Winter has arrived!

Woke up to some serious rain and a howling wind this morning … winter is definitely here!  The Halloween tent that the boys put up in the yard is starting to break apart and blow away so I’m gonna go out and take it down asap.  And if the weather is like this at Waialae, I’m not sure whether my Thursday group is going to be golfing this afternoon.  Oh well, it’ll give me more time to spend on music and work!

We had our weekly rehearsal yesterday and some of the new James Taylor songs are sounding really good!  We’ll be performing for the MDA Hawai’i fundraiser tomorrow night at 6:00pm over at the Honolulu Hale Civic Grounds so we won’t be at Lulu’s.  We will be at the Kani Ka Pila Grille on Saturday, however, and then the Nick, Alex, and I, will be judges for KZOO Radio’s karaoke finals over at the Sheraton Waikiki ballroom.  This is the 30th anniversary for this karaoke competition and the winners get to go to Japan to compete in the national karaoke finals.  Some of the judges and some professional karaoke performers are coming from Japan to take part in this event, so it should be an interesting experience for us.  Personally, I’ll be interested to see how long the boys (along with myself) can listen to people singing enka-style karaoke for 5 hours … yeehaa!!

I had a couple of beers and some pupus at the original Side Street Inn last night with my buddies Cal Lui and Roy Sakuma.  I hadn’t seen Roy in quite a while so it was good to get together with him … he was ManoaDNA’s producer & manager in our early years and continues to be a great mentor & supporter of me and the boys.  Along with the ice cold draft beers, we munched on garlic edamame, poke, fried saimin, and my all-time favorite, Chinese-style steamed moi, as we reminisced about the old days!  Great times, lots of laughs!!!

Aloha, “D”