I had a rough day yesterday, friends. Burglars broke into my house while I was at work and pretty well cleaned me out -- my computer, stereo equipment, my camera and iPod, my kids' Xbox 360, games and DVDs. Not to mention tons of personal information -- e-mails, passwords, tax returns, electronic receipts, web bookmarks, etc. -- that I pray isn't going to come back to bite me in the ass down the road. But the toughest loss of all, the one I'm still struggling to stomach 14 hours later? That would be the little 300GB Seagate external harddrive that contained every picture I've taken over the last 5 years -- every vacation, every kid's birthday, every concert, everything worth remembering -- not to mention every piece of music I've ever digitized, including literally hundreds of bootlegs. All of it, gone, just like that. The electronics they took is just stuff. But the contents of that harddrive, in very large measure, are irreplaceable.So it seems that I'll be out of commission for a while, as any sort of music blogger anyway. (That whole "no computer, no music" thing does present a bit of an obstacle.) There are insurance companies to deal with, an iMac to replace, and then a mammoth music collection to start rebuilding from scratch. But I'll be back as soon as I can -- there are new releases to talk about, which I haven't been doing enough anyway, and hey, those sorry, thieving bastards didn't get everything, so the Classic Bootleg Series will be back as well. And I know Rich will continue to post when he can. So please hang with us, be patient if the content doesn't come as frequently as it has been for a little while, and give us a week or two to get back on our feet. As our patron saints, The Clash, once said, "I've been beat up, and I've been thrown out, but I'm not down, no I'm not down."
