Two wieners

Tom Day photo.

This month was full of trips, including one to the North American brass band championships in Grand Rapids.  Since I'm on the board of NABBA (the North American Brass Band Association), I had to be there even though my band decided not to compete this year.  At the last minute, I got a call to sit in with a band from Michigan that competed for the first time.

I'm the editor of NABBA's brass band journal, so I was dashing around with my camera for most of the weekend.  Back when my  band first started going to NABBA, I took along this stuffed hot dog that I'd gotten at Tony Packo's in Toledo.  I started getting everyone in the band to hold my wiener while I took their picture.  It's turned into an annual event, and I walk around the hotel and concert hall getting pictures of my wiener with as many people as I can.  This year I tried to get a wiener photo with a person in each brass band, and I got several of the adjudicators, as well.

Tom Day photo.

While I love taking pics with my NABBA wiener (whose tag reads "Frank"), I don't actually like eating hot dogs all that much.  This is a rare photo, then--taken a couple of nights ago at the UGA/GATech baseball game at Turner Field in Atlanta.  Yep, that's a footlong dog with mustard and onions, which I polished off with a diet Coke and a miniature plastic Braves helmet filled with chocolate soft-serve.  My usual baseball game snack is a soft pretzel.

On the topic of the stuffed wiener, I also have a stuffed pickle and a stuffed tomato from Tony Packo's, and a stuffed puffy taco from Henry's in San Antonio.  Plush food makes me laugh.

My schedule seems to be easing up a little.  I had a rough few weeks, staying in town at the university for a concert, not to mention my usual weekly overnight when I teach and an Easter gig overnight last week.  I contracted that Easter gig, and one of the trumpet players cancelled on me two weeks ahead of time.  It's miserable trying to find brass for Easter, so I ended up getting John to fly to GA to play it for me on trombone.  The pay for the gig covered his flight with a little left over.

I'm usually pretty careful in hotels--I check the beds and keep my bags and clothes off the beds--but I'm also a cheapskate.  I've been using Priceline to get hotel rooms just about every week since January.  Sometimes I do better with Hotwire, but the result is the same: I put in a stupidly low price, and I get a stupidly ghetto hotel room.  In other cities, including Atlanta, I put in a stupidly low bid and I might get an awesome room, but this particular town sticks me in the same 2-3 places over and over.  This semester, I got stuck in the Days Inn at least seven or eight times, including one stay of three nights when I played with the college wind symphony. The hotel sucks, but it's cheap, and not far from the freeway.  My cell phone won't even work in the rooms.

So back to checking the beds--I missed something a couple weeks ago, and a few days later, I woke up covered with bites.  It took a few days for them to show up, but one of my arms had at least 30 bites on it, and I had another dozen scattered around the rest of my body.  I completely freaked out--I washed all my bedding and clothes, and searched my mattress in vain.  I haven't found anything yet, and the bites are slowly fading.  No new bites have shown up in a few days, but I'm still pretty scared.  I really, really, REALLY, REALLY do not want to deal with bed bugs.  Jesus, those bites itched.