Adios, Dr. Sombrero!

Big changes around here. Alexa and I have moved out of our tiny Old Town bungalow into the Farm, a spacious ranch house on the 10-acre mini-farm where I grew up. With the downturn in the housing market, my recently-moved parents have not been able to sell the property. Filling the void until the market rebounds, Alexa and I (and Annie) are enjoying the square footage, the yard and the quiet.

I have set up a writing desk in the library/guestroom. We have a living room on the ground level and a “movie” area in the sunken, main room. Alexa has gone from no office to two offices, one for work and the other for personal endeavors. The cats, used to fighting their way to get anywhere, seem bewildered in their new digs. What do you do with so much space? Which window do you look out? Buster has been following me around for the past few days; worried, I think. Annie is enjoying the yard, happily taking up dragging door mat into the yard and starting a hole near the fence.And, yes, Fraser has already puked. Four times!

We’ve ditched our broken stereo system and gone computer for house music. My computer has been set up in the sunken main room, now more a family computer than my own, which is fine since I won’t be working from home as of next week. I’ve accepted an offer to transfer from the Curriculum department to Marketing. I’ll be an advertising copywriter, working in the office full-time.

So, while I’ll still be enjoying new music, with my computer now serving as the house jukebox, I no longer have any use for Last.fm. It’s been fun, if a near-complete waste of time. I registered on 12/21/05, and in that time I’ve played 54,580 tracks on my computer. If the average song is 3.5 minutes, then this rounds out to be 3,183 hours of music. Spread across 27 months, that’s 117 hours of music per month, or a pinch under 4 hours a day. (And, of course, this doesn’t include music played the old-fashioned way: CDs.)

My most played artists, as more or less expected, were:

1. Josh Rouse (2,192 plays)
2. The National (1,981 plays)
3. The French Kicks (1,661 plays)
4. Kings of Leon (888 plays)
5. David Kilgour (856 plays)
6. Razorlight (825 plays)
7. Blue States (761 plays)
8. The Clientele (732 plays)
9. The Mountain Goats (646 plays)
10. Bruce Springsteen (588 plays)

Together, that’s 11,130 plays, which accounts for about 20.4% of my via-computer listening over the past 2+ years. (And Alexa, I’ll have you know that Patty came in at #11, with 575 plays.)

Since I’ll be closing my Last.fm account, I won’t be compiling a Best of ‘08 mix. But if I did, I’d already have a good number of tracks to put on it. My best tracks this year, for those who care about those things:

1. Les Savy Fav - “Pots and Pans”
2. Joe Beats - “Fade”
3. Devotchka - “How It Ends”
4. White Williams - “Route to Palm”
5. Sia - “Soon We’ll Be Found”
6. The Mountain Goats - “Michael Myers Resplendent”
7. Miles Davis Quintet - “It Never Entered My Mind”

All come highly recommended.

Adios, Dr. Sombrero. Keep scrobblin’!