Climbing The (Extinct) Volcano–Mt Schank, South Australia

Bad Timing

A lot has been happening around here since I last posted, and only a few of them have been good. We performed at the Hamilton Outdoor Adventure Fair on the 5th and 6th, which was great and the rain held off until the end of our last show. The crowd loved it so much that we have been invited back for next year. Sparkie and me are working on a new, fun project that doesn’t involve Roy in any way, which at some point will get a blog post to officially announce it. We went through Casterton last week and got some photos.

Bad Thing #1 Suzanna caught some really odd stomach bug the day before Hamilton that then took Gabrielle down the day after Hamilton, and proceeded to slowly hit us all in very different ways. Most of us got lethargy, diarrhoea, nausea, sore tummy, and a high temperature, at least one thing off the list, but only the three youngest actually threw up. And Gabrielle was sick all of the 7th, then fine and running around on the 8th, only to stay in bed all day and throw up some more on the 9th (Jireh’s birthday, which was also the day he spent in bed, throwing up.) Suffice it to say, nobody felt like eating party food.

Bad Thing #2 I can’t remember if I mentioned we had an agent or not. When we met Roy at Mt Isa in June he gave us the email address for his agent, who also has a lot of other entertainers she works for. Of course this was really exciting, especially when her response to my contact email was “We'd love to include you in the next round of promotions.” Roy told us not to take on any shows ourselves, and to let our agent, Joy, do all the work now. It worked ok for a while, but I got frustrated at how slow she was to reply to my emails, and get anything organised. While she was organising the Hamilton event for us, she told us she’d booked us into a cabin and that we should just sneak the dogs in, even though the rules of the caravan park were clear – NO DOGS IN THE CABINS! Of course I said no, and other arrangements were made. So I was feeling a bit annoyed about that. And then, she mentioned in one email recently that she was looking forward to seeing me perform at Whittlesea and Roy’s Speakeasy. That was odd, because I had never told her about it, and at the beginning when I asked Roy how our agent would feel about him inviting me to perform, and he basically said to forget about her and that it was none of her business. So anyway, I told Joy I wasn’t performing there anymore because, “Roy changed his mind and said we weren't wanted after all.” That afternoon I got a long winded email from Joy that started “I want to start this email with a tone that allows you to understand that I'm very concerned about what you sent in your last email…” and so on it went. She told me “I didn't want to represent Superdogs to begin with. I find that as a business the best returns are made on artists who can deliver heaps of variety in their show, travel easily to wherever the work is, are self contained and who are easy to deal with.” Apparently Roy had insisted that she be our agent and so she agreed. And was she inferring we were hard to deal with? And so she told me not to speak poorly of Roy, and that he should not be subjected to unfair comments “such as you made to me this morning.” After some discussion with the family, I emailed back that night and said I was not speaking poorly of anyone, just saying what had happened about the shows in question, and that if she didn’t want to be our agent then we’d just go back to working on our own or whatever (I wrote it very respectfully, of course). That was over a week ago now, and I haven’t heard anything from her since then.

Bad Thing #3 Our computer is barely hanging on to life – USB ports are busted, CD drive went long ago, SD card slot doesn’t work either, and the sound comes and goes. So all our internet is done on the phone or occasionally using the phone as a wireless “hotspot” for those things that HAVE to be down on the computer, like posting this on my blog. And there’s no way to get any photos from the camera onto here.

Bad Thing #4 We were going to go to a Sci-Fi convention on the 20th of this month, and had been planning it for nearly three weeks. Some actors from our favourite TV series would be there and it was going to be awesome! And then the van’s windscreen cracked and needed replacing, so there goes our convention money.

There are several other bad things that aren’t even big enough to have their own number on here (a broken DVD player, rotten patches in the bus floor, having to put seatbelts in the van or sell it due to the crazy laws around here, etc), but put them together with these four bad things, Roy’s previously mentioned behaviour, and, for the first time all year, an empty “upcoming shows in 2013” list, and you can probably understand while I’m feeling somewhat depressed. It feels like all this stuff happened at once – one at a time every few months wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but all these things have happened in the last few weeks. It’s bad timing, like that thing with Roy set off a chain reaction, with all the bad things happening at once. I know it will get better, but when?

Five Years