JazzFest greats this week were Laura Mvula and Gregory Porter. In Gregory Porter's warm baritone I hear Nat King Cole and Gil Scott Heron and the social justice themes of his preacher mother. For a jazz guy, he's pretty interactive, pulling us in on Liquid Spirit and and No Love Dying. Laura Mvula has been described as Nina Simone singing the Beach Boys. Two harps and some strings in her band, she creates layers of sound and intricate arrangements. We caught her interview. She's a total charmer and like Gregory Porter, the poetic uplift and comfort in the lyrics flows from her churchy family upbringing.

And that odd and wonderful French band, half Brittany and half Lafayette, sending that haunting chorus up the well at Ogden After Hours or rather Ogden after a wonderful dinner with family at Couchon. Helen Gillet, jazz cellist, did some amazing looping arrangements at the DewDrop on Saturday and it was especially great after a mohito and fried green tomato shrimp remoulade thing at Rip's. Now we are presently hanging out at the beach in Gulf Shores with Melanie and Jinx on an very stormy day. At night we cut off the AC and open the windows and sleep to the surf sound.

This is what spring looks like when your world is stuck in the winter that would not die. Melissa, Pat, et al had a very successful egg hunt today in Triplet Park. Using WowSlider I can get a slideshow of an event like today's up in minutes. I used to have to resize each image.

Because in some other work I do I wanted to test an Android app I'd published, I acquired a new 8.9 inch Kindle Fire HDX this week. What a total piece of crap. It's a great size, very light weight and has a lot of pixels on the screen, but it has to live in such a small Amazon sandbox that it is useless as a general tablet. It's good only for books, movies, music, email, and shopping. It won't run things out of the Google Play Store, not even Google Maps. It's too pricey to be just a reader. I side-loaded a few things onto it, but if I keep it I will end up rooting it. That means replacing the operating system with straight up Android, de-amazoning it. Needless to say, that trashes the warranty and if you make the slightest mistake in the process, you can end up with a paperweight. For now, I've side-loaded enough stuff to be able to test the little apps we are making for Language Symbols, but on some rainy day when I'm feeling reckless...

So far the melting and draining of the mountains of snow has been orderly thanks to warm days and cool nights. I like orderly. Not orderly is a temperature spike with heavy rain. Not orderly is a flooded basement. Not this year. This year the water is making its way to lakes and streams like a veterans day parade, like children on medication, like a charity soiree.

Yesterday I rolled my bike out of the basement, past the piles of snow in the yard and took my glare white legs out for a ride through town, the object being to get the mail at the post office. The post office run, between 10:30 am and noon, is a staple of small town life here. I've had a lot of good conversations there, a lot of networking. So it didn't matter that I had forgotten to bring a pack and that there was too much mail to carry on the bike. There would be someone I know there. It was Audrey who has the cell-phone place on the corner. She took my mail and I'll pick it up from her tomorrow. Maybe city neighborhoods should have small post offices where people see their neighbors when they pick up their mail.