Tonight at 9pm:
* I’ll be on XM Radio’s XMU Radar Report (Channel 43)
* FameCast.com will be announcing the Round 1 winners, moving into Round 2, and if I read it right then I’ll be one of those Top 50
* and our puffer fish will most likely still be playing like a puppy in the aquarium bubbles – up and down and up and down and up and down…

MySpace emails today from:
* a new fan wanting the lyrics to Stolen
* a band in Winnipeg wanting to open up for my show there in a couple weeks
* and XM Radio letting me know that I’m going to be featured on the RADAR REPORT tomorrow night!!

The Radar Report is a feature for unsigned artists, and I’ll be one of 13 played on tomorrow night’s show. I submitted my CD to them months ago and never heard anything but hell, I guess they didn’t have to tell me until now. At least I remembered to check my MySpace email for once…

So that’s frickin’ awesome. Steps forward, people, steps forward!

And it’s a damn good thing I got some great news today, I’ve gotta tell ya. I’m watching Magnolia right now. I was already feeling pretty low today, having had a rough morning (drinking on a Tuesday night is bad) and trying to psych myself up to pull the dead guppies out of the tank. I cancelled a mixing session this morning ’cause I just wasn’t up to it. You know how that goes.

So HELL YEAH for XM Radio, for brightening up my day!

12:00pm – America’s Cutest Puppies
12:30pm – America’s Cutest Puppies
1:00pm – America’s Cutest Puppies
1:30pm – America’s Cutest Puppies
2:00pm – America’s Cutest Puppies
2:30pm – America’s Cutest Puppies
3:00pm – America’s Cutest Puppies…

Way too tired to say anything interesting tonight…one show left this week and then I go home for a few days! For now, this is what’s keeping me entertained until I pass out…

messing with the bees

people with WAY too much time on their hands

kids with guns

anime in still life

and for all you arachnophobes…

More pics from the Beloit College Folk & Blues Fest, courtesy of my friend and fan Sam. Thank you!!

I’m back in Chi-town for just a few hours right now, watching Polydream’s acoustic incarnation at Uncommon Ground. Tonight is night 2 of my Uncommon Ground residency, and I have to admit, I’m frickin’ exhausted. No seriously. Caffeine has ceased to have an effect on me, while warm and cozy hotel beds are starting to feel like absolute heaven. Oh dear.

On the down side…I’m not staying here at home tonight. I’ve got a show in West Bend tomorrow, so my brief trip home will have to be enough until Saturday when I get to come back for a week.

Last night I played at Carroll College, and had an absolutely fantastic time. I love playing there, and a bunch of my friends made it out. I also got to meet Greg, one of the DJs on Carroll College’s radio station, WCCX, who was absolutely a blast to hang out with. Looking forward to playing there again, maybe next semester?

On a different note – yesterday was September 11. I’m not going to preach, and I’m not going to ramble about any personal connections I do or don’t have to what happened there. But I do know that there are people who forgot yesterday. I do know that there was someone in charge of raising the flag who left it at full mast, forgetting that it was a day to lower the flag to half. And that makes me more sad than anything else.

I, it seems, am a natural blonde. Years of experience have done little to deny this fact, but this morning, I proved my blondeness thoroughly. After a late night last night in the bed and breakfast in De Pere, I needed to be up and on the road by 6am to get to La Crosse in time for my show at Western Tech. Amazingly enough (my inability to respond to alarm clocks of any kind is legendary), I was heading south by 6:30, with gas in the tank, air in the tires, and my eyes peeled for the nearest Starbucks.

Sometime around 7:15, I reached for my cell phone, and realized that it was not in my purse. Nor was it in my bag, or the passenger seat, or my pockets. It was not in the KIA. It was, I suddenly knew with absolute certainty, lying on the bed in my hotel room in De Pere. 45 minutes behind me.

Argh.

If any Green Bay area police read this blog, I just want to say thank you for letting me fly by without chasing me down and ticketing me. I’m pretty sure I deserved some major ticketing for my rocket trip back up and down the 41. And somehow, despite my absolute fuck-up with the phone (which was right where I’d left it, of course), the rain, and the semis I couldn’t pass on the county roads I took to cross the state, I made it to Western Tech late for my sound check, but in plenty of time for the gig. The folks at Western Tech were great, by the way. Here are a couple of pics, courtesy of Ross LaRocco:

At the moment, I’m sitting in my room in La Crosse enjoying room service pesto pizza and watching Le Divorce on the Oxygen network. Things I don’t do when I’m at home – I’m pretty sure if either of the boys came home to find their TV set to Oxygen, they’d ban me from the remote and perform some kind of masculine cleansing ritual on the TiVo.

The hotel room, by the way, is ridiculous. In a good way. My first room wasn’t getting internet service for some reason, and I’d planned to spend the entire evening working. After over 2 hours back and forth between the front desk and phone calls to my tech-savvy boyfriend, the hotel finally just moved me downstairs closer to the lobby. And into a king suite. I’m sitting, at the moment, on the floor of the study, which has its own couch, desk, leather chair, TV, and guest chairs. From there I can walk into either the bathroom (with its beautiful massaging shower head), or through the kitchen (not kidding – I’ve got my own full set of dishes and silverware) into the bedroom with a California king bed, another TV, and a couch.

This place is bigger than my first apartment in LA. I kind of wish I knew people in La Crosse so I could throw a party or something…

Okay, a new movie just started on TBS (Spiderman just ended) and the first name I see in the opening credits is Samantha Mumba? What the crap?

I’m in De Pere, WI, all curled up in a cushy room in a bed and breakfast across the river from St Norbert College, where I played earlier this afternoon. The show wasn’t half bad, a little quiet but then a Packer game had just ended and, here in Packer country, the world stops when football is happening. I personally haven’t been much of a Packer fan since Mark Chmura proved himself to be a far cry from the family man he pretended to be. Nice tight end though…

Anyhoo, I finished up the show and then did a quick and highly caffeinated interview with Matt Konop for WSNC before weaving my way through all the construction to the hotel. It’s finally feeling a bit like fall, especially a bit farther north, so I took advantage of the last few bits of sunlight and ran a few miles along the river, listening to the loons calling and peeking up into the big expensive houses on top of the hill. It’s been a while since I had any outdoor time to myself – I’m alone a lot, driving and whatnot, but rarely get the chance to just listen to nature and breathe a bit. I should do it more often.

This is the crazy week for shows, with 1 or 2 every day and at least 3 hours a day in the car, criss-crossing the state and hoping my road-weary tires don’t fall apart before I have time to buy new ones.

Friday I played at Beloit College’s annual Folk & Blues Festival, which was a blast. There were supposed to be 3 bands, but one couldn’t make it so I stuck around and played an extra half hour. The mosquitoes were thrilled with my extended stay – I look like I’ve got chicken pox.

I’ll be updating from the road as I go, and hopefully keeping up with progress on my CD as well. Right now, I think I’m going to head outside for one more breath of fresh night air, then hit the hay for a good 5 hour nap before heading out to La Crosse.

Tonight was the kickoff for my fall college tour. I confess, it took me a bit to get psyched up for it, having spent the past month waking up whenever I wanted and spending all day on my couch with movies on while I worked (or at Panera – I’ve got a thing for their mango smoothies). I planned on heading out of Chicago early this morning, swinging up to my parents’ place in Milwaukee and getting some more work done there before driving to Lakewood College in Plymouth, WI, for my first show.

And then I looked in the aquarium in the bedroom, said hi to the tetras and…saw no mollies. We just started the tank 3 weeks ago, and I’ve become pretty attached to the fishes. We lost a gourami right away but the rest were doing great. Until a few days ago when a pregnant molly died, and today, three more followed suit.

This was the first time I’ve ever had to handle, uh, disposing of deceased pets. I didn’t cry (give me a little credit!) but I confess to being pretty shell-shocked for a bit. One minute they’re great, the next they’re wedged upside down under the air filter. Bah.

In memoriam…

So I got a late start. But the rowdy crowd at the Pub at Lakewood tonight made up for it. Aaron, I’m sorry I couldn’t stay for a Guitar Hero showdown but I promise that next time I’m in town, I’ll kick your ass up and down the cornfields. Mark and Talia, thanks for putting together a great show! And to everyone who sang along during “The Gambler” – you rock. I promise I’ll learn “Wonderwall” for next time.

But not “Freebird.” A girl’s got limits.

In other news:

To all my friends who bought the iPhone right away and called to brag, I humbly say in my best Nelson impersonation, “HA HA!”

Here’s a little suggestion on how to enjoy the obnoxious summer city heat we’ve been getting lately.

Courtesy of Joel Johnson viaBoingBoing.net:
“Of course, not all children man (sic) be as happy as this one to wake to a yawning metal blossom beaming light right into their soul, but if you can’t traumatize a child at least once a day, what’s the point of having them?”

The great and powerful Oz – er, Stephen Hawking – is infiltrating the children’s section. I’m buying this for my nephews.
(P.S. Did anyone else know that he wrote A Briefer History of Time?)

And this guy – well this guy’s just stupidly cute. I want one.

Welcome to my blog!

I used to have one of these, but it was more of an online diary where I spilled my collegiate angst out for everyone to see. This is going to be much more fun.

I’m getting ready to head out on my first solo college tour. It starts this week, Thursday, and I’ll be keeping track of things as I go. I promise there will be more interesting stories than “Today I drove for 9 hours and listened to an obscene amount of Talk of the Nation.”

For now, enjoy a little Flight of the Conchords meets Lord of the Rings.