I read the paper on the back porch in my shirtsleeves yesterday evening under a bright and cloudless sky. In the sun, it must have been seventy degrees.

While Southern California is experiencing an unprecedentedly wet winter (with the concomitant landlslides), we’re facing an imminent drought. Twice so far this winter we’ve experienced long sunny stretches that essentially melted nearly all the snow off of the Olympics, at least as far as I can see them across the sound.

Rainier still has a white mantle this time, though.

I’ve been thinking about the work schedule for my editor, and while I think it’s vital to produce for him, I can’t see how it’s possible on the schedule we’re facing. My day job makes it effectively impossible for me to conduct any business at all but the job itself for about nine to ten hours a day on most days. In order to clear the decks to be accessible for sources, I would need to go to work at about 3 am and get off around noon for at least two weeks of March.

The P-I ran a short interview with Pete Bagge yesterday, apparently the official release date for the Buddy Bradley book I wrote about a few days ago. I had seen this as I read the paper, but Paul Beard was also kind enough to call it to my attention.

Another correspondent, Per Egil Kummervold, the developer of personal fave Chordie, thoughtfully dropped a line.

He has revamped the website and is adding a multiple-instrument chording engine, to allow one to select the particular string voicing one wishes to see the chords for. He pointed out the guitar-based iteration as the initially-deployed incarnation of the tool.

While I’m running down this list, I should note that I ran into official friend of the Donk Patrick Murphy at the bus stop the other day. He looked well, and we exchanged a few words about Ken’s recnt visitor. My bus came before I was able to suggest getting a drink, but I feel certain we’ll bump into each other again.

And finally!

The amp we picked up the other week lacked a dedicated phono line in, and so I forked out about $20 on ebay for an external, powered phono prre-amp. The results are satisfactory. However, either my hearing is going in the low end, or the amp itself is waaay skewed to treble. The old, non-functional amp had an integrated graphic equalizer and I miss the feature – this one only has three generic audio presets, “jazz,” “hall,” and “concert,” singularly uninformative.

Right. Time to swap the laundry about. Ta-ta!