September recap

Hello again. Yeah, I've been a horrible blogger I know. But it's not all my fault. Allow me to suggest a few choice excuses for not posting this month... 1) I haven't had any internet connection on my computer since mid July, 2) I lost the battery charger to my camera in August so I haven't been able to take any pictures, and 3) birding has been slow to say the least, thus not much to post about. I did have excellent looks at a BUFF-BREASTED SANDPIPER a couple weeks ago but, as I said, no camera to photograph it with :-( But there is news! Great Bear played in Arkansas earlier this month for the Mountain View Dance Festival. It was a little weird because the main thrust of the weekend was clogging, not contra. And not the typical southern flatfoot kind of stuff; like the matching-outfits, tap shoes, choreographed, folksy version of line dancing kind of stuff. Very different experience. But they were really appreciative of us and invited us up to this cool party in the woods after the festival was over for food and jamming. I liked it there quite a bit, it was really beautiful once you got out of Little Rock. But they eat so much fried food; it's ridiculous. I mean it's good but after a day or two we all started to feel a little gross. And they smoke a lot too. We had a really good time though. Okay, other news... as you may have heard, Noah and I are going back into the studio to record a new album in November! We're really very excited about this project. We've been recording demos of some of the songs and they're coming together pretty well. There probably won't be as much percussion this time but plenty of strings: fiddles, violas, mandolins (including octave mandolin and mandocello), lots of guitars (some electric), banjo, ukulele, bass, I'm not sure what else. And we'll be doing some singing this time! We've got about five or six original songs that we like well enough and a whole bunch of cool new tunes. Some of the material actually got a little bit of an old-timey country sound which neither of us really expected. So I'll try to keep you posted on how the album is coming along. I've been busy lately trying to get some gigs set up for next spring. We'll be doing a 10 day tour of the southeast in March with dates in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. Also doing festivals in Maryland, Ohio and (get ready, this is the big one...) ALASKA! I'm working on getting us out to the west coast maybe next fall but we'll see what happens. So that's what we've been up too. I turned nineteen today (hurray, hurrah, whoop-dee-do, etc) and everyone is coming over this evening for chocolate pie but I just realized that I might actually miss my own birthday party. I've got a gig later today in Syracuse that might go kind of late so I hope I get back in time. Anyway, I better go take my clothes out of the washing machine. Later y'all (I had a pretty good "y'all" down while we were in Arkansas but I think I've lost it now. I need to get practicing for North Carolina :-)