Friday!

I bought some new shoes yesterday. You know you don't buy new clothing often when whenever you come into work with something new they have a coronary. I think I'll freak my boss out even more tonight and put on makeup. Given that Brian's on-call we're going to do something that won't be a huge issue to be interrupted by his on-call paging. We're going to the VFW in Saugus where there will be dancing and Karaoke, and my boss is reportedly going to perform Barry Manillo. I kid you not. A good deal of us are going, so this should be very interesting (I'll bring my camera if I remember to).

Diesel was nice and it was cool to catch up with Ectropy and Gala. I can't believe how many old Alt Gothic folks are still around in "the scene" at large. I'm not commenting on this huge Convergence fiasco specifically, but I will say that it seems that the direction its taking is not unlike any kind of niche interest as it grows and gets more organizes (501st anyone?).

I picked up lots of music last night: the new Tori Amos, Rush and Puppini Sisters albums. The first is wonderful, and I love how she continues to change with each album. Rush is kind of in the background at work right now, so I haven't been able to give it a great listen (though I did really enjoy the first single they released last month - more Rushlike than the entirely of the last album). The Puppini Sisters are so cute! They do a cover of "Heart of Glass" on the album. I also never heard the lyrics to "In the Mood" - who knew there were any? I've danced to that song many times before, but its always been instrumental (with the horns taking the vocal role).

Have a great weekend! :)

Places (a neat idea, thanks SilentQ)!

There are some locations where the geography is so etched in my mind (most of them from when I was a younger kid). Here's some:

Bates School in Wellesley, MA. There's a lot of land behind it, and during class we were allowed to roam. I told Brian about a science project where we went out roaming behind the school in the swampy, muddy fields and picked out a wildflower or weed to do a science project on. We picked it, took it back to class, research it and wrote a paper about it (mine was Goldenrod). I remember finding some kind of dead beaver or platypus or something back there once - the kids kept poking it with sticks: Bates

My old street in Wellesley. The property was really hilly and it was a ton of fun to roll down said hills on plastic big wheel bikes. The street was the same - tons of hills up and down from Rt. 9 to the Weston line. There were brooks running all over that fed into a local pond/swamp/res/whatever it was (you can see the dark blob of it in the map about 1/2 way up on the right. I used to walk or ride down there by myself and just sit and look at the trees and the ducks and whatever, and think of it as my own private magical land or soemthing. Rt. 9 is on the bottom and my street ran to the left of the pond-thing (Overbrook Drive is over on the Natick line, right next to where Chinh's Village used to be). It was a magical space to be a kid. Its too bad the other residents in the town weren't so magical. My folks moved back to Waltham when I was about nine years old: Overbrook Drive

Prospect Hill/Boston rock http://www.phpag.org/index.html. I went to summer camp here when I was a kid. They made us hike up that (huge) old ski hill every Friday, and it was a huge pain in the ass, but once at the top we'd have a cookout at their picnic area. There were a ton of ghost stories passed around about weird guys carrying axes or machetes that roamed through the woods/lived in little storage sheds/whatever. Later on we'd go up there at night - that popular 'kids drinking in the woods' thing. You can see Boston from there (duh), so that's kind of cool. The weird water tower things are very alienesque - you're just driving or walking through the woods and there they are. Some are for water, and some are left over from US Air Force research http://grovehillgardens.com/pdfs/ProspectHillPark.pdf the google pic: Prospect Hill

Hampton, NH. Wow, these pictures look neat! My Great Grandparents lived in Hampton Falls and my Grandparents inherited the house, to have my parents buy it. We spent every weekend at "the cottage" and driving to the beach 10 minutes away. Lobster every weekend and it was local/cheap. We had 4 acres of woods to run around in, which included the remnants of an old family dump (mattress springs stuck out of the ground, neat old glass bottle finds), the rotted remains of an old tree house my dad made, a well (with a visible top in the ground, I used to be kind of freaked out I'd fall down it at some point, and a dirt basement. The beach is hoaky or honkey tonk or whatever you want to call it with those skee-ball, fried dough, weekly fireworks infested beaches, but its so a part of who I am. I'll never get tired of going there and I'm so glad that Brian enjoys it too.
Beach

and land where "The Cottage" was (and last I checked, still is - its on either Rt. 88 or 84, I always confuse the two, its the road that crosses 95 (the "T" in this photo) and runs toward the left of the map into downtown Exeter): Woods

Placebo, Covers

I want the new Placebo "Covers" album. Its only available from iTunes.

From the UK iTunes :/

I'll have to get my husband poking around on that int0rw3b for me looking for it. There's some really great ones on their: Kate Bush, Depeche Mode, The Pixies