Weekly Recap

I have just discovered Kate Ryan on Friday on eMusic - and I am also totally in love with eMusic. I don't know why I never played around with it before. I think I just assumed it was kind of crappy. I don't know why. Maybe because everywhere you look they're giving away free downloads, and I kind of went with the "perceived value" line of thinking, ie if they were giving it away all the time, it must suck. Shame on me and my snobby attitudes.

But I rediscovered them when Rhapsody didn't have something I was looking for, and they did. For the "People who do really Cool Things" file: I heard (on NPR, of course) about these guys who wrote songs in honor of each US President: Of Great and Mortal Men isn't a compilation in the traditional style of school songs about Presidents - they aren't songs with lyrics like "Buchannan watched the clock while the country fell apart/Just hanging around eating pizza till Lincoln would start." They're more like folk/popish songs that evoke the feelings around the presidency that they're about. And they're on eMusic.

Earlier this week I had a weird couple of days. To start with on Monday night I had insomnia for the first time in years. I was awake until 3:30 having imaginary conversations with everyone from Jesus to Lil Wayne (is he on every hiphop album made?) and then had to get up at 5:15 to go up to San Mateo. Man, I'm getting too old for that stuff. When I was in college I could go for three days on coffee and Turkey Hill Iced Tea. Not anymore. It was some kinda painful. I kept just counting down the hours until I could go to sleep. To make matters worse, I had to rent a car to drive to the office and they gave me this Jeep, which was huge. I guess they thought it was an upgrade, but I hate it when car rental places give me big cars as an upgrade. I drive a freaking Chevy Aveo. I only know how to drive small cars. I can't drive a Jeep for pete's sake. So I drove like a grandma, with the windows open to keep me awake. I finally slept on the plane on the way home. Then J picked me up and brought me dinner, and when I got home I just patted the cats and went straight to sleep. The next day I had to get up at 6 to drive to San Diego for a meeting, so by the time I got home on Wednesday evening, I was in dire need of a nap.

That night we went out for a drive to watch the car's odometer pass over 100,000 which was exciting.

Yesterday we went down to Carson where J's grandma used to live before she passed away. His parents are fixing up her house, getting it ready to sell when the market starts to turn around, and J was putting in flooring in one of the rooms. I dropped him off and went off to the Natural History Museum, in keeping with my "visit one museum each month" resolution. We got home late, and spent today just being lazy. J is watching the rap channel and I'm listening to non-rap music with my wicked noise cancelling headphones. And we've had a fire going on all day, and ordered pizza. Lazy days are good.