This morning I woke up in a fantastic mood, wrapped in a warm sense that all was right with the world and that today would be a great day. If I could wake up that way every day, I think life would be a sweet and magical thing – however, I can't afford to sleep for 10 hours every night. Ah, well. C'est la vie. Maybe if I got that much sleep on a regular basis I could make up for lost time in productivity.

Regardless, my day really was fantastic. There's been some kind of weird snafu with our Internet at home, which I suspect is directly connected to our AirPort network being held together with spit and baling wire, so I haven't been able to check my email or surf the web – which I'm sure contributed greatly to my peace of mind. After getting cleaned up I packed my laptop and some books into my leather laptop bag and headed into town.

The weather was warm but overcast with a cool breeze and clouds so low that they concealed the tops of the skyscrapers downtown, which was really quite amazing. I made my way to the Prudential Center to pick up a copy of the new live Counting Crows album at Barnes and Noble. The band is taking an interesting stab at getting people to continue buying physical CDs – there are actually four different versions of the new disc, three of which offer a different exclusive track based on where you buy it, and the one from Barnes and Noble includes a copy of "Blues Run the Game," which isn't on any of their albums. Therefore, off to B&N I went. After that, I poked around downtown for a little bit, hiding from the occasional rain burst in Trader Joe's and Best Cellars, where chocolate.com was sponsoring a chocolate-and-wine tasting. Their little ruse worked – I left with a bottle of Gilberts Tawny Porto, which is a delicious port with "an orange colour and a ripe fruit flavor, all wrapped up in an elegant vanilla touch and chocolate hints, giving this wine a perfect finish." Whatever. I'm still getting started with this whole wine thing, so all I know is it tasted great. Good enough for me. (I'm a little more verbose in my corkd review, but that's pretty much the long and the short of it. The wine done tasted good.)

Oh, but I forgot the best part. After I left the house, I took the back way to the T stop and saw that the new lofts out back of our place were having an open house, and oh, mama. Swing by davissquarelofts.com and let the SlideShowPro module load – I suppose it's a sign that the developer chose one of my favorite singers, Beth Orton, for the soundtrack to the show (and inspiring the title of this post), but the apartments I saw were amazing. One of them had both exposed beams and exposed brick inside, with window treatments and trim that made me downright homesick. I'd never put two and two together before, but this drove the point home – a big chunk of why I love the industrial loft look stems from the style of the living room in my parents' house. Mom and Dad have a big brick wall wrapping the fireplace and exposed beams everywhere you look in our living room, and stepping into this apartment was like coming home. My heart sank when I heard the asking price, but wow. It gives me hope that there's places like this out there. Further, the guy showing the place (who also works there as an architect/designer) was a Denison grad whose father grew up in Cleveland, so we had a bit of a natter about Ohio and small liberal arts colleges and Boston and MIT and so on and so on. Yes, I am definitely my parents' son, striking up conversations with interesting strangers wherever I go. Call it the Long-winded curse.

Let's see, other news. One, my department head Henry Jenkins now has a blog, which I'm doing some design work for, and within three days he made Boing Boing. No surprise there, Cory Doctorow is a friend of the department, but I wish we'd made the link list after I'd gotten the new design in place. :-)

Two, my old friend Aurelia Flaming has joined the Flickring masses, posting a great whopping mass of photos from her recent safari trip to Africa. Very cool stuff there, including, um, a dik dik. (I can feel the comment spammers clustering around this post already.)

Oh, and to complete this little trifecta of news, the biggest piece of news I've currently got to share. Last week I received confirmation that a proposal some associates of mine had fielded a while back was accepted, and so next month I'm going to be speaking on a panel at the Sandbox Symposium at SIGGRAPH 2006 here in Boston. I am, of course, totally jazzed about this. I'm also somewhat nervous. This will be my first time trotting my thoughts on transmedia storytelling out in public (well, up on a stage anyway) and so I need to start whipping this stuff into something resembling coherence. Wow. I was stoked enough about going to SIGGRAPH without actually speaking there. Here's hoping I don't get any Statlers and Waldorfs in the audience.

I have officially joined the lecture circuit. Pass the wine.