Here's to Pleasant Surprises

It's been a busy week or two lately. You may have noticed a lack of posting here, but be sure I was busy elsewhere.

Last week at this time I was starting a short midyear conference of the National State's Geographic Information Council (NSGIC), in Annapolis. I'm communications chair for that group and so spend the conference taking notes and developing an on-line, cloud-based repository of conference stuff.

And when I returned to the office, it was to a release of 2010 Census redistricting data for Delaware, which I am working my way through as lead staff (the entire staff, to be honest) of the Delaware Census state Data Center.

So I was looking forward to this weekend; to a nice dinner out with both our girls and to ferrying daughter #1 back north to Villanova after her mid-term break. But old-lady nature threw me a curve and hit me with a fast-moving sinus infection that settled over the roots of my upper left molars for an effect like an un-ending explosion.

I'm on the mend though. And this morning came across a pleasant surprise in my RSS Reader feed (took me a while to get here, didn't it?). Yesterday I added a new blog, that of the proprietor of a new bookstore that has just opened here in Lewes called biblion. reading back through her entries, I found one from a week ago that included, as a one-off gesture to a friend, an embedded performance by
Rodrigo y Gabriela of their guitar duet Tamacun.




I've been a fan of this pair ever since hearing them interviewed on NPR a few years back. They are from Mexico, where they played heavy-metal rock before dropping out of that scene and travelling around Ireland for a time, where they earned their living playing more traditional music. They play a fusion of folk musics with a rock and roll abandon that I quite like.

This tune is on my iPod and gets much use when I'm writing, the rhythms and fast pace seem to help my fingers keep up with  my brain.