United Flight 536 Chicago - Charlotte 7:30 PM 2/20/2 The night before last I went to bed at 6:30 AM after staying up all night playing music and talking with good friends in Vancouver, B.C. This morning I got up at 4:30 AM to get to the airport on time to catch my first of three flights home. Reminds me of the Monty Python skit where the old guys are trying to outdo each other on how bad their childhoods were... "My whole family, all seventeen of us, lived in a paper bag at the bottom of a lake. Father used to wake us up every morning at four, two hours BEFORE we went to bed...." Ah, sleep deprivation is a powerful thing. I'm returning from the North American Folk Alliance convention, which is held in Canada every five years or so. It's sort of a Folk Music industry convention, if that's not too oxymoronic to fit in your head. Part folk family reunion, part music festival, part trade show. Mainly I go to see good friends and play and hear a bunch of music. It's "folk" defined quite broadly, everything from Andean pipes to Pete Seeger to what I heard some refer to as "thrash folk." Broadly defined is just the way I like it, and it was great fun. I played six showcases, including one sponsored by Taylor Guitars and one for the folks from the Kerrville Folk Festival. It was great to get to know them better, and there were some good business things that happened. Mainly, though, there was good music. And on the last night, we ended up putting down the guitars and six friends, some old and some new, sat up and talked for hours, sharing excellent wine brought from California by my winemaker friend Jeff, and much laughter, and even some tears. Sunday afternoon and Monday I took some free time and wandered off to explore. My buddy Rachel from Austin and I went to walk around in a park north of town, then went over to have dinner with more buddies. Monday I headed to Lighthouse Park with a new friend I made at the conference. We both had the day to kill, and were both needing an introvert fix after the whirlwind of Schmoozapalooza - I mean Folk Alliance - so we wandered along the rocky coast and the redwoods for the day. Saw Eagles and everything. Pretty, huh? Now I'm riding in my own big metal Eagle, after having a quick visit with my buddy Barb during my layover in Chicago. Mighty nice of her to come out and kill that time with me. Now I'm headed home for five days, then off to do some shows with my friends John Smith and Chris Rosser. We're doing a string of dates between Asheville and Boston and will be playing "in the round." All three of us will be on stage trading out songs as though we were in a living room, and we may sit in with each other occasionally. Should be a ton of fun. If you're anywhere near the route, we'll hope to see you at a show. I promise these guys will be worth it. I honestly can't imagine anyone liking my music and not liking theirs. We're almost ready to move into the new office, which I bought and had moved to my house a week ago. It's a cool little building that should have just enough room for work space for Kathy, Jason and me. Hauling it through town on the back of a tow-truck was something to see. We even had a police escort... It's pretty amazing to me to need to buy office space because my 'staff' needs it. Kathy's working full time, and Jason's working twenty hours a week, and they both have more to do than they can get to. Things really are going well, and I'm glad we're all working for you. There has been cool traffic on the discussion group lately, and Ben Senn, the host of it, has even been passing around some CD bootlegs of a showcase I did in Sydney Australia in the Fall. If you want to check all that out, you can look into it at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheDryad. You can actually read the archives of postings without even joining, if you like. There are some great things sitting on the horizon. Looks like I may get to head back to Europe in the early Fall and head to New Zealand again in January. Keep your fingers crossed, eh? (pick up those 'eh's pretty quickly in Canada...). We've begun our final descent, so I guess I need to shut down the laptop. Keep in touch, and cool runnings, David