Indianapolis, IN: One of my favorite websites to read is Google Reader. Mainly because it's the place I keep a list of the blogs I subscribe to. I don't know everyone who writes these blogs and for the most part, I don't even read these blogs everyday or every time they're updated. I may have read one blog post that I liked, so I'll save the entire blog to my subscription list and suddenly, I've got 100+ blogs I get updates on.
One of the blogs I tend to glance at the titles of (mainly because I don't have the time or patience to read the entire post) is
1000 Awesome Things, which is, exactly what it says it is. Random things that happen in life that are simply awesome. Nothing too big, mostly unnoticed, but when you stop and think about them, they just make your day. Some of my favorite examples (and by favorite, I mean the most recent ones that clicked for me) are:
Drinking with Grandma (ok, doesn't happen so much with my Grandma - unless it's hot water, that it - but I still love the idea!)
So after reading this and having a little moment of awesomeness myself in the wee hours of morning, I decided to start my own version of 1000 Awesome Things... via the road life. I'm now introducing a random, every-now-and-again feature on my blog called
100 Little Pleasures of (Touring) Life.
*100 because that is more realistic than 1000 (though I should have started at 10!)
*little pleasures because sometimes they're not awesome, but they do make me smile
*touring life because some of this stuff just doesn't translate into "real" life (air quotes semi-appropriate)
I'm not giving myself a schedule or timeline with this, I'm just hoping it makes me pay more attention to my day to day, similar to what the
365 project is doing for me.
And for my first attempt at listing 100 Little Pleasures of (Touring) Life....
#1 : Waking up at a super early time in the morning with just enough energy to get the band checked into the hotel and the driver parked up, but still sleepy enough to get back to bed in your own room.
While touring in a bus, shows are usually anywhere from 3-6 hours apart. Which means, by the time we get rolling on the bus, and I have a gotten everything prepped for the morning (next day's info sheet hung, hotel called with our ETA, possible relaxing beer drank), it's already an hour and a half into the trip. This is the crucial part where you decide if you stay awake or not.
In cases of a 3 hour trip, I can usual hang in there with just a little
baby-headding in the jump seat. However, when you're pushing 4 or 5 hours, there's just no way I'm going to stay awake. I'll crawl into my bunk for, what I hope will be a light nap, but as soon as my alarm goes off and the bus stops, I feel like I've just been yanked from the deepest sleep of my life.
The next portion is crucial: you must be awake enough to be coherent at the front desk and make sure you have all of your room key packs, plus make sure the driver knows exactly where to park the bus. However, you don't want to wake up TOO much so that when you can finally get yourself and your bags to your own room, you don't lay down with your mind already spinning in to-do motion.
This morning I was in the perfect zone of awake-but-not-all-the-way and was able to fall right back to sleep in my comfy bed before I had any time to let the realities of the day notice I was awake.
And that is just the first (of 100) little pleasure of touring life.