AEJ and I started watching Season 1 of the TV show “24” last Saturday. (That was the big blizzard day here in NY. Gotta love a Snow Day!) It took us a little under a week to finish watching the complete first season on DVD.

What an awesome show. Fortunately, we have all three seasons on DVD — AEJ got us the box set — so we can continue following Jack Bauer in season 2, maybe tomorrow night. I’m awfully tempted to start watching now, though. This show is totally addictive. And DVD is the way to watch it, because you can watch several episodes in a row. And believe me; once you start watching “24,” it’s hard to turn it off.

Shoot. I just remembered that we have tickets to see the Steve Reich Ensemble tomorrow night. Sure to be a great concert — don’t get me wrong — but this “24” show… Wow…

My new iPod shuffle arrived this afternoon. Seems like a great little device. I just loaded it with one of my playlists and tried it out for a minute, and it gave me a little deja vu. It totally took me back to the first time I used my first generation iPod several years ago, and I thought, wow — how does something this tiny do something so cool? I’d love to take it out for a run in the park, but it’s 15 degrees

The orchestration is underway on the new wind piece. It’s going pretty slowly, but it’ll get there. I need to write more wind music, just to learn how to do it. I find myself constantly flipping to different pages in my orchestration book to make sure that I’m not doing something silly like writing a trombone gliss that doesn’t work. Also, I read that baritone saxes sometimes have low A’s on them, so I e-mailed the bari sax player at Lamar University to make sure that I could get away with writing said A’s. (He said that at the very least, his sax has a low A — so I’m going to risk it.)

It’s questions like that — and getting new toys in the mail like the shuffle — that slow me down. Oh, and watching reruns of this.

Well, it’s official. The Blue Devils announced their 2005 program today, and it does, in fact, include “Redline Tango.” As I requested, they linked to this site from their announcement page.

Curious what that did to the traffic on this site?

Well, according to The Counter, which only measures hits to my front page, this site had 13 hits on Saturday. Sunday, 16. Things pick up on weekdays usually, and I had a closer-to-the-norm visit count of 36 people on Monday.

Today, since the announcement went up, my website has had 307 hits. From different people.

I’m terrified to see what happens to my bandwidth, as I’m pretty sure that all of these people are downloading at least part of “Redline Tango.” Uh oh.

If you’re here because you followed that Blue Devils link, welcome! I hope you’ll stick around, and I encourage you to check out some of the pieces besides Redline Tango!

In other news, today was my last day at the Day Job. I packed my things, cleaned my desk, and said goodbye to my boss.

I think I need a celebratory drink!