Recovery and Return

Dear Fellow Break-Fasters, allow me to apologize for my absence. I've spent a majority of February being relentlessly ill, recovering well into March, where it seems a combination of stress and productivity replaced my migraines and drippy face. So as such, this will be a slightly different format for the blog (and one I'd like to employ more often, honestly) not a straight review, but a little more slice-of-life. With breakfast, always breakfast, as a backdrop.
My stops this month of absence have included the N Street Cafe, Cafe Bernardo, Willie's, and Tower Cafe.

My first Cafe Bernardo trip was in the midst of participating in the 48 Hour Film Festival. I was retrieved by the inimitable Stephanie Hyden to become Musical Director for her project. You see, the 48 Hr Festival is part of the Sacramento International Film Festival, a competition that gathers groups of filmmakers and challenges them to create a short film (between 4 to seven minutes in length) within a span of 48 hours. To help keep you honest, at the zero hour they give all the filmmakers a prop, a line of dialogue, and a character name that must be included, as well as a genre. It seems that Stef and her group had chosen Hip Hopera. So they brought me on board to help with the lyric writing (despite the reports, I had very little to do with the script or music writing, other than second opinion standpoint. And it also took closer to ten hours). There was very little sleep to be had that first night, and a lot of work to be done. The second night (after playing a... nah, that'd be giving it away...) I got to get a little sleep in, and moseyed down to Bernardo to enjoy a cup of coffee and some extra fluffy buttermilk pancakes.

I was there today, as well, and enjoyed a spartan breakfast of granola, yogurt and water. Now I'm in the nearby Naked Lounge, which has to be one of the more annoying coffee shops to try to get any work done. Not on a distraction level, just a lack of decent work surfaces level. Not that I'm against oodles of kushy couches, but since most of the tables are monolithic structures that allow no room for someone's stilt-like legs, the places where I can prop the laptop and type this out seem somewhat limited.

But enough about me. Back to... well, me. Yesterday I made my pilgrimage out to Tower to enjoy a Mexican Hot Chocolate and a French Onion Tart. On Saturday I had... nothing. I was recovering. You see, Friday night, a couple of my proverbial homeboys came over (remember the proverbs about Homeboys? Isn't that where Bros Before Hos came from?) and we got down on a little rap action. I picked a beat I had saved on the computer, and we threw down on a little ditty about driving in the rain. It was a fun first effort, but I think next time we're going to try for something a little more on the short-and-silly side. This is only because I'm not sure I have the producer chops to make it work without the lyrics being utterly ridiculous. But, then again, there's no way to grow without trying stuff that's beyond you, right? The following night, after spending the rainy day lazily, I trekked out to Tupelo for my first Sketchbomb. I haven't made it out to a drawing group since the first Pompsicle 1.0, and I've been hankering for some practice. The idea is a bunch of yo's get together with sketchbooks, and toss around prompts; redesign a muppet, post-apocalyptic Snow White, Charlie Sheen, etc. Everyone draws there version, and then we share. It was a lot of fun, and I plan on going back again.

Which pretty much brings us to today, sitting on an work-inappropriately comfortable couch, checking out Nate Bellgarde's excellent blog, and updating y'all. I now return you to your regular schedule!