Bike Camping

I had about two weeks off between tours, and I took advantage of some unseasonably warm weather to go camping, via bicycle.  I went from my parents' place outside of Marysville OH, to the Delaware State Park, just under 20 miles away.  I was surrounded by RVs, but the trip was more to test out some gear than it was to really go camping so I didn't care.
Here are some pictures:

The ride out was fantastic, perfect weather, not a cloud in sight on the first day.
I set up camp, did some reading and snacked on a few pistachios.  I was cheating a little bit, because my parents were going to meet me there for a dinner of hot dogs cooked over the campfire, so I didn't need to carry anything other than snacks and water.
The next morning, I woke around eight, and peeked out from my tent because it seemed much windier than the day before.  I saw some big puffy clouds in a disconcerting shade of gray off towards home, and the wind was blowing them my way.  I packed up quickly because although I had a rain jacket, and it was only a 20 mile trip in the first place, I didn't really want to ride home in the rain.
Making it out of the park was great, then I dodged a few cars on about a 20 yard stretch of US-23 to get back to nice country roads.  As soon as I turned west off of the highway, the aforementioned wind that was blowing the weather my way made its presence felt.  I'd be heading right into it for about half of the trip, and the half that wasn't windy was only sheltered by the hills I'd be climbing.
I'm pretty out of shape, and had never ridden a loaded bike before the first day of my trip, but I just downshifted and got into the drops to avoid some of the wind for the first quarter of the trip.
I made it, pretty tired, but I beat the rain about 30 minutes or so.

Now... I'm back on the road, in a bus, and here's the obligatory PA shot:

18 in the mains, 8 J-subs, and 8 J12s on the side.  The sidefills are hysterical, and I don't have to deal with them, and that's ok in my book.

Packing! (And losing all of the extra shit)

Months ago, I read a short article on Carryology called Inception Packing, in which Carryology contributor JamesJeffrey briefly describes his bags within bags approach to packing, so that he can easily switch between bags day to day depending upon his needs.  Some months after that, but still months ago from the current date, I was in Reno, at some dumpy airport motel and I discovered that there was an REI less than two miles away.  I was thinking about purchasing a rain jacket, because not having one would surely mean that I would at some point soon be caught in a rainstorm, and a co-worker highly recommended the Marmot PreCip, so I figured that I would wander over to REI and check one out.
This co-worker also had a small mesh stuff sack that his jacket lived in, so I thought that I might as well copy that too, and bought a package of three mesh stuff sacks, and used the smallest for the rain jacket.

Of course, this meant that I had two mesh stuff sacks left over, so I decided that I could further organize my gear by using one of them for socks, and one for underwear.  This cleared up a ton of clutter from my suitcase, but upon discovering the Eagle Creek Packing Cubes and remembering "Inception Packing," I decided that I could be even more organized and use space more efficiently, because I had at the same time decided that my large suitcase was simply too much, and would like to downsize, not necessarily to something that could be carried onto a plane, but smaller than the ridiculous complete-wardrobe-and-the-kitchen-sink suitcase that I am currently using.  I couldn't fill the entire thing, even for my two month summer tour.    I was also reading a lot about bicycle touring and backpacking at the time, and generally felt that after trying to move cross country in a small SUV and travelling all summer, I needed to minimize my personal possessions both at home and on the road.

I haven't been at home enough to act on the minimizing the extraneous BS that I currently own and don't need, and I'm not home right now, but later this week I intend to go through a large portion of the stuff that I carried back with me from Colorado when I moved this June, and acquire four large rubbermaid type plastic tubs.  The plan is to have three tubs for hobbies.  and one tub for out of season/extra clothing, and own basically nothing else, except for a TV and a small bookshelf that my grandfather built.  Still a lot of stuff, but that will also mean that I've cut down a lot of junk that I don't use.

What I have been able to act on, is the efficient packing.  I'm on a short trip right now, and this is what I brought with me:

I have full size Packing Cube with three T-Shirts, 4 pairs of underwear, and 4 pairs of socks, a pair of pants, a half-cube with a hard drive, some toiletries, a mouse, and various electronics cables, a Marmot PreCip rain jacket in a stuff sack, a generic REI stuff sack for dirty laundry, ye olde Macbook in a sleeve, a Kindle in a sleeve, and an REI "Travel Documents Case" with some cash and some "travel documents."

I obviously wore a set of clothes and a fleece pullover on the plane.  But, everything pictured here fit in my Mission Workshop "Vandal" backpack, in it's non-expanded 29 Liter size.

I was able to quite easily fit both packing cubes and the loose pants in the large rolltop pocket, with the Macbook going into the next largest pocket, and the various other small items going into the smallest of the horizontally zippered pockets.

I've had this backpack for a little over a year now, and it is a great pack.  It has its quirks, but I actually think it's a better pack to have in an airport than my Seagull backpack because it has more easily accessible exterior pockets. It's probably a little too tall for use as an everyday carry bag for someone of my height, and ironically, it is my least favorite bag for bicycling because of that height.  It's probably the most comfortable pack that I own for travel, and if I really needed to, I could open up the middle expansion section and probably live for a week out of this bag.

Back at it!

I'm in Stamford Connecticut, and boy am I glad to be on the ground.  I normally don't mind flying, but there was a bit of rough air coming into the Westchester County Airport.  The next month(ish) I'll be on the road, first with a legendary, and I really mean legendary soul/funk/r&b/disco/insane group that puts on a fantastic show, and then immediately following that short run, I'll be headed to the west coast for two weeks of shows with a more contemporary band that's playing some arenas in the U.S. before heading abroad.  I'm only with them for the two weeks in the states, unfortunately.
Pictures of things like PA systems and backpacks will surely pop up soon.

One week left!

Although the tour started a bit rocky for me due to some personal issues that arose immediately prior to the onset, I've had a great time. But... I'm ready for this one to end.  I got a call yesterday from the office letting me know about two shorter gigs this fall, that will keep me busy from the 3rd week of September through about the second week of October, so I'll have a few weeks off once I get back to the family's place in Ohio this Thursday.

I'm headed to Chicago this weekend to see my cousin Sarah get married.  I'm glad that I can make it, because I've missed two other cousins' weddings since I've been touring, and it'll be a good chance to catch up with family that I haven't seen in a few years.  I also like wearing ties.

Red Rocks!

Last week we played Red Rocks, and it was fantastic.

You can see the +15° angle that we had on the mains in this picture:

That was just about the maximum up angle we could get with the splay that we had too.  It was very much a banana day, with almost half of the boxes at 7°.  By the time we got to our angle, there wasn't much weight left on the upstage motor at all.

It was a cool place, but it's definitely a hassle of a place to get into and back out from compared to a normal shed.  However, generally good hands that were very willing to work made it fairly stress free.

Unbelievable.

A friend on Facebook posted this link to a composite of images from Curiousity.  You can scroll around 360° and look at the Martian landscape, down at parts of the rover, and up at the sky.  I thought, "wow, this is pretty cool," until I reached this point...

...and then I just stopped, totally awestruck by the sun.  This has to be the first photograph that I've ever seen of the sun from the surface of another object in our solar system.  If I've seen one before now, then I either don't remember it, or I didn't really understand what I was seeing at the time.

Fuck politics, fuck the Republican Party, fuck the Democrats.  Fuck the Olympics, fuck Chick-fil-A, fuck the wars on terror and drugs, fuck everything in the world that distracts us from the fact that for a fraction of a fraction of our ridiculously wasteful national budget, we shot a rocket off into space on a specific trajectory, precise enough to meet up with another planet tens of millions of kilometers away, parachuted a robot filled with delicate scientific equipment onto the surface of that planet, and then started taking pictures and samples.  That's fucking amazing.  We did all of that, and compared to a lot of other developed countries, we have really really really shitty education in the kinds of sciences that enable us to do things like that, and we are barely willing to fund these types of scientific endeavors.

I'm in Indianapolis right now, and the downtown area is absolutely beautiful, but there are more homeless people per city block than I can remember seeing in any other city I've been to.  We can spend billions and billions of dollars blowing up poor people on the other side of the planet, and then spend billions and billions of dollars on political campaigns making different flavors of centrist bullshit taste palatable, but it's a huge fucking struggle to get that robot onto mars, and we've got homeless people living on the streets of an otherwise very prosperous looking downtown commercial district of a major city.

Where are our priorities?  They're certainly not on the types of things that are going to make our country and our world a better place to live a few generations down the road.

I have faith.

Chick-fil-A, my favorite fast food chain, has been on my mind lately.
This is not my blog about politics, but I'm about to get a little bit political, and then bring it back to something that I feel is quite non-partisan.

I'm currently of the mindset that as a straight man, but an ally of the LGBTQWTFBBQ community, that I shouldn't eat at Chick-fil-A because the owner of the company made donations to political groups hellbent on denying members of the aforementioned community of many acronyms and orientations from what many feel is their right to marriage.

This makes me sad, because there's nothing I love more between two buns than a slab of fried chicken and a pickle, but also because I'm not really sure if people are outraged because of the donations, or because the moron made the faux pas of publicly admitting that he made those donations.  It's no secret that private and corporate money from all sorts of companies that we socially conscious young left-wing types deal with on a daily basis goes to political groups lobbying against all sorts of things that we care, or claim to care about.  Typically, unlike in the case of this chicken fiasco, oil executives don't come out and talk in front of microphones and cameras about how they're lobbying for the rights to keep using their phallus/drill to have their way with the Earth in the name of quick money and "cheap" energy, but we know that they're doing it.

Keep the skeletons in the closet, and we can ignore them.  Maybe Americans today are very shallow politically, but that's not actually the thing about the Chicken Fiasco of 2012 that interests me.
I had a conversation on Facebook with a few friends, in which I stated that attacking Chick-fil-A publicly and aggressively might not be the best option in this situation, because the political views that led Chick-fil-A to make these donations was based on faith, and attacking someone's faith is the surest way to end a constructive conversation.

If I were to say that people who oppose gay marriage based on Christianity are wrong because Christianity is not true, THE REST OF THE CONVERSATION WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE TO READ BECAUSE IT WOULD BE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS AND CONTAIN INNUMERABLE MISPELINGS AND EXCALMASHUN POINTS!!!!11!1one

Attacking someone's faith is never helpful.

That thought is what has been on my mind for the last few weeks.  How do we have a reasoned conversation about something that is ultimately a human rights issue, with people opposed to it because their faith tells them that it is immoral, a sin, and an abomination for a homosexual couple to exist, let alone get married?

My gut reaction is to say that we simply don't, but that is wrong, and it reveals that I, the socially conscious young left-wing type am just as ignorant and bigoted as the bible thumping evangelical preacher.  This is a conversation that we as a society need to have, but we have been maneuvered into a position where it just doesn't seem like there can be a reasoned debate, because one side has God backing them up, and the other side's main argument is essentially that God is stupid.

I think that we, the young socially conscious left-wing types, need to take a step back and examine ourselves.  We too have faith, and that makes us a lot more like the people that we perceive as our foes than will make many of us comfortable.
I'm not saying that I have some sort of religious faith, or that we as a whole have a religious faith, although there are many religious people in this country that do support gay marriage, and can be considered socially conscious left-wing types, but we all have our own set of personal morals and ideas that we use to define ourselves and how we interact with the world around us.

I believe in science, and the harm principle.  If you attack science and the scientific method, I'll become defensive about it, because I have internalized my understanding of science and use it to interpret the things that I see in the world around me.  I will not stab you, because the harm principle clearly tells me that stabbing you is immoral because I would be harming you, and I would certainly not want to be stabbed myself.  And that is no different than a religious person getting prickly about an attack on his or her faith.

I clearly believe that my scientific knowledge and secular philosophy is superior to religious faith as a basis for one's morality, but because I understand the way in which I'm using my faith in science and my philosophy to interpret the world, I can understand why we now have people crowding into Chick-fil-A restaurants to show their support for the chain.  Christians as a whole were told that their morality is faulty because they don't want to extend the rights and responsibilities of marriage to couples that don't fit into the heterosexual mold, while they've been told their entire lives by church leaders that homosexuality is sinful.  If Panera came out in opposition to teaching intelligent design in public schools, you'd find me eating a lot of bagels and french onion soup, and you'd find a lot of Christians standing outside with signs, or boycotting the restaurant.

My long, meandering point is this; we all have a lot more in common than we think.  And this absurd debate about gay marriage based on secular vs. religious definitions of morality is never going to progress in either direction if we keep standing apart from each other waving signs and shouting slogans rather than extending our hands, and trying to build more inclusive communities based on an understanding of our differences.  And that message applies to every political issue we currently face, not just the struggle for marriage equality.
Keep fighting the good fight, but embrace compromise, and steady incremental progress.

Loooooooong drive to the next venue.  We're breaking it up into two nights on the bus, so that brings me here:

Tallahassee.

I found a Little Debbie trailer, which is sad, because if it was a Hostess trailer there might have been Twinkies.

Stage Right PA

I'm not a photographer!

CLE -> MDW -> STL

After a car trip from the family's place, and two flights, I'm at a hotel in St. Louis, and I'm damn hungry.  Food is on the way, so all hope is not lost.

I'm on the summer shed tour of a rock band with a big following for their live shows.  I'm flying PA on this tour, and I'm pretty excited about that, because it's a bigger main array of J Series than the last tour I did, which was the first tour I'd done with this company, I'll have subs in the air, and we're flying some D&B V8s and V12s as a side hang.  I've never flown the Vs, so that should be exciting.

Before I worked with this company, I worked for one of America's longest running family shows.  A circus that travels by train, and plays arenas.  The PA at the circus was all Meyer CQ-1s and 2s, 600HP subs, and MSL-4s as long throw "delays."  That rig is all about coverage not power, so there would be clusters mounted to the lighting/act rigging truss made up of a CQ as a downfill, a CQ as a Main, a sub, and an MSL-4 as a long throw cabinet, so really the line array thing is actually pretty new to me.  When I was in school, I worked with some of the little JBL stuff, the VRX series, but that stuff is tiny and there's no way to set any sort of angles, so the splay you get with the boxes smashed together is exactly what you get.

Last month, the first tour that I did with this company, was a big learning experience for me because of that fact.  The guys in the shop can show you how to fly something, but you're just not going to learn as much about it as you will when you're out there actually doing the work every day.  My main gig on that tour was actually not flying PA, I was miking an orchestra every day, but I still jumped into that situation wanting to get some real experience flying Js before I came out here, and the FOH tech on that tour was very thorough in explaining to me the way he does things, and I learned way more than I can accurately quantify about the way this company does things, and how to safely fly not only Js, but Q Series stuff as well.

/Starter Pistol

Awkward overshare of a blog introduction...

At least, that's what this was until I ripped it to pieces for being so embarrassing.

Professionally, I'm an audio technician.  I've toured with one of America's longest running family shows, and with a variety of contemporary rock, pop and now hip-hop acts.  No, I won't say which company I work for, and no, I won't name any names of people that I've toured with because that's a great way to say something stupid and get in trouble for it when someone looks up the wrong thing on Google.

I also like playing games, and riding bicycles.  The games have been a lifelong thing, but there was, as is common for a lot of adults into bicycles, a bit of a gap between childhood, and when I became interested in bikes again in college.  I'm not in very good shape, but that's a bit of the motivation for the bicycle interest.  Here's a healthy hobby with cool gadgets that I can use to live a less sedentary lifestyle  at home.