Thursday: Tweak the band. I see a lot of live music, at least 50 bands a year. I can't keep myself from playing Tweak the Band. Annalivia was the band. Celtic folk. Some good talent. Two excellent fiddlers. A guitarist whose voice harmonized perfectly with the lead singer. A stand up base. But something was missing. I wanted them to jack it up a bit. I wanted the song writer guitarist and the lead singer to be more Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer. I wanted the fiddlers to have some of the flair of Richard Wood. I wanted the vocal harmonies to have the intricacy of GirlyMan or Indigo Girls. I wanted them to have tatoos like the Duhks. I wanted their set list to include some bold commentary like Solas singing Springsteen's Tom Joad. I wanted their next album to be produced by Gurf Morlix or T-Bone Burnett or Daniel Lanois or Joe Henry. They just needed to be further up the dial on the edge-o-meter.

Sunday: winter reading group. First meeting. We don't read the same book, but bring what we are reading and talk about it and read from it. Jim was reading Cassanova; Diane was reading Tom Jones; George was reading Giovanni's Room. I brought the two books I'm reading. Friday on the way to the coast, Bell the Cat's Mr. Paperback didn't have Kevin Kelly's new one What Technology Wants so I had a latte and downloaded it for Kindle on my phone. The Droid X's big screen is comfortable for that kind of reading. I read it in 15 minute segments when waiting for something (daylight, the show to start, the car to be ready, godot, a renaissance of wonder). The book compares the evolution of technology to geological and biological evolution. The other book I'm reading is the hardback Nicholas Wades's The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures. I happened upon it in that great bookstore in Damariscotta, but ordered it from Amazon. Religion is one of the quirkier things my species does and following it is a hobby. Lisa Poulin put me on to Religion Dispatches which does the same.