Permanent Daylight

Un mail écrit pour une de mes vieilles mailings-listes, bien vide mais dont les membres gardent l’habitude de donner de leurs nouvelles de temps à autre, comme ça, pour voir ce qui se passe de l’autre côté du modem. Il m’a semblé que ça permettrait de dire pourquoi il n’y a pas eu de nouveau post sur ce blog depuis début janvier…

Hi, hey, hello, dear friends of the now probably defunct and yearly revived #p_d mailing-list! Here’s my (understandably) yearly attempt to revive it, hopefully bringing tears of joy and bursts of laughter to your household for days and days to come. Or at least a vague chuckle, accompanying a mumbled « Geez, I’ll be damned if I remembered I was still subscribed to this defunct but obviously yearly revived list. Where’s the Convoy when you need it ? Ooh, donuts! »

This is the part where I tell you about my life at the moment, how/if it evolved since last year at around the same time, trying to make sure you envy me, and secretly wishing some of you will answer with cute words like « you so gorgeous, you so lucky, you so good, me make love to you loooong time ». Ah, ‘Nam, so far away, so close…
Actually it’s been a bit like ‘Nam around here these past few weeks (well, it’s not like I’ve been put naked in a barrel of iced water, but hey, one can dream… err) : we’ve been meaning to do it for quite some time now, and it’s now official, my lurvely girl and I moved in. Can I hear a « whooohooo! » ?
So, the story goes like this : we browsed the daily newsletters of some online real estate/rentals website (namely, seloger.com), found a nice one which turned out to be not so good, visited a few more, and then received an appealing ad for an apartment in my hometown. Looks verrry nice (50 square meters [~=540 sq. ft.], two rooms, second floor), and it fits our price tag. « Kektendi ? » says the mail from the better half. Phone, hi, where is it ? Oh. Turns out it’s about 100 meters from my parents’ house. Independence, here I am! We decide to visit it nonetheless, and to back away at the first downside. There is none. It’s great. It’s beautiful, it’s got a real bath and a real kitchen, and it sure is a change from the 15 sq. meters my g/f actually lives in (and where I’ve been spending most of my idle time for the last couple of years). We give our papers, hope for the best, get okay’d, pay, bring in our (well, mostly hers for now 😉 ) furnitures in, spend a few teeth grinding Sundays at Ikea’s, and live happy ever after since then, which is now almost two months ago.

Plus, we got broadband. Yay, us!

So, with that in mind, our weeks have been pretty hectic, to say the least, and we’re just starting to settle down and be able to, you know, enjoy our Sundays instead of, say, jumping in the car to look for a proper bed.
Of course I got the predictable snarky comments about living a few minutes away from my parents’ (well, they reside at the 19, we’re at the 1st), but most voices got silent when they saw how great the apartment is, and how good we look in it.
Good times, then.

With the dust settled down, it is my aim to use the forthcoming year to try and become a better version of me. I actually made a page on my own wiki in order to list what I’d like to have achieved by year’s end. You’d find the usual there : exerice more, eat better, die anyway. I mean, exercise more, learn to cook properly, learn a few more things about programming (languages, methods, tools…); at last revive, build and launch of few projects I had around my belt for a few years and couldn’t tackle ‘cos I wasn’t long enough in front of my home computer; get better at guitar playing, even bass playing if possible, and why not start playing the piano again, and maybe drums with a little help from my friends; get better at photography and photo editing; get a few official papers, like diplomas and such, to assert myself; keep the house clean; write more; remember things more; spending good times with my girl, my family, my friends and nice people… I want this to be a better year, and I’d like to get results to prove it. These are not new year’s resolutions, these are goals. For now it started slowly, but hopefully I’ll find the time to do most of my list.

So, without further ado, here’s another list : the albums that I discovered and liked in the past year, along with my favourite track for each (first gotta fetch the names). If I wasn’t so lazy I would’ve put an Amazon link with me as a referrer, ‘cos I sure need the money, but I’ll let it go for the time being. Me so good, you be grateful.
The Arcade Fire – Funeral
Elliott Smith – From a Basement on a Hill
Girls in Hawaii
Laetitia Sheriff – Codification
Wilco – A Ghost is Born
Morissey – You are the Quarry
Jeanne Cherhal – Douze fois par an
Franz Ferdinand
M83 – Dead Cities, Read Seas and Lost Ghosts
Incubus – A Crow Left of Murder
The Coral – Magic and Medicine
Explosions in the Sky – How Strange, Innocence
Explosions in the Sky – The Earth is a Cold Dead Place

The list is issued from a simple search on the last modified directories in my trusty PikaOne, so there might be some other things in my home PC that I’m not aware of right now, and the order is from more recent to oldest. Also, notice that are included albums that were issued in previous years. I just happened to having discovered them (thus put them down in MP3) in the last year. And I cheated : the two EITS were actually downloaded (and bought!) in late 2003, but I couldn’t make a list of good albums without them being on it, so feck off. Don’t mess with my listing-fu, biatch.
Looking at it, it doesn’t feel like I discovered much this year. Fuckit.

So, what about you ? What’s up with this crowd ? What new music would you advise me to give a listen to ? How’s the weather like in your part of the globe ? What does ’05 look like to you, and how do you reflect from what happened in ’04 ? I’m curious as to how different we keep becoming from each others, even though we share the same (well, at least musical) roots.

I hope you’re enjoying yourself daily.

I sure am.

x.

Malheureusement, j’ai changé de fournisseur d’accès à la mi-2004, et je recevais les mails via mon compte chez cet hébergeur. J’ai l’impression que je n’ai plus accès à rien. On va voir…