Mark Hayward Is My Hero

I have been playing a lot of WeeWar lately.  It RULES.  You should try it.  But be warned that you might not want to do anything else for a few days… or weeks.  Also, if you click on the above link, I get points or something.  Whatever it is it has to be good because it’s related to WeeWar.

Today went well, but I’m glad it’s over. I’m TIRED.

Everyone should spend an afternoon swapping stories with a couple of cowboys in a barn. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I had a long break in between sets today, and I had already planned on spending it sitting on my butt backstage. It turned out that Bob Hamm: 7 time World and National Champion had some time to kill too, and he is a great story teller. I heard about shooting marbles, sticking up kids for their candy at Boy Scout Camp, shootin’ BB guns, and all kinds of other awesome childhood things today. This guy is a real character, and man can he spin a gun. Yesterday I spent some time hanging out with the lumberjacks, and I REALLY want to throw an axe now. I didn’t think they would want me throwing their axes, and besides, the target was right next to the petting zoo, and that would only lead to disaster.

I did finally manage to get my hands on an reasonably massive amount of chocolate today, so I felt good about that.

After the fair was finished I even got to hang out with some top and yo-yo pals. It was a good ending to the event.

Today I had four shows, and they were only 30 minutes apart. It was exhausting. At least it was a nice sunny day though, so there were lots of people around to watch.

Today’s high points:
– On the way in I saw a car with the liscense plate “BON JOV1” Awesome.
– Buying my SECOND 36 bar case of Limited Edition 100 Grand candy bars. Today I got the peanut case since I already had the one with the coconut bars in it.
– Eating two ears of delicious sweet corn while watching cowboys do rope and gun tricks.

Today’s low points:
– Having to talk over the sound of the speed boat races on the nearby lake.
– After all the work to correct it, the sound quality on the “Diamonds” stage was STILL terrible

If all goes well, tomorrow after the fair I will get to hang out with a couple of top-spinner/yo-yo friends. Then on Tuesday Vader and I will go off to Madison for a day to try to get some stuff ready for the move to Pittsburgh.

Today at ChocolateFest it rained. That was really the major aspect of my day. One of my shows got cancelled as a result, but mostly it just meant there were fewer people around. People were literally running from the park when the rain started. Not a good sign when you are trying to gather a crowd for a show.

In other news, I ate a whole bunch more chocolate today, so that was good.

I’m in Burlington WI today, and for the next three days performing at ChocolateFest. I met a guy from ChocolateFest at one of my gigs last year, and I actually tried really hard to get them to hire me… mostly because I had heard that there were mountains of free chocolate just lying around, waiting to be eaten. So far that has not proven to be the case. Admittedly, it’s only been one day, and while there was free chocolate for the performers, it did not come from a mountain as I was promised.

My first two shows had some mic trouble, but that was nothing when compared to the carousel trouble. It was brutal. Right across the walkway from the stage I was on was an incredibly loud carousel. They were playing the shrillest music I’ve ever heard, and it was as if they were piping it directly into my head. There were times when I could hear the carousel better than I could hear myself. Not ideal. After my show they turned it down bit, so maybe tomorrow will be better.

This is WAY harder than ever before, and it doesn’t help that we have a dog either… or that we have standards now.

In case you haven’t heard or figured it out, we’re moving to Pittsburgh.

I think we all know on some level that our country only functions because of trucks. Almost everything we buy, drive, eat, etc. comes to us on a truck, and yet they’re so common that we not only take them for granted… we don’t even see them anymore. I spend a lot of time on the road, and most of the time I don’t really notice the specifics of the trucks myself, but this week for some reason I was noticing all kinds of things being hauled around the Midwest. Here are just a few of the more interesting things I saw on my trip up to Minneapolis last weekend:

• An entire flatbed full of steel train wheels.
• Two GIANT McDonald’s Arches. So big that they had to lie them on their sides.
• I don’t know what they were hauling, but I saw the semi that has the Marines sword on the side. It’s the full length of the trailer, so it’s HUGE, and it says, “Earned. Never given.”
• Big steel tubes
• Massive rolls of metal sheet that are so heavy they can only put one or two on a flatbed trailer at a time.
• An entire locomotive frame. It was just the structure, the walkway around the outside (with railing), and the huge gas tanks underneath.
• Explosives. That’s right… an entire truck with specially built containers full of explosives.
• Russet potatoes, mmm….
• Tractors. They take the wheels off, and just stack ’em up. It’s really cool.
• Fire hydrants. I have to assume that they were being shipped up from the fire hydrant factory, ‘cuz it was a whole truck full of ’em. It was about 8-10 feet of pipe with a hydrant on the top of each one. They were stacked on their sides maybe 4 or 5 high.

I always wonder what is in all of the other trucks that have no markings on them. When I worked at REI I was often on truck-unloading duty. Our stuff only took up half the truck, and the stuff in the other half was always pretty cool. Once it was a tractor, once it was giant stacks of plastic storage bins, and once it was massive rolls of empty bags for frozen vegetables on their way to be filled. The veggie bags were actually the most impressive because they were so incredibly heavy. You wouldn’t think that plastic bags would be heavy, but they were in these big, tightly-wound rolls, and then stacked high on pallets. Everything that we ever got for our store could be easily moved by one person with a pallet jack. It took FIVE of us just to get the towers of veggie bags rolling after we got them off the ground on our pallet jack. It was crazy. I really thought that our buddy Trucker Dave was going to have a heart attack right there in our warehouse.

So truckers, keep it rolling, and thanks.