2. My garden has grown tremendously. I have strawberries, peas, carrots, lettuce, and am starting to get cherry tomatoes. The big tomatoes and summer squash are right behind, and I have a baby eggplant and baby delicata squash coming along nicely. Now if I can just manage to water faithfully.... Western Washington may have a reputation for rain, but it pretty much all hits in the winter and spring months. Around the 4th of July, a switch is tripped, and it's high desert here. Nice in that you can pretty much plan on weekend outdoor activities without worrying about wet, but it does mean you suddenly go from plants drowning to plants dying of thirst, and you have to develop new habits instantly.
Sweet potato vine, just for fun!
First full sized tomato (a Cascade) is changing color...
Bitty baby bell peppers
Summer squash coming along
Baby delicata squash
Eggplant! First time I've seen these growing....
Mmmm, sugar snap peas....
3. I'm in the middle of a major music muddle: for *years* I've intended to sit down and redo my music library by re-ripping all my old CDs and then re-adding any digital purchases from backup/cloud. I had a lot of gaps and strays and tracks that weren't titled consistently, and it was driving me crazy. I'm thinking about upgrading to a new computer sometime this year, and chances are it won't have a built in CD drive, so now seemed as good a time as any to tackle this project. I'm going to get it all tidied up and then back up to a decent external drive, so I have a clean starting point from here on out.
It's turning out to be even more daunting than I anticipated. I'd forgotten just how much music I've acquired over the years, not to mention Teaching Company courses and the like. But re-ripping has been an interesting walk down memory lane: I still like a lot of the same music I did way back when, but my buying and primary listening habits have fluctuated, and going back through the albums is like excavating layers of the last fifteen or twenty years of my life from sedimentary rock. Early classical period...flatpicking guitar period...folk rock...middle early classical...Irish. Etc. It's all pretty mixed, honestly, but every so often I come across an album that all but defined a given time in my life and which I've not listened to in a long while. Fascinating how a few notes can trigger a flood of half-forgotten memories.
4 comments:
Good you have arrived safely home. Nice garden. Glad it is doing good. I think what happens with the rain from the Pacific NW is that in summer it just skips over the country and all lands in Florida. Rains here constantly in the summer. Sometimes only every afternoon and early evenings and sometimes like recently all day for weeks on end. Florida is NOT the sunshine state, that is reserved for the true sunshine state; Arizona.
You are no alone on posting on your trip. We've been back several weeks and I don't have the ambition to post on the past.
Nice selection of music, Similar to my collection. If I were to catalog and organize all my music to digital I'd spend weeks digitizing vinyl as well as ripping CDs. I'll stick with the vinyl--sound better.
oh my god: good luck with that project of organizing your music. That surely will take hours upon hours, unlike your growing garden when you just add water and kill the weeds.
I wish there was something smart enough to catalog and back it up all for you.
I feel your pain on the music front. It would be interesting to see some of what you found though. And heck, it gives me an idea for a blog post of my own.
I used my very first Air Force paycheck to buy my first CD player: a Sony Discman. I think I bought it during my day of town leave just before boot camp graduation, and I seem to recall it costing over a hundred dollars. Can that be right? Seems crazy now.
No one in my family owned a CD player. I'd never really seen CDs up close, and they seemed like magic. I remember being fascinated by the discs themselves--that holo rainbow effect they produce, which we pretty much take for granted now. And wow, being able to skip to a given track? Way cool.
From the limited selection at the base store, I bought a CD of Pachebel's Canon, the Three Tenors, and (a little later) Carmina Burana and a Scarlatti album. I didn't know much about the pop music of the day at that point. I just listened to those few albums over and over. Somewhere along the way I also got my hands on some of my old favorites: Doc Watson, mostly.
And now, some four hundred albums later....
Actually, I don't know exactly how many I have, but I passed the 200 mark last night. Some periods I was a lot more selective than others. These days, if you're lucky, you can pick up four or five CDs at a time at Goodwill that look at least vaguely interesting, and I've done that quite a few times. But I do sort of miss the days when my choices were simpler.
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