This unrelenting rain is starting to drive me nuts.

This weekend, punctuating periods of working on record reviews and writing articles for the newsletter, I have watched the first disc of the first season of Six Feet Under on DVD. I'd never seen this show, so it's all fresh and new to me.

It's a nice little time-waster...I wouldn't say it's a great show, but there are some intriguing elements, interesting situations and characters: I like the uptight David character, who seems like an honorable and complicated man despite his neuroses, and Rico the reconstruction expert. Of course the ghost of the father is great--the character and the actor who play him are perfect.

The other characters are a wee bit too canned for me, especially that staple of all white-people shows, the perfectly disheveled and bestubbled older brother who doesn't know what to do with his life (the actor who plays him is so smarmsville) and the wispy, frail mother. The gay cop and the troubled alterna-teen sister are right out of central casting. And Rachel Griffiths, who plays the older brother's love interest, is such a wooden, lifeless actress with that annoying fake accent (what is that supposed to be?) and all that forced whimsy.

Anyway, I'm intrigued enough to at least keep going with season one.

I have been asked to officiate a wedding ceremony! I am so excited.