Yes, I know, entry slackness again. What can I say? Work! Migraine! Actually working on a new book! Reading! And if you switch the last two around it�s actually pretty much been in that order.

I mentioned about a month ago that I�d fought off a migraine. Though of course these things really only get fought back, not fought off, so on Friday it reappeared. But at least this time I was able to go home early (well, at 4.55, but at least the deal I was waiting to get done got done), dose up, sleep for fifteen hours, get up, do some washing, dose up again, sleep for three more hours in the afternoon and then go to bed at 8.30 Saturday night unmedicated and sleep another 12 hours. So far that seems to have done the trick.

That out of the way I could settle into a rainy Sunday of reading, writing and continuing my re-discovery of music.

I have written before about the sad state of my recent musical leanings, but I knew that I would eventually come out of the slump. Granted the slump has lasted upwards of three years, but it was all just a matter of time.

Having my own space has definitely been a large contributor to me starting to listen to music again. It�s much easier to flick from one album to the next while filling the whole apartment with music than it is when you�ve got to confine your music and your activities to one room while being considerate of others. I know that Betty is feeling the same liberation I have on that front now that we�re no longer sharing a house.

So there�s that, plus not having cable TV, the end of the football season where I usually listen to sport on the radio for large slabs of the weekend, and my new Airport Express. Hooking up the Airport means that I�m mainly wireless in the new place provided you don�t look behind the TV where the wires are breeding.

It also means putting all my CDs on my computer to play through iTunes, which I�m doing in a manner both random and systematic. Basically I�m pulling chunks of CDs off my CD rack starting at the top and working my way down, and putting them all on my hard-drive. And as I do it, I�m discovering many many things I�d forgotten I owned, and by no means are all of them embarrassing.

Plus I�ve been turning the radio away from sport and news and on to music in order to actually listen to some new stuff. Which is great, but also dangerous, because I don�t really have a large CD budget at the moment but there are suddenly a whole lot of new CDs I want. Especially given I�m late to the party on many things, like my new obsession Rilo Kiley, and need not one CD but the whole back catalogue (which is virtually impossible to get here in Aus, by the way). Dangerous, but fun.

Of course spending hours riffling through CD stores also leads to large philosophical ponderings about the vast number of bands and artists and songs that are out there that might be really really good but which I�ll never have a way of coming across. But pushing that aside � too depressing and also capable of taking over one�s life � it just feels nice to be seeking out new sounds again, especially when I was teetering on the brink of living in 70s nostalgia land forever.

So I�ll happily push on, listening to music on the radio, and picking up stuff I like from random places like movie sound tracks and pop culture references on TV, and occasionally from friends. And in doing this I am both annoyed and grateful that Apple hasn�t launched an iTunes store downunder yet.