Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

I had another fun session with the jazzbos on Sunday. This time it was just a 4-piece group -- no singers and no sax player. It looks like the group may stabilize in this form, and it also looks like they may have decided that I'm not all that bad a bass player and can stick around. We played tunes in a number of different styles, from standards to guitar-hero fusion stuff. I even got to call a tune, and picked Goodbye Pork Pie Hat by Charles Mingus.

I purchased something very cool off the net this week. I had been thinking that I should scan my copies of the Real Book into the computer so that I could just call up charts whenever I wanted. Once I realized that this would be 1200-1500 pages of scanning, I got to thinking that -- if this was such a good idea -- someone must have done it already. I did some searching on eBay, and was soon in possession of what I'm calling the Big Fake CD. It contains the entire contents of TWELVE popular fake books, including all of the Real Books. If anyone is interested in a copy, let me know.

I've been totally depressed by this war. All wars are stupid and this one seems especially so. My heart aches for those kids over there for what they are having to go through. I believe that the real tragedy of war is not that young men (and women) have to die, but that they have to kill. How do you come back to a civilian life knowing that you killed someone, regardless of the reason? It must be incredibly painful and difficult for them.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday we were blessed with three days of beautiful Spring-almost-Summer weather, including that rarest of occurrences here in the Northwest: two perfectly clear weekend days! I took advantage of it on Saturday to mow all the grass for the first time this season. For those who don't know, "mowing the grass" is a fairly large endeavor at our place, and takes me about four hours on our riding mower, while June spends several hours edging with her DR trimmer.