At least I had a few days of warning that things might not be quite what I had imagined. A crawfish festival for charity with a five-dollar donation—surely, there wouldn't be a lot of publicity for this? After all, when I bought that John Mayer CD a couple of months ago, nobody had heard of him…although I'd gotten hints that his (small) fanbase was (extremely) devoted…

Jess sat at my computer. She and Jeremy and I had been in the computer room for at least an hour, talking about movies and families and life and cats and anything else that came to mind. We'd gotten past the important things and onto things that matter, like recommending new music to friends. Somewhere along the line, Geof had wandered in and joined us.

"Should I queue up anything else while I'm sitting here?" she asked.

I gave a recommendation, and Geof laughed. "Get to it, DJ Jazzy Jess." We all rolled our eyes, and then I muttered, "And what are you, the Fresh Priest?" For that I got a high-five from Jess and a "That's 'Fresh Pastor' to you, Ames!"

So, yes, I had everyone over tonight. Call it my own strange, instinctual reaction to dealing with the news about Dad. I knew that Jess was coming in tonight, and it seemed like it would be a nice idea to see if any of the other local folk would be interested in having dinner with the three of us.

New music: John Mayer's album, Room For Squares. After hearing a song of his on Radio Paradise, I went digging, first for mp3s and then for a copy of the album. David Gray meets Dave Matthews, I think, but with a nice little touch of local Georgia music scene.I listened to it today while working on getting the CDs ripped—at last, at last, they are all ripped!

You face right, I face left.

You have your pile of CDs and I have mine. I am staring squarely at the cover to Leftfield's Rhythm and Stealth while you rip a compilation Gipsy Kings album. We've joked so long about doing this that it seems almost a little strange that at last, we're making good on our promise of finally taking our CD collection and ripping the songs to mp3.

"Ok, listen to this. See if you can't tell me who this is."

It starts nibbling at you around track 5: he's building up to something here, but you can't figure out what it is. It doesn't focus until halfway through track 6 of CD 1; probably because you're busy and not really paying much attention to the sonic hints he's giving.

Over the past couple of years, I've really begun to hate commercial radio. Here's why. In honor of my spouse's engineering trade, let's do some numbers.