I’m killing a little time before the opening keynote address at Computers in Libraries.  Got settled in yesterday.  I did catch the Lincoln exhibit at the Smithsonian but didn’t do much else.  The long day of travel wore me out more than I had realized until I actually contemplated more walking.  So I settled for dinner and relaxing at the hotel for a few hours.  I did notice that the National Mall looks like hell; the grass is in serious need of help.  No doubt the usual effect of winter combined with the tramping of a gazillion feet during the President’s inauguration less than two months ago.

Listened to the Decemberists new album, The Hazards of Love, yesterday on the plane.  I pre-ordered it from Amazon in the hopes that I would get it on the release day (last Tuesday).  It still hadn’t arrived on Friday; that’s the last time I pre-order music.  If I can’t get it right away, what’s the point?  I’ll just go to Best Buy.  Anyway, my friend Mike ripped his copy for me so I could bring it along.  I asked him what he thought and he simply said “Dark.  Very Dark”.  Having listened to it now, I think that’s a pretty good description.  Very dark.  More like The Tain than, say, Castaways and Cutouts.  Colin and Co. had moved in this direction a bit for their last album, The Crane Wife, and seem to have continued in the same vein but even more.  I’ll need to listen to it a few more times before I have anything intellegent to say about the songs themselves.

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But enough of that.  Things have been going pretty well in the family, albeit at a hectic pace.  We continue preparing to move.  Seems like we’re writing checks left and right and generally spending money like drunken sailors.  We’ve been furniture shopping; the new house is 2 or 3 times the size of our current place and we need to fill it up.  Not all at once, of course.  But we do need more things to sit on.  We’re also in the process of getting all the utilities connected and disconnected, as the case may be.  November 25 will be here before we know it.

Rayna is excited about everything.  We took her and Kaylee there a couple of weeks ago to measure and take pictures of the interior and she understood very well what was going on.  We went down to the two children’s bedrooms and she went into one and loudly announced that this was “Rayna’s room!”  Upon seeing the big soaker bathtub that is much larger than ours, she just stood looking at it for awhile and then simply said “How do I get in?”

Halloween was a lot of fun.  I don’t have any pictures up yet; most of the ones I took came out fuzzy.  Seems I had a setting on the camera misadjusted.  Urgh.  We took them to my office to trick or treat and a lot of others took pictures too, so I’m hopeful to get some photos from them.  So stay tuned for that.  Rayna was a princess and Kaylee was a flower.  That night, we went to a neighborhood church that was having games for awhile and then we trick or treated on our block.  The girls had a good time but Rayna got awful wound up and had a hard time sleeping.  She ended up sitting with me on the couch watching TV until 10:30 or so before she finally settled down.  The fact that I insisted on watching boring news helped too.

Not much else to report.  It’s almost time to start getting the girls ready for bed, after which I’ll settle down to watch the election returns.  Crossing my fingers…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrBLqp-s__o&hl=en]

Tommy Makem passed away today at the age of 74.  He was a key figure in the folk music revival of the late ’50s and early ’60s.  After emigrating to New York City from his native Ireland, Makem hooked up with Pete Seeger and other folkies in Greenwich Village.  Although his original ambition was to be an actor, he soon found that he could make a more reliable living playing the traditional Irish folksongs of his youth.  Sometime in the late ’50s, he joined the Clancy Brothers and together they made a potent force in the new folk scene.

Tommy was still touring and making records when lung cancer finally forced him to slow down.  For those of us who love this music, he will be sorely missed.  I think the best way to send him off is with a a few lines from a song that he and the Clancys performed often.  It’s called The Parting Glass and it’s one of my favorite songs.  Throughout the 1700s, it was traditionally sung at the end of a party…

But since it falls unto my lot,
That I should rise and you should not,
I gently rise and softly call,
Good night and joy be with you all.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCm9ajMtXMw]

The Crane Wife is the latest album from The Decemberists, who have become one of my favorite bands in the last couple of years. It’s hard to describe The Decemberists. More of a pop band than a bunch of rockers, they blend folk and pop and add a strong dose of literary style. Colin Meloy, the principle songwriter of the group, has a degree in creative writing and it shows. The Decemberists’s albums are full of sea shanties, ghost stories, tales of doomed lovers, and old-style murder ballads. It’s all backed up by lush arrangements of strings and keyboards with Meloy’s odd, but listenable, voice as the narrator.

To be truthful, I haven’t found The Crane Wife to be as engaging as some of their previous albums, particularly Castaways and Cutouts and last year’s Picaresque. Having said that, it’s still pretty good and continues to grow on me. And even their weaker material is still far better than the garbage you hear on the radio. This is subject to change but right now, the tracks I’m really digging are Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then) and Shankhill Butchers. When the War Came is also a good foot-stomper of a song that is staying in my head.