Nine days. Deal with the essentials.

Need food - 2 days I tried to survive on take out food, finally broke down and went grocery shopping for essentials, the whole starve till drive thing got old quick. Who cares if I will throw it all out next week.

Need air - It's hot in the house but that aint nothing to how hot it is on the roof. Yikes! Well, I found some fuses up there and one tests bad. Hardware store and cool air is up and running. It's been up around 100 degrees.

Need water - Well, actually need water to stop filling the mini-lake in front of the house. Sprinkler activator thing is leaky. I failed the rebuild so just bought another one.

Now for the big one. The whole 'bend the laptop' method of turning on my computer is a bit worrisome. I have had a computer die on the road before. Actually, several 'befores.' At one point I spent 2 years pecking at a Japanese keyboard after a motherboard meltdown in Osaka. Not about to go through that again, no time to get it fixed and I have torn the thing into little pieces twice already and it still needs the bendy start. My only safe option is to order a new one and have it here by weeks end. Going to stick with the Fujitsu type I have now as I have fallen in love with the fingerprint recognition thingy that remembers all my passwords. Cool stuff, I highly recommend it!

It feels like this is just a holiday in a familiar place. A place that used to be home before I agreed to move onto airplanes and tour buses again for two years of my life. It feel like a refueling station. Repack, regroup and grab a few things I forgot. Going to travel a bit lighter this trip.

Made it up to the Rat Sound shop and the Rat family had a mini birthday party for me! How lucky am I to have the most amazing group of people? Incredible!

And the Rats in the pic are Nicole, David, Taka, Danalle, Me, Jon, Jillian and Manny with Daniella snapping the picture.

My next adventure during the time off is overseeing the sound for Hullaballoo, a fund raiser for Flea's non-profit music school, The Silverlake Conservatory of Music. As we did last year, Rat is donating all the sound equipment and one Dave Rat as well. Manny and David set it all up and did a great job:

This year Patti Smith gave me goose bumps when she opened with "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine." Seeing Flea play bass with her and was truly awesome, lots of happiness going on in a room of stunned focus. Truly mesmerizing!

Here is sound check:

And the gig:

Next order of business was to drop my short people off at summer camp. Thank you Ellisa, Dillan and Grayson! Oh, so this place is run by Wavy Gravy and look what I found:

Now that is an old Gratefull Dead stage monitor, A relic of PA's past and really cool. Dual 12" and 6 JBL 5" speakers for highs. I find out that GD donated all the sound gear to the camp, good stuff!

The little people's apprehension turned faded when they saw they get to sleep in a teepee and then raced the three hour drive to make my flight to Brussels. Bye bye little friends, off to another rock tour.

DR

IWBTDTIAGTIIFTSOOY!