Tune Out, Turn Off, Be Small

It's been a while. Marko and i had a mad summer of performing, teaching & selling at festivals. We had an absolutely amazing time. The folks, the food, the art, the music. Wonderful stuff! But, those festivals are also the shit. They usually entail us packing up our entire shop, 24 workshop ukuleles, our own instruments plus sound equipment which we then lug to locations both near and far far away. Many days would start around fucking-hell A.M. and would end around crazy o'clock the following morning usually followed by a long drive home. Whoever thinks that artists and musicians are lazy can kiss my ass. I really love doing fests but honestly, by the end of July, we were ab-so-lute-ly exhausted. Mentally & physically 'kapot'.

We did our last summer festival on the first weekend of August and then we shut down EVERYTHING. We didn't actually stop working but we turned off the 'noise'. Our shop was only open via appointment and most importantly, I put a 'Gone Fishing' sign up on all of our web- and social media sites. Man, i can't tell you how much i have enjoyed turning off Facebook. Not that i don't 'LIKE' Facebook. It's an incredibly cool thing BUT! There is a whole hell of a lot of stuff i don't miss about it.

Shutting off has been a real eye-opener actually. I've come to realize that i've let internet and online media become a distraction instead of using it as the awesome tool that it is. Oh, and another little thing i realized, I've been posting things on FB which i should have been posting on my own blog and eventually linking to Facebook. As you see, that is also going to change.

I've been tackling this break with great enthusiasm in general. I wanted to go back to those pre-internet days when everything was 'smaller'. Just me, my LW Radio and my tools and 'stuff'. That's it. No email, no telephone, nothing. Just long dreamy days of creating, reading, playing and listening to stories on the BBC. It was difficult to get in the groove in the beginning. I did a lot of sleeping the first week. The last couple of weeks though have been really beautiful. Sounds strange but, It feels like my days are much longer. Being 'small' has been freakin' wonderful. I recommend it highly.