For my friends in Atlanta, you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity coming up this weekend.

I'll be in Atlanta this weekend. With my mother.

Want to join us for a memorable dinner in which you get to sit at the table and threaten me by offering to tell her all the juicy, dirty stories we both know you know about me?

Saturday night, yo.

I've got two people willing to play along with the book swap, and haven't asked at work yet. Anyone else? I need to either tag up or bow out in the next couple of days. See http://domesticat.net/node/1494 for info.

I got a fun letter in the mail from a friend this week, asking me to participate in a bit of literary chain mail. Since I'm posting it here, that should indicate I'm interested.

The premise is pretty simple. I send a used paperback -- one that I liked -- to the person included on the back of the letter I was sent. (It's the person who invited the person who invited me.) I then send the letter out to six of my friends, and change the address on the back of the letters I send so that the books will be sent to the person who invited me.

I've decided that never again will I question my abilities on this front if I see this request on a job description. It always seems to show up on jobs like mine: "must be a motivated self-starter."

What this has actually meant is "must be able to work in isolation for at least eighteen months on a project that one's co-workers do not understand and cannot assist with, but know that they wanted to have access to at least nine months ago."

..and I did NOT eat it.

http://domesticat.muxtape.com

A mix of old and new, including songs I've loved for quite a while and songs that are current earworms for me.

Last.fm lets you see your 'neighbours,' people whose music tastes are similar to yours. I've been fascinated by this list for a long time, and have taken to reading through the favored artists of each 'neighbour' to see if they already knew of artists or groups that I should be listening to.

It's actually worked. I first encountered Snow Patrol through a neighbour, and Adam's recommendation clinched it. (Though that's perhaps a misleading statement, because Adam and I trade music recommendations so often that he's been a regular on my neighbours list for some time now.)

It hit me, though: for the most part, neighbours were always slice-of-life snapshots of similarity. Single notes, if you will. If you picture a person's music taste as a chord of notes, then can we all agree to beat this metaphor into the ground and say that most of the people on the neighbours list had musical tastes that matched only a note or two in my chord.