This snowy season in the capital region has created some intense road conditions. The beautiful scenery comes at a price: more accidents. I’ve been lucky enough to avoid anything serious on that front: nothing but a mere fender bender resulting in a pulverized bumper. I’ve been getting footage of traffic misadventures as well as scenery of the Adirondacks and have encouraged the whole team to do the same. Skiing and snow-shoeing expeditions have been running steady, and the footage has been pouring in. Please submit your video recording below.
I had a hell of a time this year. I once again recycled my silver dress into yet another outfit. I wanted to approach ’space cowboy’ and purchased $10.00 worth of guns from the dollar store. Caitlin hooked a brother up and spray painted them silver. She also did my straw ‘Renegade’ hat and the ensemble looked something like this:
Restys played two shows - one at the Bread and Jam in Cohoes, and the other one at 51 3rd Street. Dirty Jeans Jenkins opened for us at the Bread & Jam, and at 51 3rd we opened for Hatchet for the Holidays. Unfortunately the only recording of our set was done in Cohoes by Caitlin. She recorded a snipped of 16 Tons:
Cameron did a heck of a job as ‘Rich Man’ - the women couldn’t keep their hands off’im:
Even though this guitar was a huge part of my adolescence, I don’t play it anymore. It was a gift from my mom so … is it wrong to sell it? It’s quite cool - and not because of the custom knobs (these are orange, and by default they are smaller and white). The guitar has been augmented with a mini hum-bucking pickup in the bridge position. This is essentially a pickup with two electromagnetic coils that have inverse polarity to each other and thus cancel out interference hum. The sound of hum-buckers is usually thicker, and its a nice boost to the thin sounding bridge position pickup. I would never dream of putting this in the neck position - thats the most ’strat’ sounding position there is. But the bridge pickup is all thin sounding and crappy, so I experimented. If you desperately need that single coil sound in the bridge you can always ‘cut’ the pickup in half but pulling up on the tone knob (also custom) and this will turn off one of the coils in the hum-bucker.
I forgot to blog about this atrocious experience. After hanging out at Fritz and Allison’s house for a few hours, we were leaving the way we came - through the front door. Before walking down the steps though, I spotted a nifty wooden chair to the left of me on the porch that I promptly tried out. When Caitlin came out, I stood up and was ready to walk down the steps when she grabbed me. Right where I was about to put my face was a giant spider web - strung up while we were inside. In the center of it was a gigantic yellow monster. As I realized what I almost did, I exhaled and my breath hit the spider. It clenched its legs - tightening the whole web, and sent a shiver down my spine:
To make it more immediately hot, I replaced some of the rooster sauce with freshly ground black pepper. I added a tiny bit of toasted sesame seed oil to give it a bit of a kick. I was out of worcestershire sauce unfortunately but the results were excellent - this is probably the recipe I’ll stick with.
Ingredients:
2 lb Beef
1.25 Cups of Soy Sauce
1 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 Table spoons liquid smoke
2 Table spoons sriracha rooster red pepper sauce
2 Table spoons freshly ground black pepper.
2 table spoons of Brown Sugar
It was very fun to eat jerky and watch the election results get tallied, all while practicing Restys tunes.
Last time I saw Dr. Squakers, maybe a month ago, he was flying at my head beak and talons out - shrieking. He was having parrot angst. But this time, he was all feathers: I learned the trick of holding him belly up. Morgana showed us the way to make him feel vulnerable and thus more docile. Whenever he righted himself he would rush to my shoulder and clean his feet incessantly. He would try to bite any finger that came close and got mine feeling like it was squeezed by a pair of pliers. Overall - much nicer this time - I guess he was behaving for Morgana’s birthday. The gnocchi Matt made were delicious too - in ragu. Squakers said “good-bye” a lot when we went.
I mean, the other month he ODed on Calcium and got all dizzy. Who else do you know thats on the front line of food additive experimentation? Thats right, no one. Here he is suckin down ginseng through a straw:
