New York bound

Getting ready to head to NYC for work this weekend and the computer is still gasping for breath at home, so this may be the last you hear from me for several days. I know, I know, it will be hard to go without a dose of my wit, but try to persevere. Those of you lucky enough to see me in NYC will at least not be going through withdrawals.
I should have called this miscellany because the brain is off on several tangents today, but at least they aren’t bitchy tangents like my last post! : )

First, if you have ears you should check out these two Web sites. www.CDBaby.com and www.yourmusic.com. My friend Big T (NOT her real name) got an awesome note (see below) after she ordered from CD Baby.

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Tuesday, August 9th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'. We're all
exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you once again,
Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby
the little CD store with the best new independent music
phone: 1-800-448-6369 email: cdbaby@cdbaby.com
http://www.cdbaby.com

So I of course went to the site and am going to order some CDs to up my music IQ, expand my horizons and all that jazz. It’s a cool site because you can listen to samples of the CDs, always a good selling point for me.

Yourmusic.com is an offshoot of BMG or Columbia House or something, one of the many clubs I used to belong to but got fed up with the shipping/handling and overall horrible process of ordering CDs. But at this site you subscribe for like $6 a month and create your own music queue (what a great word!) and there’s no shipping and handling, you know what you’re getting, and it’s great. I think you can sample the tunes there too. Based on Keri’s suggestion I’m adding Ben Folds to my queue.

New York—ok, I’m not looking forward necessarily to going out of town right now. The kids are gearing up for back to school (the start of school for my baby), mine and the hubby’s bdays are coming up (he’s going to be 40!), he’ll be going out of town for his Dad’s wedding, etc. However, I can’t describe what being in NY is like for me. If I lose you in this (probably) cheesy diatribe, just check back sometime next week for more fun.

New York reminds me of the feeling I got when I lived in Germany as an army brat in high school. We’d catch the u-bahn to downtown Nurnberg (don’t know how to do umlauts) and spend the day. Walking down the streets you’d pass churches, cathedrals really, that had stood for hundreds of years, see street vendors selling fruits and vegetables, hear a cacophony of languages (mostly German then) and just feel like there was something much bigger than you going on. History I guess? I don’t know. And there’s a smell, not a stench, though all big cities have those, but just an overall mingling of scents that’s not good or bad, but New York smells like Germany, Paris and London to me. I know, it sounds weird. Maybe it’s more than the smell but the feeling of rushing people, cabs, tall buildings and modern and historic structures living side by side. I guess I’m just in awe when I’m in those places.
A friend recently sent me one of those test I so love taking, and one of the questions was about the biggest regret you have. I can’t remember what I said now, but I think I regret not being adventurous, or really brave enough, to have lived in New York for at least a year before becoming grounded. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I’d be happy living there forever, but I do think it would have been exciting and amazing to live there for some time, either single or as a couple. I read Pete Hamill’s Forever, and though it’s fiction, it takes place in NYC and it’s awesome. I highly recommend it.