Another good night

Popped into SL to fix a few things up before hitting the hay prior to my Stupid O'Clock Session as I've named it, at Dreamers. I checked out the Bushy Beard to see what was what & it turned out Steve Raymond was having trouble with his net connection & couldn't DJ, so I filled in for him in the final hour leading up to Poise's Gravy Sauce set, playing some of my Dreamers' metal/punk/goth set that I'd sorted out for later. Went & watched "Hustle" after & then after a couple of hours' sleep got back in to do my SOS gig.

Tonight

I shall be DJing at Dreamers' Nightclub, a set of mostly thrash metal, nu-metal & some old-school hard rock. Might bung some Combichrist & EBM type stuff in too, bit o' Rammstein & so on. Gotta make sure I go to sleep & wake up on time. If people don't see me about earlier it's cos I'm catching 4 hours' sleep before my set, which finishes at 4AM UK time. Just enough time then to get my head down for another couple of hours. Looking forward to this set - hope to see many of my regulars & mebbe snag a few new listeners too!

Wow... Just had an excellent night down the Bushy Beard. Jazz was hosting, with her partner Eifachfilm Vacirca DJing. We have many similar tastes, & Eif was doing mostly a selection of mashups that I'd not come across before. Bloke knows his stuff. Anyway, a friend came by & we got talking & well, just a really bloody excellent night. Life is good. I like being able to cheer people up when they're down.

Well...

Interesting few nights in SL lately. Kezzy's back online & we've been hanging out a wee bit. I miss her - she's a funny lass, makes me laugh, with rather than at her too. I spent some of the evening at a trad Irish fiddle gig at the Blarney Stone, some of it at the Bushy Beard where Steve Raymond was doing his set, which was pretty good too, but also IMing Kezzy while I was there. Then, fairly late on, I got a random TP from Faith Hilra. Bit weird really - Faith's ok but once TPed there she hardly spoke to me (there were a few people there) & I ended up IMing another mate, having a good old chat about films & the like. Turns out we're both into some pretty sick horror flicks, which is good. Someone came to join Faith & the others who, well, if he mattered enough, I'd say I hated him, but nowadays it seems like such a waste of time. Even these pixels would be happier spent doing something else so I won't even mention his name. I don't think he'll ever be un-muted though. Meh. We've all moved on anyway: nothing to see here.

*Coff*

Turns out, according to the doc at least, I'm clear from infection, but my asthma is still Darth Vader bad - I walked my son to school today, and made it back, just. Not in any shape for work yet. The doc has put me on a high dose of prednisolone corticosteroids for the week & signed me off for the week. Not happy. I wanted to be well by now dammit.

ION I'm grinding my Cooking skill up with my feral druid, Enkidu, in WoW. It's slow & boring but it'll stand me in better stead when I'm in Outland & able to cook up stuff that gives me stamina bonuses from the beasts that I meet. After cooking, it'll be Leatherworking, which I haven't bothered with so far. None of the gear that I crafted at low levels was worth me wearing myself, & it's easy to flood the AH with expensively made yet common as muck & therefore unsaleable items. I suspect until I get up to the master level gear where I can craft epics, it'll be massively unprofitable. But anyway. If I'm to be useful to my guild at all, I should do it.

In SL, I'm at the quiet part of the week at the moment. Job on Thursday night/Friday morning, gonna play some Drowning Pool for the Americans & whatnot, then on Saturday I'll give it more of a mix of Israeli psytrance & D&B, maybe chill it down with some dubstep from time to time then whack on some System 7 or something to bring it up to the heights again. I love that :-)

Last night Lissie was a right PITA - she was whining & crying all night, complaining of a sore ear. I suspect ear infection, but there's sod all we can do at the mo, and she kept us awake all night till she was allowed to come & sleep between me & Sue. And then she kicked me in the head repeatedly. Not happy. Hopefully her ear will sort itself out, *if* that's what was up - once nestled between Sue & me she was out like a light so I suspect she's just attention-seeking. It's not happening again.

I aiten't ded!

Well, I've finished my antibiotics. I do feel a LOT better than I did this time last week, though it's not 100% gone. I'll see if it resurges after tomorrow but I'm going back to work anyway. Going stagnant around the house.

Tonight was my first night at the Bushy Beard as a DJ. I played a mix of jump-up D&B - easy accessible stuff, nothing too jazzy really - and mashups by DJ Earworm, Party Ben & a few others. Although it started slow & I thought it'd flop at first, Campanula & Doramia showed up. Valentine Easterbrook was there with Brucie & myself from the start. Zeeblebob was away for the first half hour then turned up & fought the crash-monster valiently for the rest of the set. Khloe Nightly was there too, and gradually the place filled up till there were more people than my Mystitool could track. I'm really chuffed at the amount of support people have been giving. Thanks to you all - and if you haven't been mentioned here, I'm sorry - I've an awful, awful memory, to the extent that Campy said goodbye when she was going & then 10 mins later I IMed her to ask if she'd gone when Dora went. Really - very bad memory!

Next week, I'm going to see about doing ANOTHER set maybe at Nee Botha's place "Nee's Up", which I'm told has been emptyish of late. I like the idea of building up something from nowt again. Zee's also said that if the BB's empty, we can put on impromptu DJ events, so I'll get cracking with that too, see where the vacant slots are. I'm just downloading another couple of D&B albums right now that I think will go down well.

Weekendy updatey thing

I've been horribly ill in RL this last week - chest infection is making it impossible for me to do much of anything at all except sit still, and even that I can't do as I'm wracked with paroxysms of coughing. My breathing sounds much like the monster's did in "The Relic". For those that haven't seen the film (& I do recommend it, as even if it does have some very silly dialogue & some major plot flaws such as the museum's security systems, it's quite the scariest monster movie I've seen well, up until Cloverfield), it makes a sound that makes Darth Vader sound like he's a champion marathon runner with no breathing problems at all to speak of. Oh, to sound like Vader again!

So, anyway, I've been unable to sleep as I keep waking myself up with my coughing & getting glaring looks from my wife, so instead of pressing the matter futilely & lying there vainly trying to get back to sleep, I've been propping my barely alive carcass up at the computer desk instead. At least it's warm here, and while I can type with no problem, I can't actually talk very well at all. It's annoying and frustrating to be expected to do the sort of things that I just don't have the breath for, like getting up & going downstairs (or worse yet, getting back up them), or talking with people who don't have the hearing to hear what you're trying to say to them anyway. My thinking's kind of fuzzy like this - I'm dosed up on cold remedies - and it's difficult to think of responses to questions. So mostly while I'm like this I'm at my Mac on the 'Net, and since I'm not feeling too chipper I've been mostly at Warcrack levelling up my gnome, and now playing with my new Blood Elf Death Knight. This involves minimal movement, merely pressing the same keys every so often, and use of the mouse, and I can do this with no real problem (except when in combat & suddenly wracked by another coughing fit, and the mouse gets jerked around wildly).

So anyway, I'm still alive, and I'm off down to the doctor's again to see if maybe now will they give me antibiotics for the bacterial chest infection? See, it's easy to say when someone has a cold & asthma that well, your asthma is aggravated by the cold, but I've had asthma for 37 years. I have 38 years of fairly specialist research on my own body & I've gathered enough info now to know that in 99% of cases where I have a cold & this doesn't go away & I end up with a bubbling, hacking cough & bronchitis, that a secondary infection has set in in my lungs. It has so far happened every time except for once, which over 38 years is probably a better batting average than most GPs would be able to boast (mind you, in fairness, they're looking at a lot of different diseases in a lot of different bodies - I wouldn't want their job) - but it would be nice if they listened for once.

Bah, anyway...

Turns out leaving Dublin's worked out for me okay: I've a twice a week gig at Dreamers / The Wild Rover, and another on Sundays at the Bushy Beard in Brugge. The BB seems to be run pretty much how I'd have expected most places to be run, but have found that few are: the management give you the slot to play in, you turn up & they trust you to do a good job of it, playing what you feel would be good. You're a trusted expert, not someone who needs micromanaging. They don't have the cruft of bureaucracy that other places seem to have - the 3-5 level management & corporate matrix structure & all that. You don't need it, not at an operational level, & I'm so glad to be somewhere that just makes it easy for you to do beautiful things. *So* looking forward to the tail end of the week!