Goodbye Dan...

Conner and I have been MIA for a while now; we’ve been wallowing in a bit of a Funk Fest.  Dan flew out from Chicago on August 10th to see about a girl; he moved in with his girlfriend in upstate New York and to get a job.  He had some medical problems, including hospital visits, and no insurance.  Being responsible he left the project to begin the long process of paying for his health care out-of-pocket. 
Truth be told, things have not been working out as we planned…or as we failed to plan.  I followed advice that life on the road never works out as expected and to leave room to be flexible.  I didn’t exactly find a musician in each place that committed to working with us, I only had a lot of possible leads.  There was also the problem of finding a place to stay for a month at a time that we thought would work itself out.  But it didn’t, especially not in larger cities like Chicago.   

After Dan left, Conner mourned the loss of his musical right-hand-man.  He hasn’t really played out since Omaha.  However, he did purchase Music Theory For Dummies and has been pouring over treble and bass clefs.

Conner and I were both silently stressed out over how rapidly our money was evaporating.  We traveled through half the mid-west missing all these amazing sites because we were trying to stretch our small savings across the US and into next March.  It was a futile exercise.   While we were in Indianapolis I bought a USA travel guide and after much moping, we decided that we would spend what little money we had left actually enjoying ourselves, and make a beeline for North Carolina.  My parents live in Chapel Hill and we can stay in their driveway, get jobs through the holidays, and plan our next leg better.  Chapel Hill is also the home of the Mountain Goats, Ben Folds Five, and the Squirrel Nut Zippers; it’s a music-centered town and will hopefully be good in getting Conner back on the musical bandwagon. 

Squirrel Nut Zippers photo via MTV

We recently received a grant for $650 from the Puffin Foundation, a non-profit group in NJ that funds the arts.  While not a huge amount of money, it’s still amazing and it was the first grant I ever wrote.  I took a class on grant writing ages ago and learned that grants are not just free money; they are more like a contract and you best be following through on what you proposed, otherwise you have to give the money back.  The grant coupled with my general stubbornness-well, we just gotta finish this project now.  And I have ultimate faith that we can pull this off; the deadline hasn’t arrived yet, there’s still time.