The last post of 2008

Here we go again ...

(List of excuses deleted)

We've done about half a dozen rough mixes of tracks for our next album, with more to come as soon as is humanly possible.

Thank you once again to everyone that has downloaded our iDusk EP so far. The number of downloads has far exceeded our expectations... but then our expecations were very low (always aim low, that way you can't miss). The EP will almost certainly not be available indefinitely, so if you're interested, make sure you act sooner rather than later (early bird, worm and all that).

We wish you a Happy New Year if you happen to be using the same calendar as us. If not, we hope that the next time this planet passes some arbitrary point of your choosing along its orbit of the sun, you will have a happy next orbit, or something.

PS. The jetstream was too far south again this summer. Could someone please sort this out? Hello technical support? Thanks.

All the broken promises

Close your eyes, think of home
So far from you
All the broken promises
None of them came true

OK, not very profound, but never mind. That was from a song we wrote in 2000, called White Noise. It sounded a bit like OMD, but not as good, probably.

Speaking of songs, you might be wondering where the new ones have got to. In his last post Simon said "keep checking back here regularly". For those of you who have (many hundreds, I imagine) you may be wondering what exactly you were expected to find.

So what has changed since August? We have done preliminary mixes on lots and lots of vocals; vaguely decided on what the album will look like; drunk at least 329 cups of tea; umm...

So here's an early New Year's Resolution for 2012 err... 2009. We will complete our new album, and stick it out. There, I've said it.

I'll go away again now.

New old songs on MySpace

Hello,

We've put two new old songs up on our MySpace page. The songs are both taken from the Dusk project, so they are at least new-ish. You can now hear:

• King for a Day from our most recent stop-gap iDusk EP. If you would like to know what on earth it's all about, you can consult Rollo's thesis on the subject here. If you like it, the track is available to download along with the rest of the EP from iTunes


• My Light - b-side on the Consequences single. To enhance your listening pleasure, you can read Rollo's musings on the subject here. If you like it, the track is available on the Electraparade compilation, which you can still download from the following sites: DJ Download, Ministry of Sound or Juno records.

We're currently working on tracks for our new album. I know this because I was doing exactly that before I decided to do this instead. After I've finished doing this, I will go back to doing that, or I might have a cup of tea first. I haven't decided yet, but I'll keep you posted.

For all this and to keep up to date with our lack of progress on the new album, make sure you keep checking back here regularly. I would suggest that once a day should be sufficient for the time being.

All is far from quiet

Why do birds suddenly appear? Thought for the day.

Anyway, we have been very busy making our next album, so I think you'll let us off for not "blogging" very much.

Some numbers:
- About 20 tracks being considered
- 5 are definitely on
- 4 are probably on
- 7 more will have to fight it out between themselves

I've been working on vocal mixes - initially just rough ones, but these will evolve into the final ones over the next couple of months. Simon's just started moving towards the final instrumentals as well.

As regards timescales - well, we'd better not make too many promises at the moment. But if it ends up being Autumn, I'll be annoyed.

Oh, and a special thankyou to everybody who has been downloading the iDusk EP off iTunes - ta very much!

Faint Footsteps

Sometimes it's best just to let the songs speak for themselves...

... and that's the last of my comments, for now!

What I Would Do

What I Would Do is a song which I was pretty proud of, for a long time. And then along came Flight of the Conchords, and they spoilt the whole thing.

In fairness, their song was a lot funnier than ours could ever be.

Well, anyway, this actually started life as an homage to Douglas Adams, and dates back to around 2004. Somewhere along the way, it all got shifted around, rejigged and rewritten, and ended up being a harmless but ultimately meaningless pop song. Which we both like, I should probably add.

... and I'm afraid that's all I can think of to say about that one. You'll probably find the comments get shorter and shorter from now.

Running with the Wind

A common theme with the b-sides for Dusk seems to be that they were started around the time we were completing Empires (well, I suppose we had nothing better to do). Running with the Wind is yet another of these. It's a pretty simple song about throwing everything away and biting the bullet, but I got stuck half way through, with one verse and half a chorus. I handed it over to Simon, and he did all the hard work on this one.

Musically, it owes a lot to the Dutch duo Sylver, and they should think themselves pretty lucky given the number of song titles they've stolen from us in the past* - In Your Eyes; Summer Solstice; Turn the Tide... (actually we may have borrowed that last one off them). Because of this, it rumbles along at over 130bpm along with slightly clichéd fills, bass and filters.

And so that was Running with the Wind. More tomorrow.

* This does not constitute an accusation of theft.

Point of No Return

This takes us into our last week of comments from Dusk. You're probably relieved to hear that; I know I am.

This was another track I started just after Christmas 2002. The person singing the song is basically saying that they wish they had taken things a bit more slowly.

It somehow got overlooked when we put together Empires, which is possibly a shame, as it probably would have been on there if we hadn't forgotten about it. Then it very nearly made it onto Dusk as well, but in the end, it was dropped because the album was looking way too down-tempo as things were.

It's quite a powerful song really (in a very laid back kind of way). The only other thing I want to point out is the not-entirely-intended reference to the Rail Riders comic strips I vaguely remember reading as a whippersnapper: "By quirk of fate..."

Lose Control

Around the time Empires came out, we went through a brief spell of experimenting with guitar-based songs. Inevitably, some of these were more successful than others. The first has still to be released; Not a Million Miles went straight onto the album; and this one ended up taking a bit longer.

According to Simon, Lose Control was originally inspired by Simple Things by Dirty Vegas, but clearly went on quite a long journey before ending up how it did.

It's a song about losing control... obviously. I think at one point I was actually genuinely envious of people who run around naked on the streets at night. Now I think I could have put some more work into the lyrics, but I think I thought they worked pretty well at the time.

General verdict: quite good, but we've done better.

Moving On

Moving On started life in Autumn 2002, and like so many songs of that era, took a very long time to be finished. Ironically, it almost got considered for Dusk at one stage, but was finally dispensed as a b-side, purely because it was a little old-fashioned.

The original chorus, which is the first chorus in the finished song, was written by Simon, but everything else was rewritten at some point along the way. At some stage it was merged with a song of mine called Yesterday Forever. It's actually gone through several incarnations, but the basic themes were always the same.

It's actually quite a deep song for us. The first verse was at one stage a comment about the fall of Apartheid in South Africa, whilst the second was about the Germans dealing with their war guilt. Around 2006, I went back in and took all the direct references out and made everything a lot more subtle, and I think it works a lot better for that.

Ultimately, it's about how we deal with our history - how do we decide which bits to ignore and which bits to remember? How can we ever begin to understand the evil things our ancestors did, and why do we commemorate them as heroes?

I think I'll leave you with that thought.

Never Wanted This

Guess what? This one's really, really old.

In fact, it dates back to about 2000, and somehow took seven years or so before it got released. Perhaps even more surprisingly, we both really like it.

It's been on a very long journey. The lyrics have been completely rewritten on several occasions, and it's gone through a couple of very different sounds as well. The original was very dark and analogue, but at the end of 2005, Simon re-recorded the whole thing on my MicroKorg, and made it sound less dark but still very analogue.

The song is about bullying. It started life as a song about being bullied, and ended up almost being a song about doing the bullying - which perhaps isn't as much of a transformation as it might seem. Generally, I think a lot of discontent went into the lyrics over the seven years it took to write, which led to some wonderful lines, such as "All my life, I've never looked back / But now I'm only human", and of course the eternal question "Why waste all of these years out in the autumn rain?"

House of Cards

Hello.

Previously in my very long and rather dull series of comments about tracks, I have told you rather more than you actually wanted to know about things that you probably weren't very interested in anyway.

I lost track of what I wanted to say during that sentence, so if you can tell me what it was about, please do get in touch. The next sentence is quite improbable, as well.

So around 1997, both of us wrote songs about helium. We mangled the two together very badly, and ended up with an appallingly bad track called Free Helium Balloon. This is one of those highly improbable coincidences, which you might think would only happen the once.

Until early 2002, when I wrote a song called House of Cards. Which is exactly the same name of a song which Simon had started four years earlier, and had never told me about.

This time, we learnt our lessons and sensibly kept the two tracks entirely separate.

Anyway... this is a song about the state of the world in early 2002, and it tells a true story. Like all good students, I spent many a whole night talking complete nonsense about the state of the world until the sun started to rise.

In retrospect, the time between 9/11 and the start of the Iraq war was a slightly strange period. Some people agreed with the Afghanistan war; others disagreed, but at the time there seemed to be some degree of hope: a country had been liberated from an appalling regime; and terrorists were being rounded up across the country. In the UK, we still had some civil liberties, and everything seemed reasonably hunky dory.

All of this comes across quite nicely in the lyrics: there are lines such as "The sand is washed away, and who is right today?" or "... you wonder who is right, and why they fight". There's a wonderful line about the way we view history: "The faces of tomorrow stare like people who were there"; and there's even a little dig at what we were doing: "Sitting in comfort, we fought for freedom and peace".

As with many of the older Dusk b-sides, it is a song which has been through several different phases: it started off life sounding almost appallingly 80s; we tried to remix it to sound less dated, but failed entirely; and eventually ended up with the version which would appear as a b-side on the Bulletproof single.

So all in all, this is a song which I'm pretty proud of. It sounds like something from our Empires era, and honestly I have no idea why it took so long to get released, but I'm pretty proud nonetheless.

Broken

If Someone Else's Dream was a relic from the turn of the century, then Broken is most definitely a relic from the Empires era.

This one was originally started around Christmas 2002, around the same time that we were working on Here We Stand. Somehow it missed out on being on Empires, entirely failed to be on Dusk, and failed to be on any of the seven singles that we released in the meantime. And then we recorded and mixed it, saw that it wasn't that bad, and eventually put it on The End.

That wasn't really a terribly exciting story, so here are two more facts, which may or may not be of interest...

1. It uses lots of sampled sounds from a Korg Prophecy


2. It contains a siren sound that is suspiciously similar to the noise from Visage's astonishingly good Fade to Grey*

* If any lawyers are reading this, we would like to make it clear that this doesn't mean it was stolen, because it wasn't. Your honour.

Someone Else's Dream

I imagine psychologists have field days with people's songwriting. Or maybe it's all just a shade too easy for them? Either way, I don't think they would get much out of this one. Even so, there is a story behind it...

Between 1999 and 2001, our songs changed gear completely, both literally and metaphorically. Where previously we had done everything on one or two keyboards, suddenly we were using "synthesisers". But perhaps more to the point, where previously we had taken influences from pop music, we started to look at literature, books and politics.

But this song is not an example of that. Instead, it is something of a relic of that inbetween period, where songs seemed to be about something very profound, but actually weren't. In fact, it was as simple as having a list of good words and phrases, and working them together into a song.

Which is not to say that it's without its interesting references. You'll find references in there to a song by U2, a book by Susan Cooper, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Kalihari bushmen (actually, we wrote a whole song about them once).

The song first acquired some music in early Autumn 2003, but somehow didn't get released until the end of 2007. One verse got ditched, and then reinstated; and a whole album got released while it wasn't looking.

And so that's the story of Someone Else's Dream, which I haven't sold very well, but you can find it on the back of our single The End.

King for a Day

The story you are about to read is very long, and extremely dull. If you think you might get hungry, I'd advise you to have some nibbles by your side before reading any further, just in case, you know?

Established history says that we started making music in 1992. This is not actually entirely the truth, as we had actually been messing about unsuccessfully with keyboards from some time in the mid-late 1980s, and would continue to do so right up until about 2000, when we finally started to have some success at getting decent noises out of them (basically, we bought a sequencer, which finally meant that we could actually play the right notes, at the right times, and in the right order, all things we'd been struggling with up until that point).

Our first album, or more accurately, our first tape, was completed in 1992, and would later come to be called Schizophrenia. Sadly (I say this now with some sincerity), the original recordings were lost in the following year or so, but most of it has at some stage been re-recorded since then.

One of the tracks on the album was called Spud! (Yes, the exclamation mark was part of the title. OK. Before you say anything, we still had a lot to learn at that stage.) The final version was pretty typical of our early output (bilge), but it originally started life as a cod-reggae track, which for some reason at the time I thought was a good idea.

But it wasn't an idea which ever really went away. In 1997 I wrote another cod-reggae track called Fruit on the Tree, and shortly afterwards Simon wrote a track with the working title (the previous one had been called D; you can probably work out some of the other titles from that period). The tracks were merged, and, perhaps fortunately, that idea stopped there...

... for a little while. Four years later, Simon picked the track up yet again, this time ditching the frankly dire lyrics to Fruit on the Tree, and replacing them with the distinctly half-baked lyrics to King for a Day (as I recall it was a poor chorus; an even worse verse; and that was about it). And then, yet again, it reached a standstill.

Then in 2004, Simon had been listening to The Human League's Best Of album, and had been particularly struck by Empire State Human, so tried putting an electro beat and a 6/8 rhythm onto the track, and was very pleased with the result. But the next barrier was the lyrics.

Finally, three and a half years later, at the end of 2007, I decided enough was enough. I'd been dipping into the lyrics on and off since 2001, and still couldn't quite get them to work. Finally, I thought, there was no shame in just throwing it out in whatever form it currently was. So I made a few minor changes, recorded the vocal the same day, and that was that.

The final mix wasn't quite ready for The End, and so we were left with this historical oddity. When the idea of the iDusk EP was first floated, it seemed to be an obvious candidate, and so there you have it. After ten years of cod-reggae, and ten years as a rough demo, what are we left with? Superficially, an inoffensive track about nothing in particular, but somehow I don't think it's an understatement to say it's also one of the most important tracks we've ever written...

If, after all that, you want to download the track in all its gory glory, click on these words.

iDusk EP

Ooh ooh, news!

OK, so a couple of weeks ago I wrote something very mysterious and dull. I'm now happy to announce that I'm in a position to explain what the heck I was on about.

Well, we were feeling a bit bored, so we decided to make our iTunes debut.

So anyhow, it's called the iDusk EP (although it may actually be called Idusk due to a slightly overzealous spell checker), and it can be downloaded from iTunes in the UK, Europe, and the USA on or shortly after the 5th of May 2008 (that's today, for those of you not too clear on dates and the like).

1. Consequences
2. Signs of Life
3. King for a Day
4. The End (Ostkreuz mix)

For those of you with iTunes installed, here's the magic link.

For those of you who haven't, tough cheddar for the time being. There are very good reasons why we went down an Apple-only route, but if that annoys you, please email us; the address can be found on our main website.

It has one of our favourites from Dusk; one of our more low-key tracks; and one of our favourite remixes. Oh look, it's got an exclusive new track as well! Comments will follow.

Why have we done this? Hmm, not sure, really. We thought it would be worth a go, if nothing else. If you want to, download it; if you don't, don't worry too much - we won't be too offended (you might not get Christmas cards for a year or two though).

Fallen

It may not have sounded it, but Fallen was one of the oldest tracks on the Dusk project. But not the oldest of all, as will be revealed soon...

Fallen started life as a sequel to a track called Swan Song, from our 2002 album Zero. Both were started well before the album came out, so its origins probably go back to mid 2001. Superficially, Swan Song is about a rock band on its last legs, going out on a blaze of glory, and so its sequel, initially called Come Back (with the footnote "the one after Swan Song") was about the not-so-glorious comeback.

I'd also made a vague request that Simon should write a song where the chorus and middle eight should have the same chords, so that the two could be combined in some sort of marvellous crescendo at the end (in fact, the chords for the verse are the same as well). So at some point around the time we were working on Empires, that is what he did.

You'll probably have realised by now that one or two things went wrong with the whole procedure. It's not called Come Back; it's not about a band making its comeback; and it doesn't have any sort of marvellous crescendo at the end.

Somewhere along the way, we realised that the whole thing wasn't really working out, and so we ditched (at various times) all but one line of the lyrics, and also reworked the whole production as well.

Instead, we ended up with (in my opinion) one of the stronger lyrics I've ever written, and actually a pretty good song generally. It may not ever have been album material, but it's a track that I'm very pleased with, and one of the ones I go back and listen to every so often.

The Healing

The Healing was the fifth and final track from the second Dusk single Beneath the Silent Skies. It was even on the album for a while - I just uncovered an early tracklisting where it was sandwiched between Perfect Geometry and Bulletproof, followed by a note advising that it should be replaced with The End. Which was undoubtedly a sensible move.

It's strange though, because The Healing is still one of my favourites. It's an unusually upbeat lyric over a decidedly midtempo backing, which is always a great combination. It's even got some lyrics that I'm very proud of, such as "We've turned our home into a war zone" (and also some that I'm less sure of, such as "... to reap the seeds that I've sown", which fortunately wasn't intended as a rhyme for the other line I just mentioned).

Somehow it got lumbered with the label of "another midtempo track", and got missed off the album. In fact, there's a very good reason why it shouldn't have been before Bulletproof on the album: the chords are the same, but backwards. It's a trick we've used a few times, and mostly you'd be none the wiser - but would it have been a good idea to put the two next to each other? Probably not...

Heaven Only Knows

Heaven Only Knows rather confusingly ended up as the lead track on the last single The End. For a long time it was one of our favourites, so you might be wondering why it wasn't on the album. The story is long, and not especially interesting...

The track started life as a sample from Simon's beautiful red SH-101, with a very analogue sound, with the working title Battleship Grey. When Simon passed it on to me, it was a lively track which reminded me (ahem) very much of the wonderful Röyksopp single Remind Me, which has some really evocative lyrics about happy memories, particularly about travelling abroad.

At the same time, Simon and I had been doing a lot of city breaks across western Europe, visiting obscure places on late night flights, and so I had a lot of places from which to draw inspiration. I've got a feeling there were already some rough lyrics, and I can't remember what remains of those, but I effectively rewrote the whole thing. I've got a feeling the line about "All the sins and the harsh regrets" may have come from the original...

At this stage it was all going well, and we must have been pretty happy with the production, because I don't think it changed in the slightest from the original demo. Unfortunately, it was in the recording process that we discovered it was almost entirely impossible to sing.

The final version is a patchwork quilt of different vocal takes from different sources, many of which were recorded several months apart, and incredibly it works pretty well. Once again we have a track which we're both pleased with. So much so, in fact, that it was very nearly held back to be included on album number nine.

And so it's a bit of a shame really, because this track could have fitted nicely on Dusk. But that was clearly never meant to be...

Neglect

Hello.

Well, we've been neglecting you a bit recently, haven't we? (Don't bother answering that; we already know the answer).

So here is some news...

Maybe you thought Dusk was over with, dead and buried? Frankly, so did we. It was an album which took about three years to write, record and mix. Then we prolonged the agony by releasing four singles / EPs / whatever you want to call them. And in the past, that might have been (if you'll pardon the pun) the end.

I'm not really at liberty to tell you what I'm talking about at the moment, so I'm just going to have to remain enigmatic. (Is that the right word? Probably not.) Anyway, suffice to say that Dusk still has one final trick up its sleeve. To celebrate this, the handful of remaining comments will make their way onto this very blog over the next couple of weeks, at the rate of one every day or two. I'm not going to make any promises about how regularly I can get them on here, but I'll do what I can.

That wasn't really news, and it didn't really say anything particularly informative, so here's something a bit more substantial...

The ninth album is really starting to take shape now. An impressive total (or should that be toll?) of 34 tracks are being considered, each in a varying place somewhere on the road between "vague musical idea" and "finished". Before you get too excited, here are some statistics:

• 2 are left over from Empires (yes, they are that bad)
• 2 are left over from Dusk, and are completed (but possibly not very good)
• 2 are left over from Dusk, but the vocals haven't been mixed yet (these two are OK, actually)
  
• 2 are left over from Dusk, but I haven't finished recording the vocals yet (one of them is quite good)
  
• 4 are left over from Dusk, and haven't quite got full sets of lyrics yet (none of them are any good)
  
• 1 is complete, but I want to re-record the vocal because it's not very good (yes, we now have some kind of quality checking procedure*)
• 1 is a song by someone else, which probably won't get released properly anywhere (I'm not sure why I'm telling you about it, actually)
• 1 is a song by Simon, for which he's hopefully going to take full responsibility
  
• 9 have been recorded, but the vocals haven't been mixed yet
• 8 don't yet have any kind of lyrics recorded for them
• 2 don't have any kind of words yet (or rather, they do have some kind of words, just not a very good kind)
  

* That's a vast improvement on what it replaced, which was nothing.

One of the nine recorded but not fully mixed tracks is called Here Comes the Summertime, and was recorded a few weeks ago in one of my more hirsute periods. It also coincided with me playing with my new iMac, which has a built-in iSight camera, and so I recorded a video as I was going along. It was fully edited in iMovie, and so it's not exactly up to the standards of Señor Spielbergo, or even (dare I say it) George Lucas, but in fairness it's our first ever video, and I didn't really know what I was doing (I still don't).

Hopefully the final version of the video will be ready to premiere in the Summertime; there might be a single at some stage; and the album should follow not long afterwards. If everything goes according to plan, which of course it never does.

In the meantime, you'll have to make do with the dregs of Dusk.

Nine facts about our ninth album

1. We've written lots of songs for it
   
2. One of them is called Better Days
   
3. We haven't thought of a name for it yet
   
4. It sounds really good so far
   
5. We're between 0% and 100% through the recording process
   
6. It's between 0% and 200% better than our eighth album
   
7. I've run out of facts
   
8. 
   
9. It will be released in summer 2008
   

The Download Chart

Well, as Simon said, 2007 was a mammoth year for downloads. Some misguided fool clicked on our tracks nearly 6000 times, so thanks very much if you are that fool. And here's the chart of our least unpopular tracks (the numbers in brackets refer to their respective 2006 positions):

1. (-) Perfect Geometry
2. (-) Consequences
3. (-) The End
4. (1) Here We Stand
5. (2) Turn the Tide
6. (-) Beneath the Silent Skies
7. (-) Moving On
8. (-) Bulletproof (western mix)
9. (-) Point of No Return
10. (-) Echoes of Perfection (demo)

To hear what you've been missing out on, why not head to the audio section of our main site, which can usually be found here.

What he said

... except there was one thing he forgot to mention...

We completed our fourth and (probably) final single of Dusk just after Christmas. It's called The End for no particularly good reason. Here's a picture:


This time we've gone completely overboard, with no less than seven songs:

1. Heaven Only Knows
2. Never Wanted This
3. What I Would Do
4. Someone Else's Dream
5. Broken
6. The End (ostkreuz mix)
7. Faint Footsteps

And it's a happy new year from him.

Electraparade for download - right now!

What do you know? You wait ages for one download site to come along, and then three appear at once.

Yes, the Electraparade compilation album, which includes our track, 'My Light', is available to download from the following sites. Take your pick, and choose wisely, depending on whether you want to pay a miserly 79p per track or a very generous £1.10:

DJ Download

Ministry of Sound

Juno records

Should you need anymore convincing, here's an unbiased review of the compilation courtesy of Electro Garden. Apperently, we were a highlight.

Go on, do it now, before you regret it!

Frohes neues Jahr and all that ...

Hello and happy new year to you (all).

I seem to remember that when we started this blog, I was going to write regular updates, just on the offchance that anyone in this or any other universe would be interested in what we'd been up to, had for breakfast, read in the Daily Mail etc.

X months later, erm, well, that hasn't quite happened has it? Road to Hell, good intentions, paving and all that. Personally, I blame the Daily Mail. Or maybe I was just lazy? Or could it be that muesli is a bit boring?

Anyway, at this time of year, it seems to be obligatory to do a review of the last year's highs and lows, preferably in a bitesize chunks top 20 format and then to make outlandish predictions for the year ahead. Do you see a bandwaggon? Well we're a band (some might say) and we're jumping right on it:

So, 2007 was pretty good for us. We released four singles from our Dust album, all packed with new songs and remixes, we were featured on the Electraparade compilation CD (buy it now!), we wrote and made demos of a pile (cohort? phalanx?) of new songs and did we remixes for Erasure and Marsheaux (not that they asked us to, mind). All this whilst trying to hold down normal jobs and occasionally have lives.

The whole MySpace / internet thing has been quite entertaining. I like the idea that anyone can knock a track together in their bedroom and then minutes later the whole world can either tell them what a steaming pile of manure it is, or propel it towards the hit parade. We've enjoyed the feedback that we've received about our songs and have been amused, encouraged, inspired and bemused in various measures by the comments that have arrived over the last 12 months.

And what of 2008? If everything goes to plan, we should have a new album out this year. The only obstacles in our way are (i) finishing the writing, (ii) doing the recording, (iii) doing the mixing and (iv) other obstacles that we haven't yet thought of. As I mentioned in the 'idle boasts of 2007' section above, the writing has been going well, so we will soon see how the album is shaping up. With a bit of luck, it will be a bit more upbeat and 'of the moment' than Dusk, but whether this constitutes an outlandish prediction remains to be seen.

Most importantly, you've been missing out on the weather updates for the last year, so here's the official summary for 2007: Summer: Wet (Jetstream allegedly too far south), Winter: Cold, everything else: Sunshine and showers.

My one and only new year's resolution: To try to make my contributions to this blog a little more frequent.

More this time next year ...