When I have new albums I usually mix them up into an MP3 collection of about 150 tunes and play them on random while driving, and it can be weeks or more when I hear a new song for the first time. So on the way to work one morning I was surprised by a song from a new Rory Block album about meeting old friends in "a place called Unity." Cheap thrills on I-95. Melissa and I attended the local Democratic caucus at the Community Center today. Record attendance has been reported at most Maine caucuses; about 25 people at ours. The vote was almost evenly divided up between Dean, Kucinich, Kerry, and Edwards. Most of those holding out for Kucinich and Dean hoped to influence the platform. In the spirit of the primaries, I'm reading a James Carville's Had Enough? A Handbook For Fighting Back. Full of useful facts, colorful expressions, anecdotes about growing up in Louisiana as the son of Miss Nippy, and of course, recipes. I tuned in to the middle of an radio interview with him some weeks back and new immediately by his accent who he was. The town Carville is on the river south of Baton Rouge and until a few years ago, it was the only leprosy treatment center in the U.S. and still called a leper colony. The book I'm reading concurrently on the science of networks explains the origins of some popular notions like degrees of separation and the 80/20 rule. James Carville would be 3 links away from me by network links. Any day now the 2004 JazzFest schedule will come out. Our plane tickets are bought and put us there April 22 to May 4; the sisters are lining up the beach weekend arrangements. In the meantime it's February in Maine and not a great winter for outside stuff. Very cold and not enough snow. The upside of that is that the dogs' invisible fence is working. There's not enough snow to cover the rocks and make a chute onto the lake through which they could speed faster than the fence could zap them. Entirely foreign to our experience of owning a couple of Maine Black Dogs (black lab mixed with something else) is the magazine Urban Dog of which 3 issues are sitting on our coffee table. Foreign because city life is foreign to us. One of their contributing writers, Melinda Underwood, stayed with us at the Heron a couple of times when she came up for the Maine Film Festival in Waterville. She gave us the subscription. A second link to the magazine is that it's designed by Kerry Tully's fabulouly named company TchopShop Media. Coupla things I like about our dogs shiny shiny in the sun; shiny in the shiny water alien intelligence (a radically different opinion) fart dissassociation (the way they look behind them as if their rear end is some stranger who just got on the bus) frolic factor (they don't hike; they explore and are always up for a diversion) clockwork pack independence of owner (I don't like controlling other beings) games as fitness work (We'd all be healthier if we chased squirrels every day) high speed flex tubing (the way they go through a door as it opens) console philosophy (philosophy held by beings without human consciousness; like a console TV, it's just built in: Scout believes in the operation of cause and effect in an ordered universe; Wing espouses opportunistic proximity)

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