Terry decided to make it official saying that every Monday from here on out would be Laundry Day. That worked for me, since I only had one more day of underwear left, and my half-dry gig clothes were beginning to ferment a bit. So back to the laundromat we trucked. Jesse requested we pick up Kenny on the way back so we could have a songwriting rehearsal for a couple of Jesse's new songs. I had planned to hike over to the Warren Post Office to 2nd Day Air Dede $120, which was about two and a half miles away, but word had gotten to Terry of my plan, and he let me know both he and Jeff had some business there, so he'd run me over there.

Jesse and Kenny ran over the new song parts while Terry, Jeff and I went postal. Jeff and Terry were laughing because they'd been to the PO earlier in the day before the laundromat, but Jeff had forgotten to get a money order, blaming it on short-term memory loss. While in line at the PO, one of the counter workers started sneezing and coughing. The other two employees were offering Kleenex's and Hall's between every sneeze, until the poor woman was embarrassed from all the attention. It actually wasn't inhaled Anthrax, fer gawd sakes!

I hauled my snare, some hardware and my throne out of the drum bag in preparation for the rehearsal. Jesse had been working on his new song for about a week, and was really curious what we'd come up with as a rhythm section. We recorded the results on a little Walkman, which sounded surprisingly good. I rigged up my kick pedal to thump against the snare drum travel case, which worked great. Jesse was ecstatic and enthused with the results of our contribution. We farted around with the tempo a bit looking for the best groove. The song is a slow, bluesy AAA-radio-ready composition reminiscent to me of Bruce Cockburn's "Nicaragua." Jesse was going to run it by Terry to see if he would be interested in using it on the next album.

We worked until about 4:15, because Terry wanted to return once again to the Taiwan Buffet, the obvious food trough of choice. The information at the time was that the $5.99 all-you-can-eat lunch special ran until 5 p.m., so we wanted to be there before that. Turned out lunch stopped at 3:30, and although the food selections stayed the same, dinner was now $8.99. Ouch. I wasn't planning to spend that much! Nonetheless, I decided to make a feast of it, and stuffed myself full of a surprisingly wide selection of oriental and oriental-style dishes--everything from pizza to sushi, and all the Chinese in between. Very good.

I opted to try going to Kroger's again to stock up a bit on groceries after splurging at the buffet, now smartened up to the sloth man checkout dude I'd previously time-warped with. I selected various varieties of apples, got some non-hydrogenated peanut butter, Kroger-brand raisins, a loaf of non-preservative bread, two more cans of tuna, and, oh yes, prune juice to get me moving better. The ol' travel bind-up was bugging me some.

I stopped by the nearby Target store to see what their lineup of cheapo digi-cams was. There was one for $40, so that was a possibility for next week. I really didn't want to stop with the pictures for these reports. It was just too precious. When I got back to the room, I tried plugging the camera into the laptop and lo and behold it worked fine. Mmmm...intermittent short of some kind, I guess, probably temperature related. Well, good. Maybe it'll work for a little longer anyway.