Imagine spending months eating every meal off of flimsy paper plates. And you only get one paper plate at a time. Also, you’re using equally flimsy plastic cutlery, so you finish every meal with a perfectly smooth edge on your knife and two tines on your fork. Imagine living that way.

Now imagine upgrading to Chinet®, the heavy, fibrous, cardboard kind that makes a healthy “thwap” when you flick it with your finger. The kind you can load up and still hold by one edge.

With apologies to Neal Stephenson, the Krakathoom demo CD I’ve been listening to is the paper. The new copies Jeremy made us are the Chinet®.

For whatever reason, Rob had a copy of the demo that didn’t have as many of what Jeremy called “artifacts” on it. Jeremy burned us copies of it and passed them out last night at practice. I listened to the first three songs on the way to work today. The skip at the end of the first chorus of “Polaroid,” the burst of static that used to cover up the beginning of “Adornments,” the skips in “Boomtown” are gone, all gone. It’s exhilarating. It’s like getting new glasses. It’s like the pothole you have to drive over every day finally getting fixed. It’s like the static on your radio suddenly disappearing. It’s like the sun rising over a remote Finnish village for the first time in five months. It’s like a kiss from the Homecoming Queen, assuming of course that you don’t hate her. I’m probably going to be listening to it all weekend.

Oh yeah, practice. We played a whole lot of songs. That’s about it. Some of them were songs we hadn't played in months, including the ones where I play guitar, something I hadn't done all year. Jeremy has a new song that we’re putting together, and Richard has kind of a Who-sounding song that’s just sort of spontaneously taking shape. We were a little off, what with various band members having been occupied with leaving town, being sick, and getting root canals, combined with the practices that were preempted by photo sessions (more on the results of that in a minute). We haven’t spent an evening concentrating on playing since mid-February. The upside is that every time we get rusty, it takes us less time to get back where we were. So that’s encouraging. We’ll see how we sound next week.

By which time, we may be moved back into the KrakaTomb. Richard tells us that the guys are coming to put in the carpet early next week. I’m excited to see what the place is going to look like when it’s all finished.

We’re of course grateful to the guys in Barbeau for letting us share their space the past few months. At the same time, we’re looking forward to being someplace a little homier, and I’m sure Barbeau is looking forward to subletting to a band that’s not as cheap as we are. I'll miss the pizza smell, though.

More on photos (as promised above): our photographer got the film developed, and says she has a couple of “hero shots” (that’s photog talk for “good pictures”, I think). She’ll be e-mailing them to Richard and there should be photos on the site at any time. Maybe even now!

Okay, I just checked and they’re not there yet. Stay tuned, though.