Ladybug and I went to see Sarah Harmer last night. I was expecting that she’d play solo, the way she did when we saw her in 2003, but she had a full band. And she also packed about 100 more people into the Cradle this time around.

Holy crap, it was a good show. She played probably 22 songs, three acoustic by herself and the rest with the band. There was a drum kit on stage the whole time, and she used it only for the second half of “Lodestar,” which was the final song before the encore and was simply amazing. They covered a Luther Wright song (“Luther’s Got the Blues”), a Shins song (“Gone for Good”), and a Weakerthans song (“Left or Leaving”). She did one Weeping Tile song, “Dogs and Thunder.”

Her newest album is more country and bluegrass, but it’s still excellent. If you aren’t already a Sarah Harmer fan, you should be. It’s just that simple.

Joel Plaskett opened up– he used to be in Thrush Hermit and is now doing solo acoustic stuff. He did one song on keyboard and one on the Wurlitzer, definitely his two best of the night. Otherwise, just OK.

Over on Flickr, this dude is doing some really awesome stuff. If you look closely, the model in this photo is the same woman from the photo in my last entry, and she seems to be his favorite person to photograph. They have a neat partnership, to say the least.

I feel like people I know were all over some flickr for a while but that’s died out. I still love to poke around every so often, especially to clear the brain of whatever is happening. John Betz and I had lunch today and he said he tries to do one Sudoku a day just to do brainwork. (I replied by reminding him that he teaches Statistics… you don’t get much more brain-work-y than an AP Statistics course.) I don’t think that browsing flickr for five minutes qualifies as brainwork, particularly, but I do see the need to re-set. I’ve been in the habit recently of firing up an application, and by the time it opens, I’m already thinking about the next task and I have forgotten why I opened the application. I hardly think that’s normal, but I’ve had a hard time slowing down recently.

That’s all this blog entry is, you know. Just a deep breath because I didn’t go outside and walk around the parking lot with Corey today.

I’m jittery. Really jittery. Like I had fifteen sodas or something. But I’ve actually cut back a bit this week and have been drinking even more water than usual.