'Tis the season... to get gigs

This is cause for celebration! Patrick wasn't kidding. With the advent of late fall heading into winter, the gigs have really started coming in. Can I just say that I love how he gets paid for this?! It's fabulous. Along with a number of other ones, he just got a gig playing with the Seattle Symphony for a show at the Paramount. The group they're performing with is called Pink Martini. Here is a poster:

Damn right it'll be "very special." They're getting my husband to play with them!

I think they might be French. At any rate, they sometimes perform in French. ...I just looked it up and they are not French. At least one of them is from Oregon. BUT here is what it says on that site: The band began to write songs together and their first song “Sympathique” – with the chorus “Je ne veux pas travailler” (“I don’t want to work”) – became an overnight sensation in France, and was even nominated for “Song of the Year” at France’s Victoires de la Musique Awards.

So that's cool. Plus it pays pretty well. $200-ish per service, which means each time he plays. There is one rehearsal and the show, Friday afternoon and then Saturday night, so that works out to an extra $400! Seattle Symphony gigs are very lucrative. Hopefully this with the money we've gotten back so far for the dress will cover Gurglepurr's teeth yanking procedure. It's always something, I tell you. I think I'd rather just pay for all his tooth problems than get stuff for Christmas this year. A healthy, pain-free kitty (with better breath) is much better than more things, no matter how cool they are. Bow and arrows, you can wait.

Oh, and the last recording gig turned out to be for Underworld 4, which is probably going to be a really awful movie, but if any of you see it, you'll get to hear Patrick playing. They usually only find out what they're doing when they show up to sightread for the recording (which in itself is pretty impressive), but sometimes the guy who contracts all the musicians will tell them what they're doing when he sets the gig up if he thinks they'll actually be interested in whatever it is. Needless to say, Patrick didn't find out what this was until he got there...

If any of you watch Community, he did a few episodes of that as well. I've made him promise that I can come along to listen if he ever finds himself recording soundtracks for any Silent Hill games. I could not miss that! It hasn't been the same since Team Silent at Konami gave over control of the game to various Americans, and I miss Akira Yamaoka's composing, but it's still not horrid. I suppose it's my fandom extending itself to things that don't really deserve all that much loyalty. For example, I've heard they're going to make a second Silent Hill movie. The first one was pretty bad (barely followed the game, which is too bad because it was brilliant), and I expect the second one will be terrible, but I'll see the damn thing anyway because I'm sort of like a bug attracted to a zapper when it comes to that series. They screwed up the plot so badly in the first movie that it'll be entertaining to see if they just wallow around in failure or try to cobble something together that vaguely resembles the games. Sometimes I enjoy lameness.

I've only just now realized that this post has turned into a really long rambling session, but I am not quite done yet! I was thinking about the whole archery thing, and I think it is a good idea for me. I've shot various guns and I'm not bad at it. I was also involved with martial arts for a few years (kyokushin full-contact karate), and I wasn't bad at that either, but I've finally gotten old enough to appreciate that breaking things will ultimately result in a lot of aching later in life. I was fortunate enough to not break anything while I was involved in martial arts, and I have no desire to return to hand-to-hand combat any time soon. The culture is not that great for women, let me tell you.

Ranged weapons, on the other hand, don't have those drawbacks to them. I don't have to join a league or dojo or whatever to shoot a gun or a bow and arrows. And I actually own a gun, but it's at home in Montana. We shoot cans. It's really fun, to tell you the truth, especially when one is swinging in the wind while hanging by a string from a distant tree limb. I haven't done it in years, for various reasons (mostly time constraints or forgetting about it), but I think I will the next time I make a trip home. A bow and arrows could be really fun, too. I hope it's sort of similar. Obviously the mechanics will be very different, drawing a bow instead of pulling a trigger, but the general idea of aiming a projectile at a distant object is the same. Also, I'm pretty strong and that should help me. Being strong doesn't seem to really help anything with guns, except maybe with bracing yourself so the recoil from a big one doesn't knock you over backwards.

Plus you never know. It might turn out to be good exercise, all that running back and forth to retrieve arrows and strength used to draw the bow. I could use some of that! Hopefully sometime within the next half year or so I'll be able to get some lessons and see if I like it. If not, there's always learning to throw knives!

I'm a strange girl sometimes. I have no problem learning how to engage in various types of combat, but I won't bait a hook with a worm. Yeah. I had to draw the line somewhere... /eyeroll Thanks to my darling grandfather for never making me touch squirmy things and putting up with getting hooked now and again because I haven't ever learned how to not yank fish directly skyward when catching them. <3