It was a busy holiday weekend: I was pieced, burned and bruised - only one by choice... Friday I decided to get a new ear piercing, a loop on the upper edge on my right. July 4th seemed a good day for this, since it is in honor of my new mode of musical expression. A little tricky finding someone who was open, but I ended up at Chromatic Tattoo and Piercing in Medford. Jason did a good job, both in the work and in instructions to maintain it. I picked out a gold loop, with a hematite ball (always good to have some grounding when working with the unconscious!). So far I've been surprised at how little it has seemed to need any cleaning (though still doing it 2X/day per instructions). It's tender when I move it, but not nearly as much as I thought it might be. Strangely, no one has yet even noticed it - I'll have to point it out to Joann in a couple weeks, before our next hair appointments, so she won't "find out" by my telling the hairdresser to be careful cutting around there! Saturday Joann wanted to go to the New Bedford Summerfest Folk Festival. It was blazingly hot and sunny, so even though I had liberally applied SPF 48 sweatproof sunscreen, and reapplied during the day, I still got some burn on my face - I'm hoping my nose isn't going to peel... While some of the shows weren't really to my taste (e.g., "The Greatest Squeezebox Workshop Ever!"), I really enjoyed the "Hard Rocking' Folk" set. Joann had been interested in hearing the British band Little Johnny England, and I was impressed during this set with their violinist, Guy Fletcher. He had an acoustic with a Baggs pickup and a Line6 delay box, and was jamming energetically with everyone else on stage, even though he had not met the other performers before. It was interesting to see how he would try a few things while getting the hang of a song, then use a lot of the techniques Meredith has been teaching me about how to add to a song without overpowering the singer. I felt sort of bad for another of the performers - while she was rocking out on her own tunes, she did not know how to jam with her guitars on other folks', just occasionally add some harmony vocals. It's been so hot this week that it really got my 89-year-old father down. We've been wanting to get him a new air conditioner (the one he was using was acquired trash-picking, and what little cooling it might do was negated by his insistance on running it on the Fan setting). But after he tripped Saturday night trying to hit a foot switch for it, I decided we had to do better for him even if he screamed about it (he wanted the "perfectly good" 40-year-old one from his second floor brought down, though it was stuck in place and weighted ~100 lbs...). It was really difficult finding any units at this point in the heat wave, but fortunately Target still had some Sunday morning. So Joann and I sweated out for several hours installing a 6000 BTU with remote control in his living room plus a 5000 BTU in his sleeping area. The bruises, plus some back strain, came from carrying out the old unit, which must have been ~80 lbs. Hopefully he will not mess with the controls too much - we showed the neighbor who helped him Saturday night how the settings should be, and she'll check in a day or so that they are still right. I'm just glad I didn't have to sacrifice the new unit I recently installed in my music studio, which would have had to happen if we hadn't found the others...

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