Happiness is a cool mojito. In a Chococat glass.

To put this in perspective, if you don't feel like reading the article, for the foreseeable future, you won't be able to buy a house unless you're paying cash. You won't be able to buy a car unless you're paying cash or your credit score is 800. You won't be able to get student loans unless your credit score is 800. For the short term, at least, you won't be able to borrow money.

At all.

Now, this might not affect you that much, but two of the biggest industries in this country are automaking and homebuilding. Both are effectively at a standstill, and will be for some time. This will affect everybody.

Bummer.

More importantly, we'll be going with the general flow of things on this release, and trying out how the current wind blows with respect to our own business, and release this album for free. How we'll do it is thus: if you want the high quality VBR MP3s and the FLACs, the album can be purchased in the normal way via the Posi store. If you want to access the album as part of any service (Rhapsody, et al) that you use, it will be available in the normal fashion in those services. However, if you just want 160kbps MP3s, those will be free to download.

This is just going to be a trial balloon to see how things work in this regard. If it isn't too ridiculous, we'll continue in this fashion. If it is ridiculous, we won't. Simple as that.

In any event, I have 2/5 of the album mixed, and 5/5 of it written and recorded, so it won't be long.

It's odd, because before I essentially stopped playing live, I had a lot of stamina. Doing an hour and fifteen minutes on stage is just about the most intense aerobic workout you can get, and at around 130 degrees, it's a sauna simultaneously. Do that a couple hundred (or in my case couple thousand) times and you'll be in pretty good shape for the rest of your life.

However...

Since I haven't actually done that for, what, four years, I'm in nowhere near the condition I was in when I did do it. While I'll be thin and reasonably strong my whole life as a result, it seems the stamina part doesn't stay with you.

Long story short, I didn't break any bones my first trip out, but I just about wrecked the SUV on the way back due to the fact that I was seeing double. Nothing but fun 'round here.

And oh, hey, two of the five tracks for the new Micronaut record are mixed and done. Three more to go.

Finally took the plunge and bought myself a proper mountain bike, seeing how I live in the mountains and all. Pictured above is the Kona Dawgma I ordered today (w/ 20" frame). As an old school road/track bike guy, it took a lot of muttering and hee-haw before I was able to talk myself in to joining the dark side of the force and getting a mountain bike. But considering where I live, it seemed more logical to get something better suited to the terrain.

So I'm gonna transfer from the go-fast-go-far crowd to the downhill crazies, and hopefully not break my fucking neck pelting down a logging road at unsafe speeds.

If my headway today is any indication, you'll shortly be able to enjoy Aoede, a five-song Micronaut EP. It is one of the stranger collections of music I've made, but still very much in keeping with the Micronaut ethos. I'd wager somewhere around 2 weeks away for completion on that.

I'm simultaneously working on the next CR release, which I had set aside for some time. This one will be markedly different than the last one, and I'm sure you're all shocked by that. Touchstones this time will be Joy Division, Tones On Tail, Gang Of Four, that sort of thing. I'm fairly pleased with what I've accomplished so far, but unfortunately none of that accomplishment includes vocals. So that's the next thing to dig in to.

No arrival date for that yet, but I'll post some preview music as soon as I have something I can stand to set free.

It is occasionally annoying to be right. Just got back from our family reunion. Weather was ass. Drama was more or less constant. Whee.

That aside, we actually did have a fairly good time. I actually got Elle out in the Dunes on a Sand Rail, which she took with surprisingly good humor. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but once we were in the midst of it, I was like "she's gonna be stern when we get back to the car," but it didn't turn out that way, despite the fact that it is something that could have easily brought out the latent Chupacabra.

Back to work tomorrow, and the usual grind.

I personally don't think this means a whole lot to Americans. They'll probably cut back on ethanol production to keep more corn for food products, but there's a lot of excess corn to be used for that sort of thing. The bigger issue is the places that our excess production goes, like Africa, Russia, etc. Those places won't be getting any of our corn this year, and not as much wheat as they would normally get, and this is going to cause Issues.

I'm not foolish enough to make any particular prediction, except to say that old Chinese curse, "may you live in interesting times," is perhaps going to come true towards August. I'm also not foolish enough to think that a barrel of pinto beans in the garage and a case of ammo for the 30-06 is something that I need to concern myself with, because I'm not a Libertarian, I don't subscribe to Backwoods Cabin magazine, and I have a (generally) sanguine view towards our government. Our state government, anyhow.

I'll just say that the times, they might be interesting for the next year or so.

On another somewhat lighter note, my 40th birthday is tomorrow, and I can't help but notice that none of you bought me a Heuer Monaco. That sucks, and now I'll never know what time it is.

Adjunctly, our family reunion is on Friday. Ye gods. We're in for a real hoot as we spend the weekend on the balmy Oregon coast (the Riviera Of The West!), sunning ourselves on the beautiful sandy beach, splashing about in the warm, blue pacific ocean with dolphins and sea otters, and making s'mores around the campfire as we sing family songs.

Oops. I was talking about the Cleavers. In my family, we'll actually have a contest to see who can make the most other members of the family cry by saying mean things. Then we'll all sulk out in the rain, while the 33-degree ocean throws creeper waves at us and tries to kill us. It'll be awesome.