Busy last few days...
I certainly do live in interesting times... it's just one thing after another around here. With brief periods of relaxation and/or interesting musical research (like earlier this evening, 4th of July at Mel Graziano's place - great food, fireworks and music around the piano.)

Earlier this week, however, was more 'interesting'. Such as Tuesday, on which there was a sudden torrential downfall in the afternoon, leading to more localized flooding (none in my office, thankfully), in which my hapless sister in law was nudged off the road into a ditch. She ended up the the entire front end of her pickup submerged, with only a foot of water below the ceiling of the cab. Luckily both she and her dog were pulled from the truck in time.

I took it upon myself to try to get all the water out of her Gateway laptop. I think I succeeded, but left the battery at her work so I had no way to verify whether it would come on afterwards, and I think the thing was in hibernation when it took a swim, so there was evidence of corrosion. Hopefully no water got in the hard drive... that's the real key with cases like this. Unfortunately the damned thing was fairly modern, the hard drive was a mini-SATA and I have no adaptor for laptop SATA drives. Waiting to hear back from her regarding her fortunes... her truck unfortunately looks like a total loss, but she had a lot of unbacked-up work material on that laptop.

Also earlier today I bade farewell to my friends Tyson and Michio who had spent a week in our guest room while they were staying in New Orleans. It was great hanging out with them after being out of touch for so long.

My musical reminiscence continues with some unreleased material I recorded for local prog-pop band Garaj Mahal, 15 years or so ago... (man, I've got to stop fooling with these old tapes and concentrate on the upcoming concert at BabelCon!)