My, I wish being so ill was more exciting. All I’ve done is whine and have my wife fetch shit from the store for me, despite the fact that she’s busy cleaning the entire house in preparation for our friends and house guests Chris, Kathy, and Joshua, who are coming into town for Rock Lotteries 9 and 10 this weekend.

Turns out we need to replace the evaporator coil in our AC unit. $1500 and some plumbing. Totally sweet, being a homeowner.

Whoopee, I have pneumonia!

We managed to print a mix for another song, “Body And Soul” and had started on “The Idea Of You” before I couldn’t take the aching and the loopiness anymore. It wouldn’t be a Kadane Brothers-related happening if someone didn’t fall violently ill, right?

The doc put me on antibiotics and ordered me to stay home and do jack-all, which I’m pretty good at anyway. Of course, Katey and I had just decided to cancel the cable, so I’ve been reading these things called “books” (The Unfolding of Language right now) and periodicals (my subscription to the Texas Observer just started up, lucky me). Yeah, and watching the bonus features disc of Knocked Up.

I figure while I’m laid up, I also might as well see if Richard Lloyd can teach me how to play guitar right.

A few things I’ve been up to:

• I start mixing a new New Year record tomorrow. As with The End Is Near, they tracked with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio, and we’ll do overdubs and mixing at the Lab.
• Had a couple of tremendous meals, first Saturday night at La Mexicana with the Tre Orsi, MagElecCo, Dave Bazan, and Casiotone crews, then Sunday morning at the Taco Lady with Tre Orsi, Bazan, Casiotone, and Rob G + Melanie. Camaraderie is a beautiful thing.
• I’ve (finally) started working with the Querencia Community Bike Shop
• Over the past few months, I’ve given serious thought to leaving UNT and going back full-time to audio work. If all goes as planned, I should be leaving just in time for the ensuing Shearwater and New Year tours in 2007. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and I embrace its warm glow.

Flew back home from Baltimore last night, where we spent a long weekend attending our friends’ wedding and catching up with lots of people. Lots of food, lots of drink, a nice walk around Ft. McHenry, lots of of new babies running around, and no work whatsoever. I’m finally starting to get used to taking actual vacations, not working vacations. ’tis a good feeling.

We visited the Sound Garden record store on Sunday — man, I miss record stores (just not enough to start up my own) — and picked up some great things:

• Angels of Light We Are Him CD
• Goodbye, Babylon box set of early 20th-century gospel
  Incredible packaging! A cedar box holding 6 discs, a book, and small balls of cotton.
• Molam: Thai Country Groove From Isan Vol. 2
  Another amazing, essential Sublime Frequencies release. Even better than Vol. 1.
• Fucked Up Year Of The Pig 12″
• The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of comp

More to come…

I’ve always liked the idea of the GTD system, but help me if I’ve ever actually take the time to go through the book and setup the system for myself. It turns out that I’ve been basically using the GSD instead. It’s a simplified, paper and pen-based system, and it works pretty well for me, at least for my personal life.

I still have a lot of places for my stuff, because I have a lot of contexts to keep up with:

• Notebook: personal to-do’s, other long-term lists (records to buy, long-term life plans, etc), general thought capture. I also use it for work-related “priority” lists, keeping me on track on what I’m supposed to be doing.
• Google Calendar: all of my scheduling, with SMS and email alerts too. Shared calendars make it work for stuff like band practice, the studio calendar, and keeping up w/ other’s schedules
• Quicksilver’s Append To File action: I use this for work-related thought capture, and it’s really awesome. I’ll be in the middle of something, and a thought pops into my head. Just hit shift-option-command-F and type my thought, URL, or whatever, and then I go straight back to work. No fumbling around for a pen, or going to a to-do app.

And that’s just the personal stuff. I have a lot of other projects I need to keep up with that require collaboration w/ other people, so a notebook is out:

• Work: our group at work is using a Wiki for keeping track of our current maintenance window tasks. There’s a ton of stuff to do, and we’re basically using it like we would RT, Bugzilla, Remedy, or any other task-management app. Basecamp would actually be a far better solution — it sucks to have to think about Wiki markup when you just want to check off a task as completed — but I don’t want YA application to think about right now.
• Record label: Katey and I are trying out Basecamp for our new record label. It’s pretty much perfect project management, at least for my brain.
• House: I’ve also been trying out Backpack for house-related projects Katey and I are working on. Again, really useful, without Basecamp’s extra features.
• Studio: currently, for to-do lists we have a Google Spreadsheet that no one ever looks at. This sucks, really. It suffers similar problems to using a Wiki: you have to think about the spreadsheet, not the task you’re completing. I would move us to a Basecamp site, but I don’t think I can rely on this group of folks to keep up with it any more than they do w/ the spreadsheet.

Wow. After typing all that out, my life seems like a total clusterfuck!

Been insanely busy lately, but I have managed to write a few little things for foodaboutmusic, a blog started by Howrad. Of particular interest is my new latest obsession, the wonderful Bookish Coffee, which is literally two blocks away. I suggest all Dentonites check it out!

The past few weeks at work have been intense: 60 hour work weeks are typical, I’ve barely left the office, and Dead Moon’s Echoes of the Past has been on constant rotation. Is it bad to have a soundtrack of Pacific NW punk rock ennui when the mind is in this state? I think I was chanting “D! E! A! D! M! O! O! N! Dead moon night!” in my sleep, which is still better than dreaming in Perl, which I’ve done before.

Tre Orsi update: got the test pressings, label art is sent off, still need to finish the cover. Also managed to move forward on some new material. Very exciting stuff.

Recorded a few songs for a couple of very nice fellows last weekend. Very much modern guitar pop, ala Weezer, Fountains of Wayne, etc. Considering how much heavy, doomy music I’ve recorded this year, it’s a nice change of pace.

Projects for later this year: new Shearwater album, mixing a new New Year album. Again, very exciting.

BTW, I also started a work blog to write about the geeky crap I do at UNT. Feel free to read if you really want hear a punk rocker complain about the state of IT in higher education.