With the onset of spring I found myself in Texas and New Orleans. My less than 24-hour stop in Houston was for a benefit for the Society of Iranian American Women for Education. I was playing there with my friend and great persian singer Hamed Nikpay www.hamednikpay.com. They took great care of us and at 8am after flying all night it was truly wonderful to crawl into bed with luxurious cotton sheets, down comforter and a feather bed. I'm not picky but nice hotels are, well, nice.

The next morning I took an early flight to New Orleans to teach two workshops that were hosted by N.O.Madic Tribal www.nomadictribal.com. I was told that I had brought spring with me and for the next week enjoyed many a nightclub, afternoon bike rides, and sleeping in late.

Upon returning home I found that spring had arrived here too, with the symbolic blooming of the cherry tree in our front yard. Next to it, the wisteria was showing its first clusters of fragrant purple flowers.

I'm basically off until the last weekend of April, when I'll be going down south to see my family and friends and teach workshops in San Louis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ojai. After that, home for a couple days and on to the Serpent Rouge tour for the first half of May. With my month off we will be preparing for that tour and, with my fancy new audio interface, working on some recording projects -- one with Faisal Zedan, and one with Dan Cantrell of the Toids www.bellowhead.com.

dvd sales have been going well. People have been saying tons of nice things about it. This inspires me to work on more projects and, hopefully soon, start another video project. With such large projects the only way to make it through them is to just focus on the piece at hand, doing the best possible work while remaining unattached to the outcome. This is especially true when a technical issue comes up and you realize that you really aren't going to make that self imposed deadline. After all that hard work the dvd is being used and appreciated. That makes me happy. The surprising thing is how many have been going international -- to the Netherlands, Italy, Taiwan. . .all over the place. How did these people find out about it? the power of the internet. . .