News, May 2003 • May 1, 2003, 12:19 AM

Whoa! Have I been swamped these last several weeks! One of my hobbies is collecting teddy bears, and for the last year and a half I've been working on a "bear book"—that is, a catalogue of all 250 or so of my bears that contains front and side shots of the bears, scans of hang tags and receipts and so on—and just when I thought things would be going smoothly, my mom came along with a genealogy project she wants me to key in. I'm trying to get both these projects out of the way by next month, but it hasn't been easy. And on top of that, a friend of mine is setting up a day job for me which could begin any week now. Add to that the rehearsals with Barcode, Hotter than Ice, and the Edsels and my work with the two choirs and with Tracy and you can see why I haven't had much time to devote to my web page, let alone start work on the Edsels page. I've been meaning to work on the French translation of this web site, but haven't had time to start. However, things are finally starting to settle down, so I should be able to start working on the translation this week.

Hotter than Ice has its own web site now, and fortunately for me, I didn't have to write it myself. Our first gig is scheduled for May 7 in Montreal, with a followup gig on June 14 at the Good Companions Centre in Ottawa.

In addition, the Fabulous Edsels are looking at getting an agent. One of our guitarists has been talking to the CEO of Marquee Productions in Ottawa, who is reportedly going to try to book us at the Avonmore Fair for July 17.

Just a reminder that I'm planning to be in Toronto from July 7-14 for Toronto Trek. If you're in the Toronto area and you have an event there you'd like me to play at during that time frame, let me know so I can plan my time accordingly.

First of all, let me apologize for not updating my page since mid-October. Normally I would do the updates on Saturday afternoons, but up until recently my Saturday afternoons had been taken up by personal projects. I intend to clean that up: the location of a meeting I usually have on Saturday mornings has been moved to a place that is much closer to where I live, so I'm able to get home from that earlier than before—and thus have more time to update my web page.

A lot has happened in the last four months. Around the time of my last web page update, I was in the process of joining an Ottawa-based Caribbean band called Hot Ice, and at first I was worried that the band's sole stylistic focus would be reggae. When I played keyboards for a Toronto-based production of a show called Sticks and Stones in the late '80s, at our wrap party the DJ played nothing but reggae. Thankfully, though, Hot Ice also does soca and zouk, which are basically modernized, uptempo versions of calypso—sort of like a Caribbean version of the Latin rhythms Chick Corea does in tunes like "Captain Marvel" and "Spain". And I like that. Besides, Bob Popyk, a well-known columnist and speaker on business strategies and a member of two Locals of the American Federation of Musicians, has written that you shouldn't turn down a gig just because you'll happen to be playing music at it that you're far from in love with. On top of that, Barcode hadn't been doing much lately, and Hot Ice, being in a music market where there isn't a lot of demand for Caribbean music, doesn't get all that many gigs itself, so I felt justified in taking on a second band.

At about the same time, a third band came my way when Mike Purdy, one of the guitarists in Barcode, invited me to rehearse with the Fabulous Edsels, a revival of a band that had originally been based at North Dundas District High School in Chesterville. The band does early rock material from the 50's and 60's. In the original version of the band, some of the members were teachers, and the rest were students, and every couple of years or so the student portion of the band would change. The band was featured on local telethons and on Wayne Rostad's show On the Road Again and assisted in several fundraisers. This new incarnation of the band, referred to as the Edsels for short, reunited some of the original members for a New Year's Eve gig at the Chesterville Legion, and I am the only member of the current band not to have been a member of the original. The band has since decided to stick together, and we have a couple of gigs in the works, the earliest of which I understand would be late in March. Already the Legion has asked us back for next New Year's Eve. The band is currently taking a month-long break because another of its guitarists, Bernie Harper, is on vacation in Australia with his wife.

And if you didn't think that was enough, I've also been doing some occasional work with Tracy Annand-Robichaud, a member of the Cumberland Community Singers. She and I have been doing gigs at the RCAF Officers' Mess on Gloucester with a friend, Leona, and plan to book appearances at events such as the Ottawa Tulip Festival, a jam session at the Nepean Sailing Club, and on local telethons.

As for my plan to eventually move to the States—well, that's still in the picture, but not as soon as I had originally hoped. My American girlfriend of over 26 months and I broke up in mid-December. I don't want to embarrass her by publicizing the details of the circumstances behind the breakup, but let's just say that the 490-mile distance between us, coupled with some aspects of her character that I began to see over the periods we were together face to face, gave me more and more indication that she was not the one for me. So now you have more of an opportunity to book me for your event than you did before.

And early this month I decided not just to update my web page, but to give it a facelift. Why? I'm not too crazy about the multi-frame approach, and a lot of web sites I've recently seen don't use it either. Besides, I also wanted to add this news section, and as long as that was going to require me to modify the menu structure in every HTML file on the site anyway, I might as well simplify the menu structure and group certain sections of it together. I'm also working on translations of the site into French and German. (I may not have a very strong command of those languages yet, but hey, I'm trying!) The Barcode section of the page has been eliminated because I plan to create a separate web page for it, just as I'm currently doing with the Edsels and Hot Ice. And I've made the text all bold so that it stands out better against the grey music notation in the background.