Night’s Angel by Robin Wayne Bailey
Stop Being Your Symptoms and Start Being Yourself: The 6-Week Mind-Body Program to Ease Your Chronic by Arthur J. Barsky
I took my project management final tonight, so I’m done with the semester! Now I’m trying to download the textbook files for next semester, but the ebook server is having Issues.
In the meantime, I’m listening to some lovely new music, free and legal, over at TheSixtyOne. I don’t know how Sam found out about the place, but it’s neat.
Fun video from George Hrab. I’ve heard of the guy quite a few times, and seen a fair number of photos, but this is the first time I’ve actually heard his music. I like!
Many thanks to Chris Miller, who sent me a link to this video via Pownce.
This afternoon, I opened the blinds on the windows behind my chair, thinking it would draw Kioshi off the monitor (his tail kept obscuring the screen) to look out the windows. Nope. He turned around, so at least his tail wasn’t in the way, but he was inordinately pleased with himself because he could then survey his world from his nice, warm perch.
I download a ridiculous number of podcasts, then forget to listen to them. I can’t find my MP3 player, and it’s tiny anyway (512k), so it doesn’t hold much. Sam has the same kind, and he gets by, but he’s more motivated: it keeps him sane while he’s “out there” every day. I normally take the lazy way out and listen to Pandora or Last.FM.
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I can’t remember whether or not I burbled about this already, but if this is a repeat you can get extra hugs the next time I see you or something. We have a working, marvelous, beautiful piano! It’s the freecycled Korg 88-key digital that I mentioned way back in November, all clean and functional thanks to my sweet Sam. It sounds so good! It even feels right, unlike any electronic keyboard I’ve ever tried to play. I learned to play on an acoustic piano, and the feel is just different. This piano has nicely weighted keys to help oldsters like me, and they’re even touch-sensitive, like a “real” (acoustic) piano. And it has two pedals! (There’s a picture of a similar model down there under the “read more” link.)
It won’t go out of tune. We can record anything that’s played on it. There are not one, but two headjack ports, so that, say, a teacher and student could hear the student’s attempts without bothering anyone else in the household.
Yes, I like!
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I got through NaBloPoMo, as ridiculous as it was to commit to posting at least once a day for a month. So of course that small success has led me, in a moment of more-than-usual-lunacy, to sign up for Blog365 (otherwise known as “Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire”).
The purpose is fairly clear: to post at least once every day of 2008. February 29 is a “rest day.” Posts may be written on any site, rather than sticking to just one blog, so I’ll try to spread them around on mine/ours. If I can’t get something on the actual site on a particular day due to net connection issues or whatever, I have to write (yes, write! like, cuneiform or something!) a journal entry and transfer it to a blog as that day’s entry.
It would be far simpler to have a system of some sort. Maybe I’ll create a rotation:
Hopefully there will be new podcasts up soon. There will definitely be more music, as we have that lovely concert piano we received via freecycle all repaired and put together. It’s beautiful and sounds great! Not at all bad for one drive to pick it up and less than $200 in repair fees! (Sam wanted to just take it to the nearest authorized repair center rather than doing it ourselves.)
2007 wasn’t a stellar year, but neither was it terrible. Sam has a steady, secure job that he enjoys, in an organization that’s allowing him to advance. , Katie had a lot of health problems, but I’m hoping that we’re on the right path to resolving them. Shelley passed away a little shy of her 18th birthday, but since we’d been told in 1999 that she only had a year (at most) left, we felt that we’d gotten an “extra” 8 years with her anyway. Kioshi has grown into a nice companion, too.
We really kept to ourselves a lot through the past two years. When you’ve been betrayed and hurt as deeply as we were by our former housemate’s sudden craziness in 2006, there’s a lot of healing to be done. I don’t know if I’ll ever approach Thanksgiving without trepidation again, but we had a good one anyway. The stress did contribute to the deterioration of my health, and that does make it harder to get out. We’re working on it, though. We certainly learned who our true friends were, and we’ll never forget that.
So on to 2008, which we hope to be full of more time with friends, better health, much more music, Katie spent last night and almost all day today with friends from the school she was attending as well as her new beau. Sam and I spent the day gaming, upgrading some web sites, eating good food and watching movies. If it’s true that whatever you do on January 1 indicates how your year will go, we should be just fine.
