Happy New Year

Happy New Year! Didn't quite get around to doing the 2006 well wishing on New Year's day or the day after for that matter, so now on January 3rd I'm wishing you all a fantastic, prosperous and truly happy 2006. So I was listening to my iPod, (hooked up via my iPod Griffin - Christmas present, naturally - to the car, after overly concerning myself by listening to an NPR broadcast on the severity of aural decline due to listening to iPods via earbuds,) and I was listening to Enrique Inglesias, (yes, my taste in music is truly appalling) and realised that Enrique's singing totally reminds me of Fes from That 70s Show. If Fes were to produce an album it would sound like Enrique. Anyway this amusing revelation of trivia had me giggling for hours. So to redeem myself and my dreadful taste in European pop music I did download Joaquin Phoenix singing Ring of Fire - pretty excellent even in the shadow of the late, great Johnny Cash - and Jamie Cullum's London Skies, just to make me feel even more homesick than I do already. Complete masochist me. Have managed to persuade Keith to build me a new sawhorse desk. My method of persuasion went along the lines of..."Seeing as you have just bought a new Mac, (yeah - finally getting the studio together,) we'll need more space for the computer and all your audio equipment and I promise to give you sex every day for the next week." Actually I think it was the last bit that made him agree. It seems men will do just about anything for a bit of nookie. Total power to women, hmn? I have finally picked up Beowulf again and am determined to finish it this time. I got about half way through it last year and somehow always seemed to find a far more exciting book to read instead. While my Old English is a little rusty I am reading the parallel translation as my love of language won't allow me to read it without noticing the history and similarities, or lack thereof, of our modern day English. Plus with my constant homesickness always hovering beneath my conscious surface, I am inevitably drawn to anything English with such a fierce sense of national pride it makes me quite question my sensibilities. I can't sit through Love Actually without bawling my eyes out and not at the bits that should make one cry. I am caught up in hopeless tears at the black Hackney cabs and the office flirting and the sight of London with all its Christmas decorations up and Heathrow airport. I even fancied a Jammy Dodger with my cup of afternoon tea the other day and I don't think I particularly even like Jammy Dodgers. Perhaps it's time I went back out to work...