I'm still around, but not getting to post much. Yes, not posting is as easy as falling off a blog.

Not much dramatic has been happening in my life of late. It's more a slow accretion of events, little of which inspire me to post much. I go back and forth to my jobs and to rehearsals, and am too tired to do much else. Today I took a day to have nothing scheduled, and thus ran around town doing stuff that I'd put off, so I've now had an evening in which to post.



I find that one thing that tunes me into posting more is reading fiction, which I haven't done much this year. Last year, I was consuming a whole lot of Delany, as well as Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, each of which kept the word-absorbing-and-generating parts of my mind hopping. I'm pretty sure that I've read one novel this year, but I can't recall what it was. (Did I read Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow this year or last? Either way, it was so grim and awful that it may have pushed me away for a while.)

Work continues, without the ongoing crises that spawned so much blogging last year. We've had a lot of turnover on the team this year, leading to a decrease in the amount of drama. Corporate decisions that have caused workers at the ground level endless struggle, but by working twice as hard, we try to keep customers from feeling the effects. And the decisions were made at such a high level that no one responsible for them ever sees the problems that they have caused.

My father has been in and out of the hospital repeatedly. My brother told me yesterday that he had gone to see him, and that he was appearing to fade to and from sleep, but with his vocabulary still intact. There's little to be done.

Meanwhile, his book creeps ever closer to production. With some repeated tweaking to the document, it now looks, as Tom says, like a real book rather than a facsimile. We're now at the stage of some inner tweaks (mostly problems with page headers) then getting the ISBN number for it. I hope my father is still around to actually see it on sale in a bookstore.

On Rosh HaShanah, as last year, I went to the seashore with the liturgy, spending a few hours there. (This time, though, having sold my car last December, I took the BART and MUNI out there.) I found the liturgy pretty annoying this year -- it seemed to keep boiling down to "Our Father, our King, we know you can really screw up our lives if you want, so please don't."

Over the course of the holidays, though, the shape of a fairly large musical project came together, and I've begun working on it in earnest. I figure that it will take about a year to complete, with the result being a recorded album. It's taking some of my older songs as well as a lot of new material and tying them into a (hopefully) cohesive framework.

I've been helping some of my roommates, who are trustees at the church at which I have my second job, set up a music studio in the balcony above the sanctuary. We hope to use it as a recording space, as well as to do sound and record events in the sanctuary itself.

I haven't gotten to doing much with figuring out the music software on my laptop. I understand that several programs are supposed to allow me to play instruments and record tracks via my MIDI keyboard, but how that works is a mystery. I can confirm, through a test program, that the keyboard and computer are actually communicating, and I used to be a whiz at this using external MIDI samplers and synthesizers on my old MS-DOS machine. But things have zoomed forward in the dozen years or so since then, and I'm left scratching my head. I have little doubt, though, that when I get the answer it will seem obvious and I'll be productive again.

I've been watching a lot of TV, though almost none of it on a TV set. I've been getting much of my TV via BitTorrent feeds, at some hours or days delay.

I'd been saying for a while, though, that if there were a way to get at episodes of a TV show within a day or so of when they aired, over a fast connection and in good quality, I could see paying, say, two dollars an episode for them. iTunes has recently come through with some shows, by arrangement with Disney, so I now download episodes of Lost from them for $1.99 apiece. The thing is, the downloads are optimized for the video iPod, and, while they look pretty good on a computer screen, the bootleg downloads look even better. So I've been doing the Right Thing in making sure that royalties, etc, get to the right people by downloading the official versions. But I've been watching the bootlegs.

Other shows that I've been caught up in include the new Battlestar Galactica, The West Wing, Invasion, and Veronica Mars. I've been watching the new Commander in Chief, too, though the writing is execrable. I know that as of the next episode, the creator and much of the writing staff had been sacked, and people with more experience brought in, so I'm staying tuned in hopes that it suddenly improves.

I've caught very few movies so far. I just got back from seeing Serenity. I'd been planning to hold off until I had seen all the episodes of Firefly from the boxed set, but the movie will be disappearing from theatres around here after tomorrow, and I wanted to see it on the relatively big screen and loud. I'll definitely be getting the DVD when it comes out in December -- watching the movie, I kept being frustrated that I couldn't wind it back and listen to some dialogue again.

Almost all my music listening has been via my iPod. We've been able to play albums from our iPods (or other digital media players) overhead at work, as long as we have the albums in stock. In addition to new albums by Kate Bush (yes!), Brian Eno, Alison Moyet, Charlie Haden, and others, I've been able to turn some of my younger coworkers on to albums by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Ornette Coleman, Fela Kuti, Bruce Springsteen, David Byrne, and others that they hadn't heard.

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts, too, mostly ones about music and some tech stuff. I've gotten so used to listening to audio and watching TV on my own schedule now that the old broadcast model seem as odd as being only able to read books when someone chooses to project their text in a crawl across a TV screen.

Well, that's about it for now. I'll post again, sooner or later.