1. I accepted a new job in the Chicago metro area today. I need to let public announcements be made through proper channels, but suffice to say at this point that it’s a grant-making organization with an international reach, it had an excellent board and staff, the mission is deeply resonant to me, and the board has recently completed an exciting transformational strategic vision for the next five years. It feels good to have that piece in place. I’ll be starting the new job on August 24. I’ll be thinking about this when I do it. Watch this space for news when I can say more. And then send me money.

2. Once upon a time, I had two closets full of vinyl albums. Then some years later, that arrangement was replaced with two book shelves filled with compact discs. Today, my entire music collection fits on a one terabyte hard drive that’s about eight inches by six inches by two inches. I suppose this is progress, since now I have more room in my car for stuff like clothing when I move from place to place.

3. As part of my final CD unburdening this month, I found a box of compact discs from a lot of Albany artists who I have not listened to much in recent years. I have very much been enjoying having Beef, The Wasted, The Wait, Small Axe and others in the iTunes mix again. I was dismayed, however, to discover that I was missing a crucial piece of the Small Axe canon: their first CD release, A Shot to the Body, which was released in 1997 on their own Shithouse Rat label. It’s a fantastic record. I reviewed it when it first came out, noting “it won’t sell many copies in its initial pressing, but will be hailed as a great lost masterpiece two decades from now when some 21st century music critic rediscovers it at a garage sale and slaps its choicer cuts on the Nuggets, Volume LXXIII compilation.” Apparently, it might be own copy of the album that’s going to trigger that response someday, since I can’t find it anywhere. If anybody has a spare copy of A Shot to the Body, let me know, and I’ll be happy to work with you to figure out a way to get its contents onto my hard drive.

4. We are one week from Pluto and Charon! I watched New Horizons’ launch nine years ago while sitting at my desk at the Chapel + Cultural Center at Rensselaer. Then I spent a good portion of the next year or so posting as the character “Pluto Rocket” on the late, lamented Upstate Wasted and Upstate Ether boards, long before people did such things on Twitter as a matter of course. After a brief loss of communications scare last week, New Horizons is sending ever-more astonishing images of the Pluto system, and I can’t wait to see what the next few weeks bring as it zips past its primary target and heads deeper into the Kuiper Belt. As I’ve said many times in this blog: we are living in a glorious era for planetary exploration. Relish it!

5. I’ve written before about my reluctant decline into twittering, and in recent weeks, I’ve found myself once again questioning whether I’m a point where I just need to decide that the social media era of my life is over, completely. Since I tend to follow specific areas of interest (politics, music, space), what I find is that I’ll have these long periods where it seems that everything that crosses my screen is about the same thing — and much of the time, it’s something I don’t care about, or that actively annoys me. Case in point: the recent Twitter coverage of some new documentary about Amy Winehouse. I did not care about her or her music when she was alive, and I do not care about her or her music now that she has died a junkie’s death, either. But the hyperbolic word salad spewed about her on Twitter is filled with nonsense about how we’re somehow all culpable for her death, and how we’re somehow all responsible for her “harrowing” upbringing, and how watching this documentary is going to change us all forever, somehow. But we aren’t, and it won’t. And I don’t want to see or hear anything else about it. Or about Donald Trump. If you tweet about either of them, I’m likely to stop following you. Just so you know.