I can has an official fan list! I’m working on something that’ll be a bonus track for listmembers, too, if I can make it work the way I want to. Not sayin’ what it is, ’cause that’d be telling! It’ll be a bit of fun, tho’. And evil. Like y’should!

Also, if you missed Leannan Sidhe’s first show Saturday night, you missed somebody new getting off to a good start. Shanti’s music is very much unlike mine in a deeply oldschool way and it’ll be very interesting to see what she does with it. Plus, unannounced mid-show bonus set by Alexander James Adams, who just felt like stopping by! And maybe yours truly threw in a bit in the afterparty. Hard to say. I been makin’ a habit of that lately, so it totally coulda happened. Totally.

Verizon has hardware problems right now affecting a very small number of people – meaning us – and it’s still not fixed going into the weekend. And it’s gotten much worse over the last hour! It’s fuckin’ awesome! So if you’re trying to reach me, it’s probably smart to forget email until Monday. (It’ll get queued up; there’s just no telling when it’ll get delivered.) If you’re trying to listen to songs on the band website and manage to catch us in a moment of connectivity, go to the bandcamp site (http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.bandcamp.com) and play stuff there. Sorry, there’s nothing I can do about it, it’s all in Verizon’s hands, they have bad hardware at some sort of substation and it’s just getting worse.

So I’m bodging together improvements to the band website and I’m wondering: what would you want on it? I know I need a mailing list of some sort (eventually, anyway) but what else is missing?

After some work, http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com is now slightly less provisional. Check it.

So the Oregon trip went mostly really well, with one major fail moment which was not my own. But as a whole? Awesome. A girl could get used to that lifestyle. Seriously used to it.

I drove down to Eugene on Sunday to spend the night with internet friends there, since the whole show thing was so far away. Passing the 45th parallel in a car was a first, and conceptually kind of amazing; I tried to get a photo of the sign, but missed both times. I stopped in a rest stop to make a peanut better sammich and eat fruit rolls and ended up having a hot dog from racecar driver Ed and his partner Nancy going up from an event in Oregon to another event in Washington. It’s some sort of sub-NASCAR circuit and they don’t make a lot of money but they have fun, and it was really just nice meeting them!

I’d never been to the Willamette Valley before, and damn that thing is wide and flat. I expected flat – it’s farming country – but I didn’t know you lost site of the edges. I kept thinking MOUNTAINS I MISS YOU! and eventually they came back, and I got down to Andra’s house and met her partner Sandra and housemate Jana and ended up geeking about her music theory work and we had all sorts of fun. Thanks for dinner and crash space! And brownies! Yum. ^_^

I set out to Redmond in the morning, forgetting to get gas before leaving Eugene because why would I buy gasoline? I just bought gasoline yesterday. How could I need more? It hasn’t even been three weeks! So I stopped at a store on the way which had all the hallmarks of an updated 1920s/1930s general store and gas station, complete with antique coolers with huge wooden doors. I love those.

The mountain passes had these amazing stripes of silver trees – there’d been a forest fire, which is sad, but everything left behind kind of shone and glittered. I tried to take pictures while driving because I didn’t have time to stop, and you can see a little of it in a couple of the shots. It was both sad and gorgeous.

Redmond’s a nice town. I like the new park, and the 1940 late-nouveau city hall, and the amphitheatre is pretty big, really, for a three-teir theatre. Sadly – and this is the big fail – the event I was playing got cancelled after I got there, due to high winds. But I looked around and realised that neither the amphitheatre nor those kids playing in the amphitheatre’s fountain were blowing away, so decided that, well, y’know what? The event can be cancelled; I’m not. So even though most people left before I even started, I played anyway, and made the 8-10 kids and their parents who stayed behind very happy, and all the kids came up with their quarters and pennies, and I gave them stickers, and we all had a good time.

An archeologist named Fred out in Burns gave me crash space for the night, so out into the badlands I went! And I’m so glad I did. I had no idea the Oregon high desert was so… astonishing. I thought the valley was wide? No. This was akin to another planet. I have photos that look like moon photos. I got eyestrain from the hours of focus-on-infinity the trip entails.

The whole trip out to Burns was just hypnotic. The strange low ecosphere hiding out in one metre above the ground? Crazytalk amazing. The deep violet colours with the greens and the yellows? Completely unexpected. I wish I could photograph it. I tried again, even knowing it never works. Stupid cameras. And, pleasantly, not as hot as I’d expected. Then I got there and met up with Fred for the Mexican dinner and conversation and better directions and a little obsidian arrowhead! I have it upstairs. Thanks, Fred! (He made it himself. ^_^ )

The next morning, I went to Glass Butte. I wanted a piece of volcanic glass, and… it was just lying out there waiting for me. Glass Butte DOES NOT LIE. It was everywhere. I got there at the wrong time of day to see the reported glitter effect, but on the other hand, everything kind of glittered out there – even the plants – so I doubt I missed too much. I also saw elk tracks, and a strange little lizard visited for about two seconds too long – I spotted it before it noticed I’d seen it, and then it ran like hell.

I went north the dry way, through the pass at Mt. Hood, looking at ancient river canyons and listening to tribal radio while rolling through Road Runner cartoon-style buttes down side roads and old highways and parts of 99. I’m pretty sure I spotted the pass of Caradhras on Mt. Hood. Someday I want to trace the old 99 route out as much as it survives in Cascadia, and travel it as best it can be travelled, but that’s for a later time.

Then yesterday, I had my final show of this long June/July set, at Juanita Bay, and now I go back into the studio for a big push on Dick Tracy. This man’s needed killin’ too long. It’s time for a reckoning.

Hey, I’m on the front page! Of the Juanita Beach Friday Market webpage, where I’m playing Friday from 5-7pm. They’ve had to move over a bit to get out of the way of construction, so I’ll be getting to test out my SUPERS BATTERY AMP OMG, and I’ll probably be one of the few acts there this year with a PA at all! Yay, experiments! I hope some of you can come.

Normally they have a nice grassy seating area, but I don’t know whether that’s true this year. I suspect it is – it’s still at the beach park and there’s a lot of grass and beach and it’s nice. Directions are at the website, or you can just map 9703 NE Juanita Drive, Kirkland, Washington.

And I meant to write up more about the Oregon trip – I’m still shaking desert dust out of everything – but it’s after midnight and I’ve been going nonstop last night and all day today, so it’s bedtime for now. More later for sure!

Where have I been?

• South of the 45th Parallel.
• Eating hot dogs with racecar driver Ed and his partner Nancy at a rest stop
• Safe and sound in Eugene ensconsed with Andra and Sandra and Jana! who are awesome for putting me up and up with me. Thanks so much! ^_^
• Redmond, Oregon, which had an obelisk and also high winds cancelling the event I was playing! After I got there, just before my showtime. Everybody left. But a bunch of kids came out to play in the amphitheatre fountain, so I thought, “Y’know what? The amphitheatre isn’t leaving due to wind, and these kids aren’t either, so neither am I.” And I played a free gig for a big ol’ gaggle of children, who came up after and gave me their pennies, and I gave them stickers, and we all had a good time. Take that, wind!
• Nomming Mexican food in the Oregon high desert town of Burns, with Fred! Yay! Thanks, Fred! More people should go visit Fred in Burns. He’s an archeologist!
• Glass Butte, which pretty much just handed me obsidian. Glass Butte does not lie. Also, there are elk.
• Being ambushed by a river spirit. Or possibly wind. But I prefer the former.
• Government Camp Lift and Mt. Hood, with chipmunks.
• Through the remnants of Highway 99 in northern Oregon, along with a bunch of other old, twisty roads, the best kinds.

Where’m I now?

• Back in Kenmore, Washington, tired but happy, for SEKRIT MEETINGS (disclaimer: not actually sekrit) and a Juanita Bay gig at 5pm on Friday.

More on that tomorrow. Now, I sleep.

Well, I’m all packed and ready for Oregon. Shower tonight, drop overnight stuff in the bag, and off I go. If you’re in Oregon, near Bend, c’mon up to Redmond for my 1pm show on Monday the 12th! Centennial Amphitheatre, Centennial Park, Redmond. Sample musics at the top level of this site, like you’d expect.

This one’s different. Why is it different? Because this is far and away the farthest I’ve gone solely for a gig. I’ve played further away, sure, but I’ve had other business; this is just a gig trip. It’s my first overnight, it’s my first this far south, it’s a lot of little firsts like that which kind of add up, at least, in my head.

I’m not taking the laptop. Everything else in the world, yes; laptop, no. If you’re coming, awesome – I’ll see you in Redmond! If you’re not, wish me luck, and I’ll see you… when I see you.

I dropped the car off for long-overdue work in Bothell yesterday – I don’t drive much but I’m driving to this Oregon gig, and I tend to forget things like, idk, oil changes for six or eight or nine months – and on a whim decided I’d just walk home instead of catching the bus. It’s about five miles, but it was still morning and kind of pleasant. I sang a lot of way, got a good vocal workout.

On the way, I wandered by a pawn shop, went in on another whim, and it just happened to have a little battery powered combo amp for sale, used. I could kinda use one of these – a lot – because I’ve got two gigs later this summer which normally have power but currently don’t because of construction, so it was kind of switching from “gig” to “billed busking,” which has too much derp derp derp for my tastes, and I’ve wanted a solution. So I went home, did some research, came back today, and after some negotiations, it was also just barely affordable! I think it’ll double as a monitor for my main PA, too, which makes me extra happy. ^_^ It needs a little work (there’s some hiss on channel one that implies a needed capacitor swap, and since it’s made in China I need to examine all of them for capacitor plague) – but so far, it’s usable as-is!

So, hopefully, I just got lucky. Let’s hope that holds all the way through Oregon! ^_^

Well, that was fun! Gave out lots of cards, Anna sold CDs and sang along a couple of tracks, I talked to a lot of people – I got compliments on my voice, which is a new and awesome thing to be getting, and several people grabbed me after the show to say nice things, too. Thanks for having me, Inger and Tone! See you next year. ^_^

NEXT SHOW: July 12th, 2010: Centennial Park Amphitheatre in Redmond, Oregon; 1pm-2:45pm.