I just freaked myself the hell out.
[phone rings]
Me: “Hey, Chris.” [ohnosecond] “Wait a minute, I don’t have caller ID. I have no idea if it’s Chris or not.”
Chris: “You don’t? Well, it is me.”
Me: “What the. That’s freaky.”
Chris: “That’s scarier than you normally are.”
Six days to vacation.
Here’s an email I got this afternoon, at the end of a really crappy day—not-fun work things, compressed schedules, and several hours of meetings coming after finding out that my maternal grandmother fell, again, yesterday and is in the hospital with a brain bleed—that kinda set me off:
Subject: [Upcoming] (username redacted) sent you a note!
The note reads:
The address:
(address redacted) that’s under the name “Grace Free Evangelical Church is WRONG. The church at that address is my church, which is (church name redacted to protect innocent parishoners). Please get your facts straight, and please correct this. I don’t know why its saying I’m sending this from the email address “(redacted)”. That email has been deactived. Please email me back at (redacted, although I want to subscribe her to a lot of funky porn spam). Thank you.
Ummm … huh? Okay, so I made a mistake. Actually, I copied another person’s mistake—this was a venue for one of the artists for whom I enter data into Upcoming, and apparently, things changed, the address was wrong, or something. But anyway. Two things immediately struck me:
Here’s my response:
Would you shoot me the URL to the venue you complained about? That’ll help me get it corrected in the system.
As for the facts, I entered them from an artist’s Web site as to where they indicated that the show would be held. I apologize if you were offended by this error, but I would urge you to look look at it from my end—by being so strident with your response, you give me very little incentive to fix it. That said, I want to get the right address for the actual venue, and while I’m at it, I’ll add in your church so that anyone else who tries to add a venue at that address will get an error in Upcoming’s system.
Ahhh, Christian kindness and charity. [I'm including my response here as a slight reproof for myself, because I certainly could have done a better job in my response.]
Redux, 20 Jun: I got a very polite and contrite reply. I’m satisfied, especially because I’ve lashed out at people unnecessarily, and heck … my OCD nature is to want such things right as well.
It’s not every week that a musical instrument I own makes its way into a recording I have, but … this week, it does.
Andrew Osenga’s Letters to the Editor, Vol. I. I love Andrew. I also love that he plays my grandfather’s old guitar on this one. I’ll be getting copies of this CD to Dad and Doug, because … well, because they need to hear Pop’s old Gibson being used.
Paste Magazine Music Sampler #32: June 2007. Admittedly, I bought this issue of Paste because I was with Derek and their review of his new album was in the issue. [They gave The Ringing Bell five stars.] Other than the DW track, the highlights are Cary Brother’s “Who Are You”, Low Stars’s “Just Around the Corner”, Gina Villalobos’s “Somewhere to Lay Down”, and Haunt’s “Run Run Run”. The Haunt stuff especially intrigued me … I haven’t yet found much about them on the Internet, but I’ll keep looking. Three stars.Not only have I been very busy at work, but then my laziness made for a server exploit that I’ve been working on fixing for the last four hours [and have several more left to go]. :sigh:
Paste Magazine Music Sampler #32: June 2007.Last week wasn’t all that great, to tell the truth:
The Awkward Romance’s AudioBio. Edgy punk stuff just typically isn’t my fare. But thanks, Danielle, for thinking of me. Two-and-a-half stars. Look at me, being all arty. I sat there while little Emily cried, thinking, “How can I take a cool shot in here?” I finally decided to hop up on the windowsill and shoot past Ashley to Jonathan and Emily. Predictably, I played with the focus so that I could get some of each.
Anyhow, the full set of photos I took is available on Flickr. Go knock yourself out.
I hope Emily’s gotten some rest. She really hadn’t had much uninterrupted sleep since mid-afternoon, so by the time I got there around 1900, she was just inconsolable. Finally, Jon could get her settled down by walking back and forth in the room. Hopefully he’s not going to have to do a ton of that, but if he does, well, I don’t think he’ll have to pick up jogging again—he’s gonna get enough walking in!
So … yay. 
Congrats to the Creekmores. We’ve got us another sweet little girl to watch over in our local brood.
It's all just a stream of consciousness for me, folks.
