My morning grind just got so much better.

I'm a big fan of music. When I was younger I played in about every band possible (like, school orchestra type bands - not cool rock bands. Let it be known that I am not hip). When I was in high school, the Information Superhighway* (which, by the way, I was sure would never fly) was just starting to become accessible to the average Joe and I would search music message boards and try to find new, cool alternative** music. I would drive to the mall and search Sam Goody for a cd that looked interesting, and give it a shot. This was in the days before mp3s and Napster and in general being able to sample bits of music to see what you liked. In fact, cd's themselves were relatively new. I bought my first cd in 1994, right before I started high school.***

This is all to say that now, with music as accessible as it is, I'm in hog heaven, and I spend a lot of time on iTunes and The Hype Machine downloading new music. I downloaded enough that I ran out of room on my 8G iPod. Which would have been alright, but my iTunes was being annoying and I could only manage to get a few hundred songs on there, and for some reason, when I put it on shuffle in the morning so I could dance around while I got ready for work (and, let's be honest, so I could sing to my cat), it would play the same handful of songs over and over. It was getting a little monotonous - and whose morning schedule needs MORE monotony? Not mine, that's for sure.

Enter Lori Culwell, author extraordinaire. Note that I said author, not writer, because she is published. Several times. Check it out here, here, and here.

I met Lori while taking a UCLA Extension class, and we bonded over the fact that we both appreciate all the really weird and funny crap that happens around Los Angeles. (More on this later). Anyway, Lori's husband, Stephan (who is a voice-over actor and was on Family Guy once, which makes me want to pee my pants a little), somehow managed to run out of room on his 80G iPod. So after hearing my plight of the full iPod on Facebook they...drum roll please...decided to give it to me. How nice is that?? I loaded it up last night, and while I still have a long way to go to fill all the space, I really appreciated the eclectic mix of songs that were the soundtrack to my morning and Miss Mags really, really enjoyed having Erasure's "Always" sung to her.

Thank you Lori and Stephan!!!

In other Lori news, she has a blog (Funny Strange) that details all the weird and hilarious things that she witnesses around town and she invited me to be a guest blogger! I'm not sure exactly when it will post, but it should be up this week, so head on over there and check out my 15 minutes of fame!

* If you were born in the 90's you may not know it, but Information Superhighway was what they called the Internet before it exploded into what it is today.

** Again, if you were born in the 90's, you probably don't know that alternative music used to be the term for the underground stuff that not many people listened to - Nirvana, Bjork, etc. When those bands became more widely-liked, underground stuff then became Indie, but now Indie is what's popular, so I'm sure another term will be coming soon.

*** I'm starting to feel kind of old.