It's snowing

Yes, it does snow in rural Australia! We've had two days of it here. I physically got snowed-on at the end of our Sunday arvo band rehersal, standing in the doorway of Julian's garage. A lovely feeling.

Not a whole lot of snow, compared to our northern American and European friends, for certain. But still pretty.

As a band, we're travelling very happily and creatively at the moment. We've bought our own vocal PA (that is, amplified loudspeakers for the singers etc), and we should be moving to a new rehearsal hall this Sunday. No more garage band! While it's been more-than-adequate at Julian's in his garage, it is [cough] fairly "compact" as well. It'll be nice to move into a local hall and spread out a bit, and work on our sounds - and finally start our long-awaited recording sessions for our debut album!

You have no idea how awkward it's been trying to find a suitable and available hall for us to practice in around here! It's all basically to do with the "Public Liability Insurance" issue, which, as a group of three individuals wanting just to play a bit of music, don't have that sorta cover. It's total madness, but a sad fact of life in these litigious days :( So a lot of the available halls don't really want to risk having us using their premesis weekly, dagnammit. But hopefully a local hall willing to let us utilize their space is been solved as we speak.

In Sydney (where I've done about 90% of my music), there are proper band rehearsal spaces for hire all over the place, complete with soundproofing, PA's, kitchenettes and coffee even! Unfortunately, they just don't exist out this way, west of the 'Sandstone Curtain'. Now if we could raise the capital, that could be an interesting small business enterprise we could start, perhaps? hmmm...

One thing I've been doing yesterday evening and this evening, has been creating some new bright and colourful overhead transparency cells for use in the band, as part of our lighting show. I was given a brilliantly reliable overhead projector about eight years ago, partly in lieu of payment for a few days' work on the far south coast.

I made an attempt to print some of these cells about six months ago, with fairly limited results. This time the colours and sharpness turned out vividly exciting! Tis just me having some randomly psychedelic lighting and colour projecting moments for the band! They love it, by the way! Different shapes, patterns and colours projected onto the back wall, or the ceiling, or us when we're playing, sure adds an extra interesting visual element to our little show

Here's two quick examples of what sorta lighting effect I'm talking about, when projected onto something (in combination with our other lights as well)...

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The Sailing Club will be getting together on 7th September for our annual business meeting, in Orange, somewhere nice and warm. It'll be the first time most of us will have had the opportunity to catch-up for about 6+ months! The water level out at Carcoar Dam remains painfully (and dangerously) low, so it looks like there'll be no sailing season out there this coming summer, dagnammit. Seven years of drought... it's not over for most of rural Australia. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

Yes, that's Carcoar Dam, taken in June! Sad, isn't it? Everything in the foreground of this photo should basically be under 30 meters of water!

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more cat pictures

Peas be with ewe

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