Sorry for the station interference. We've taped a bunch of coathangers to the antenna and things seem to be transmitting just fine.

(It occurs to me that this indicates that there were technical problems. There weren't, but you just go right on thinking that.)

(I still owe you e-mail. I know, I know. So, shoot me. I'll get around to it this week, to Everything In My Inbox. Promise. Not lightly.)

Listened to a few tracks of records I don't own yet, but want to. This list is getting too, too long. The Smokey and Miho track they've got up on Salon sells the record, and the new Kristin Hersh and Throwing Muses album sound delightfully like they should. There's more, but I'll get depressed. These are the ones at the top of the list. Sometimes I wish I had my very own teenage boy who had endless amounts of time to burn bootlegged CDs for me. And I can't even wax or wane about the good ole days of whatever that site run by that kid was, which I can't even remember the name of despite it's being modern copyright history. Yeesh, brain freeze sucks. (Christopher writes to remind me it was called NAPSTER.) Anyway, I can't wax about that, because I missed the MP3 revolution. Don't know what to do with 'em at all. It's a sad, sad fact.

Much like this entry, so far.

But there are pictures! Which I am going to put on little link pages that you can click on if you want to see them, rather than causing the internet to come crashing down around us by sticking them up here. They tell a little story of our weekend and the woods.

This is me in the woods. Note the shades and the posture. I am a creature not entirely comfortable with the woods. This was about a quarter of a mile into a two mail hike through a nature preserve. A nature preserve which used to describe what it was -- The Palisades Nature Preserve -- until they renamed it after a man, who I happen to be glancingly familiar with and can report is a boorish alcoholic bore. Why do we feel like we have to rename everything after politicians and contributors? Isn't it better when things have names like Kill Devil Hills, rather than Margaret McSomebody Hills? It's disturbing too that certain words will always be tainted by nefarious meanings for me, because of my sojourn in politics. Words like "contributor" which rather than meaning "one who contributes" now means "influence bought and sold."

Anyway, two mile hike, down down down to the river to see the several hundred foot tall cliffs tower over. But we're not there yet.

We took George, slinking toward Bethlehem here, like a proud star or the Poster Boy for American Values that he is. He was a very good boy, except for that one time when he tried to jump in the river. You have to watch him every second. The sirens of the river, they call to him, he claims.

And then, we saw the famed palisades, which don't look anything like an influence peddler. They're very nice, and there's a surprising amount of sand on the shore and the trees had spooky clumps of leaves and other things from recent flooding but I wasn't able to get a very good picture of that.

And, flashing back in time, remember when I was kvetching about the ice storm? Which has left piles and piles of branches and sad cracked trees seeming defeated rather than triumphant all over town? Well, here's a little of our backyard, circa three weeks ago.

All the Say... replies are done, it's shaping up to be a helluv-an-issue.

More coherence later.