I Can Be Moving or I Can Be Still, But Still is Still Moving to Me

Friday. Yeah! This week has been so busy for me I didn't think I would make it. I guess it is just going to get even busier until the end of our customer's fiscal year (9/30) because in order to ensure that each of our customer's respective entities get more expense funds allocated to them, they must ensure that they overspend their budget. See, it works like this: They purposely overspend so they can go back and say, "see, we obviously need more money because we are X amount of $ over budget." So, the next year they get the requested funds, they overspend them again, they request more, and the cycle continues. This gives my department a nice double-edged sword to deal with. I mean, it's great that we are going to get all of this business, but the busyness of this business is a pretty big bear to have to deal with, that's for sure. I'm already feeling it from all of these orders coming in, and we are still 5 or 6 weeks away from year's end. Oh well, it beats being bored out of my mind I guess.

Since today is Friday, I had to find someting upbeat to get my weekend started off right. I thought some funky reggae would do the trick, so I grabbed True Love by Toots and the Maytals. True Love is actually kind of a weird mix between a "greatest hits" release and a tribute album. Toots plays all of his big tunes, but this time they are re-recordings with guest musicians. Normally I get a bit wary of tribute albums. Usually they completely suck. There tends to be one or two halfway-decent tracks and the rest are horribly obvious attempts by record companies to try to push their lame signees on us by having them record awkward sounding cover tunes of much, much, much better artists. However, this album thankfully bucks that unfortunate trend. Toots pulls out all of the stops in bringing in guest players, with names the likes of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Bonnie Raitt, Ben Harper and more showing up on the liner notes. You probably already know this, Sweet Lil’ Gal, but your main squeeze Ryan Adams appears on this record as well. Even Willie Nelson shows up for a duet. Yes, you heard me. Willie Nelson sings reggae (in fact, I heard he recently put out a whole reggae album - hmmm... now that would be a great discussion for Inaction in Action...).

Anyway, I enjoyed this album thoroughly. Sure, some reggae traditionalists would shudder at the thought of Toots going commercial with this crowd-pleaser, but I can't deny that the album had me feelin' the good Rasta vibrations by the time I got here to work (of course, now my co-workers are wondering why I am wearing sunglasses indoors and why I just ate nineteen glazed doughnuts...). This album was a lot of fun and it did what I wanted it to do. My weekend is ready to begin. Can I go home now, mon?