Mon Jan 28 22:49:03 PST 2002

Lots of fun stuff today. Got to practice guitar with James for a couple of hours and I’ve got a number of new songs to add in now. My fingers are a bit sore, but it’s worth it. Also, lots of fun stuff came in the mail, although not entirely the stuff I anticipated.

First up was the Usagi Yojimbo book #6. I read through it fairly quickly and it’s pretty good. On a par with his other work. It’s got parts of several stories that are referenced in other books, like a bet-maker who tries to rig duels and get townsfolk to bet on the duel, and also Jei has a significant role. It also deals heavily with Usagi’s past and the town he grew up in, revealing a number of suprising bits, and filling in some details that didn’t quite make sense earlier in the series.

The second fun package was Lisa Loeb’s "Cake and Pie" CD (it’s an advance copy that I got via ebay and won’t be released until Feb 28th). It’s got some really fabulous songs on it like "The way it really is" and a couple of others that I like a lot, and some songs that I’m not too keen on just yet. But I think that if I listen to it another time or two some of them might grow on me, although one of them is a bit odd, and I’m not sure if I like it at all. But anyway, the studio version of "The way it really is" is just about worth the price of the CD anyway. It sounds to me like it had the most time and effort put into it, and it sounds great.