Woke up to snow. Big snow flakes were falling all around, without any chance of resting on the ground for more than an instant, for the ground was too warm. A few flakes could cling to branches, to the piñon needles, for a little while. Within a couple of hours they were all gone.

Finished Bruce Sterling’s book The Caryatids. I read the Kindle edition on my iPhone – iTunes has a free Amazon Kindle application for the iPhone – and was surprised how easy and even enjoyable reading from the iPhone was. I also didn’t like the book much and was glad not even a little branch of a tree had to give its life for it. Plus, I saved 7 bucks by buying the Kindle edition instead of the hardcover. :-) While there are books that I want to own in their traditional form, because I want to re-read them or loan them to friends, I definitely think I will buy more Kindle books. (((and then there are currently rumors that Apple is digitizing books for a new iTunes-Book store and a new combination netbook/e-reader)))

Afternoon: practicing guitar and learning parts for the tour. People often expect me to remember the music, since I wrote it, but I don’t. When we played Winding Road last year, or was it the year before, I learned the music from the Opium Songbook.

Read this quote in an email a friend wrote and traced the source to a Dave Smalley. Fitting words for 2009: culture, education, economy, transportation, jobs – it all points to this:

The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.
— Dave E. Smalley

Here is a little tip: bookmark http://ottmarliebert.com/backstage instead of http://ottmarliebert.com/friends. Sometimes one has to enter the password twice when one enters at the friends address, but that never happens at the backstage address. Also, you might want to add friends@ottmarliebert.com to your email address book – you will receive an email with a new password from that address at the beginning of each month.