Not a strong run this morning, but still a good one. A stiff left calf that didn't loosen up during the run was my only concern, so I took an easy day and went two and a half miles. Added to the half mile elliptical warm-up and the five minutes of big stairs at the end, and I consider that a decent workout. My sweetie and I have added the pre-workout, 20-minute hot tub session to loosen up the ol'muscles and it seems to be helping.

So now I'm more than halfway through a mostly bland workday, counting the hours until I can escape and get some useful things done, such as get an oil change (my car is – gasp! – 2000 miles overdue for one and I deserve to be sent to car maintenance hell). I'm listening to the CD I ordered on behalf of my sister, Black Happy's The Last Polka. Black Happy is this Christian rock band from Idaho who put out a few releases back in the early-90's (all out of print now – one sign there is a god). Now, I'm not saying they suck, wait wait wait….yes I am.

The Last Polka contains songs that they saw fit to release after the breakup of the band, and contains a collection of live tracks and unreleased studio work. There are a couple hidden tracks, one's a live version of some song called "Chicken in a Biscuit" and some other song that I don't know the name of, but it sounds like a combo of Kurt Cobain's unintelligible lyrical style and a bad imitation of Scott Stapp's (infamous lead singer of the other craptastic "Christian" band, Creed) voice. Oh, and most of these songs have some Mighty Mighty Bosstones style horn-sound thrown in for good measure.

Their cover of "Toys in the Attic" ("A twist on the classic!" says the liner notes, although except for the suck, I'm not sure what the twist is) made me want to reach thought he headphones and slap the singer who was trying (and failing) very hard to do a dead-on impersonation of Steve Tyler.

Oh, and the CD came to me smelling like it had sat around in a head shop for the past five years. I can't imagine being stoned enough to enjoy this.

And I profoundly apologize to my sister in advance for ripping on her music. We enjoy very little music (or much anything else, except for our parents), in common. For instance, she likes to surf. I think strapping myself into a rubber suit and throwing myself into the ocean on a piece of wood would very likely kill me. Dying is an activity I tend to avoid.

Song of the Day – There is no song of the day. I'm going to spend the rest of the day in cleansing silence.

However, I do need to give props to Djangos, which is a great source of hard-to-find used CD's. They used to have a store in Portland, but for whatever reason, they got rid of it. Just sign up to be notified by email for that hard to find CD you're looking for, because they're bound to get it eventually.