Summer has landed. A week of steady heat, raw sunshine, beer, water, friends, music. 

Ah yes…I’ll take it. The days have been in the mid to high thirties, the breeze barely enough to rustle the leaves. It’s great summer weather if you’re able to be by a lake where you can dip freely into the cool wetness…which, as it happens, is exactly where we are. And the evenings cool down beautifully here in the Okanagan. You can usually turn off the A/C and open the windows around eight. 

Last evening though, we had a fairly rare experience. A hot, dry wind blew in from the south turning the lake into a froth of white-caps and filling the air with all manner of fly-away plant matter. There was thunder and a fabulous lightning display…fabulous because it all seemed to release from cloud to cloud… sparing us any new fires. 

Nothing more than a few drops of rain fell and it was all over in twenty minutes but what followed the storm was something different. A mass of humid air rolled in…unusual in these parts… which served to keep the night hot and bring out legions of bugs followed by a half dozen bats which took to swooping past our noses in a frenzy as they vacuumed up the night blood-raiders. They gorged themselves I’m sure, but didn’t make so much as a dent in the swarming invisibles. Nor did the citronella candles keep them away. We scratched and swatted for awhile and then retreated to the house where we kept the A/C running through the night. 

A little bit of Ontario… or maybe Louisiana in our usually dry valley. 

On another subject…I’ll be back on the road in a couple of days. The Stamps are gigging in Sault Ste. Marie this weekend and in Newfoundland the next. 

I’m going to hole up in Ontario with Gary Mac for a few days in between.  Our plan is to finish up work on a dozen or so tracks that have been in progress for the last year. So, barring catastrophe, I should be able to post some new music within the next couple of weeks. 

I’m looking forward to getting feedback. You get to a place, when you’re working on the same stuff for months, where you lose perspective and start going in circles. The beauty of all the new tech is that we can always claw back a song and change it if everybody hates it…which is, of course, our worst nightmare…but you will let me know if you hate stuff…right? Nightmare notwithstanding. 

So… no blog next week. I’ll be too busy and I’m not into lugging a laptop anymore. I like to fly light. I boast that I could go around the world with a carry-on and I believe it’s true…especially in summer. 

Newfoundland can be tricky however, so I best dig out my windbreaker that folds down into a fanny-pac. 

But then again, it will be summer in NFLD too…official summer no less…which, in case you didn’t know, encompasses the last week in July and the first week in August. 

So I probably don’t need the windbreaker. 

Maybe I’m being too cautious? 

I’ll sleep on it. 

Cheers!