Busy day

I can’t believe what a full day I had today! It sure beats the heck out of bor­ing, although I have to admit that with the dra­ma that goes on around mak­ing a liv­ing, some­times bor­ing sounds good to me.

I woke at a (some­what) rea­son­able hour, and got up and start­ed to work with­out much dawdling, too. Even so, I was­n’t able to get much progress made on my to-do list before more work came in. One of my clients dis­cov­ered a prob­lem with print­ing their coupon page in Netscape Nav­i­ga­tor 4.xx and that took pri­or­i­ty because it was an item to be fixed rather than new devel­op­ment. Any­how, that took most of the time I had before run­ning out to go meet the client and pick up a check.

After the clien­t’s office, I went on to the bank and then to the phone com­pa­ny store to pay my bill and get my cell­phone ser­vice restored. I ran a cou­ple oth­er errands and then called Mr Ham­mer­head as we’d made plans to go out and maybe see the show that he had tick­ets for, which was Pork Tor­na­do at Slims.

I took BART over to Berke­ley and then we came back over to San Fran­cis­co for the show. Hon­est­ly, I thought it was pret­ty lame. Usu­al­ly I have a high tol­er­ance for live music, but this just did­n’t do any­thing for me. As Ham­mer­head point­ed out, it was like a typ­i­cal bar band, not up to the cal­iber of a show we’d paid to see.

So after a half hour or so of putting up with Pork Tor­na­do, we left and went to Bot­tom of the Hill to see Sun City Girls, which was much more inter­est­ing, although I had some prob­lems with them. SCG are not an access­able band by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion. They seem like a free jazz band play­ing with a tra­di­tion­al rock arrange­ment. As such, they make some great sound tex­tures, but it’s the sort of thing that is bet­ter in the back­ground when you’re pay­ing atten­tion to some­thing else. As strange as it may seem, they would be per­fect for a Yoshi’s-like din­ner club atmos­phere where patrons can sit and con­verse while the band is play­ing. Like most music in bars, it was just too loud to con­duct con­ver­sa­tion. For­tu­nate­ly, above the bar was a TV on which was play­ing a hilar­i­ous col­lec­tion of trail­ers from sci-fi and hor­ror movies from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, which gave me some­thing amus­ing to watch while the amaz­ing sound­track washed over and through me.

Still, I found myself uncom­fort­able being in a room full of peo­ple, some of whom I know or was intro­duced to, and feel­ing insu­lat­ed from them by the sound. I saw oth­er peo­ple at both venues chat­ting ami­ca­bly, so I’m start­ing to won­der if either theres a skill I need to devel­op to con­vers­ing with oth­ers in loud places, or if my hear­ing is start­ing to dete­ri­o­rate. I find it dif­fi­cult to pick out what oth­er peo­ple are say­ing when there’s a lot of ambi­ent sound, and it’s one fac­tor that keeps me from social­iz­ing in those sorts of venues.

I prob­a­bly should have my hear­ing checked just to be safe, and also be more vig­i­lant about bring­ing earplugs to shows. I may not hear peo­ple bet­ter, but it should help keep my hear­ing from deteriorating.