Press-ganged into service

I'd been congratulating myself on being well on top of things in terms of getting ready for hosting today's music session. Until yesterday's problems with the sound system cropped up, that is. Once I'd got a replacement system hooked up and operational I called a halt and went to bed, setting the alarm for 8.30 am to give myself what I thought would be plenty of time to finish setting things up, re-arrange the furniture, and clean and tidy the kitchen and the rest of the house. That was the plan anyway. As it happened, I woke shorty after 5.00, couldn't get back to sleep, and decided to begin work at 5.30, which I thought would allow me to grab some more time in bed later on before the music gang arrived.

Ah well, the best-laid plans and all that. I ended up going to the supermarket before the sun rose, between bouts of cleaning and tidying, and had things fully under control by 11.00 or so, which seemed like a good time for another trip to the Beaumont Drive-in vegetable shop and the get stuck into making some soup before the invasion. Not surprisingly, there were lots of questions about the strange loudspeakers and the weird amplifier as one by one the people got here. I explained about yesterday's problems and we settled down to listen to music. My mate Derek reminded me yesterday that the valves in my Jadis amplifier need to be replaced. I thoughty it sounded okay yesterday when I got it connected, but it failed to cover me in glory today when we were listening at higher volume settings. I'm very much afraid that the guys went away thinking in terms of all style and no substance.

Still, we had great crack down at the local pub afterwards (just catching the end of Ireland's pathetic performance barely scraping a low-scoring win against Italy in the first round of the Six Nations rugby championship). We discussed forthcoming music performances here and talked a bit more about our trip to Vienna at the end of April. The lads were decent enough and didn't come clean about what they really thought of today's sound in my place.

I was back home by 6.00, had my evening tablets and a bite to eat and then, since I'd been up over twelve hours at that stage, I went upstairs. I tried to read myself to sleep but had to admit defeat after an hour or so and took a sleeping tablet.