Yesterday, I received 3 late christmas presents (OK, 1 was a band purchase, but close enough).

1 - The Indie Bible - a great book with tons of information about how to "make it" as an independant musician. Thousands of web site listings that review music, articles about how to get your name trademarked, etc. Fun stuff (for me at least).

2 - The Slonimsky Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns - great fodder for practice, reccomended highly by most of the best musicians I've ever known.

3 - A Nomad Creative Jukebox 3 40GB audio recorder. This thing is all the rage among tapers, because it can record and store about 60 hours of music in CD quality (uncompressed) WAV audio, and you can then transfer those recordings to a PC more or less instantly. That is light-years beyond the minidisc method I've been using for taping Drop Trio shows. Now I just need to find a microphone for it ...

As of yet, I haven't been able to actually enjoy any of these new purchases, but I should be able to soon.