I believe 10 days is a new record.

OK, there's a lot of stuff to catch up on and not much time, so let's get right to it. Thanksgiving long weekend was just great. We went to a cottage that was NOT in Cape Breton, as I may have previously suggested, as that plan fell through. Instead, we were able to procure one of the MacLeod Cottages in Green Bay again, this time with our friend and neighbour Krista. It was the last weekend of their season, meaning we were the last 2006 tennants of "Boulder" (our cottage's slightly less than whimsical name [cf. Heart's Content, The Bonnie Dune], presumably referring to the rock at the head of the driveway), and what a last weekend it was. The weather could not possibly have been better. And the scenery was gorgeous as always, this time tinted with the bittersweet colours of death's preliminary pallette. There weren't many other people around, either, which was both eerie and nice. We took lots of walks and drives, heading on one trip along the south side of the LaHave river inland past Bridgewater. The leaves looked great beside the rushing water. We found lots of good spots for fishing, not to mention paper boat sailing.






Then there were four days of work in there. That part's kind of a blur.

But then this last weekend, I followed through with my plan of working non-stop for two days on music writing and recording. I'd made the plan to go through my fifteen dictaphone tapes worth of song ideas which I've been keeping for the past as many years but rarely if ever actually go back and listen to, and plunder them for songs which I would finish writing and recording as quickly as possible, avoiding my usual finicky, slow methods. Whip 'em off scrappy and whimsical, à la early-to-mid-period Guided By Voices, in other words. I figured if I paced myself all right I could come out the other side with a whole album's worth of material.

Well, it didn't exactly happen that way, but I did get three songs done from start to finish, and more importantly I began to see how it can be good not to be so picky, especially in the initial stages. The closer you get to the final product, the pickier you can be, but constantly reminding myself not to be so precious with chord structures and not letting myself use a thesaurus were really helpful. I'm excited to keep this little project up, and anxious to see whether it's possible to do in much smaller packets of time. Maybe I'll put one of the songs on next time.

After two days cooped up with ProTools, it was weird to go out of the house and see a movie. Things moving in my visual field and sounds having meaning beyond their strictly sonoral properties took some getting used to. But the movie we went to on Sunday night was The Science of Sleep, Michel Gondry's latest offering, which fit in perfectly with my state of consciousness as the whole plot centres around a guy never being sure about his own state of consciousness and the film's style is Gondry's usual one of whimsical silliness with a lot of clever work put into it. It was very inspiring.

That's all for now. I gotta go to work. But there's more...

- Andrew