I got an email from Blogger today that indicated that I had some accounts that are set up to publish via FTP, and that Blogger is no longer going to support that.  I had forgotten completely about even having those accounts, so I logged in to check them out.

Turns out that one of them is my original stab at a DD69 blog.  Here’s a look back at the very first entry (from 2/19/2005, zoinks!):

It’s two-two-two days in one!

For some reason I generally don’t have the capacity to get out of bed early. Usually I know I’ve got to go out there and make some bucks to keep Hellpellet and I in beer and skittles, so I manage to get up with enough time to get cleaned up and out the door so I can make it to my latest money-earning location. I have these (possibly delusional) ideas about getting up extra-early so I can put in a half-hour at the gym before going to work, but they never seem to pan out.

However, I do manage to get up at ridiculous hours when I know I’ve got to be somewhere for real. Take this morning for example: I was up and at ’em before 5:30 AM because Skinny Moo, the funk cover band that I enjoy playing in so much, was slated to perform in Medina for a location broadcast which was part of the Fox 8 Cleveland morning show.

We’ve played in the studio on the morning show several times (always fun, with a neat combination of TV studio weirdness), and we figured this was just another opportunity to do something similar, except as part of one of those morning show segments from some event location. Today was the start of the Medina ice sculpture festival (umm, big deal in Medina, okay, cuz it’s fscking freezing) and we were going to perform in a bar/restaurant that we usually play once a month, which just so happened to be the location of the broadcast.

Well, things weren’t quite as they seemed when we planned to do the gig. Did I mention that I was up before 5:30?

It turns out that there was really no formal arrangement between the venue owner and the station as far as our performing was concerned. Generally, the news is scheduled down to the minute – so many minutes for this segment, commercials at 14 past the hour, a 69 second ‘bump’ into the next segment, rinse, repeat. So the prevailing wisdom of the guy who said, “sure, come on down, be on TV, it’ll be fun” seems to have been that if we were in the room with a PA system, certainly we’d get some airtime.

Well, the long and short of it was that we played to a room full of people who were there to see the local news celebrity, who is certainly a fun guy to watch, while he did his segments outside. During the segments, a talented fellow carved a big hunk of ice into a number of fishes, making me think of a kind of winter Jesus, but that’s another story entirely. We wound up getting to wave to the viewers for about a second, and then the show was done.

We wound up feeling like media whores, despite the fact that we were really just suckers. So, feeling like used scumbags, we packed up our gear, scarfed a pretty good breakfast (free food always tastes better) and headed back to Cleveland. Through a snowstorm. Nice.

I got back in time to do some work and earn some money for a few hours before I had to pick up my car from the garage where it was receiving a brand new tie rod. Hopefully that will keep the wheel from ripping off while I’m driving somewhere. After getting a ride out there and bringing the car back, I had enough time to grab a bite and get cleaned up before our show tonight.

We played a corporate function at a local Marriot hotel. We’ve played for the same group for a few years, nice folks, some interesting ‘dancers’. One guy crawled around on the dance floor on his hands and knees. Talk about funky. By the end of the night we were all pretty slaphappy since none of us had really gotten any sleep, and we kept inserting comical lyrics about dojos and senseis into every song. That’s a long story precipitated by our weekend in Pittsburgh with Uncle Crappy and the Wife, during which we met a funny cab driver – but that’s yet another goofy story I’ll get to later.

So now I feel like I’ve packed two days into the space where one would normally have been. And of course it’s 2:30 in the morning and I’m not tired. Jeez. That’s the secret life of double-d-6-9 all right.