Category: tunes

Music. Bands. Songs. Concerts.

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of music: 2006.5


Tuesday night as I write; a day ahead on blogging this week because the whole “clothes to charity” bit came so easily and quickly. Sharaun’s cleaning the guest bathroom for our next visitor, a friend of hers and mine both who was actually my 1st “real” girlfriend, my first real kiss, and certainly the first girl I ever “did stuff” with. Yeah, I pretty much tagged-up all the bases, but never quite made it home… it’s OK though – we were young. It’ll be nice for Sharaun to have a friend come visit, and they’re even planning on leaving me on daddy-duty for an overnighter into San Francisco and the wine country this coming weekend. Me, Mr. Mom alone with Keaton for the first time. I’m excited, but will surely miss being able to hand her off to her mom, who has some kind of stop-crying magic about her.

Been working on and off over the past few weeks on material for a new “thing” I’m debuting: I’m taking the yearly “best of” post and adding a mid-year checkpoint, a best of “so far” type thing. I think this will help me be more accurate with my year-end list, and besides – I love ranking and writing about music I like. I’ll do the posts in June, trying to stay around the mid-year mark, and format them identical to my year-end roundups. Since I know so many people are hanging on my every recommendation, and no one skips right over my music entries, I’m sure you’re waiting patiently to see what albums you’ll be rushing out and buying. I sometimes surprise myself with just how much effort I put into making these little lists: writing 50+ word blurbs about each album, making sure each has a hyperlink to more information, and formatting them all to be nicely indented and accompanied by a mini album cover. Anyway, without further ado – here is my best of 2006.5:

7. Sufjan Stevens – The Avalanche

I never thought of myself as one of the many Sufjan “fanboys” out there, but I must admit I do find myself admiring him more and more each time I hear a new song of his. Granted, there are several “weaker” numbers on this outing – particularly some of what the album’s press blurb refers to as “outlines, gesture drawings, … musical scribbles mumbled on a hand-held tape recorder.” A flute arpeggio with some dreamy flashback chimey stuff that runs for ~30sec is hardly a masterpiece, and I don’t think Sufjan is quite yet the class of musical enigma which warrants releasing his “What’s the New Mary Jane, takes 1-6” equivalent for posterity. Dang, that last sentence has so much literary and music-nerd potential… but I just can’t seem to execute it properly. If you fancy you can rewrite it better, comment me with your version, OK? Bottom line, there are some painfully gorgeous tunes on this album – and it would make the list for “The Henney Buggy Band” and the spruced-up “Adlai Stevenson” alone.


6. Tapes ‘N Tapes – The Loon

Yeah… so… everybody with broadband loved the Tapes ‘n Tapes in 2006, and I’m no exception. A very basic album, The Loon impresses a lot for being as stripped-down as it is. Some of this album reminds me of what I loved about Wolf Parade’s “Apologies to the Queen Mary” last year: nonsensical lyrics, shuffling washboard tempos, and a bounty of energy and snarl. I hear Pavement in there, even the Arcade Fire… and I guess that’s not entirely a bad thing, especially if you can pull of all those analogies and still be more than just the same-old hero-worship. So, number six it is.


5. Thome Yorke – The Eraser

The solo effort kept a secret until just before its planned release, Yorke’s Radioheadless foray into melodic-electronic took the music blogosphere by surprise. Then, it leaked over a month in advance, and the web collective had dissected and discussed the album to death before the law-abiding, CD-buying public ever even got to hear it for the first time. For me, I had to get it – couldn’t wait. I must say, I was leery from the moment I heard about the album. Could Thom’s genius shine as well without the group effort? In short: yes. Thom’s lyrical prowess and knack for eerie melody make a fine showing here; although I will admit the album is a little too ProTooled for me, and it drags a bit through the chewy center – it’s still a damn fine effort with some classic tunes. And for that, it falls in at number 5 on my list.


4. Phoenix – It`s Never Been Like That

Every summer deserves a summery album. Like a sweet, dripping ice-cream cone, “It’s Never Been Like That” plops perfect little circles of melted goodness all over your favorite Hawaiian shirt. Each track a self-sufficient pop gem, bouncy and singalong, with just enough rock sensibility and “rawness” to save it from being pure bubblegum indulgence. This album is 2006’s 95° summer-drive-with-the-windows down blarer; put it on and watch the sun move across the sky, maybe toss the frisbee with the hand not holding your beer while you wait for the meat to come off the grill. Oh, and chicks’ll dig the thing too… makes a great poolside swimsuit soundtrack.


3. The Islands – Return to the Sea

When I first heard the Unicorns album “Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?,” I fell in love with it almost instantly. I was bummed, but not entirely surprised, when they announced their breakout shortly after the album’s internet buzz carried them to underground stardom. After all, I’d seen them on stage and they were young and insane with very distinct personalities – I could tell just watching them that they were a bubbling pool of varied talents… and sometimes that just doesn’t work out. But, when I heard that the two “creative” members of the group had formed a new band and released an album under the name The Islands, I was excited. Turns out, this album is only just shy of “Who Will Cut Our Hair…” awesome – and that’s pretty damn awesome. The songs are longer than what they did as the Unicorns, and a little more cohesive with less randomness. “Swans,” in particular, is a good example of why I consider this to be one of the best albums of half-2006.


2. Built to Spill – You In Reverse

I first heard of Built to Spill in my first year at “real” college. Back when CMJ was a funny-shaped little magazine that came monthly with a free CD and didn’t yet cover hip-hop or rap, they recommended BTS’s “Perfect From Now On” “if you liked Pavement’s ‘Wowee Zowee.'” I did indeed like Pavement’s “Wowee Zowee,” a whole heck of a lot. So I ran up to the CD Warehouse and picked up a copy. I liked three songs. Turns out, later on down the line that album would end up being one of my favorites – it just needed some time to grow on me. Now, BTS are back, and they sound outstanding. Write more here. (Yes that last sentence was a placeholder for more hyperbole, but when I eventually came back to it I thought it had comedic value all by itself, so this review is over.)


1. Wolfmother – Wolfmother

This album is so badass… it’s like a flying brick of solid rock and roll, aimed straight at your pearly whites – ready to smash them out in a fit of guitar-induced hysterical rage. You can’t help pump your hand in a clenched-fist salute to these driving basslines, neck and head at the ready to snap into hair-tossing action upon the tidal wave of guitars. It’s Sabbath reborn, it’s a Deep Purple-esque Hammond B-3 churning out macabre-sounding minor key hooks over a deafening crunch of guitar and high-pitch male vocals. Put this album on and try not to punch things, I dare you. This album will actually make your cock thicker. So filled with awesome you’ll choke on your own enthusiastic screams of “Yeah motherfucker!!” as the solo rages during “Pyramid.” People… this album… it has a flute solo… c’mon!!


Well, that’s it for tonight… no small effort mind you, but I’m sure not as worth the trouble as I might think.

Goodnight.

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don’t blog for no suits


Another Monday done gone, workin’ for the man.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know that I talk a lot about my work without really talking about where I work or what exactly I do. That’s not gonna change, but I did want to talk about a fairly recent development at “my work” that has caused me to think. At “my work,” the corporate intranet this year added a dedicated space for employee blogging. Much like wordpress.com offers subsites that come preinstalled with the WordPress blogging backend – our corporate blogging area has it’s own custom backend and offers a working blog to any employee who wants to write. Everyone at “my work” can read these company-sanctioned blogs, and from what I can tell – there are no boundaries on content other than the standard stuff like no porn, etc. Meaning, these company-resource-supported blogs don’t force employee bloggers to write about company stuff. In fact, upon browsing many of the employee blogs I’ve noticed the posts are often just as banal and random as my own.

This is where I get to thinking. These blogs are hardly anonymous. Not only do they contain the employee blogger’s name, but the time and date of the posting. Every comment is also timestamped and tagged with the commenter’s name. I browsed these blogs a bit today and found ruminations on clogged gym shower drains, commentary on articles seen on Fark and BoingBoing, and all other sorts of non-workish type content. Not only that, there were employee comments on the stories, and comments and stories alike contained links to non-corporate-intranet URLs. This corporate blogging thing is definitely not for me. Not just because a lot of my content is “gauche” at best, but moreso because I’d worry these employee blogs could be used as accurate records of company time wasted. Why tell everyone you work with that, at 3:23pm on Monday, you were typing about the nice sunny weather rather than whatever the hell you’re actually being paid to do at 3:23pm on Mondays.

I’ll stick to my external blog, thank you. With full knowledge that it’s out there on the internets for anyone to read – but also a guarded tongue at work as far as publicizing it goes. I don’t need the man breathin’ down my neck trying force some “rules” on my blogging. I don’t blog for no suits…

Folks, I have to say I was worried. About what? Why, about this new Thom Yorke album. Yes, I was worried. When I downloaded it, and had run through it once on the iPod, I was worried that I’d be underwhelmed with it. My first impression what that it started and ended strong, but got all blurry and drug-out through the middle bits. Alas, a couple more casual listens didn’t do much to change that initial impression. Then, I got some focused one-on-one headphone time with the album, and things began to get clearer. Swirly keyboards and understated beats, Thom’s sing-song phrasing full of unexpected changes in timing and key… yeah this thing is good. I still think it’s strongest while opening and closing, but now the middle seems more supportive than weighing. It is worth mentioning though, that, in my opinion, this isn’t as good as what these tunes could’ve been would they have been collaborated on by Jonny, Phil, Ed, and Colin.

Anyway – I’m glad it leaked, and boy did it – nearly two months in advance. Following in the tradition of the last Radiohead albums, all of which have leaked considerably prior to street. XL, the label the album will be officially released on, had some interesting things to say about the leak at a recent Eraser listening party:

Given the nature of Radiohead’s audience, and the history of their albums leaking, it has generally happened a lot earlier. Any label at this point expects that an album is going to get leaked. It definitely happened earlier than we had anticipated. I think it [the listening party] would have had a lot more punch if it was truly the first time that anyone had listened to it, but my assumption is most people in the room last night had already heard the record.

Leaks are just a given now, I suppose. I’m not sure there’s a way anymore to not have an album leak prior to street. You can restrict access to the studio during mastering, but things will still have a tendency to fall into the janitors pocket; you can watch the mastering plant where you cut the discs, even the assembly line where you package them; you can even embed digital “fingerprints” into advance listening copies sent to journalists and media outlets – but nothing is gonna stop that thing from making it onto the ‘net before you can buy it in stores. I’d wager that, if there’s any amount of pre-sale interest in an album, that there’s close to a 100% chance a release group will beat the street.

In the midst of an abysmal “funk” at work, I begrudgingly do my work each day, suspended in some perpetual state of limbo while my project gasps and sputters the longest death rattle in recorded history. But, work is work. Lumbering, wounded project or healthy, shiny-new project… it’s what I do for a paycheck. I keep telling myself to just shut up and get done what needs to get done. That kind of tough-love motivation does work, but it doesn’t come close to replacing genuine enthusiasm.

Goodnight my friends.

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thom yorke in a cave


Good evening from Wednesday night, which was a slightly more productive than the bust that was my Tuesday night. I did manage to get my hair cut, which was one of the things that’s been nagging me – but I missed mowing the lawn again… tomorrow, I guess. Work today was an 8hr exercise in futility: lots of math, thinking, crystal-ball-peering, planning and plotting… all with not nearly enough satisfaction at the end of it all. I keep hoping the direction will return to what I’m doing, and know I’m partially responsible for feeling without it. I can do my part to operate under whatever pieces of direction I can assemble, but I know I won’t feel 100% “purposed” again until I get some better clarity from above. I suppose this is all a learning experience, a primer in big-business red-tape… but I still have little tolerance for aimlessness. Enough with this.

The premise of this article fascinates me: that there are still areas on this planet which may remain relatively untouched by human development. It gets me thinking about how many other sealed-off isolated little ecosystems are out there. Little tiny worlds that exist only unto themselves, knowing nothing about anything else outside their walls. What if our whole galaxy is just some little sealed-up pocket of space in someone else’s world, waiting for some sanitation workers there to break through into our sheltered existence while drilling for a new sewer system? Yeah, I like thinking about things like that.

Well, it was only Tuesday I wrote about the eventual leak of Thom Yorke’s solo album as The Eraser (which happens to have one of the best album covers I’ve seen in a long while), and wouldn’t you know it I “happened” upon it while webbing around tonight. Needless to say I was ecstatic, and could hardly wait for the electric pulses coming down the coax to be converted into music. It took some ingenuity to find the dang thing, since it hadn’t really hit the “mainstream” filesharing sites yet (and I’m not exactly sure I’m still young enough to know where the “mainstream” filesharing sites are anymore anyway). Turns out it “officially” leaked sometime on Tuesday, maybe even Monday night – so I am indeed a few days off “fresh” when it comes to illegal album leaks. I’m still listening now, but I’m pretty much bound by my abounding enthusiasm to like this album – either that or eat my words. It’s crazy that an album can make me this happy.

Oh, and I dunno if you guys noticed – but I got like 4,000 spam comments overnight, check out the proof:

That’s a lot of spam in a short amount of time… it was just a couple days ago I was talking about hitting 30,000, and here I am about to break 40,000… I am so popular; with spammers; yay.

Goodnight.

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oh how i’d miss the porn


Lasik tomorrow. Ben asked me if I was nervous about putting my eyes nuder the knife/laser. My immediate answer was “no,” as I’m actually not that nervous about it. Perhaps naive considering it’s elective surgery and has inherent risks – but my confidence has been so bolstered by the successes of my friends who’ve undergone the procedure, and the success rate overall. The only time I do get a tad “concerned” is when I think of it in terms of putting my vision on the line – more specifically, when I think that the worst possible result could be permanent blindness. I know this is incredibly rare (one out of millions, according to the stats), but boy… would that blow. As small a concern as it is, I have caught myself shutting my eyes tight for brief moments over the past week, in an attempt to get an idea what it might be like to be sightless for good. I know it’s a bad point of comparison, as I can simply open my lids and have the world once again revealed to me – but it does provide a bit of realism to the thought. At least, if I go blind, I’ll still have music. But porn, people… oh how I’d miss the porn.

Funny how things can change so much from day-to-day. It was just yesterday I wrote about being frustrated at work, and then this morning I went in and reopened stale tasks with a new vigor. Maybe writing about it was my own form of catharsis or something. Whatever happened, I just went in this morning and grabbed the reigns again. The afternoon was largely made up of meeting with various folks to inform them of the new direction I’m pursuing – all of which went well. For the moment, at least, I feel like I’m back in the game and contributing again. I guess it really could be as simple as being a work-only manic-depressive…

Let’s do a quick-bits roundup: Sharaun talked to her mom today, I guess all the ladies she works with now have a picture of our daughter being chased by a bear as their Windows desktop wallpapers. This makes me happy. Have successfully ripped and tagged over ~14GB (~4000 files) of Beatles bootlegs with my best-use-of-wasted-time Godfather script. I’m now on the home stretch, having nearly all my discs completely digitalized. It’s taken a couple years, but it was worth (or will be) worth it. Been working my “best albums of 2006, so far” list (a new “thing” I’ve been wanting to do here), and it’s coming along nicely. Aiming for sometime in June (y’know, to kinda reinforce the whole halfway thing). OK, done with that stuff.

I know I’ve written about edgewoodhospital.com before, but it’s inspired at least another paragraph. Let me first reiterate how much I love the site. Not only is it a timepiece for several generations, it’s gained quite a following of regulars who are digging up old pictures and posting them. These snapshots of parties past at Edgewood elicit the best comments from the site’s readers. People recognize people, recognize events, relive and share memories… I only wish I had some pictures like that from all the stuff we did as kids. We didn’t have an Edgewood where we’d go drink Budweiser and smoke Marlboros, but we did have several other “hangouts” where we could safely indulge in the excesses of youth while remaining relatively free from “the man.” Our main ones were: the pits, Skyview, the tracks, Barton extension, Hoo-Hoo, and BP. We had some good times at all those places, even spent the night at one of ’em a couple times – camped out in our cars, too stoned to want to leave. I wish I could make a site enshrining our teenage haunts, something along the lines of edgewoodhospital.com where folks could create accounts, upload old pictures of of kids being kids at those sacred places… comment on photos and carry on conversations. I would do it, but I have doubts I’d be able to properly publicize it – and it’d stagnate. But it sure would be fun to work on…

Any old cronies from the Rock read this? Anyone down? Leave me a comment if so.

And, before I go, just so Sharaun doesn’t read this and give me grief for talking about porn where anyone and their brother can go read it – I wouldn’t really miss the porn. I’d miss the internet, but the loss of porn would be an easy tradeoff. OK? Summary: Dave = not into porn as much as the tongue-in-cheek title may insinuate (it’s comedy, remember).

Goodnight.

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catching up


I apologize for my website of late, the performance is horrible. The page either loads incredibly slow, or times out altogether. I have no idea what’s causing this, but am fairly certain it’s nothing of my doing. I’ve been running the same pages with the same scripts for quite a while with decent performance… and all of the sudden things are gummed up. I’ve narrowed it down to any page which accesses one of my MySQL databases (as both this page and my gallery pages do), so it seems the problem lies there… somehow. I have noticed a sharp increase in the amount of spam comments the blog gets, up to about ~3000 per day now – and that might be the culprit. I wrote to my host’s tech support – but so far they’ve only offered me an upgrade package to a dedicated server (rather than the virtual slice of a server I now share with others). This sounds appealing to me, but also ticks me off… I should be able to expect my pages to work. For crap’s sake I only have a measly three databases and a handful of scripts that call them. So, dear reader, I’ll do what I can to fix the situation – but until then I apologize if your experience here is frustrating.

But, just to make it all the more frustrating – here’s a link to Keaton’s gallery, where I’ve uploaded some annotated snaps from our weekend in Oregon which you’ll read more about below. Oh yeah, today’s entry is mad disjointed… and I make no apologies, as it was written in fits over the last week, often for entries not posted (as the gaps in writing last week make evident).

Let’s get started with random paragraph #1.

The other night on TV 20/20 ran a story about a girl who had to have half of her brain removed, due to a rare brain disease that was causing her to have debilitating seizures. Yes, it was a storyline on a popular medical drama recently. Anyway, they showed video footage the girl’s family took when she was a baby – and cut to her parents saying how happy they were when she was born that they got a “healthy baby.” Yes, aren’t we all… it’s what we all hope for, a healthy child with ten fingers and ten toes. But, when this family’s little girl turned four – something went wrong. I think about that all the time, how things can look so normal and right for so long – and then, seemingly out of the blue, go so terribly wrong. I think about that with our daughter, how perfect she is, how healthy and happy and beautiful. Watching a show like that before Keaton tugged at my heartstrings, watching it now that I have Keaton – it full-on hooked my heartstrings up to the Concorde and took flight.

Continuing with random paragraph #2.

Showering at my folks’ place these past few days, I noticed that their guest bathroom is stocked with a bottle of “body wash” instead my preference a bar of soap. I never did get into the “body wash” thing, just doesn’t equate to a bar of soap to me… leaving my skin feeling all slimy when I draw my fingers across it, instead of the squeaky clean of soap that I like. Anyway, I picked up the body wash to check it out – and read the following off the back label:

We know how special your bath or shower time is…a place for you to be private, reborn, where creative thoughts visit.

Reborn? For me, my bath or shower time is more like a time for me to wash the stink off my ass, sweat off my balls, and grease off my face (although not necessarily in that order). Who are these people for whom bathing is a religious experience? Although, I guess, I can’t argue with the “creative thoughts” coming to visit part – as this whole bit was indeed inspired by a shower…

And, random paragraphs #3 and #4, written last week but never posted.

Why are large conference/meeting rooms always unable to cool themselves properly? It seems like every time I find myself congregated with a large group of folks in big conference room, I’m sweating balls. You’d think that engineers designing these big conference rooms for hotels and the like would take this into consideration and install cooling that could handle capacity. Ugh… now my face is greasy and I’m getting sleepy, thanks a lot hot conference room.

The trip to Oregon has been a huge success thus far. Keaton must have her dad’s genes because she traveled like a seasoned pro – making nary a peep and sleeping the entire time. Last night Sharaun and I slept with her lain betwixt us, which we’ve never done before – partly for fear of rolling over onto her mid-sleep. Well, we didn’t roll over onto her, and I really enjoyed the experience. It may sound dumb, but I loved waking up in the middle of the night and seeing her sleeping face just to my left, her little pink-clad arms flung up above her head just like dad does when he sleeps, her little chest rising and falling and making soft breathy sounds through her tiny nose. I want to describe it as “intimate,” but that sounds kinda pedo… so maybe I won’t.

Let’s end this mess just as randomly, shall we?

I’m so excited about the news that Thom Yorke is doing a solo record, I can’t wait to see what he does with his “spare time.” I certainly love the woodcut-esque flash animation on the frontpage of his solo-centric webpage – I the imagery there is in any way representative of the album’s vibe, I’m down. I’m also excited because the new Sufjan leaked… a full two months in advance of the album’s official release. I’ll write more about it once I’ve had the time to properly digest it.

Well, today (Monday) is the 1st of my two Lasik consultations, with surgery possible as early as this Friday. I’m so pumped folks, so pumped. Talk to you all later, Dave out.

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once more to the skies


Not much meat today, but I didn’t want to do one of those skip-two-days things again. We fly to Oregon tomorrow (we’re already gone as you read this), for a work/vacation thing (I work Wednesday through Friday, hang with the folks in the evenings and on the weekend). Keaton’s first flight, and we have to roll out of bed at the ungodly hour of 3am in order to get ready and catch out 6am flight. Wish us luck, OK?

Work’s got me in a rut… some recent goings-down there have shaken up my responsibilities and rendered a good part of the planning I’ve done over the last six months moot. Gave me occasion to sit aimless for a bit, without direction, wondering where and how to get back into things. I’m reluctant to go back and redo all my careful planning, as I’m somewhat concerned the dust hasn’t quite settled and it may all be for naught. I will admit, though, that a Tuesday with no direction and no solid deadlines was kinda nice…

Progress on ripping the very last remnants of my CD collection is moving along swiftly, thanks to the bootleg-wizard script I wrote to tag-up the resultant MP3s. I’m working through the Beatles at a breakneck clip, and excited about the prospect of finally getting down to zero physical CDs and an all-digital music library. Well, to be honest I do have plans to box up some of my original Beatles bootlegs and store them for safekeeping – as they’re rather rare and have a high sentimental value. But all the CD-R copies of stuff I traded for over the years is going right in the bin – trash.

Until Oregon, goodnight.

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firsts


A weekend of firsts: First night away from home with little Keaton; Keaton’s first camping trip; Keaton’s first time to the ocean; and Keaton’s first night slept entirely through (she’s been doing ~6hrs for about week, but Sunday night she went 11 hours – in a tent no less). Camping was good, but freezing – windy and in the low 50s / high 40s at night. We bundled Keaton tight, and she really seemed to enjoy being outside. Laying down in the tent must’ve seemed like a circus-colored light show to her, with the wind blowing the canvas walls in and out and the sunlight playing through the trees we were pitched under. I’ve posted the Keaton-specific pictures from the trip in a new gallery, and the more general camping-related pictures in another new gallery – go there or be square.

Speaking of galleries and pictures, I made some simple optimizations to my Coppermine gallery script (the machine behind my photo galleries). I’d had problems with slow loading and updating, and most annoyingly I was getting SQL “max_questions” exceeds errors (seems Coppermine is pretty liberal in the number of SQL SELECT statements it does, and my server limits me to 5000 per hour). I actually think it’s Google’s robot spidering the images that was constantly pushing me over the limit – but regardless of the culprit it was annoying to have the gallery go down for an hour at a time. I added a brilliant bit of randomization to the SQL user, so the gallery will run the SELECT statements with one of four different users each time, randomly. This way, I can effectively have 20000k queries per hour. What’s more, it seems to have greatly improved the speed of the galleries – maybe by deserializing all the queued SELECTs from a single user. Either way, it seemed to be working well over the weekend – but I did get a couple slow loads… we’ll see how it works under the “strain” of all my readers.

Tomorrow, Monday as I write, is gonna be a busy one. Unfortunately, I had to cancel this first of my two much-looked-forward to Lasik consultations… to schedule some last-minute meetings at work. Things were thrown into the air at work Friday, as some major shakeups went down. So much so that my planned travel this week is now up in the air, which is tough because I was using the trip to Oregon to get to my folks’ place for our Mother’s Day visit (Sharaun is meeting me there Wednesday). Now, however, I don’t even know if my work-related travel is still on – although the trip to the grandparents’ place still is, meaning I may have to find my own way there… which may or may not be on the same flight as Sharaun and Keaton. Not a big deal, it’s just that, me being anal, I like to know how I’m getting where I’m going – especially when it’s Keaton’s first plane trip. It’ll work out I suppose.

Three songs from the to-be-released new Radiohead album leaked in live form this weekend, from a recent Thom & Johnny outing – and they’ve got me salivating for this thing. Also, tickets for the show at Berkley’s Greek Theater (a short jaunt for me) go on sale next weekend… and I’m just dying to find a way to go. Too bad I’ll be out of town the day they go on sale, as I know I stand no chance online and the phones will be jammed. I’d love to see them again, any chance I can get really… maybe Sharaun and I can hire a babysitter… or I can take a night off and head over with someone of similarly excellent musical taste. Maybe… just maybe…

Blogging this week could get sparse, as we’ve got more firsts for Keaton which may end up taking precedence: first trip on a plane, first time meeting grandpa on dad’s side, and mom’s first qualifying mother’s day. Until tomorrow, take care out there in the real world… and we’ll do the same here at sounds familiar.

Goodnight.