Today's Wizard Rock offering: Something kinda different from The Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office

I think I may have mentioned British group The Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office previously. I like their "Lily's Green Eyes" (which is downloadable, if you have a MySpace account) and I REALLY like "Occlumency Lessons," which, alas, is not. I'm keeping an eye on them, hoping they'll come out with an album before long.

They have just uploaded a new one, "The Veil," which is not a song, per se, but more like ambient music, rather like The Mirror of Erised does. The Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office asked their friends list to give them their favorite lines by Sirius, and they then overdubbed those lines into whispers, running softly under the music. Although "The Veil" is not downloadable, they have put up another track which is, of just those whispering lines of Sirius ("The Veil the Vocals") which, the accompanying blog entry says will only be downloadable for a short time, and it will not be on the album. I liked it and downloaded it; haunting.

Wonderful Sunday

Yesterday I was treated to a flying visit from kijjohnson, who had come into town for just one day. I picked her up at the airport and drove her back to my house where I had the fun of watching her open my birthday gifts to her (since her birthday's next week), instead of shipping them off to her and then hearing about her reaction a week afterwards as I usually do. We took the makings of a miniature cream tea to Anodyne (cucumber sandwiches, clotted cream, a miniature serving of Death by Chocolate), bought tea and gingerbread, ate our loot, and talked for about an hour. We are both feeling that we are rather at a cross roads--me because Rob now has a job which (once the budget settles down) leaves me free to look around for myself, and Kij because she is re-examining her decision to go to graduate school. Both of us have been thinking about hiring a life coach.

From there, we joined some other friends for a celebration. It seems totally inadequate to say that a lovely time was had by all. That was one of the best dinners of my life.

It was also really cool, among other things, to be able to sample a forty-five year old port.

I dropped Kij off at a hotel afterwards, and she is winging back to Seattle probably right now. It was wonderful to see her again.