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.