Consistent content; I’m sorry my website lacks it. Most days I don’t even know how to speak like a normal person, much less attempt to communicate in a public setting such as this. I’ll just type and see what comes about.

Awhile back, Andrew Peterson invited me to sub for Andrew Osenga whose wife was to give birth to their second child during this time. (The Osengas actually had their baby a couple of nights ago. Congratulations to them.)

A baby, a baby girl
For the body Osenga
Andy swims in estrogen
My wife is a month away from
A baby, a baby boy
For the body Peters
This, aloud, I wonder:
Will I faint during delivery?

Last Tuesday I flew to Dallas to meet up with the bus and band who had already played the first pair of shows in Texas. By the time I made it to the bus which was parked downtown at the base of that weird green-lit space needle thing by the hotel everyone was off gallivanting elsewhere. I loaded my gear in the cargo bays and sat in the bus reading the previous days’ USA Today while waiting for someone, anyone, to return. Welcome to the exciting touring life. A couple of the guys, upon their return, were kind enough to share their leftover Tex-Mex lunch since by this time I was well beyond the bewitched lunch hour and I didn’t really feel like walking far to fetch food. I’m lazy; were I paleolithic, I would have made a horrible hunter-gatherer. A spaghetti dinner in celebration of Cason’s birthday rounded out the evening and we walked back to the bus past the grassy knoll where President Kennedy was shot. I fell asleep to the comfortably familiar sway of a moving bus along highway pavement and woke up the following morning in shivering Kansas. We left a 70-degree Dallas. Stepping off the bus at the church in the morning the temps had plummeted a healthy 40 degrees. Sleet and snow fell all day. We spent the following day in Wichita, KS where it snowed hard all day long dropping several inches on the ground; a weather experience I would dub a blizzard, but which the locals would call merely a storm. So goes the errant southerner in me. Chicago the next day was covered in 12-inches of snow from the same front that pushed through Wichita. This particular show was at a private school and it felt weird to be walking the cinder-block halls and eating in a cafeteria under life-sucking fluorescent lights. I couldn’t help but recall my childhood years involving those same exercises. Several games of Boggle helped pass the downtime. I once thought I was very good at Boggle, now I know better. Never play a competitive word game with a bunch of other songwriters. Unless your name happens to be Peggy Hill. A fabulous audience in Milford, OH the following night made for a nice going home present.

Tonight’s concert is at the historic Ryman Theatre (British spelling my choice) in downtown Nashville and I’m at home for the day re-packing the suitcase, folding laundry, cleaning up a bit, catching up on email and mail-outs, and feeding our Christmas tree some much-needed water. Playing a song on the stage of the Ryman will be a fine story to tell my boy one day. We leave in the morning for another stretch of shows from Alabama to Florida. I hope there’s no more snow involved. I’ve seen it and am done with it; I don’t see how you northerners survive it year in and year out.

I’m thoroughly enjoying the company on this tour: I get to talk sports with Andy Gullahorn, ornithology with Sandra McCracken, Freedy Johnston with Jill Phillips, mandolin with Josh Coffey and food in general with AP. It’s a good season. Cheers.