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Just got back from Rock & Blues. My bike and I were caked in mud, but I had a great time. A friend has promised me some photo’s, which (after suitable censoring to save my pride) I’ll put up in the PhotoAlbum as soon as they arrive. Arrived at about 12pm on Friday in the driving rain after a 90 minute ride up the motorway in convoy with a bunch of guys from the Past Its MCC, and had to set my tent up for the first time in the rain. My leathers were soaked right through to my skin and the inner skin of my tent got drenched during the hour it took me to get the damn thing up. Even my dry clothes from my rucksack had gotten damp where the rain had soaked through the bag material. Music was great on the Friday night, particularly Rainbow Rising, and the rain was easing up. I had a go on the reverse bungie after a lot of beer, which was err… interesting :-)

Saturday daytime was glorious and I managed to dry out my leathers and the remaining contents of my rucksack. Had a major shop around the stalls and bought myself the ‘Team Satan’ hockey shirt I’ve been hankering after for a few months and some body jewelry. The bands were much less memorable, either because I was partying too hard to notice them, or because punk is not really my thing. The mud wrestling was under-subscribed but fun to watch, and the bikini contest was on in the beer tent during the worst shower of the day, so I was unfortunately trapped in the beer tent and forced to watch :-) Things get a bit hazy after that…

Until Sunday morning, with a severe hangover trying to fit my enormous 5 man tent into a tiny little bag to strap to the back of my bike. Note to self: Next time I buy a tent, be sure to remember that I am actually only one man. Instead of riding back in convoy, I decided to set off before lunch so that I would have a fighting chance of getting up the muddy bank before the other 40000 bikes churned it up too much, and made it back home in time for dinner. And a bit of a nap to recover from the festivities.

105Jam (our vocalist) finished the artwork for our demo yesterday, so with a little help from the GIMP I added some photo’s taken by Steve (other guitarist) while we were recording, and now we have a pretty damn sexy looking CD. Drop me a line if you would like a copy… I’ll put some mp3′s up here soon.

Managing a grand total of 6.5 hours sleep between getting up for work on Friday morning and going to bed before work on Sunday night, I have been run off my feet this weekend. AfterTaeKwonDo on Friday night, I arrived at the studio around 23:00 just as Steve was recording the final lead guitar break for our new three track demo. Mixing to DAT took another nine hours! Then transferring from DAT to CD through Steve’s 16 track desk took another five hours. The very first disk was duplicated on my iBook at about 22:00 on Saturday night, and the celebrations fizzled out about ten hours later.

I just have to duplicate the sleeves and inserts and I should have some to use for soliciting live gigs in time for next weekend.

128 Browsing the shelves at the News Agent a few days ago, I discovered that there was a review of the Goat Book in this month’s Linux User and Developer Magazine. In the press twice in one day! Double cool :-D

Day 1 is just a mild niggling headache at the nape of your neck and the back of your eyes, which builds to a full-blown head splitting throb by the middle of day 3. By now, you are probably dosed on pain killers, and have lost your appetite due to the dull ache in all your joints and high temperature. You figure, “What the hell, I’m in excellent health! If I take a day off work and sleep for 36 hours my body will soon recover.” Bzzt! Day 5: Stomach cramps and vomitting. So it’s not getting better, in fact you feel worse than ever: you’ve barely eaten in three days, you’re bored of being in bed, and you’ve got the runs ‘cos your drinking 3 litres of water a day to replace the fluids you’re sweating out. Day 6: The doctor tells you that you’ve contracted Gastric Flu and you’re just gonna have to wait the 7 to 10 days it takes for you to flush it out of your system. “Eat little, and often. Drink plenty of fluids. You have the runs already? Drink even more then! And here’s some stronger pain killers to help with the aches and pains.” Day 7: You feel a bit better, but maybe that’s just the drugs? Your appetite is returning, but your stomach has shrunk so as soon as you eat a little you feel bloated. I’ll tell you about days 8, 9 and 10 when I’ve experienced them :-(