I hate being sick.

I’m holding water down now, but I’m running a fever and I’ve got aches and chills. Writing about it is helping me to NOT make whiny noises my family has to listen to.

When Patches was sick last week he practically took care of himself. We came downstairs and found that he’d quietly filled his bucket, wiped his face, and was back to watching a movie.

When Link was sick early this week, he was the same way.

Me, though… I shiver, groan, and ponder death. If I DO die, I’ve got a week colored and uploaded, and another three weeks inked. Sandra’s in charge of finding somebody to wrap the current story per my notes.

My notes are pretty sparse. It’s all up here *points at head*, where I have exactly zero blood-nannies to haul my sorry, whiny, shiny tuckus back from the beyond.

Based on the best data we’ve got (three children worth of baseline), I’ll bounce back sometime tomorrow around 8pm. Then again, none of the baseline cases were as whiny as I am.

iTunes finally added the feature I’ve been waiting years for: gapless album tracks.

Maybe other players have had this for years. I don’t know. All I know is that ever since I started listening to MP3s I have bemoaned the small gaps that appear between track numbers which, when played from CD, play straight through. Some CD software on the computer would even introduce the gaps when the discs were played back on my PC.

With the latest iTunes update, however, it scanned my whole library looking for “gapless” album tracks, and now if I’m listening to those tracks back-to-back, they play the way the artists and engineers originally intended.

My favorites:

#1: Vangelis Oceanic — the whole album. This is my nap-time music and bed-time music, and I’ve played the CD at least two thousand times, back-to-back.
#2: The Alan Parsons Project Eye in the Sky – Sirius/Eye In The Sky
#3: Chicago 18: If She Would Have Been Faithful/25 or 6 to 4

In order to fill out my top 10, I’d have to dip deeply into my Alan Parsons and Vangelis collections. There would be lots of ties. And don’t even get me started on my classical and symphonic CDs.

So… what are YOUR favorite gapless album tracks? And if there are other MP3 players out there that will play truly gaplessly, what are they?

(One more note: my ancient 1st-generation iPod doesn’t seem to recognize gapless playback. I’m not sure whether the firmware will ever be updated to support it. Can anybody tell me whether newer iPods will do this?)

I had a dream last night/this morning, from which I awakened. It’s behind the cut. more

Whatever stomach-bug Sandra had yesterday is mine today. It’s hard to get anything done when the small gods of Gastro and Enteritis make war with one another, hurling their spears in the battleground of my belly. Their minions die by the thousands… it makes me sick to my stomach.

The gastro-enteritis war is depleting resources from other bodily nations, so I’m sending for aid packages all the way around. I see help on the horizon — troop and supply trains from Hotbath and Longnap.

Sketch editions… I think we’ve got 753 confirmed orders, and another 100 or so in limbo. We’ll get it all squared away before we set the number on the rubber-stamp.