Sadly I didn’t get as much sleep as I had hoped, and consequently also didn’t get up as early as I had hoped I would. Nonetheless I still made it to my Databases class, which was on fault tolerance across distributed systems. Interesting stuff and still very much an open problem. In other news, it was raining again today, after some nice days over the weekend, some grey days earlier in the week… now it’s rain time again.

After that I went and tried to cash my rebate cheque (which I got a while ago) and the bank on campus told me I needed to have an account somewhere to put it in (as I have no local bank as yet, I’ve been working from my bank in New Zealand), find the bank it was issued from, or get a friend to bank it for me. I’ll look into if there’s the right bank downtown or something, and in the mean time I might ask Rob or Marisa if they could bank it for me or something.

Anyway, from there I went and picked up my packages. One was my Valentine’s Day present for Anastasia, which took a lot longer to get here than I thought it would. I was hoping that it would be here so I could give it to her while she was here. Ah well. I’ll just have to send it down to her. The other was a small, balloon covered package from New Zealand.

You’ll have to excuse me at this point as I go into fanboy mode. First, some history.

Some of you may know that I used to work at E-caf in the Arts Centre. While I was working there, there was this lovely girl named Hera that used to come in on some of the Saturday evening shifts that I worked and start playing little ‘practice gigs’ right downstairs. Since at that point in the proceedings there would be very little for me to actually administer (either no people or the people that were there weren’t the kind that needed assistance), I would walk halfway down the main stairs and just hang over the rails watching and listening to her play (which echoed all the way up anyway). There’s something cool about gigs that are only a dozen people at most. I would have a coffee from the Boulevard Bakehouse and pay attention to people when I needed to (which was pretty much just when they wanted to leave) by periodically checking on things. Hera’s music was her gorgeous voice and her playing on her guitar, some songs simple and some more complex but always melodious and filled with her talking to the crowd in between. I got to know pretty much all of her songs as she played them, including the little vocal exercises that she did.

Whenever Hera was the artist playing in the Arts Centre on the lawn, I would come and sit down in the sun, listening and usually having some coffee from the Bakehouse or some food from one of the many stalls around the back behind the Court Theatre and the shops around that side, like the Fudge Cottage. Anyway, I got Hera’s CD ‘Not So Sweet’ as soon as she released it, got it signed and everything. Later at one of her going away concerts at the Dux de Lux I also picked up a signed copy of her limited release of a live concert in Reykjavik. I haven’t managed to pick up copies of ‘Not your type’ or her Icelandic one, ‘Hafið þennan dag’ (which you can buy here) just yet because she’s always out of copies when I ask to buy one. ^^; That and the shipping from Iceland is probably killer… then again, I might just pay for it anyway.

I pretty much went to all of her gigs in Christchurch that I could. I met her boyfriend outside one of her gigs at Mainstreet. Nice guy, musician as well with long dreads. I later met him again at another one of her gigs at the Dux – I didn’t actually expect him to remember me, but he was chatty nonetheless. He told me the name of his band while I was talking to him, but I had forgotten it by the time I stopped talking to him, so I couldn’t look it up when I got home. ^^; I even went to a gig of hers with Dad at some random bar in town for one of the Jazz festivals in Christchurch where she was just singing a bunch of jazz standards with someone else playing the guitar… that was awesome. ^^ I’m trying to remember the guitarist’s name… Petch? Keith Petch or something. If I had my Hera CD cases here, I’m pretty sure he does some guitar on one of them as well.

Anyway, a little while ago I got one of those general emails from Hera updating me on her upcoming gigs… in Christchurch. It also announced the release of her new CD, ‘Don’t Play This’. I emailed her (as I do very occasionally to generally keep up my support) saying that I sadly would not be able to pick up her CD just yet or be as regular at her concerts now that I’m in Seattle and that I missed the Arts Centre gigs from ‘back in the day’.

Generous soul that she is, she sent me a signed copy of her new CD! How cool is that? I’ve just finished listening to it and found that it’s a bunch of cool new songs (one of which I already had because I downloaded the music video) as well as a lot of songs that I’ve been listening to her play at concerts since I started listening to her. It’s really interesting to hear how they sound in production with the extra instruments and the different feel that comes with it being on a CD and not all the variation of being live when it’s just her voice, her guitar and sometimes an accompaniment. In particular ‘The devil and me’ has a different feel to it from when I first heard it live a few years back. ‘Déj