Out to lunch

Oh, yoo-hoo? Ms. Work Supervisor? Yeah, hi, it's me, Adam. Fine, thanks. Listen, could you do me a favor? I appreciate your help and all, but the next time you give me an hour of time off the board to take my girlfriend to a doctor's appointment, could you do me the service of letting someone, any one else know that you've done so? That way, when you've left for the day and my manager can't figure out where I am or why I'm not plugged in at my appointed time, they can solve the problem without worry, and my coworkers won't have to slip me notes later saying, "Is everything okay?" Thanks lots.

Other-worldly visitations. The good kind.

Ack, it's a week later, and I never did give the full report on the concurrent visits from daev and odhierre, two college friends whom I hadn't seen in the flesh in two and eight years respectively (and who hadn't seen each other in even longer), but who decided to be traveling to and around this area at exactly the same time. Go, synchronicity, go!

daev was the first to arrive, and in fact did so a day early (Monday), prompting rafaela and I to go into our patented Frantic-Like-Chickens-With-Severed-Heads-Cleaning-Frenzy; unfortunately, he had picked up a death-flu bug of some sort on the road, and ended up checking into a hotel instead of crashing on our futon, which would've been screamingly uncomfy anyway. We got to hang out with him for a bit before he Nyquiled himself into a coma, and he slept in the next morning, convalescing while we ripped some CDs he'd lent to us (more on that later). odhierre showed up around lunchtime, and we spent a while amazed that his beard had somewhere in the last decade moved off his face and onto mine. Lunch at Friendly's, games of Ninja Burger and Chez Geek, and a handover of some MP3 disks (more on that later) followed, at which time daev was feeling well enough to pop by and see odhierre before he had to return to his sweetie. Wednesday consisted of a mixture of down-time and whirlwind tours of Lake George and Saratoga's used media emporia. He sprung for dinner at Little India; we sprung for gelato. Then we returned home so we could transfer a bunch of music files between us (more on that later), and he and I reminisced on the couch until well after Anna had turned in for the night.

So. About that music. It's all about the music. odhierre is someone I've been swapping mixes with for over 15 years now, and we still manage to surprise each other; the last one he sent is still in rotation in the car. For this trip, he came bearing three crammed-full data discs of stuff for our enjoyment, and enjoying them we are: Moxy Früvous, Tempest, Black 47, Cowboy Mouth, Eddie From Ohio, Van Morrison, Silly Wizard, the two Tori Amos albums we didn't already have, the Timbuk3 album that Anna's been searching for, and on and on. Great, great things.

And as for daev... All right, let me tell you something. I have been complimented as of late on my mix-making skills and my esoterically good taste in music, and I wish I could accept those compliments gracefully, but I am painfully aware that I. Am. An. Amateur. Everything I know about the art and craft of a good mix, I learned from daev Half of the material in my collection that gets noticed and adored, I first heard from daev. (Richard Thompson? Runrig? Robyn Hitchcock? Yeah. Him.) Whenever I manage to slip him something that we was unfamiliar with and immediately likes, I pump my fist in the air in victory. My mentor.

And last week, he brought not only a boxful of CDs, including several amazing box sets (and one for me to keep, a compilation from Champaign-Urbana's late-lamented Outnumbered), but also his laptop and external hard drive crammed full with music I'd been searching for and music that I didn't know I wanted, but do. So a great deal of time was spent moving files from place to place. A small sampling of what I got off of him:
* Harvest Festival, a 5-CD manifesto on EMI's 70's underground label that may very well be the best prog collection ever
* Left of the Dial, a Rhino Records box of 80's alternative. 'Nuff said.
* The American Anthology of Folk Music, remastered onto 6 discs.
* at least 5 early-phase R.E.M. albums, and another 3 from Robyn Hitchcock, with or without the Egyptians.
* Alvin Lives (in Leeds). Those of you who live for weird cover tunes will find out what that's about soon enough. *evil cackle*
* a colelction of Greenlandic Eskimo rock. Yeah.
* a bunch of Anglo-Celtic folk-rock that I used to listen to in college, but which I haven't had access to in long, long years: The Oyster Band, The Bothy Band, The Saw Doctors, etc. etc.
* some songs from the Muppet Show. (Three words: "The Rhyming Song.")
* Unicorn by Tyrannosaurus Rex, before Marc Bolan shortened the name, back when he was hanging with a freaky bongo player named Peregrine Took. Weird, but soooo good.

And on and on it goes. Let me put it this way: Just before they visited, our total song count has just barely reached 8,000. Current count: over 9,300.

I love my friends. Must go create new playlists now...