high volume of new music

Let's do it again.

It's my special time of the month. Time to download my 75 songs from emusic.com. I took my brother's advice and downloaded The Avett Brothers as well as a bunch of world and classical music. Since it's the new year I wiped as much music as I possibly could stand to from my overflowing ipod. In its stead I've put Paul Lewis' Beethoven: Piano Sonatas, Vol. 4, Hari Prasad Chaurasia (Indian flute music, who just played a phrase that sounds like "don't cry for me Argentina"), She & Him Volume One, Best of the Staple Singers (and no that's not a collection of National Anthem's before Laker games), Thievery Corporation, Aaron Copland, Sia, Mstislav Rostropovich (I'd like to buy a vowel), and Okkervil River. These are not endorsements of these artists yet. I need to start training for a marathon so I can have time to listen to this, and the other couple of hundred songs I've downloaded in the past few months. I will, however, say that I love Vampire Weekend.

I live in an apartment in Los Angeles. I like to recycle. In LA we use blue bins to recycle stuff. My apartment doesn't have separate blue bins. I used to stockpile cardboard and other recycle-y items and do nighttime commando runs to stuff them in my neighbors blue bins (yes, this is strange behavior). Recently, I said to myself: "self, there must be a better way." I spent some time on the interwebs at LARecycles.org and discovered that if you live in an apartment building that the city will provide free blue bins for your building, and take them out to the street. All you gots to do is call, and you've got a friend. I wrote my landlord a letter to ask him if he'd opposed to putting the recycling bins at our place. It turns out that everything that goes into my dumpster gets sorted and recycled after the fact anyway. All my stockpiling and strange behavior was for naught. Anywah, I wanted to share that with you, because it's worth finding out if you don't already recycle whether your trash goes to a great trash heap in the sky (and by sky, I mean ground) or gets reincarnated into something useful.

Speaking of recycling. This is an interesting NYTimes article on water usage I've been meaning to post. It discusses, among other things using "greywater" i.e. post-dishwasher/laundry/shower water to water your lawn. "Landscape watering accounts for 50% of usage in most districts." It also has some great photos of living roofs. That's my next project to bug my landlord with.

And now: time to listen to music until my ears bleed.

What?

Three Cups of Tea for the New Year

Happy New Year, ladies and gentlemen. I'm nestled into my computer chair making a venti-sized to do list for **two-thousand-fine**. An excerpt:

-Stop bouncing off ceiling from caffeine O.D.

-Comb hair

-Cut hair

-Breathe in

-Find out who has video of last night's Michael McDonald karoake impersonation and destroy all copies of said video

-Do push ups

-Breathe out

-Finish the highlight reel of my film and television music

-Roll in my Benjamins

-Eat canned tuna to save aforementioned Benjis

-Breathe in

-Beat heart

-Breathe out

As you can see it's going to be the best year ever, even better than two-thousand-great.

I'm almost finished reading the book Three Cups of Tea. Side note: I'm almost finished drinking three cups of tea today as well. Point being, Three Cups of Tea, is simply an inspiring and crucial story, a method for combating terrorism and poverty with the most effective weapon: education.

More to come.