There's A Life In Here Somewhere

Young Folk at the Hall 2008

I talked Jean into signing up for "Young Folk at the Hall" this year, and that seems to have been a pretty good move. She's much fonder of fiddle than she is of violin, so I figured she'd be sufficiently motivated to learn what she needed to, and would relish the chance to do some music stuff out from under the totalitarian thumb of her mother. She didn't tell me too much about what went on during the preparatory sessions, but she went to the second one with eagerness and had no trouble getting up on stage at the final concert. Here is all the evidence of my proud mom-ness.

Video (all five in one player): (playlist at YouTube)

Concert Photos: (whole Flickr set)

Setting up for Young Folk at the Hall

Fergus O'Byrne, co-host

Anita Best, co-host

The Candy Band

Four To The Sound Of One

One Grey Mouse

Everything But The Kitchen Sink And A Fiddle

Input Output

Cafe And A Half

Auntie Mary

Band photos by Rick West

a quickr pickr post

Culture clash

Tonight I went to the Messiah with Jean (the only Christmas concert that I've been able to attend yet, but that's another grumble) and got my head all full of glorious oratoriations (great job everyone, by the way!), and then went home to run smack dab into Randy Bachman on the radio in my kitchen playing Buddy Holly, while Bob made meringues. Now Bob, when baking, gets total control over the music, lest he stop. I beat a full retreat and eroded Mount Laundry down to a hillock. Going to bed with a book, shortly.

Hercules' river actually LEFT the stables

Yesterday evening there was an inch of water on the floor of the basement. Looks like we have a leak in our foundation somewhere... Bob suspects the worst possible place - behind the oil tank! Just to add to the fun, the litter box, regular pan-shape, was in the path... and the cats tend to kick stuff out of it. You can imagine, but not while eating. Bob spent most of the evening shoveling water and slop. Haven't I been saying we needed a fire? Flood's just as good. There are eight bags of garbage in the alley, including the sneakers Bob was wearing, and more to come.

And our dryer is broken, until Tuesday at the earliest. And the renovators are coming to put new windows in throughout the lower two floors, next week or week after. We had planned already to spend the weekend housecleaning, but not including this cramp in our style. I did, while Bob was shoveling, gut the kitchen, and today got Eleanor's room whipped into shape, so that's something. Jean has been working on her room, but it's a longer term project and not a primary renovation target this time round. The living room, our bedroom, and study remain. I'm only typing this while recharging.

Rip Van Winkle awakes from sleep

Welcome back, everyone. (Anyone who's still here, that is?) This blog has been down since early summer, since Aliant took away my static address that I was using to host the web server under my desk. I've found a new home for the site, and I'm in the process of re-doing all the little tweaks and weirdness that were possible with one's one server but aren't when one is hosting elsewhere. (The old blog entries are all mis-dated, so that's going to take a while to fix!) Similarly the Hymn Search site was very customized and is now quite broken. In the meantime, I've found several quickie alternatives: my Flickr page is still running and showing off all my pictures; Twitter catches random thoughts via my cellphone (and updates Google Calendar and adds things to Remember the Milk, both very useful features when not in front of the screen); you can nose into my music, books, and bookmarks at last.fm, LibraryThing and del.icio.us respectively.

And I've succumbed to the pull of Facebook. I had no idea there were so many people on it. Almost 60,000 self-identify in the St. John's network - that's half the population! I think a lot of it is silly and I'll probably lose most of my interest after I play with it for a while, but plan to keep up at least a daily status update and to check in to see everyone. I've already found out how to get Flickr, Librarything, and Twitter onto the one page there, and there's something I read about streamlining group emails which sounds fantastic.

Longer missives will still appear here, although one-offs I will probably leave in the other specialty venues. Tweaking and fiddling and re-programming will continue until morale improves.