random thoughts

1. Our office building recently installed flushless urinals. Flushless urinals + room with no windows = bad idea.

2. Double Cheeseburgers at Del Taco are really good. They're even better when you use a coupon to get it for 60% off the menu price.

3. Nerds are the best candy. Free Nerds are even better.

4. On Monday the mailman dropped off a new fuzz pedal for me. That means that something on my pedalboard has to go, and it is no easy choice. My new toy is a Subdecay Flying Tomato. It's a silicon fuzz pedal with a bunch tone-sculpting features. Brian Marshall at Subdecay is really earning my respect as a builder. His big thing is creating products that allow the user to adjust a given pedal to their current setup. Where many fuzz pedals just have volume and fuzz knobs, the Flying Tomato also has bass and treble controls, plus an optional input buffer that allow you to place the pedal anywhere in your signal chain. (Many fuzz pedals work best at the beginning of the signal chain). Perhaps the coolest feature is the bias knob, which controls the amount of power going into the circuit. With the bias turned down, you gan get sputtery & glitchy sounds; with the bias full up, you get a nice sustained sound. In between those two extremes is where I've used it most (so far).

5. I used real drum sticks at church on Sunday. It felt so much better than the "acousticks" I normally use. Practice on Saturday was okay, but I felt a little rusty. The ideas were not coming. Sunday was entirely different. Everything flowed well, and the ideas flowed nicely. It's the most "free" my playing has been in quite a long time. I got good response about my volume as well. I guess drum sticks are the way to go. Heh... the sound guys are going to love that.

6. I heard a friend of mine is in a band and that he actually has decent guitar gear. When I knew him, he was a great player but hat not-so-great gear. I'd always think, You know, ___ would really love this pedal. Oh, wait a minute, he's probably still playing a Carvin through a solid state Peavey. Never mind. At lunch today I snooped around and found the band website. As expected, he's still got the facial hair thing going on.

7. It's easy to feel coordinated and athletic when your competition is a three year old child. Yeah, I rocked Trevor at soccer. And I don't even like soccer.

8. On Wednesday we went to opening day of the Ventura County Fair. It was not too crowded, and not too hot. Andrea got a tri-tip sandwich that was disappointing. I'm really glad I didn't get one. Instead I got a gigantic (foot long) corn dog. And I also got a corn polish sausage (is that what you'd call it?). After that, I was stuffed... and kind of sick. Because of time and money, we let Trevor pick one ride to go on. He picked the same one he rode last year: the helicopters. You'd know about that if I ever got around to posting about last year's fair experience, but I don't think I'll be doing that now. I went over to the ride operator and verified how many tickets we'd need.

Me: Excuse me...

Angry Adolescent Augusto: Mmm (nodded but didn't look over)

Me: Excuse me (louder)

A.A.A.: Yeah?

A.A. Augusto must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. He angrily motioned that he (apparently) had to keep his eyes glued to the ride in progress and so couldn't turn and look at me. Yikes. I was just making sure he heard me the first time.

Me: If I'm going to take my son on the ride, do I need 3 tickets or 6?

See, last year, Trevor went on a ride and I was pretty sure I could accompany him without needing tickets. That was why he went on more than one ride last year.

A.A. Augusto held up three fingers.

Me: Three?

I wanted to make sure.

A.A. Augusto again showed me his tres dedos and nodded his head in annoyance.

So guess what happened? I bought 6 tickets so Trevor and Ava and I could go on the helicopters. We got to the front of the line, and...

That's right. In broken English, Angry Adolescent Augusto conveyed that I needed three more tickets. Three each for the kids, and three more for me since Ava was under the height limit.

Me: But you said...

A.A.A. shook his head

Me: But I asked you how many and you said six.

I don't know why I bothered... language barrier and all. So after explaining to Trevor that the man made a mistake, we got back in line (after I simmered down). Ava had to ride the stroller instead of the 'copters, but she recovered quickly.

After the fair, we went to Andrea's parents' house. Later that evening, we picked blueberries with the kids and two of their Aunties. I carried Ava for most of that experience (and was really sore yesterday).

When I was in fourth grade, my class went on an overnight trip to Placerita Canyon. I remember only a few random thoughts from that trip--I was afraid that bugs were going to crawl inside our sleeping bags since we were open-air camping, and that my teacher was surprised that I ate a bowl of Corn Flakes with no milk and no sugar--but one memory sticks out even more than those. We were going to take this nature hike deal, and we were gathered outside some ranger station listening to the ranger tell us about something... naturey. The path was lined with melon-sized rocks. I looked over at a kid named Matt M. I still see him at church occasionally. Anyway, crawling all over his shoes and legs were a ton of gigantic black ants. Since that day, I always wondered what that was like and hoped I never had to find out.

So back to blueberry picking. I was standing there holding Ava and I kept feeling this poking around my ankles. I finally thought to look and what did I discover but that I was standing on top of a nest of red ants. They did not take kindly to this intrusion; a whole lot of really mean red ants were crawling all over my shoes and jeans (and biting me whenever they found my skin). I brushed them off as best I could, but they were really persistent. I had to kill them to remove them, because it was tough to just brush them off... they just wouldn't let go. Grr...

Before long, Andrea was their next victim.

And then Trevor.

And then Lisa.

Stinkin' red ants. Grr.

9. Songs for Sunday were "The Solid Rock," "Son of God," "Lamb of God," and "How Great is Our God." Lots of "of God" songs, but not on purpose. Something weird was going on. The guitar sounded out of tune when I was playing, but when I checked the tuning, I was in tune. As soon as we all played and sang, though, something sounded really wrong. It was distracting to me but I had people tell me it sounded fine out in the audience. Oh well. As I told a friend, "You win some; you lose some." Not every worship set will go exactly as planned, but people can still enjoy the time. And based on the singing volume, people seemed to. And for that, I'm thankful.