It's hot. Very, very hot. Last night was one of those sleep-in-your-boxers-on-top-of-the-covers-with-the-fan-on-full-blast nights. Everytime I open up the refrigerator at work to pull some medications out, I'm tempted to crawl inside.

MP3 of the week: or, Why I Lag: Everything is sorted out now. I was a half a week off, so I had two of them up there for awhile. Now we're down to one. I'm back on track.

I'm making a mix Minidisc of upbeat songs for springtime, full of tunes that I can actually here when I'm driving on the freeway and have all the windows down. So far I have Why do you have to put a date on everything? by Superchunk and Sugar's If I could change your mind. Feel free to suggest your favorite.

When I was in high school I went on this band tour every year, where all the various symphonies and wind ensembles got together to form one big clumsy band and ride around on a bus for awhile to play these festivals. Once, we went to Los Angeles and had rented out an entire floor of this hotel. All the girls had rooms on one side of the hallway, and all the boys were on the other. The band instructors had a room somewhere else above us, we were left to our own devices.

There was a guy in our band who played the tuba and looked about 30. Earlier in the day he snuck away and went down to the liquor store on the boulevard (directly across the street from Disneyland) and got a huge plastic bottle of vodka and some orange juice. Not long after lights out the room hopping began, and a bunch of guys started a mini-party in their room with the vodka. Kids were getting pissed drunk all over the place, and then this flute player girl with huge bangs and alot of hairspray busted out her pack of Marlboro Reds and kids snuck cigarettes on the balconies. I think I ended up in a bed with two freshman girls, not messing around or anything, but after that I could honestly say I slept with two girls at once. Smooth.

Of course, half the band were super snobbish geeks, many were Mormon, and someone told one of the chaperones. We all split, chaos ensued while everyone tried to run back to their respective rooms and jump under the covers to feign sleep. They finally found the band directors, but they were trashed themselves at the hotel bar. They were in charge of 40 or 50 kids, and weren't supposed to be out drinking even though it was well after midnight. They came back and we came to this unspoken compromise: they wouldn't call our parents and make us fly back home, and we wouldn't tell the school that they were wasted while we were in their care. Nobody snitched, and everyone went home happy.

That is, everyone except the kid who got put in jail the next day for standing up on the log ride at Disneyland and mooning the camera, but that's another story.

Played a wonderful show on Friday night. Everything clicked and the room was packed, there was cheering and applause and good feeling as we all meshed together.

Went to the baseball game on Thursday with my brother and father, we drank seven dollar beers and laughed at the suburbanites in their only city experience. When I was a kid we'd go to San Francisco solely for baseball games, I never got to see the city. I asked my parents where all the people lived, all I could see were stores and office buildings. A little blonde girl caught a foul ball ten feet from me, she didn't even stand up, the ball landed in her lap. A fat drunk guy and his ganster girlfriend wander down to our section late in the game, he stumbled over all the seats and yelled at the left fielder for a good five minutes straight. She sat there egging him on and spitting peanut shells everywhere, unaware that everyone was staring and mocking their actions.

It's cold today, not the most perfect weather for our planned afternoon of softball in the park.