile back, and promptly forgot all about it.  When I went to look for it again much, much later, I couldn't find it, and then yesterday, I just happened to run across it again.  If you don't know who he is, Roger McGuinn was one of the founders of the Byrds.  He has recorded a lot of folk music, and every month he posts an MP3 of a folk song, along with the lyrics and guitar chords.  Best of all, a bunch of these songs are sea shanties!  Anyway, Check it out if that's your thing.  I can't say I'm a big fan of all the recordings, but it is nice to have ot only the lyrics and chords to the songs, but also an example of how the song sounds.

OK, after overhearing my Rennie friends talk about Livejournal endlessly for the last couple of years, I hve finally decided to start an account here.  I have been reluctant, because I have tried blogging before, and I have never been any good at it .  Sure I'll post once or twice, and be as thoughtful and insightful as I can possibly be, and then it will stagnate.  Sure, I'll mean to get back and post.  I'll tell myself that I'll have something profound to say tomorrow, and I'll post then.  Before I know it, it has been weeks since my last post, and now, even though I really want to post something, I'm too embarassed to be one of those guys who starts every post with "I know it's been three months since my last post, but...."  And then, it will end up as one of the countless dead blogs that litter the interweb, slowly filling up with spam comments as it metaphorically blows aimlessly across the barren internet landscape like a tumbleweed in an old Clint Eastwood film....

Wow, that was cheery.  Ignore that.  I'm here and ready to give it another shot!

Just back from Joplin Renfest, and boy did I have a good time!  Got to hang out with some old friends, made a bunch of new friends, and developed my character far beyond what it was when I came up with it last year.  If you don't know me, I play the Shantyman on board Captain Sir Francs Drake's Golden Hind.  I had itended to be calling out shanties all over the place this weekend, but I was still recovering from a cold that I came down with last week, so the amount of actual singing I did wa miniscule, but I still got in and played my character and had a great time.  Everyone really pulled together and the whole cast really was a good cohesive unit working together to make sure that both cast and patrons alike had a wonderful time.  Thank you all for letting me play, and I'm already looking forward to White Hart!

OK, that's enoug for post numero uno.  I gotta sleep if I'm going to manage to get any work done tomorrow.  Night all!