My post for last week's quote (wk 1) is still in draft form, due to me wanting to make it good. I suspect they will often be late. I said at the end of December that I would rather like not to be spending 50% of my working life out of the office. It's not that I mind the travel or the trouble-shooting but it's so disruptive to my writing not to have the routine. So last week, my first back in, I spent...50% of my time out of the office. Running about a site in London did get my pedometer reading for yesterday up to 12000 (mitigated by only having 6000 today, so my average isn't so great).

Another thing I said at the end of December was a drunken NYE night, whilst kneeling on a cushion by a stereo and rapidly flicking through a soul vinyl collection to keep the music coming, was a promise to make mix CDs of stuff from the mp3 blogs. Saturday seems to have become my day for sifting through the blogs for songs: today's haul included:

for soul girls
• Bettye Swann - Make Me Yours. via Honey, Where You Been So Long?
• Brenda Holloway - When I'm Gone. via...er...damn...lost it.

for indie girls
• The Smiths - What Difference Does It Make? (Troy Tate Session). via the redesigned and still good scensters. Doesn't that opening still tingle up the spine with the promise of exploding your CNS? Just me, then.
• Pin - Yeah Yeah Yeahs. also via scensters. Weren't these supposed to be the New Favourite Band of 2004 until Franz Ferdinand blasted everyone else out of sight?

for 2-tone ska girls
• Rico - Oh Carolina! via The Suburbs Are Killing Us (thanks jg). Instrumental version of the classic by Rico, the veteran Jamacian trumpeter who worked with the Specials.

just too damn good not to get

• Sam Cooke - A Change is Gonna Come. via Spread the Good Word. This is a new blog, and rather good. I watched a documentary on Sam Cooke on, you guessed it, BBC4 recently.