I’m really enjoy­ing wak­ing up to the con­trast­ing sen­sa­tions of the smell and the feel of the radi­a­tor with the cold wall of air beat­ing from the win­dow­pane. It reminds me of an old girl­friend who insisted on sleep­ing with the win­dow open a cou­ple inches every night. I remem­ber lik­ing it. I still have a mug I stole from her, come to think of it.

I leave for Lon­don on Fri­day morn­ing and I’m still a lit­tle con­fused about how I’m going to handle:

• cell ser­vice: I think my options are either to pay the $1/minute inter­na­tional rate offered by AT&T’s Eng­land part­ner, or to get a pre-paid SIM and use that with my phone, which will result in a dif­fer­ent num­ber, and hav­ing to trans­fer all the phone num­bers in my address book from my SIM’s mem­ory to my phone’s memory.
• money: traveler’s cheques? Credit card? Debit card? Cash? Prob­a­bly a lit­tle of every­thing? I’d like to use cash as much as pos­si­ble for some reason.
• inter­net: I read that the place where I’m stay­ing offers wifi, but that it’s like 6 pounds an hour or some­thing. Maybe that’s changed. Inter­net cafes? I’m going to bring my lap­top just in case, and so that I have some­thing famil­iar with me. My depen­dence on the inter­net is kind of sad, but truth­fully I am look­ing for­ward to email­ing and forum­ing late at night in bed with the TV on. Is that bad?

I’m kind of tempted to get one of those iPod portable stereo speaker mount things too, oth­er­wise all the music I hear will be through ear­buds or shitty lap­top speak­ers. I don’t really keep any mp3s on this lap­top any­more, it’s all on an exter­nal drive, for the most part, so my iPod will be my only source of music. Rather than sweat­ing for days over what to stock it with, I’ll prob­a­bly just empty it and refill it with the con­tents of all my foo­bar fil­ters, giv­ing me a broad enough sam­pling. Christ I am square.

I should prob­a­bly have a much stronger grasp on the logis­tics of bum­ming around a Euro­pean city at this point. But it’s only five days, and I know sev­eral peo­ple there, I’ll sur­vive. Oh I also bought two Smena 35s for the trip: the first because I don’t trust the dura­bil­ity of my Smena 8Ms, and the sec­ond because I don’t trust the con­di­tion of the first, or its like­li­hood to arrive in time, and because I pre­fer the green stripe to the blue one. This is intel­li­gent eBay­ing. I’ll have my dig­i­tal too and plan to post a lot of pic­tures when I’m at the hotel at mid­night being lonely.

Final ques­tion, do I bring my violin?

Fri­day night I saw Ariel Pink at the Milky Way, it was actu­ally pretty amaz­ing. He had like five guys back­ing him, and they pulled off impres­sively faith­ful ren­di­tions of some of his more rec­og­niz­able songs (“Helen,” “My Molly”). I expected some­thing far less together.

I spent most of yesterday’s day­light hours chang­ing the back­ground color of this site from #080808 to #202020, and today’s mak­ing a mix CD. I saw The Lives of Oth­ers on Wednes­day too, it’s great, every­one should see it. I kept want­ing to call it Other People’s Lives. I filled the rest of my time lis­ten­ing to cLOUD­DEAD repeatedly.