Although life has been throwing a large amount of curve balls, testing my inner fortitude and dedication to my 95% rule( more on that later), closing one life chapter and starting a new one with regularity that is no excuse for being so darn tardy in writing to my true friends. I grovel at the alter of your kind hearts and compassion and ask for the forgiveness which I deeply believe yawl will bestow upon me. I APOLOGIZE AND ASK YOU E-MAIL ME YOUR FORGIVENESS IN A SHORT NOTE, SO I CAN GO ON LIVING AND CREATING. THANK YOU.

                                                 Now on to HF lore:

The fellers and I have been a pickin’ in a variety of places traversing the midwest in various combinations of the band, from parties to small town clubs to the start of the outdoor season.
Oh the outdoor season !!! The first 3 outdoor shows we did were Balmoral Race Track USA Fest 43 degrees on to Milwaukee River Splash 44 degrees on to Navy Pier Chgo. so cold they shut the pier down early !!!! I guess this means that part of the road gear for next year needs to include and have handy HEARTSFIELD PARKA’S. Yes sometimes in the ole’ midwest, spring can be a cruel mistress
just ass cold as a well diggers ash, and then low and behold 95 degrees sun screen and where the hell did all my shorts go? With that fine spring done we jumped into summer.
We spent most of June in Wisconsin starting out in a fine lakeside pub Lily Lake Resort with the acoustic trio with mystery picker Tim Johnson on acoustic gtr, mandolin and harmonica and we tore it up. The trio is now Davie and I with a mystery picker that fills out the trio so it is always a nice surprise and keeps the music fresh. We also have added Scott Stevenson on piano & accordian from time to time and that is takes us to a whole other musical place come check it out, tons of fun.
Next Clark place one of our favorite clubs in Stevens Point WI. this place is dedicated to music, infact they are not open unless there is music there a real music club.
Off we went to Phillips Wis. to play a full band show right on a lake in front of a great country bar, oh life is so tough. Dave went Muskie fishin’ all day, couple of us went boating all day and I discovered LOW CARB BREAD in that small town. Now for a guy on the Atkins Diet that’s like winning the lotto, oh my kingdom for a sandwich !!!!
Anyway after all that funnin’ we hit the stage an hour before dark played good folks loved it but then..... the sun went down and the hungriest, meanest, swarminest, people eatin’ creatures the “Wisconsin Mosquito” came out with a mission to eat and chew heavily on every member of the band. I know we tend to move around quite a bit on stage but this got us dancin’ like the Back Street Boys !!! You never saw fellers a pickin’ and a swattin so feverishly in your life, play a solo spray some Off, sing a line spray some Off, I must have swatted Elmer 50 times during With These Tools alone. Fortunately after the show we had a large group of folks to take us in the bar for some fine Wisconsin Mosquito Bite Antidote and that helped relieve the wounds of that vicious attack. 
Then we headed out to Greenbay for another festival and by now it was 96 degrees in the shade but a great bunch of folks were there to cheer us on. Little Feat was there the night before so they had some great music happening there all weekend and we all felt their vibe on that stage. However, the time it took to get for our make up artists to cover our red, swollen, rashy lookin’ skins from the Attack of the Killer Mosqiutos the night before took as much time as they needed for makeup in a major horror motion picture or Terminator 3 !!!
Wisconsin Rapids was next right on the river lots of bands and summer starting to really come on.
Next stop, working with a favorite radio folks WWHP, at the High Dive in Champaign IL. where we did a show with James McMurtry for the Lonesome Larry’s summer concert series. Some folks just make ya feel like family and that is all the Folks at the WHIP station we love ‘em. Lot’s of great folks there and we will be going back in the fall.
Then we hit Hobart IN. Jaycee’s Fest and on to the Naperville Ribfest where we ate some great great ribs and got the hang with the Dickie Betts Band sort of a Les Paul convention. Between Los Lobos Dickie Betts’s boys and Elmer and Dave the guitar armory was a thing of glory. Good to play with some of those Southern Rock kin from time to time.

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Beware the speed dial, PDA’S , cell phone/ phone list conveniences, they can be helpful but can also make you helplessly lost. A short while ago I got myself in a situation where I seemed to be stranded in a strange place ( don’t ask why) with no cell phone in hand. No problem this stranded guy thought, I got money and there is a phone booth but... lo and behold the only number I had in my memory was mine, and I was out there, NO ONE HOME. Try as I may and I tried hard I tell ya, I could not remember a single number to call for anyone to come fetch me from my plight, I thought so hard that it hurt, 386 no 388 no 838 maybe, then it hit me !!!!! I haven’t dialed a number in years not the whole number, it’s always search, Steve Cell, send, search - Scotty - send. At home speed dial the same thing, couldn’t remember the last time I really dialed a full number. Now you might think “call directory assistance”, yeah tried that but everyone I know at least close to where I was at 5 am in the morning had an unlisted number and no amount of sweet talking or direct threats at the operator would get them to budge. Finally I walked a few miles found a cab and went to my bass players house for my rescue. After hours of being stranded got to his house about 11 am I realized I DON’T KNOW ANYONE’S PHONE NUMBER BY MEMORY barely my own, like I said search send, search send is the way of modern phone communication and that can be not so darn good in a situation like I was in. So the lesson was take a pen and paper, remember those, and put a darn old fashioned card in my wallet. No longer will I depend on my digital lists, no longer will I relinquish my vital information to some microchip, no sir it’s back to an analog back up for this boy. As a matter of fact my bathroom reading now is PHONE NUMBERS and I am entertaining taking a memory improvement course. The new slogan is if it’s not in my Head it’s not in my grasp and I could be lost out on my ass.

Speaking of the modern appliances and convinces why does everything nowadays have to have a 3 inch manual with it and on top of that one you can hardly make sense out of it anyway. Is it just me or do some of you feel like the folks who write manuals are just f@cking with us, I see them finishing one up just a laughing and thinking “that ought to frustrate and confuse the crap out of them”. Heck if they have a paragraph that makes sense and clearly tells you what you have to do I think they feel like they failed in their quest to make us feel like dumb asses !!
I bought a frickin’ toaster a short while ago, got it home and out of the box fell the manual, for a damn toaster, then I saw why.... blinking lights, settings for pop tarts, waffles, bagels, pastry,
frozen, warming and another dial with 8 levels of heat but not a word about TOAST. Now I may be old fashioned but I just wanted a machine that I could put a couple of slices of bread in pull down a handle and have it pop up some toast, simple.
Another thing is the concept of each appliance/ electronic device has to multitask, do any number of things in one unit. My new cell phone goes on the web, can get my e-mail, has a calendar & calculator, an alarm clock, tip calculator, world clocks, note pad, fax capability, plays game on the smallest screen imaginable (nothing like bowling on a 1/ 2 inch screen), birthday reminder, speed dial to a horoscope, GPS capable, mileage log etc. etc. Not only that, it has 15 ringer tones, 12 color schemes, a tone for missed calls, caller ID calls, different peoples calls, ID unavailable calls so on and so on. The manual is huge and almost worthless, it gets ya going on something but somehow always leaves out one bit of data the will make the thing your working on really work, you know f@cking with us again.
Software is the same damn thing. A word processor now has to be a web page builder, birthday card maker, newsletter maker, drawing program, photo enhancer, data base builder, html translator blah blah blah!!!!! I can take years to get a hang of it and then you have to upgrade and start all over. And these computer manuals are the KINGS of F@cking with your head, these guys work for the devil I am convinced of that. There is a whole corporate division in HELL that is dedicated to manual making and a research department that is in charge of combining as many applications to one device as possible, just to make modern living as confusing and aggravating as possible.
It’s all a plan to drive us completely crazy & frantic so we have to run to evil distractions to get some relief from the technical/ digital/ connivence material world, that’s putting our motherboard brains on overload. Maybe that’s why sin is IN, Girls Gone Wild, Sex in The City, half naked girl Beer commercials, divorce up, Rave parties, Ecstasy running wild, folks shooting anybody anywhere everyday for anything, Martha Stewart and her kind just a stealin’ and cheatin’,
serial killer movies abounding and a general disgruntledness !! Could be, think back to a time when we had princess phones, hand written phone books, type writers with paper, a toaster with one lever, 2 or 3 pages manuals, when you could tell a gal she looked very pretty and open a door for her. Much less of all this weirdness going on.
Maybe I should join the fray and invent a thang that shaves you, faxes, blends drinks, metal detects, plays dvd’s, calculates tips, is a marital aid, radon detects, makes calls, goes on the web, eliminates pet odors, prints,is a convection oven and makes a mean expresso. Yeah sort of a Swiss army knife concept you can put in on belt clip and hang it from your hip & does it all. Like the young sales feller at Best Buy told me (the snot) when I was hunting for a phone and was getting dizzy and lost at the HUGE VARIETY OF CHOICES of machines that did everything, every which way but in 100 different ways in a 100 different colors and a 100 different configurations “ We don’t live in Kansas anymore Dorothy !!!!! Now how’s that for respecting your elders !!! That’s Ok though my eyebrow/lip/navel and butt rings was way way cooler than his, and he didn’t even know what a record album was, the blue haired snot.
Anyway my friends take the time to find the simple things and enjoy them by the way things are going they will be illegal soon. Til’ next time much sooner than the last just “Keep On Smilin”.

P.S. The 95 % rule is one of the rules I live by. I can only allow 5 % of my time to feel bummed out, sad, depressed or negative. 95 % of my time has to be spent in the smiling, happy, laughing, having fun with my life zone. It is not always easy and not without effort but since it’s a rule I have to obey it and it works, even when live is kicking me squarely in the ass, I think of that rule and it helps me smile again. Think about it.