Repatriating, I've decided, means being exhausted all the time. Between the new job, meeting up with old friends, finding a place to live–and making it livable–well, I'm about to keel over. (Today's fun involved the 5th day of no hot water finally coming to an end. As well as a gas leak. If you're a dork like me, you might be interested to know that my new hot water heater is so sophisticated that it actually TURNED ITSELF OFF on Wednesday last week when it could sense the floors being varnished. Seriously. My hot water heater smelled fumes and thought "Oh boy. Better turn myself off. This could be dangerous." Awesome, really. But not an everyday problem so I had the plumber stumped there for a while.)
But I digress. Through all of this, thank God for two things.
1. Pandora.com. Long-ago, they stopped providing service to the UK because of copyright reasons. But they truly are the best online music jukebox ever. Plug in any song you like. Their music technicians have analysed a gazillion songs based on a gazillion criteria, and they will play songs that are musically similar to the song you like. Does that make sense? So this is not a popularity contest like iTunes Genius. It's an actual musical similarity contest and thus an amazingly fantastic way of discovering new bands. If someone is not waiting to be bought by Google, I don't know who is.
2. My Altec Lansing laptop speakers. I remember over New Year's, I brought these little puppies to our cottage somewhere in the countryside and no one could believe the quality of sound they delivered. So small, yet so powerful. Seriously, if you have a chance, scoop yourselves up the ALTEC LANSING 2.0 Loudspeakers XT1. Unbelievably good sound. Really. They're kinda old now so not sure if you'll find many of them still around, but I've been a big fan of their products for a while now so if you can't find the XT1s, take a look at their similar, newer models.
I have some food-related content in the hopper. I promise. I'm just tired, that's all. xx
