It seems that I can’t be without Erin for very long, she received my birthday gifts in the afternoon of the day that we split up and she got very emotional about it as she was watching the DVD’s I sent her wearing my Plymouth Argyle shirt. And I got all emotional when she called; hearing her crying just broke my heart. I do want to be with Erin but I am trying not to let myself get so emotionally involved until we can meet in person which is likely to be Christmas time now, but we have hatched a plan to make that happen, more on that later. I was feeling like I was a little trapped and very frustrated as I had all but given up on any sort of social life here in the UK in the pursuit of getting the cash together to fly out to the US in June and yet still seemed to have no cash towards the airfare at the end of the month. So I am going to try to have as normal life as possible here with a view to making it to the US at Christmas. Things came to a head a few weeks back when Erin went out for the evening and I came home early-ish and she still wasn’t home despite telling me she would be home at 9pm (3am BST) at the latest and I got home about 3:15am (9:15pm CDT) and I kinda lost it (see previous entries for details). Anyway, Erin went out again last night for her birthday (again changing her plans as she said she wanted an evening in with me watching some movies) but I just let it go and stayed out having a couple of drinks with the band that played last night, then came home at 2am and went to bed, watched a couple of episodes of Red Dwarf on DVD and fell asleep about 20 minutes into the second episode. I am not giving up on having a life here any more as it’s depressing me as I don’t want to be coming home to an empty bed if Erin isn’t there for me to talk to. Yes I love spending time and talking with Erin, but that can’t be my whole life. I can go out and have a few drinks and enjoy myself, I just have to keep my drinking under control like I did last night. I enjoyed having a drink and a chat with the boys from Renegade Beat and I enjoyed the gig, no problems and it sounded amazing once the place started to pack out. Anyway, the plan for us is to try to save back any spare money we have and pay it into a PayPal account until we have enough for airfare. The plan is to pay in about £25 per week each, and maybe more if we have more spare money than expected. That way it’s out of reach for both of us, we can’t just buy something on our debit cards without thinking as we would actively have to transfer money from the PayPal account into a bank account which would take a couple of days at least. This is the best way we can think of for making this relationship even a possibility. But at the same time I am trying to remain slightly detached as I don’t want to feel the way that I have been feeling the past few weeks again. When you are into someone so intensely as myself and Erin are to the point of missing that person so much it hurts when they aren’t around, emotions tend to run very high and that is very bad for our relationship prospects!
Work has been good, Monday was the monthly Cafe Concrete; which was pretty uneventful, had some bizarre feedback issues with a laptop which baffled me as you wouldn’t think an electronic device could feedback. But that was easily resolved by muting the internal laptop microphone. Wednesday was Alternation and that worked out pretty well, we had a couple of live bands on before the club nights started so that boosted the bar takings, which is good for the health of the night. But as expected the people that came to see the bands left pretty much straight away and the regular club goers sat downstairs until the live music had finished. This baffles me as for the last band it was free entry, so they could have seen the excellent Dead or American for free. Either way, I don’t really care, I made some extra cash by engineering the gig beforehand and have got even more engineering work because of it! Friday was live Reggae/Ska night and all the bands were fantastic. Exeter based Scavenger Type kicked off the night with their mellow reggae beats, top quality start to the night. Then local ska act Renegade Beat hit the stage and ripped it up getting the crowd up and skanking. Then headliners Skankt stepped up onto the stage and suddenly their upbeat ska tunes had the dancefloor packed out which was wonderful to see at a live gig! Tonight is the regular true metal night; Cerebral Punishment with two live bands on tonight, which will keep me happy as club nights are normally boring as hell for me; even if it’s easy money!