Oh the silence around this blog has been deafening lately.  Though it’s easy to say I’ve neglected my duties, that’s pretty inaccurate since I don’t technically have any “duties” to take care of on my site.  The easiest promise to live up to is one you don’t make, so I’ve happily made no promise to update at regular time intervals.  But it’s true that long stretches between posts doesn’t do much for my blogging cred, though I still subscribe to the “quality over quantity” school of thought.  Or anything over quantity, really.

Spring has turned to summer, and the mercury has steadily risen.  What have I been up to?  Everything and nothing at the same time it would seem.  I’ve had vast stretches of off time that were used for extensive relaxing in addition to countless menial tasks meant to get my life in order and accomplish personal goals.  When Shaimus lost a guitarist this past spring (though we are making our triumphant return to the stage on August 4th at the Troubadour), I came upon even more unexpected free time than I had even planned on, and one task I’ve taken to has been laying down some music that I’ve been meaning to record for ages.  More on that in a (near) future post.

Some things over the past few months have gone oh so well.  Others have gone oh so poorly.  Such is life, so “they” say.  Although I wouldn’t mind life strictly going well for at least a little while.  A few months here and there, maybe?  I suppose I could be asking too much.  I think a recent story sums up my life as of late quite well.  Perhaps it does the same for yours:

Five years ago, I was at a party for student employees at Berklee College of Music, where I worked in the Media Development office.  They had a raffle with gift certificates to Newbury Comics, a popular local music/comic/pop culture store.  The biggest one was worth $100, and by a rare stroke of luck I happened to win it.  For a college student, a hundred bucks seemed like a pile of gold bricks, so I set it aside and plotted what CDs and DVDs I would add to my collection.  A few days later, it was gone.  Whether I had misplaced it, unintentionally thrown it away, or was the victim of theft I had no idea.  But there was no trace of it.  I silently cried on the inside.  Then I moved on with my life.

Flash forward to May 2009.  Hank Woods, my former roommate/one of my best friends/guitarist of the Mike Lombardi-fronted rock band Apache Stone, calls me one sunny afternoon. While this sort of occurrence is not out of the blue, what he asked me about was.  “I seem to recall about five years ago you lost a Newbury Comics gift certificate,” he said.  Turns out, while discussing the finer points of the music business with a friend, Hank had pulled out a book that he hadn’t opened since college.  What should fall onto the street but my old prize.  What are the odds?  And conveniently, just days later he was headed from New York City to Los Angeles and would be able to hand it directly to me.  I also discovered that Newbury Comics, a local Boston company, happened to have a website that I could order from.

What a rollercoaster of luck I was on–win $100.  Lose it without a trace in Boston, MA.  Have it found five years later in New York and returned to me on the West Coast.  Then to top the story off, after browsing the Newbury Comics site for an hour and figuring out what I would be getting, I went to check out only to find that you can’t use their gift certificates online.

Chalk that last one up to life, but I’ll have the last laugh anyway.  Just might take a little more than five more years.